Die in Plain Sight Read Free

the room.
    Lacey started. She’d forgotten that her business partner and old friend was with her. Painting—and paintings—had that effect on Lacey’s brain, as people had pointed out more than once. Guiltily, she looked over her shoulder. Shayla was sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, price stickers clinging like confetti to her black bike tights and red sweatshirt. Hersleek laptop computer balanced uneasily on her long legs as she updated prices and inventory for their shop. That was work Lacey should be doing, or at least helping with.
    “Oh, I just was hoping I’d read the pamphlet wrong,” she muttered.
    Shayla glanced up. “Huh?”
    “The charity auction. They only let you bring three paintings for Susa Donovan to look at and I can’t get past these six.”
    Shayla bent over the computer again. “I don’t blame you. I like all your paintings.”
    “Not mine. Grandfather Quinn’s.”
    “You’re better than he is.”
    “You’re sweet, but you’re no judge of art.”
    “I know what I like, and it’s your paintings I like. So there. Sue me for lewd and dissolute taste.”
    Laughing, shaking her head, Lacey turned back to the six Quinn canvases and rearranged them yet again. Maybe this time a different angle of light would reveal flaws or flatness or slightly skewed compositions—anything to put three paintings out of the running.
    Five of the six paintings were solidly in the tradition of southern California Impressionism, lyrical yet muscular evocations of a landscape that had long since gone down beneath D9 Caterpillars and belly dumps gouging out pads for upper-class MacMansions overlooking the ocean. Sandy Cove was a case in point. The paintings done by her grandfather showed a landscape more than fifty years in the past. There were golden beaches with no human footprints, coastal bluffs with no houses. The ravines were green with grass from winter rain and graceful with eucalyptus trees dancing in the breeze, instead of the modern cement culverts lined with chain-link fences.
    Whether David Quinn painted coastal mountains, beaches, grasslands, or chaparral canyons, most of the canvases celebrated southern California before the huge population leap at the end of World War II. The land was filled with light and distance and clean air.
    Then there were his other paintings, the ones that Lacey could admire professionally but wouldn’t hang in her own home to be part of her life. Perhaps a tenth of his work was in the dark, brooding school of social realism that had supplanted the plein air painters after the Depression. Not that Quinn’s bleak canvases really fit in that category, either.
    There wasn’t any handy art history label for the grim side of her grandfather’s talent.
    The Death Suite.
    Her artistic conscience wanted her to include a painting from each of the three kinds of death—fire, water, and earth/car wreck—but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. She’d settled on one of the water paintings with its chilling contrast of blood-red scream, blond hair, turquoise water, and inky night. The figure’s humanity was clearly visible, the death struggle intimate and terrifying.
    With a sigh, Lacey kept on trying to pick the three best paintings out of the six she’d set aside. She rearranged them, leaning two against the big fire extinguishers that she insisted be kept in the storage area. Her grandfather’s phobia about fire in the studio or storage room had been thoroughly drilled into her.
    When the silence got to Shayla again, she stretched her back and looked over at her friend. As always, Lacey’s hair was a glorious whirl of cinnamon-colored chin-length loose curls, the kind women with straight hair would kill for. The rest of the package was equally casual—faded jeans, sandals, no socks, and a flannel shirt that could have come from one of the garage sales both women haunted, looking for new merchandise for their shop. Old paint stains made startling