Free Die in Plain Sight by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

turned it faceup again, fascinated and bemused by seeing the past live again in her hands, a past brought to life by someone who had lived at the time when Painter’s Beach was called Sandy Cove.
    “Well, a rose is a rose is a rose and all that,” Susa said. “No matter that it isn’t signed, this was painted by an extremely talented plein air artist who worked in Lewis Marten’s time.” More likely, in his body.
    Lacey grinned. “I knew it!”
    “A garage sale. My God.” Susa laughed triumphantly. “My ancestors strike again.”
    “What?” Ian asked.
    “Long story,” she said, shaking her head. “Put it this way—I just knew I’d find something wonderful if I did the triage for the charity auction. But this—this is like pulling weeds and finding diamonds in the roots. Extraordinary.” She looked at Lacey and started laughing. “A garage sale! Lord, but life is sweet.” She held out her hand. “I’m Susa Donovan and I’m delighted you came here tonight, Ms.—”
    “January Marsh,” Ian said before Lacey could get over the shock of shaking hands with a painter whose name was often mentioned in the same breath as Georgia O’Keeffe.
    “Are the others like this?” Susa asked, releasing Lacey’s hand.
    At first Lacey was afraid that Susa had somehow read her mind and knew that there was a storage unit filled with hundreds of unframed canvases by her grandfather. Then Lacey realized that Susa was looking eagerly at the two other wrapped packages.
    “They’re all unsigned,” Lacey said carefully.
    “Well, open them up!”
    Ian smiled at Susa’s enthusiasm. “I’ve just about got this one out of its cocoon.”
    “Here,” Lacey said, leaning in over his right arm and pointing to a piece of red tape. “Yank on that and it will all come off. Mostly.”
    He yanked. Bubble wrap slithered down the canvas. Stately, elegant eucalyptus trees rose against a radiant slice of dawn.
    “Oh, my,” Susa murmured. She took the canvas and turned it slowly in a circle, letting light flood over the painting from all angles. “Superb. Just superb. Muscular, graceful, energetic, serene. Emotionally vivid,technically fluid. Everything you could ask of a plein air painter. And so very like Marten.”
    Ian looked from the canvas and Susa’s rapt face. “Should I know that name?”
    “Lewis Marten?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “No reason to, unless you have a doctorate in obscure California Impressionists. All anyone ever knew was that Marten was a teenage runaway who showed up in Laguna Beach before World War Two,” Susa said. “The local artist community took him in and then watched in amazement as a skinny child painted them right into the ground.”
    “Ouch,” Ian said.
    “Oh, they didn’t admit it aloud. There were some excellent painters around at the time and their egos weren’t tiny. But still, when you confront huge unself-conscious talent like this, it just takes the world away.”
    “That’s how I felt the first time I saw a painting by you,” Lacey said. “It…burned.”
    Susa glanced at Lacey, saw sincerity rather than flattery, and smiled. “Thank you. I love knowing that one of my paintings reached out and grabbed someone.”
    Lacey started to say that her grandfather had been a great fan of Susa’s paintings. Instead, she said, “Anyone who isn’t ‘grabbed’ by your work must be dead between the ears and the ribs.”
    “It would be lovely to think so,” Susa said dryly, “but I know better. After you cut away all the intricate intellectual rationalizations, art is a matter of taste. No single flavor works for everyone. Nor should it, despite what the critics and academics would have us believe.”
    “Don’t tell me you had problems with the critics and academics?” Lacey asked before she thought. Then she winced. “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
    Susa was laughing too hard to hide it. “I came of painting age during the last hurrah of postmodern abstract