Fatal Brushstroke (An Aurora Anderson Mystery Book 1) (25 page)

Rory sighed when she saw a photo of herself taken at Trudy’s wake: the fixed smile on her face gave her a slightly demented air. “That’s a nice shot of you and Nora. I look a little crazed,” she said to her friend.

“You look fine.” When a wide shot of the group appeared on the screen, Liz said, “What’s that in the background?”

Rory groaned when she realized what the camera had captured. “I think that’s my butt. I bent down to get that lipstick, remember?” She wished Veronica had left that photo out of her collection or at least cropped it.

Liz covered her mouth, but she couldn’t completely stifle the giggle that came from her lips. Rory quickly flipped through the rest of the photos, but nothing suspicious leapt out at them.

They sat on the couch in the living room and drowned their disappointment in bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

“Has that unit in Julian’s condo complex sold yet?” Rory asked. “Just wondered if that fire had hurt its prospects. I feel a little guilty about that.”

“Why? You didn’t set it.” Liz placed her empty bowl on the coffee table. “The place shows well. They’ve had multiple offers, though I hear there may be problems now that the prospective buyers realized Ocean Park was the complex where the arson fire occurred, not Ocean Gate as earlier reports suggested.”

“The one on Fifteenth?”

Liz nodded. “That’s right. They have similar names, and, to add to the confusion, they were designed by the same architect, built about the same time. They’re almost twins.”

Rory stopped eating, her spoon hovering in front of her mouth. “What did you say?”

“Built by the same architect, about the same time?”

“No, the other part.”

“They look a lot alike. They’re almost twins?”

At that moment, Rory realized she’d been looking at the case all wrong. “I think I know who the murderer is.” She set her half-eaten bowl of ice cream on the table and raced back to her computer. A few keystrokes later and she was once again viewing the photos of the wake. She zoomed in on one and said, “See that? The logo is wrong.”

Liz stared at the picture while Rory explained her theory. She was convinced she was right. She knew in her gut who the murderer was, but she had no proof. They needed to uncover concrete evidence in order to convince the police to investigate further. She knew just where to find it.

Rory looked at her friend and said, “There’s something I need you to do.”

Chapter 37

By the time darkness fell the next day in Vista Beach, a dense fog blanketed the city, imbuing an eerie quality to the night air. Dressed all in black with the hood of her sweatshirt pulled over her head to obscure her face, Rory kept to the shadows as she crept along the walkway. She shone her flashlight on the pavement in front of her, shielding the beam with her hand so no one would notice her progress. When she heard a rustle in the shrubbery to her left, she froze until a cat on its nocturnal rounds emerged from the bushes. She suppressed a nervous giggle and moved forward.

Rory slipped through the partially open gate and headed toward the building she intended to explore, praying the lock on the door would be easy to open. When she reached her destination, she turned the handle but, as expected, the entrance was securely fastened. In search of a hidden key, she swept the beam of her flashlight over the nearby landscaping. When she spotted a suspicious-looking rock, she picked it up and removed the key from the secret compartment.

Once inside with the door closed behind her and the overhead lights off, Rory pushed the hood off her head and paused by the entrance to remind herself of the layout of the room. Her search needed to be as efficient and discreet as possible. She didn’t know how long Liz could keep Nora occupied.

Rory had no doubt Hester had been killed here in the painting studio, but she needed proof to convince the police to investigate further. Unsure where to start, she shone her flashlight around the twenty-foot by twenty-foot room: at the drafting table in the far corner, the work tables in the middle, the scroll saw kitty-corner from the entrance, and the storage areas covering most of the two walls to her right.

None of the items spread over the nearest table (brush caddy, paint bottles, and partially finished ornaments) screamed murder to her. She doubted the evidence she needed would be out in the open, so she dismissed the other tables as unlikely to produce results and concentrated, instead, on the storage areas.

Starting with the open shelving to the right of the door, she inspected every item, picking up wood plates, boxes, and sign boards, looking for traces of blood or hair. When she moved a birdhouse to one side, she thought she’d found what she was looking for in the back of the top shelf, but what had appeared to be a long club in the semi-darkness turned out to be a hollow cardboard tube, too insubstantial to have inflicted any significant damage.

