Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

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 patterns on both shirt and jeans.
    Then Shayla noticed the six paintings lined up. “Hon, you aren’t going to show that one in public, are you?”
    Lacey jumped again, having forgotten again that she wasn’t alone. She looked at the dark, savage painting. “I don’t know.”
    “It creeps me out.”
    “That’s what it’s meant to do. That’s what makes it so good.”
    “Well, yippee-skippy. Give it to a horror museum or the public morgue. Should fit right in. How many of those damn things did he paint anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” Lacey said. “I inherited thirty of the dark ones, but they’re numbered one through forty-seven. So my grandfather either sold, gave away, or destroyed the seventeen missing paintings. Or some combination of the three. The man was nothing if not unpredictable.”
    “I’m voting for destroyed.”
    Lacey sighed and swept her hand through her unruly cloud of curls.
    “I’m not. Even though the subject matter of the paintings isn’t exactly warm and cuddly—”
    Shayla snorted. “Ya think?”
    Lacey ignored her “—the Death Suite—”
    “Now there’s a name to draw little children.”
    “—is nothing short of brilliant,” Lacey finished loudly.
    “What about the others? Just because they don’t make you want to scream, does that mean they’re not good?”
    “Of course not. The landscapes have the same emotion and energy and finesse as the bleak paintings. Quinn painted light and dark, yin and yang, heaven and hell with equal skill and emotion.”
    “Maybe he was bipolar,” Shayla said, bending over her inventory again.
    “Could be. My dad said as much once. But I think my grandfather was simply a gifted artist who was able to create both sin and salvation with equal power.”
    “Give me heaven every time.”
    “Hey, I didn’t say I was going to hang any of the Death Suite in my apartment. But that doesn’t make those paintings bad. Just uncomfortable to live with.”
    “Uncomfortable. Yeah. The way a bed of razor blades is uncomfortable.”
    Lacey ignored her friend and went back to staring at the six canvases. Well, Grandpa Rainbow, she thought, using the nickname she’d given him for the paint splatters on his clothes, you’ve given me an impossible job. I’ve been hovering over these six paintings forever, and they all still look equally good to me.
    She turned the paintings to a wall, shuffled them like a con artist moving a pea beneath walnut shells, and then picked three