Sweet Masterpiece: The First Samantha Sweet Mystery

that’s all we would need. Can’t think of any way this is going to change our investigation. We don’t even know yet if there’s anything suspicious about this death.”

Sam handed back the tape and his fingers touched hers. The closet felt suddenly intimate, with the two of them crowded in there. Beau leaned toward her, ever so slightly, as if he wanted to say something. Sam bumped into the wall behind her.

Heavy footfalls on the porch and a knock at the door interrupted.

Beau sent her a searching look, which she tried to ignore.

“Hellloooo . . . “ Rupert’s voice echoed through the house.

She slipped past Beau and peered out the bedroom door. “In here,” she called.

Rupert tended to float into a room, his trademark purple scarves and full-sleeved tunic shirts billowing, the gestures and number of scarves increasing in correlation to the size of his audience. Considering that he was nearly six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, he was pretty hard to miss in a crowd. He preceded the appraiser who introduced himself as Esteban, a thin, dark-haired man in a business suit, that Sam guessed to be in his mid-twenties.

She introduced Beau to the other two but it was apparent that Rupert couldn’t wait to show off the mural, and Beau seemed eager to get on the road. While the two art hounds crowded in near the painting, she saw Beau out to the front porch.

He got to the bottom step and turned. “I started to ask if you would have dinner with me. Tomorrow night?”

Sam almost blurted out, why?, but stopped herself at the last second. Guys like Beau Cardwell—tall, calendar material—did not date women like Samantha Sweet—average, chunky, with strands of gray in their hair. It just did not happen.

“A date?” she asked. It had been way too many years.

“Why not? You’re a beautiful lady.” He actually sounded sincere.

“Beautiful? You’ve only seen me in jeans that are coated in dust,” she countered. “Besides, I don’t really date much.”

“Okay, we’ll call it dinner for two friends who want to get to know each other better.” This time, he really sounded sincere.

She debated.

To question why a guy wants to share a meal with you isn’t polite. And if there’s one thing she’d learned growing up in west Texas, it’s that a lady is always polite. She accepted.

She watched him climb into the department SUV and drive away. Well. This would be interesting.

Excited voices inside the house caught her attention. She walked into the living room where Rupert met her in a flurry.

“Sam—” He was nearly breathless. “Esteban is very encouraged.”

“He thinks it’s real?”

The appraiser stepped out of the bedroom. “Is early to say.” He had some kind of Spanish/French euro- accent, which seemed completely affected. “I must run tests.”

Rupert was practically twitching with anticipation, while Esteban played it cool, ruffling the pages of a magazine that Sam had left lying on the coffee table.

She shrugged. “My supervisor said that it was okay to remove it.”

Rupert nearly drooled.

“I’ll need to get a receipt. It belongs to the estate of the home owner.”

Esteban reached into an inner pocket in his jacket and pulled out a small book. He might look like a cool customer but he’d come prepared. While he filled out a receipt and signed it, Sam went out to her truck and brought in the tools.

Neither of the men looked eager to get drywall dust on their clothes so Sam drilled four corner holes, inserted the wallboard saw and started taking out a section about twelve inches larger all around than the actual painting. They wrapped their treasure in a blanket that Esteban had conveniently remembered to bring and drove away in Rupert’s Mini Cooper, both looking happy as clams.

Sam watched the plume of dust settle on the road and walked back to her truck to get the sheet of drywall she’d brought along to repair the gaping hole in the wall. About the time she’d measured the hole, brought the saw back outside, and cut a replacement piece she realized that she had company. A woman wearing pink capris and a loose, floral-patterned T-shirt was coming up the drive. Sam guessed her to be in her seventies, with peach-tinted hair almost covered by a pink floppy hat.

“I saw your truck here yesterday, too,” the lady said by way of greeting.

Sam gave the quick explanation of her role as caretaker. She still found it amazing how often she spent days at a place, carted away half the furniture and no one even raised an eyebrow.

The woman stuck out her hand. “Betty McDonald. My husband and I live at the next place over.” She waved vaguely toward the west. Sam spotted another simple wood frame house about a hundred yards away. “Been here since before Riley bought his place five years ago. Way before his friend moved in, the young one.” Her eyebrows formed a pair of golden arches.

“Oh, were you friends with Mr. Anderson too?” Sam knew what she was hinting at when she said friend, and couldn’t resist the little dig back at her.

Betty ignored it. “The sheriff’s deputy came around yesterday, asking me about them. I told him what little I knew. Riley Anderson wasn’t all that neighborly. In fact, Leonard Trujillo had to get nasty with him. See that fence over there?” She pointed to the property on the opposite side of Anderson’s place from her own. “Riley put that up and it was on Leonard’s land. Leonard threatened to sue him.”

Sam didn’t mention that she already knew this little tidbit.

“Most of the other neighbors wouldn’t even talk to him, but I’d stop in now and then, just to check on him. I’d see him puttering around the yard. He seemed to like working in the flower beds. But after the other one moved in, Riley didn’t show his face much.”

Sam recalled the haphazard mess in the second bedroom, clothes strewn about, the unmade mattress on the floor. He might have been a slob but there was no evidence that Betty’s sly insinuation was true. “How long did the other guy live here?”

Betty rolled her eyes upward, remembering. “I’d say he moved in around the beginning of the spring. Four or five months maybe? No. You know when it was? St. Patrick’s Day. March 17. I remember because I was heading into town to meet some other Irish friends for a traditional dinner. Corned beef—um, I love that stuff. That’s when the strange blue car showed up.”

Of course. The perfect busybody neighbor who watched everyone’s comings and goings.

Betty went on. “I only saw Riley a few times after that. He didn’t look so good. I stopped in once with some muffins I’d baked and he said he’d been sick a lot. I gave him the name of my doctor in town but he wouldn’t go, told me he didn’t believe in doctors. After that, I would see the blue car come and go, not very often though. They mostly stayed around the house. Then Bill and I went on vacation the first week of June. When we came back, Riley’s old pickup and the other guy’s car were both gone. Place looked empty. Never saw either one of them again.”

When Betty started repeating things, Sam knew she was out of information so she started rummaging through her tool box, hinting that she still had work to do.

“Well, I need to get on with my walk,” Betty said. “Can’t be standing around here gabbing all day.”

As if it were Sam’s fault. Strange woman, she thought, as Betty walked back to the road and headed west.

Sam carried her rectangle of drywall back into the front bedroom and set it down, went back for the tape and joint compound. The studs behind the cut-out section might need some additional bracing. She tugged at the edges of the hole to see how sturdy it was. And then she noticed something odd.

Her sawing job had caused some of the old tape to split and a section of the old wall board now swung outward, as if a mini door had once been built into the wall. She pulled at it and a section about two feet tall came toward her. She reached for the flashlight they’d used earlier to look closely at the painting and shone it into the space behind the wall.

A couple of items seemed to be jammed in there. She reached in. Out came a leather-bound book, about