Before she continued her hunt, Rory reached for her belt to check the time on her cell phone. Only when her hand came up empty did she remember she’d left her phone in her car so it wouldn’t inadvertently betray her presence as it had in the past. Without a clock, she had no idea how long she’d been searching. She needed to step it up. The more time she spent snooping, the greater the danger of being discovered.

Rory ventured further inside the studio to inspect the cabinets on the wall next to the scroll saw. When she opened the door of the first one, a can of spray varnish tumbled out and dropped onto her right foot. A few colorful phrases involuntarily sprang from her lips, and she hopped backwards until she ran into the table behind her. After the pain from the two attacks subsided, she placed the offending can on the nearby table so it wouldn’t roll around on the floor and cause any more accidents, then continued her examination of the cabinet.

She was checking out a nutcracker so tall it reached her waist when the room burst into light, temporarily blinding her.

“I was hoping you’d be here,” a familiar voice said. “You won’t find it, you know.”

Rory blinked several times, trying to get used to the brightness that dazzled her eyes. So much for the plan to keep Nora occupied, she thought.

“I didn’t realize what you were up to until I was getting out of my car at Liz’s place. Until then, I thought I’d fooled you.” The studio’s owner stuffed her keys in the pocket of her slacks and set a gas can down just inside the door.

The sloshing of the liquid inside the container made Rory nervous. “Why’d you kill them? I thought they were your friends.”

“Friends don’t steal. Or try to blackmail you.”

Not liking the hostile look that momentarily appeared on the woman’s face, Rory closed her left hand around the head of the heavy nutcracker without lifting it off the floor. “Hester’s latest book?” she ventured.

“Those were my designs! I should have gotten credit! She was just supposed to give me suggestions for improvement, not publish them as hers!” A gleam of satisfaction in her eyes, Nora pointed at the floor in front of Rory. “She went down right about where you are now.”

Rory took a step back and stared at the concrete floor, feeling a little sick to her stomach at the thought of the violence that had occurred on the spot. “You could have complained to her publisher instead of killing her.”

“I had no proof. She’d taken the originals and stuck them in that stupid safe of hers. Besides, no one laughs in
my
face.”

A vision of pencil drawings on butcher paper flashed through Rory’s mind. She finally understood why Hester had kept calling her. The woman must have been afraid Rory had seen the originals on the drafting table when she used the computer during the painting seminar. Hester had probably hoped to preoccupy Rory by accusing her of identity theft before she could realize the import of the drawings. If only Hester had figured out her biggest enemy was the woman she’d stolen the designs from and not Rory, she might still be alive.

Nora reached underneath the shelving unit by the door and pulled out half of a baseball bat, cut lengthwise. She brushed dust off the sleeve of her jeans jacket and turned around to face her adversary.

Rory silently cursed herself for not looking underneath the raised shelves. She’d thought the space too small to contain anything significant. “Is that what you used to kill her?”

Nora laughed and, gripping the bat with both hands, took a step toward Rory. “What I used is far, far away thanks to you. Though I wanted to scream, you took so long to finish.”

Rory almost released her hold on the nutcracker when she realized she’d had the murder weapon for days. “Samantha’s project,” she whispered to herself.

“So nice of you to dispose of the evidence for me by sending it out of town. I cleaned the bat pretty thoroughly, but the flocking you put on the back should have covered up anything I missed.”

Rory tightened her grip on the nutcracker. “I lied.”

Nora cocked her head as if deciding what effect the news had on the situation. “Even better. They’ll find it in your house. Another nail in your coffin.” Bat in hand, she edged around the table until she faced her opponent.

Rory picked up the nutcracker, brandishing it as she would a club, and stepped backward. “I’ll just tell them I got it from you.”

Resembling a classic western showdown, the two women stood face-to-face, weapons at the ready, fifteen feet apart, both waiting to see who would make the next move.

