Just Before Sunrise (5 page)

Annie drove across Divisadero to upper Market Street and found her way to the tangle of streets where the reclusive painter she knew only as Sarah lived. She grabbed a parking space on a narrow street below the little hilltop bungalow. To get to it, she had to take a set of stone stairs that ran up the steep hill between two pale-colored stucco houses. She was still getting used to how San Francisco, built on forty-odd hills between ocean and bay and crunched for space, piled houses on top of each other and tucked them into every possible nook and cranny.

Having become adept at parallel parking in her three months in the city, Annie got her car into the small space on the first try. She laid down the law to Otto and, taking no chances with Sarah's painting in back, locked all her doors. She didn't bother with her shawl or an umbrella. The rain had stopped, and the sun seemed to want to come out. It might decide yes; it might decide no. She'd given up trying to predict San Francisco weather.

She took the stone stairs two at a time, arriving at a little cul-de-sac—a turnaround, really—with several small houses built around it. A street curved sharply, and almost vertically, down the other side of the hill, but Annie hadn't quite figured out how to get to it from the bottom. Even her map of San Francisco hadn't really helped. Back in her part of Maine, there wasn't a road she didn't know.

Perched on the edge of the hill, Sarah's pale pink clapboard bungalow would have been a mundane house but for its sweeping views of the city and the bay, stretching not quite from the Golden Gate Bridge east to the Oakland Bay Bridge. Even now, her heart still pounding from the Linwood auction and her encounter with Garvin MacCrae, Annie took a moment to appreciate the picturesque San Francisco skyline, the tufts of fog clinging to dips and valleys, the impressive expanse of the Bay Bridge, the bay gleaming in the distance. Nothing, she thought, seemed to detract from the beauty of her adopted city.

The little house had no yard, not even a scrap ol grass, nor was there a front porch or front steps. Only a sloping square of concrete marked the entrance. Pots of hydrangea on either side of the white-painted front door would be a nice touch, Annie thought. Gran had always hated a bare entrance. Anyone, she'd maintained, could manage to grow something with a packet of seeds and a few cheap pots of dirt.

But Gran had never met Sarah. Not only was she possibly incapable of such endeavors, she seemed thoroughly disinterested in her surroundings.

Annie rapped on the front door. "Sarah? It's me, Annie Payne."

"Door's open."

Given the dampness, the door stuck. Annie had to push on it with her shoulder.

She found Sarah sitting in her rattan chair to the right of the front door, from which she could take in the impressive views of the city and still see who came into her house. How, Annie wondered again, had this woman ended up painting such an intimate portrait of a Linwood? With her fair skin and horsey jaw, her faint eyelashes and eyebrows, she had none of the wealth and sophistication of the Linwoods. Her reddish, softly curling hair was erratically chopped, probably by her own hand, and going gray ungracefully. But her eyes were a vivid, penetrating blue, her best, and most revealing, feature.

She studied Annie without moving from her chair. Today she wore navy stretch pants and an oversize white polyester pullover with a fuzzy, bright yellow sunflower stamped on the front. She was a tall woman, at least five ten, but whatever condition she suffered from had left her stooped and gnarled. Despite her swollen, twisted joints, she continued to work, which Annie found nothing short of amazing. Her bungalow seemed as suited to her lifestyle as her functional attire. It was set up less for living than for working. Every available space—shelves, counters, cupboards, walls —in both the kitchen to the left of the front door and the living room to the right was crammed with canvases, paints, brushes, supplies, paper, drawings, books. Yet Annie detected nothing deliberate or affected about how Sarah lived. She wasn't playing to anyone's idea of who she was or how she should live but her own.

"Did you get the painting?" she asked without preamble.

Annie nodded. "I had to pay more than I thought I would."

"Over ten thousand?"

"No. Five on the nose."

"Then there's not a problem. Where is it?"

"Down in my car. I thought I should make sure you were here before I brought it up."

"Where else would I be? Go get it, please." Her thin mouth twitched into the self-deprecating smile of a woman who had no illusions about who she was. "I'll wait right here."

Annie retreated and raced down the stone steps back down to the street, her pulse racing. Her first two visits to the pink cottage, peculiar as they were, hadn't given her a false reading of the reclusive artist's talent. Even one quick glance at Sarah's work had reassured her that she was right. Here was a stunning artistic discovery.

