no-usually no, because he won’t take money from any corporation or individual whose ethical standards he doesn’t approve of. He can really be quite maddening sometimes. The Museum of Modern Art approached us a few months back about marketing a line of candlesticks and jewelry made from his designs. The museums do a huge business nowadays through their gift shops and catalogs. It’s really quite lucrative.”
“He said no?”
Greta nodded. “Not only won’t he be a party to hawking knickknacks, as he calls them, but he insisted that I rewrite his will so that no one can ever license his name for the sale of anything. That man simply does not care about making money. He owns no stocks or bonds. All of his wealth is in his farm and his art. That’s how he wants it. So that’s how it is.”
Des nodded, wondering just how frustrated Greta Patterson was by a client who chose to leave so much money on the table. If she weren’t frustrated, she wouldn’t have brought it up. That was one of the most important things Des had learned about interviewing people: What they talk about can often be more revealing than the words they say.
“The Pattersons believe in artists,” Greta explained. “And we always have. When I was young I honestly thought I wanted to get away from this. I studied law at Duke. But before I went in with a firm I put in a year in London at Christie’s, another two years in New York, and before I knew it I was right back here working in the family business. I suppose, deep down, I always knew that I would be. I’ve run it on my own since my dad died.” She narrowed her eyes at Des appraisingly. “I understand you’re quite the artist yourself, my dear. Don’t look so surprised. Talent can’t hide. Especially in Dorset. I’d love to see your portfolio of murder victims. Perhaps we can do something with them, you and I.”
Des swallowed, taken aback. “I’m really not ready to show them yet.”
“Now you’re being unduly modest,” Greta scolded her. “You’re a beautiful, take-charge woman of color. Your art is highly political. Wake up and smell the turpentine fumes, my dear. Your timing could not be better.”
“But I don’t even know how to paint yet,” pointed out Des, who wasn’t expecting such interest so soon even in her wildest dreams. “I’m still learning.”
“Picasso was still learning until the day he died,” Greta scoffed. “That doesn’t mean you can’t find a home for your work. Besides, raw immediacy can be very, very commercially viable. Especially coming from someone like yourself. Do you understand what I mean?”
Des understood perfectly. Greta was saying that because she was a woman of color, people’s expectations would be considerably reduced
… Step right up, folks, and see the barefoot colored girl. She draws!!!… Des sat there in silence for a moment, seething. Not that she was a stranger to this kind of prejudice. She’d lived with it her whole life. Had she honestly thought the art world would be any different? Of course not. That would have been deluding herself. “I still need a lot of work,” she finally said in a muted voice.
“Good, I admire that. But please keep me in mind. I can get you wonderful critical attention in New York and Boston. Possibly even turn Oprah’s head. Trust me on this,” Greta said, eyeing her up and down. “You are very promotable.”
Something about the way the older woman’s eyes were gleaming at her now was giving Des a prickling sensation on the back of her neck. Or was that just her imagination? Greta Patterson was a married woman, after all. Albeit to a man at least twenty years her junior. What kind of a marriage did she and Colin have? Des didn’t know. All she knew was that when you really got to know the private lives of people, especially the wealthy upstanding bluebloods in Dorset, one truth always won out:
No one was who they appeared to be. Everyone was hiding something.
So what was Greta Patterson hiding?
The Leanses lived on a twenty-acre mountaintop high above Lord’s Cove from which they could see all the way down the Connecticut River to Long Island Sound. In days of yore, a fortified castle would have been built there.
Bruce and Babette Leanse had erected a post-modern jumble of cubes, rhomboids and scalene triangles that seemed to be tumbling right down the hillside, rather like a large child’s toy made of rough-cut timbers, granite and glass. Gazing at it through her windshield in the late-afternoon sunlight, Des initially thought that it was a total folly. But the more she looked, the more she liked its spareness, and the way it didn’t impose itself on the mountain so much as become a part of it.
She left her cruiser in the driveway next to a Chevy Blazer with Ohio plates. It was a vehicle she recognized. She’d seen it in the parking lot of the inn for a number of days. She rang the front bell.
“Trooper, glad you could make it!” exclaimed Bruce Leanse as he came charging out the door with his hand stuck out, all five feet six of him. “I’ve really been wanting to meet you. Babette’s still on the phone with the school board’s attorney about Colin. Poor guy.”
He closed the heavy oak door behind him and walked Des around the house and then across a meadow of knee-high wildflowers and native grasses. The sun was low, the trees casting long shadows across the meadow. Overhead, there were thin wisps of white clouds. A turkey vulture wafted on an air current, searching for prey.
“I’m hearing such good things about you from everyone,” Bruce said, glancing at her as they walked. He had a faint, knowing smile on his lips that Des didn’t care for. It bordered on a smirk. “In a lot of ways, I feel we’re so alike.”
“Really? How so?” asked Des, who could not summon up one single thing they had in common.
“I’m an outsider, too,” he responded earnestly. “And I feel like I’m constantly being watched and judged by the entrenched old guard, same as you are. Me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. How about you?”
“Me, I can’t have it any other way,” Des responded coolly.
He let out a delighted whoop of laughter. “Well said.”
Bruce Leanse may have been short but he was movie-star handsome, and he knew it. He had sparkling blue eyes, a rock-solid jaw, long, thin nose and lots of white teeth. His hair, which was flecked with gray, was short and spiky. He carried himself erect, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled back to reveal powerful, hairy forearms. He wore a fisherman’s vest over his flannel shirt, jeans and work boots. Des had read a lot about him over the years. His life was one long-running tabloid story. He was a billionaire’s son, a Rhodes scholar out of Princeton whose prowess on the downhill ski slopes had landed him a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. He was also someone who was not above crowing about his latest conquest. That was why the tabloids had taken to calling him the Brat. By the time he took control of the family real estate empire, he had climbed Everest, sailed solo around the world, hosted his own daredevil show on MTV, launched a magazine, a restaurant and a brewery, run for mayor of New York and dated a string of towering, glamorous supermodels. Lately, his private life had quieted down. And now here he was in Dorset.
Across the meadow, beyond a stand of cedars, Des could hear an occasional metallic plink, followed by shouts of husky male encouragement. “This is a very interesting place you have here,” she observed, as they made their way past a wall of solar panels.
“God, don’t let Babette hear you say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she designed it, and in the world of architecture interesting is synonymous with bad. People call something interesting when they truly hate it.”
“Well, I meant that I liked it.”
“Thank you,” he said, gratefully lapping up her praise. He struck her as rather needy. People who craved attention generally were. “We wanted it to blend in with the landscape, unlike those gargantuan trophy palaces that everyone else seems to want these days.”
“But you do build those, too, don’t you?”
“That doesn’t mean I like them,” Bruce said defensively. “I’m in business. If you don’t give people what they want, then you don’t stay in business. This is a universal truth,” he pointed out, as if this were a pearl of wisdom she might wish to jot down in her diary. “If someone is sinking two million into a house, then they want what they want, not what you think they should want. We wanted to be as green as humanly possible. We use less than a third of the energy of a normal house here. We installed geothermal heating and cooling, solar panels, waterless composting toilets. The lumber is native or reprocessed. I try to be eco-friendly, believe me. I’m someone who’s active in the Sierra Club. And if you ask me, the suburb is the worst thing that happened to this country in the twentieth century. That probably sounds odd to you coming from a developer, but I believe it.”