“You won’t get the chance. You’ll ‘accidentally’ die in a fire. One you set yourself, of course.”

Rory’s gaze strayed to the gas can next to the doorway. “No one will believe that.”

“Why not? ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ Isn’t that what those women at the paint-a-thon said?”

“That was just idle gossip. No one really believes that.”

“The seeds have been planted. The police think you’re a little off. They believed you painted that graffiti on the gate, didn’t they? If only they knew the truth.”

“That was you?”

“Clever, wasn’t it? After that and the fire at Julian’s condo, no one will be surprised about what happens here. Especially with your family history. There are mental illnesses that come to light only when people are about...oh...your age.”

“My mother will know the truth. She’s remembering things, you know. It won’t be long before she identifies you as her attacker. You shouldn’t have worn that perfume.”

Nora moved forward. “You’re bluffing. She never saw me. And even if she remembers a smell, well, that’s easily solved. I’ll dump all my perfume tomorrow.”

“You forgot about Hester’s car keys. You shouldn’t have kept them.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Rory realized she shouldn’t have alerted Nora to the keys.

“So that’s how you knew. Another item that goes into the trash. Or, better yet, I’ll toss them in the fire with you.”

For every step forward Nora made, Rory took one back until her body brushed against the table housing the scroll saw. She didn’t know if the saw could cut through bone, but she didn’t really want to find out. She inched to her right until her back met empty space. Rory judged the distance to the door, the only way out of the former garage. Just a foot or so more and she’d have a straight shot to the exit. She continued talking, trying to keep Nora occupied so she wouldn’t realize Rory’s true intent. “But...your studio.”

“A small price to pay to get rid of any traces I killed Hester...and you. I’ll remove the few items I can’t live without, of course.”

“There’s still Trudy’s murder.”

“There’s nothing to tie me to that. The phone and pills were in
your
car. And I made sure to destroy anything that would expose her blackmail attempt to the police.”

“What did she have on you that you had to kill her?”

“She saw me parking Hester’s car on Surf Lane that night. At first, she thought I was Hester going to stay at the condo and that’s why Julian wanted to spend that night at her place. Later, when Trudy realized it was me, instead of telling the police, she thought she’d get some money out of it. That was always more important to her than anything else.”

Rory inched along the table. Just a few more steps, she told herself, and she’d have a clear path to the exit. One, two, three steps and she flung the nutcracker in her opponent’s general direction, then sprinted for the door.

Screaming obscenities, Nora raced to intercept, hurling bottles of paint, cans of varnish, and random pieces of wood in front of Rory’s fleeing feet.

Rory stumbled, flailing her arms in a vain attempt to keep her balance. Within moments, she found herself on the concrete floor, eye-to-eye with a table leg. She was halfway to her feet when Nora aimed the flat side of the half-bat down on Rory’s head.

Just in time, Rory deflected the weapon with her arm, sustaining only a glancing blow to her temple. Even so, her head burst with pain as she struggled to remain conscious. Unable to stand the agony any longer, she closed her eyes and passed out next to the table.

When Rory came to sometime later, the smell of gasoline permeated the air. With every movement torture, she grabbed a can of spray varnish lying next to her and struggled to her feet, using the nearby table to help herself up. Nora was so preoccupied with splashing gasoline around the room, she didn’t appear to notice the other woman’s movements. Rory stumbled toward Nora at the moment the woman tossed aside the now empty gas can and dug a lighter out of her jacket pocket.

Fueled by desperation, Rory rushed forward and screamed “No!” at the top of her lungs. She popped the top off the can and aimed the nozzle at Nora’s face.

Nora flicked the lighter.

Varnish streamed out of the spray can and burst into flames.

An unearthly scream filled the air.

Rory dropped the can and a ball of fire shaped like a human being tumbled out the door.

With sirens wailing in the distance, Rory rushed to follow and slipped on the gasoline that covered the ground. Within inches of freedom, she passed out, her last thoughts of her opponent and how now she’d never find out why Nora had chosen to frame her instead of someone else.