Otto gave her no trouble when she removed the painting. Indeed, he seemed glad to be rid of it and immediately reclaimed the entire back of the station wagon. "Behave," Annie warned him, and started back up the steps. She was slightly winded from excitement and exertion. The painting, at least, wasn't heavy, just awkward. She wondered if the girl who'd sat for Sarah had framed it herself, if she'd ever even owned it herself.
Would
she be disappointed now, as an adult, when her husband reported that he'd tried to buy it and failed?

All was fair at an auction, Annie reminded herself. If Garvin MacCrae had wanted to pay ten thousand and ten dollars, he'd have gotten the painting. She needn't feel guilty. But as she labored up the stone steps, breathing in the damp smells of the northern California winter, she remembered his expression at her mention of his wife and felt a pang of regret. Still, the painting was Sarah's work. She had a right to it, and she'd paid for it, fair and square.

"Set it over in the corner," Sarah said when Annie, slightly winded, came through the door.

She leaned the painting against a kitchen counter. Seeing it amidst other examples of Sarah's work, Annie was even more confident of her assessment. This was the artist early in her development. Her style wasn't set, wasn't polished, but it was very much
there.

Using her walker, Sarah pulled herself slowly to her feet. She seemed to be in more pain today; perhaps the dampness made her stiffer. She struggled over to the counter where Annie had set the painting. "She was a lovely child." Her eyes misted unexpectedly. "I didn't do her justice."

"Then it is your work," Annie said, her excitement subdued by Sarah's unexpectedly somber mood.

"Yes." Her voice was barely audible. She tried to straighten but winced in pain, her spine remaining stooped. She turned to Annie, her vivid eyes shining with tears. "Thank you. I knew I hadn't made a mistake when I chose you."

"Why did you? Choose me, I mean. I haven't quite figured that one out."

Sarah shrugged, then said simply, "I've been to your gallery."

"I know, but that doesn't explain—"

"Yes, it does."

"I don't understand."

Sarah smiled, her tears subsiding, and for a moment she might have been a gentle, maternal older woman instead of an eccentric recluse. "It was the painting behind your register that convinced me you were who I wanted."

Gran's painting. "It's a watercolor my grandmother did of our cottage in Maine. Most people dismiss it as tourist art."

"So?"

"Exactly what I say. Gran managed to make a decent living as a painter, and she just loved it. She did our cottage, the rocky shoreline, wild roses, lobster boats, lighthouses, you name it. They're all skillfully done, unpretentious, openly sentimental— just what people want to take home with them from vacation."

"Is the painting in your gallery the only one of hers you have?"

Annie nodded. "Gran died about a year and a half ago. Our cottage was lost in a coastal storm last fall."

"A hurricane?"

She shook her head, remembering the relatively innocuous weather reports, a storm coming at high tide, the potential for some coastal flooding, then, seemingly out of nowhere, the surging ocean, the wind, the panicked fire chief racing down her isolated peninsula, yelling for her to get out. "It was just one of those nasty, unnamed New England autumn storms that got out of hand. I escaped just before it washed my cottage into the bay." She cleared her throat, fighting back the memory of that terrible moment when she'd realized with utter finality that Gran was gone, her cottage was gone, and no matter what she did, her life in Maine could never be put back together again. "There was hardly a stick of the place left. The painting and Otto were about all I had left. I decided I needed a new start."

"So you came west," Sarah said.

"I guess I'm hardly the first. I didn't agonize that much over leaving Maine. I pretty much woke up one morning and decided it was what I wanted to do." She smiled. "I've lasted out here longer than any of my friends thought I would. Anyway, it's refreshing to find someone who appreciates Gran's work. I'm glad I could help you, Sarah. I can write you a check for the balance of your ten thousand—"

"Keep five hundred for yourself."

"We agreed on one hundred, but I don't really want any payment. It was fun." For the most part, she thought, remembering Garvin MacCrae's eyes boring into her from the back of the Linwood ballroom.

"I put you in an awkward position. You had to go up to five thousand—it must have been far more of an ordeal than you expected. Please. Take five hundred out for yourself." Sarah started back toward her chair on her walker, but paused to glance back, her vivid eyes warm and far too knowing. "Who bid against you, do you know?"

