The Color Of Night Read Free Page A

nearest to a large and unusual outdoor aquarium watched over by a pair of small, brilliantly colored macaws that looked as though they had flown through a freshly painted rainbow. He ate breakfast—the only meal served at the bakery—and read the newspaper while the macaws scolded and cajoled the fish and each other, and anything that moved, sometimes inching to the near end of their perch to read over Strand’s shoulder.
    Around nine o’clock he pulled into the porte cochere at home and went straight to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Harry Strand lived and worked in a two-story home in the museum district, an expensive address just a few streets off Bissonnet. The home was old, with Mediterranean influences and made of stolid, gray limestone. The minute he and Romy had seen it they had loved it and bought it within a week of arriving in Houston. They had lived in Vienna before they were married, and the warm and fertile Mexican Gulf coast was an exotic and welcome change for them.
    The house was on a quiet, narrow lane that meandered among other aged and behemoth domiciles, most of them only partially visible behind a well-groomed wilderness of oaks and palms, azaleas and laurel, boxwood, quince, and bougainvillea. Encompassing stone or brick walls shrouded in vines were de rigueur, and privacy was as precious as time itself.
    Built on all four sides of a central courtyard, the home sheltered a large carved stone fountain at its heart. Semitropical plants filled the courtyard, and their care and cultivation had been Romy’s abiding passion. Often Strand would watch her from the windows by his desk as she dawdled among the tiled paths, pinching a faded blossom here, monitoring a pale new shoot there, checking the progress of the long awaited efflorescence of a favorite species.
    She had been content here, in this home and its environs, and Strand had frequently reminded himself that their shared happiness was uncommon good fortune. It wasn’t anything he had ever experienced before, and he had told himself that he would be a fool if he ever, even for a moment, took for granted the wonderful balance they had managed to achieve together.
    He had also known that balance, by its very definition, was fragile.
    Meret Spier, Strand’s assistant, had become irreplaceable after Romy’s death. She had begun working for them two years earlier, when their workload had increased to the point that they couldn’t handle it between them. Fresh out of graduate school at the University of Chicago, Meret had recently returned to Houston after failing to find a position with the museums in the Chicago area. After Romy’s death, Meret simply became indispensable. Strand paid her very well and even increased her salary significantly when she had to take over so many of Romy’s responsibilities. She was worth every dime of it. Aside from her impeccable scholarship, she was intelligent and low-key, facile at reading between the lines, and perceptive when assessing personalities, all invaluable attributes when dealing with art collectors, who could be as eccentric as the artists they collected.
    The rooms that formed Strand’s offices also served as the showrooms for the drawings he owned and sold. They occupied the entire left wing of the house as seen from the front entry. Most of these rooms were accessible from the peristyle that surrounded the courtyard. The porch of the peristyle was deep, providing a buffering shade from the summer heat and reducing the glare from the sunny courtyard.
    Strand’s office was the first in order from the front of the house to the back. It opened onto the broad front entry hall as well as into the courtyard, with a third door communicating with the library that separated Strand’s office from Meret’s. The walls of both offices were covered with framed drawings and a few paintings. In the library a long antique walnut table used for research sat squarely in the center of the room and was usually