Sunlight broke through the clouds, giving a whole new perspective to the house, as she walked through the living room. The rooms she’d cleaned were nice and bright, and the main bedroom felt quite benign now that Bertha’s personal belongings were gone. With a square of late-afternoon sun on the floor, even the red room showed itself to be what Beau had described, a dusty collection of old things. Sam took up a broom and swept the white stones and bundled herbs into a harmless pile. The stiff snake went into a garbage bag. It was a little creepy, picking it up, but she handled it just fine. She dropped the black candles—so dusty that they were nearly gray, in the clear light of day—into the same bag with the snake. All of it went out to the bed of the pickup.
A stack of books in one corner showed titles pertaining to native American symbolism and beliefs, herbal treatments and such. Two of them specifically addressed witchcraft but even they didn’t seem nearly as ominous now. She whipped the dust off of them with a cloth and carried the stack out to join the other books in her truck. There. All done. Alive to tell about it.
Alive and hungry. She locked up and headed off to meet her destiny at KFC.
Zoe stopped by around seven. Sam had showered off her coating of dust and whipped up the batter for her special lighter-than-air white cake. With raspberry and truffle cream filling, and her secret fresh-coconut frosting, the triple layer torte would be the highlight of the ladies luncheon for the Taos Heritage Foundation tomorrow. The three layers went into the oven and she sat at the kitchen table tallying her hours for the two properties she’d cleaned this week. It would add up to a decent amount and she hoped to bank at least half of it in her special account for the opening of Sweet’s Sweets.
“Hey there! Knock-knock.” Zoe called through the screen door and opened it at the same time. “Any more weird things happen today?”
Which? The artist’s sketchbook hidden in the wall at the Anderson place, or the witchy room at Bertha Martinez’s? Sam started to give the condensed version when Zoe spotted the carved wooden box at the other end of the table. Life had been nothing but weird this week.
“Oh, is this it?” Her eyes grew wide and she reached for the box.
“Careful. That thing is . . .” Sam wasn’t sure quite how to describe it.
“Possessed?” Zoe joked.
“I don’t know. It’s got something.”
She turned it over in her hands but didn’t open it.
“I brought you some more strange stuff. I’ll get it out of the truck in a minute.” Sam hadn’t bothered to deliver any of the collected junk from today’s haul. “Some antique bottles with herbal
Zoe set the box down as if it was suddenly too hot to hold.
“Sam . . . do you really think that old woman was a
“Never thought about it until I came across that red room at her house. I don’t . . . I don’t know much about any of that stuff, but aren’t the
“They were often consulted for their healing powers.” She raised a foot and wiggled her toes.
“No. Forget it,” Sam protested. She did
“The stories go every direction,” Zoe said. “A lot of them seem to combine tales from all sorts of tradition— shamanism, Catholicism, voodoo. Many people believe
“Or a snake?”
Chapter 9
The oven timer went off just then and Sam jumped up to check her cake layers. By the time she pulled them out and turned off the oven, Zoe was antsy to go. She’d left Darryl with the impression that she was bringing home ice cream and she still had to deliver on that promise. Sam poured her a little jar of fresh raspberry filling to use as a topping and they walked out to the driveway together. Sam retrieved the boxes of books and medicine bottles from the back seat of her truck and Zoe headed off, happy with her new treasures.
Sam watched her taillights retreat down the quiet lane, thinking how glad she would be to offload the rest of Bertha Martinez’s stuff, with stops at the thrift shop and the county landfill. Her glance slid sideways to the trash bag that held the stuffed snake. Shape-shifter indeed.
Cake layers occupied her mind for a few more minutes, as she removed them from the pans and laid them out on cooling racks. While they cooled she blended the truffle cream filling for one of the layers, and cooked the raspberry syrup down until it was thick and spreadable for the other layer. The best thing about baking was that little tasks like grating fresh coconut were the perfect way to relax and escape all of the day’s other stresses. Before she knew it, she had more than double what she needed for the coconut frosting. Into the fridge, it would be there for something else.
While the layers cooled completely, Sam brought her laptop computer to the table and did a little research on the artist, Pierre Cantone. A search brought up at least a dozen websites devoted to his work and she knew this was more than she could absorb that night. She bookmarked the ones that seemed most interesting and turned back to assembling the torte before exhaustion overtook her.
Sam woke up early, probably because she’d completely crashed around nine o’clock. Today would be a busy one and that, too, contributed to the fact that she was staring wide-eyed at a clock which said it was 5:38.
Over coffee she took up her research on Pierre Cantone where she’d left off last night. The artist, born in 1937, raised in Provence, was best known for the amazing quality of light and shadow that he brought to an otherwise-fuzzy impressionistic style. He’d come onto the art scene when Picasso was grabbing all the attention with cubism, just a young wannabe when tastes were moving away from the style so popular a generation earlier. But Cantone ploughed onward and garnered, if not critical praise, popular attention. The elite called him a hack but buyers flocked to him. By the time Picasso died in 1973, Cantone was at the top of his game. Then tragedy struck.
His lovely wife Adele and their two children died in a train derailment, the only three fatalities when hundreds of other passengers escaped nearly unscathed. It crushed Cantone. Ranting against the world for the gross unfairness of it, he took to drinking heavily and he stopped painting. A corrupt business manager may have raided the successful artist’s life savings—no one seemed to know. The man disappeared, leaving Cantone living alone in a squalid New York tenement, in poverty.
At some point the Frenchman met a woman, another artist who raved about the art scene in New Mexico. Georgia O’Keefe was living there. Perhaps Cantone would be newly inspired if he were to meet the great lady artist. The record was never clear on whether this woman was a lover or simply a friend with Cantone’s best interests at heart, but she did carry enough influence to convince him to give New Mexico a try. He moved to Santa Fe and lived in the guesthouse of a patron. But, sadly, his work was never the same and he barely produced enough to live on. Then he vanished.
Sam followed other links in the search but everything written about Cantone seemed to agree. No one knew where the artist went after a dozen or so years in Santa Fe. He’d either died ignominiously or simply dropped out of public life. Since then, of course, his remaining known works had skyrocketed in value, with several of them bringing high six-figures at auction. She studied photos of the paintings and felt her pulse quicken. The little mural they’d found was certainly in the same style, and yet it was not a duplicate of any of Cantone’s known works. Had she found Cantone’s mysterious hiding place? And where was he now?
She would probably never know the answers, but she’d drained two cups of coffee by this time and was antsy