"A man named Garvin MacCrae. He's—"

"Haley's husband."

Standing in the middle of her tiny house, Sarah gazed back at the portrait she had dispatched Annie to buy on her behalf, then proceeded slowly to her chair. The name Haley struck a chord with Annie. Haley MacCrae. No, she couldn't place it, but there was something hovering in the back of her mind, out of reach.

"Then you know him?" she asked Sarah.

"Oh, yes. I know Garvin, John Linwood, Cynthia." She staggered back to her chair, sank into the soft cushions, cast her walker aside. A sheen of perspiration had formed on her upper lip. She brushed one large, paint-stained hand through her hair. She seemed suddenly exhausted, overcome. "I know them all."

"Because of the painting? This Haley—she's a Linwood?"

Sarah's eyes seemed focused elsewhere, another time, another place. "I painted Haley a long time ago, before Garvin or Cynthia were in the picture—before I even knew what I was doing with a paintbrush. I was taking a painting class. The portrait was an assignment." She sank her head back into a tattered cushion. "Haley was my niece."

Annie could barely contain her shock. "You were married to a Linwood?"

Sarah glanced at her and, momentarily, looked amused. "Why do you think that?"

Annie flushed. "Well, if Haley Linwood was your niece and isn't now, I assume you must be divorced—"

Her face clouded and went pale. "No, no, Annie, that's not what I mean—" She faltered. "I used the past tense because Haley's dead."

Dead? Annie felt her knees go out from under her. The red-haired girl in the painting was dead. That explained Garvin MacCrae's pained look at Annie's innocent, idiotic mention of his wife. The painting hadn't been a present for her. His wife was dead. No wonder the crowd had been rooting for him. They must all have known that was Haley Linwood MacCrae in the painting, and they'd thought the man who'd loved and married and lost her should have it.

Sarah, clearly, hadn't troubled herself to give Annie a wide range of pertinent details before letting her walk into that auction room.

"She and my father were murdered five years ago," Sarah went on softly. "Haley's father, John Linwood, arranged the auction today. He's my older brother. I'm Sarah Linwood."

She paused, eyeing Annie as her words sank in. "A Linwood— you're a Linwood?"

"Yes."

"So that's how you could afford the ten thousand dollars you put into my account. But I don't understand—" Annie took a step into the living area, toward Sarah. "You don't live like a Linwood."

The older woman smiled thinly. "Nor do I look like one, at least not anymore. Annie, I'm sorry. I knew you didn't realize who I was the other day, but I thought—I assumed you knew about the murders."

The Linwood murders. Yes, Annie thought, feeling sick to her stomach. Now she remembered. Not everything—not the details— but enough to understand that sense that she'd been overlooking something she knew, missing something. "I suppose I did know. But I didn't—I just didn't make the connection between the auction today and a sensational case I read in the papers five years ago."

"It's my fault. I should have explained. I've struggled to maintain my privacy—to go on with my life—and perhaps was more secretive than I should have been, in fairness to you. I hope you don't feel used."

Annie stared out the windows overlooking San Francisco, noticing that the sun was shining through the clouds, scraps of blue sky visible, giving the city a sun-washed look. It was so damned pretty. She hadn't headed west to escape life's ugliness; she wasn't naive that way. But she hadn't expected it to catch up with her so soon, so terribly. She'd bought a painting of a murdered girl out from under the man who'd married and lost her. She was standing here, talking to a misshapen woman—a Linwood —whose father and niece had been murdered, who was obviously trying to keep her location secret from her wealthy, prominent family.

"I just thought," Sarah went on tiredly, "that it would be simpler and easier if you didn't know who I was. You wouldn't be tempted to tell anyone, you'd have nothing to hide. Believe me, if Garvin MacCrae sensed you were trying to hide something from him, there'd be no peace."

"Why? Does he think you had anything to do with the murders?"

Her shoulders slumped. "I don't know what Garvin thinks. That I didn't tell the police everything I know, that I led them to the real killer, that I helped him get away. I just don't know. I haven't seen him in so long..." Her voice trailed off; the faded pink of the chintz cushions behind her made her face seem even grayer. "Maybe I should have stayed away."