Gone Gull Page 3

  I took him by the arm and tugged gently. He dug in his heels.

  “Ridiculous,” he said.

  I could see Prine scowling.

  “There’s roast chicken and mashed potatoes—” I began.

  “This is all wrong.” Grandfather was staring at one of Prine’s paintings. I had only seen the back of the canvas when I was walking over, so I braced myself to turn around so I could see what Grandfather was frowning at. Though I could probably guess. He was probably inspecting one of Prine’s erotic paintings—although he shouldn’t have had the chance. Cordelia had laid down the law to Prine about not festooning the studio with what she called his “bare-naked ladies and pinup queens.”

  “I don’t object to nudes,” she told me afterward. “Or scantily clad women. But some of our students don’t have my broadminded approach, and besides, that man could make a fully clad portrait of Mamie Eisenhower look smutty and suggestive.”

  And it suddenly occurred to me where our vandal might have stolen the tacky lingerie—if Prine himself wasn’t the vandal. I made a mental note to discuss this with Cordelia.

  But to my surprise, the painting that had incurred Grandfather’s disapproval was one of Prine’s inoffensive ones. In fact, it was really rather attractive: a three-by-four-foot canvas showing a larger-than-life gray-and-white seagull. The bird stood on a white railing in front of a grayish-blue sky. His feet were planted on the railing, his feathers ruffled in the breeze, and he stared moodily into the distance. Of course, I was anthropomorphizing with that moody part. Or maybe Prine was. You got the definite impression that the gull was contemplating the meaning of life, or the secret of the universe, or something equally profound, although any real gull staring into the distance like that would probably just be keeping his eye open for a likely bit of garbage to float by.

  “Ridiculous,” Grandfather repeated. “You’ve got this all wrong.” He turned to Prine. “There’s no such gull.”

  “Nonsense,” Prine said.

  “You’ll never find a gull with those markings on his wings and those on his tail.” Grandfather tapped the offending bits of the painted bird.

  “Don’t touch my canvas,” Prine said.

  “And then topping it off with a bill that color and shape—ridiculous. You’ve conflated at least two completely different species of gulls—possibly three.”

  “I saw that very gull,” Prine said. “And painted it—”

  “From life?” Grandfather sounded scornful.

  “From photos.”

  “Photos of two or three different species of gull,” Grandfather said. “That’s what comes of doing your research on the Internet.”

  “From half a dozen photos I took myself of the same damned gull.”

  “Hmph.” Grandfather was shaking his head, and looking at the painting as if Prine had slaughtered the gull, and a few hundred of his cousins, instead of merely painting him with less than perfect accuracy. “Waste of canvas, if you ask me.”

  “Well, no one did, you old coot!” Prine roared.

  “Let’s go up to lunch and you can tell me all about it.” I grabbed Grandfather’s arm and attempted to steer him toward the door.

  “Old coot! I could beat you in arm wrestling any day, you degenerate twerp!” Grandfather shouted.

  “Shut up, both of you!” I snapped. “I won’t have behavior like this in front of the students.”

  “No students here,” Prine said.

  “There will be any minute if the two of you don’t pipe down. You!” I pointed to Prine. “What do you care what he thinks? He’s not an art critic. And you!” I whirled back to face Grandfather. “Stop picking on your fellow instructors and come have some lunch.”

  I half-coaxed, half-nagged Grandfather down the hall and breathed a sigh of relief when the door that separated the great room from the studio wing slammed shut behind us.

  Even as I hurried Grandfather toward the dining room, I couldn’t help looking around with pleasure. The great room was one of my favorite parts of Cordelia’s newly renovated craft center.

  In its heyday, the rambling building had been a well-regarded art pottery factory. Unfortunately its heyday had been around the 1880s. The Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery had gone bankrupt during the Depression and Cordelia’s family, the Lees—no relation to the more famous and wealthy Virginia Lees—had sold it. By the time I first saw Biscuit Mountain, nearly a century later, it had been abandoned for several years and was on the verge of falling apart. Cordelia had bought the property, renovated the building and grounds at great expense, and hoped to recoup her investment by running craft classes.

  Luckily for us, when the Lee family had built the factory, they’d had the money to do it well and the taste to want even a factory to be aesthetically pleasing. A graceful and inviting porch ran along the front of the building, and when you entered, you found yourself in the great room—one of the rooms carved out of what had once been the enormous high-ceilinged main factory floor. The dining room, library, and several other public rooms also filled the central block. At the back of the great room a wide terrace gave a sweeping view of the Blue Ridge. Downstairs were the kitchens and staff bedrooms which, because the land sloped down so steeply, were as full of light as the main floor, with almost as good a view. Upstairs a series of echoing storerooms had been converted to small but elegant and comfortable bedrooms for the instructors and students.

  To the left of the main building was a wing that had also once been an enormous factory workroom, this one converted into a small but well-designed theater and two roomy rehearsal rooms. This week, Michael was teaching a children’s theater camp in one rehearsal room while in the other a veteran hoofer taught a class she called An Introduction to Dance for Musical Theater.

