AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“How do you like your coffee?”
“Just like before, thanks,” Connie said. There was a reedy waver in her voice, for she too had felt the same tremors of heat from the innocent contact.
When Blake came back, he was carrying two mugs. He handed one to Connie and then chose the seat across from her to sit. He sipped at the coffee, watching Connie’s face over the rim of the mug.
“Why are you here?” he asked at last.
Connie set down her mug. She clasped her hands in her lap and seemed to lean forward as she spoke, as if to give her words greater sincerity.
“I found a small painting in a Hoyt Harbor gallery,” she began softly, holding his gaze, her eyes never wavering from Blake’s. “And when I saw it… I wept, because it was one of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen in my life.”
She sat back, took a deep breath, and then went on to explain how she had purchased the two paintings from Warren Ryan and realized that the name Bill Mason was a veil for Blake McGrath.
Blake listened, his features seemed to be carved in granite. He was unmoving, watching Connie’s face, her eyes, and her expression with wariness.
When she had finished retelling her story, Connie lapsed into empty silence. Her lips were parted, glossy and soft. “I fell in love with your art,” Connie added in a whisper, “and I wanted to know if my heart was right – if my instincts could be trusted. I wanted to find out who the man behind the work was, and what drove you to create the most beautiful paintings the modern world has seen… and why you suddenly disappeared.”
Blake raised an eyebrow. The woman seemed sincere, yet he had learned to be miserly with his trust. The fact was that she had come from a gallery, and every commercial gallery survived by making a profit.
“How much did you pay for the paintings?” he asked.
“Three thousand dollars,” Connie said softly.
Blake smiled wryly. He remembered the works. He had given them to the grocery store owner. “Well I imagine you will be able to turn a tidy income,” he said in understatement. “Together, they’re worth probably half a million, maybe even a little more.”
Connie nodded, but then her eyes widened and she began to slowly shake her head. “They’re not for me,” she explained. “And I didn’t buy them to gain from directly.”
He was surprised, but he tried to conceal it. “You said that you were good at your job,” he challenged her.
“I am,” Connie said earnestly, “But I am a lover of art, not a lover of money, Mr. McGrath.”
Blake winced. Coming from this woman the formality of a name he hadn’t heard uttered in five years sounded too impersonal, too distant.
“I called you Connie, back at the car,” he said tactfully. “Please call me Blake.”
She smiled then, and her whole face seemed to light with a sparkling glow of unaffected beauty. Blake felt something tight squeeze in his chest and it took an effort for him to raise his wary guard again. Sometimes, he reminded himself, nature’s most beautiful creatures can be her most dangerous.
“So now you have found me,” he said and lowered his chin onto his chest gravely. There was a moment of heavy silence in the room. He tried to smile but his lips would not hold the shape. “So what more do you want?”
For a moment Connie’s face was blank with innocence. “I would love to see any other paintings you have made,” she admitted shyly… “and I would like to ask you why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you disappeared. Why you have never exhibited again.”
Blake stared hard at Connie. There was shadowy movement behind her eyes and he could not tell if it was deceit or sincerity, for her voice and body language betrayed nothing that he could match to her expression.
“I don’t paint any more,” he said.
Connie looked appalled. Her expression became stricken with shock. She felt something squeeze painfully inside her. She could accept that this man had hidden his work, accept that he chose no longer to share his gift with the world, but to stop painting seemed too tragic, too cruel.
“Why?” the word escaped her in a scandalized breath.
Blake shrugged, but said nothing. His expression darkened as though he could deflect the needle of the question with an inscrutable scowl. He stared into his coffee mug for a long time and then gave her a sideways glance. She looked pale, and he instinctively knew at last that she was genuine. He sighed. He could see a private pain like hurt in her solemn enigmatic eyes and he suddenly wanted to make that look go away – to offer something gracious that might retrieve the situation.
“I’ll show you some paintings,” he compromised. “Works that I did when I first moved here, seven years ago. But I won’t answer the personal questions,” his voice took on an edge of warning. “Can you accept that?”
Connie nodded, but kept her expression veiled. Someone had hurt this man, she realized intuitively. At some time in the past, someone… or something… had left Blake McGrath broken, and altered the course of his life.
11.
Connie followed Blake down a long passageway that ran past the kitchen, and then into a large cluttered room at the far end of the house.
His art studio.
Connie stood in the doorway, her eyes taking in everything in an instant. In front of a large window on the opposite side of the room she saw his easel, a high triangular frame that stood at least six feet tall. In front of the easel was a backless chair on casters, and beside the chair was a small kind of bookcase, perhaps a couple of feet high and wide. The bookcase was on the same kind of casters as the chair. The shelves of the box were crammed with tubes of paint and rags, and atop the box was an old-fashioned wooden palette and several paintbrushes. Everything was layered in a thick coat of grey dust.
“I don’t come in here any more,” Blake seemed to sense the direction of Connie’s eyes, and offered the explanation. Connie nodded, said nothing. She took several steps into the room, and her eyes swept from the ceiling to the floor.
“It’s color-corrected light,” Blake explained the complex grid of tracks and globes that hung in clusters overhead. “I had a team of consultants and electricians create the system, so that the light in the room would be natural and constant. That’s why it looks like daylight in here – even in the middle of the night. The globes don’t give off the typical yellow hue that could affect the colors while I was working.”
Connie nodded again. She still had not spoken. Her eyes went to the furthest wall from where she was standing and settled on a timber rack of high vertical shelves. Stored upright, like library books, were over three-dozen canvases, each one wrapped within cloth, each a different size and shape.
Connie went towards the rack in a kind of reverent trance. She carefully caressed the edges of each bundle, needing to touch them, as if she could pick up some other sensory vibration of the marvels they might contain. She turned back to Blake who was watching her from the doorway. Ned was standing by his side, tongue lolling from his slack jaws.
“How many paintings do you have stored here?” she asked in a softened awe.
“Thirty one,” Blake said. “What you are looking at is everything I created for an exhibition.”
“The one you canceled?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “But, you had the paintings.”
“Yes. But that’s not the reason I canceled the show, and it’s not the reason I stopped exhibiting and painting.”
He came into the room, Ned at his side like a silent shadow. The big dog found a piece of rug-covered floor in a corner and dropped to the ground with a weary sigh.
Blake went to the easel, turned it so that it faced into the room, and ran the palm of his hand over the frame to wipe away the dust. Then he slid the first canvas from the vast timber storage rack, and set it on the crossbar of the easel, still covered by its dust cloth.
“You need to stand back near the door,” he said to Connie.
Conni
e took several steps away. Blake stood beside the painting and took hold of one corner of the cloth.