  To the right of the main building was the wing containing the nine studios. The rooms there had actually started life as studios, in which artists had once done all the hand painting that made Biscuit Mountain pottery famous, so Cordelia hadn’t needed to do much remodeling there.

  Above the theater and the studios were more guest rooms, but since there were not nearly enough rooms for the students, we’d set up a rustic campground in a field that bordered the front drive and compiled a list of nearby bed-and-breakfasts and Riverton residents willing to rent rooms to our students. We’d even set up Cordelia’s enormous Victorian house on the outskirts of town as a temporary bed-and-breakfast, with Cousin Mary Margaret acting as chatelaine. But even the students staying in town tended to hang around the great room and the terrace when not in class, and almost everyone soon figured out that Marty, Cordelia’s cook, was so good that the meal plan was well worth signing up for. Cordelia offered pro-rated meal plans to the skeptics who didn’t believe her brochure’s promise of delicious gourmet feasts. By the end of last week’s classes, nearly everyone at the center had signed up.

  Thank goodness for the food, I thought as I steered Grandfather across the great room and into the dining room. Grandfather’s quarrel with Prine would have been a great deal harder to avert without the prospect of one of Marty’s meals to tempt him.

  As soon as we entered, Caroline Willner spotted us and waved us over to her table.

  “What’s got you all riled up?” she asked Grandfather.

  “The miserable degenerate of an artist,” he said.

  Hmm. Perhaps this was not the first time Grandfather had inspected Prine’s studio.

  “He’s not worth blowing a gasket over.” Caroline steered him to a seat. “Meg, go up to the buffet and get him a plate.”

  “He’s completely unsound on seagulls,” Grandfather was saying.

  “Well, what do you expect?” she retorted. “He’s an artist, not a naturalist. I bet you’d be completely unsound on Pointillism, gouache, and the proper use of cadmium yellow.”

  “Nonsense,” Grandfather said. But he sounded more mellow than usual. Caroline’s good influence no doubt, or perhaps the prospect of the plate I’d be fetching.
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br />   But just as I was turning to head for the buffet and follow Caroline’s orders, I heard Grandfather hiss in a stage whisper.

  “Damnation! What’s she doing here?”

  He was frowning thunderously and pointing across the dining room. Caroline and I both craned our necks to see who had upset him.

  Grandfather was pointing to a small clump of gray- or blue-haired matrons, clad in pastel tracksuits or skirt-and-sweater sets, who were seated together, picking at chicken-salad or tuna-salad lunches while eyeing the desserts with which they probably planned to undermine their healthy main meal choices. They all looked fairly typical of our student body, which skewed heavily toward women, many of them retirees or at least empty nesters.

  “She who?” Caroline asked.

  “That Venable woman,” Grandfather snarled. “There—on the end. In the purple.”

  “Ah.” Caroline nodded as if that answered her question. It didn’t answer mine. The woman at the end of the table was clad in a lavender tracksuit and had a pair of lavender-framed reading glasses dangling from a purple cord around her neck. She looked like someone’s twinkly-eyed grandmother.

  “What’s a Venable woman?” I asked.

  “A menace,” Grandfather muttered. “A blot on the face of the earth.”

  “A lady bird-watcher,” Caroline said. “Of whom your grandfather does not approve.”

  “I wouldn’t call her that,” Grandfather said.

  “Not a lady, then?” I asked.

  “Not a real bird-watcher,” he said. “What the hell is she doing here?”

  “Presumably taking a class,” I said. “Probably the jewelry-making class—I don’t recognize everyone at her table, but the ones I do are all from the jewelry class.”

  Grandfather snorted and pointedly turned his back on Mrs. Venable.

  I decided it was not the time to ask why he disliked her so intensely. Perhaps she was unsound on the issue of Wilson’s Snipe, a subject about which Grandfather had recently insisted on lecturing me at great length. I could no longer remember what it was about the particular snipe that had divided the birding world into separate and warring factions. But I came away more convinced than ever that birders were capable of the most passionate feuds over things we mere mortals couldn’t begin to understand. I’d ask Caroline about Mrs. Venable later. For now, probably wise to see if a good meal would mellow Grandfather’s temper.

  I went through the buffet once to fill a plate for him. Caroline looked relieved when I delivered it, and both of us were relieved when Grandfather left off sulking over the presence of Mrs. Venable and tucked into his meal with gusto.

  And then I went through again for my own lunch, though I decided to take mine in one of the carryout boxes we kept for people who wanted to eat in their rooms or studios. I’d been doing that all too often lately, because if I didn’t, something invariably interrupted me before I could wolf my food down. The students who’d invited me to lunch were just leaving, so instead of mingling with them I joined a table where Amanda was sitting with my cousin Rose Noire.

  “Just the person I was looking for!” Rose Noire exclaimed. “Meg, I have a Plan.”

  Yes, I was usually just the person Rose Noire looked for when she came up with plans, in spite of the fact that at least half the time I shot them down as impossible, impractical, or just plain cuckoo.

  “I’ve been thinking about how we can prevent any more problems like the ones you had last week,” she added.

  “Too late—we’ve already had one suspicious incident.” I explained about the lingerie display, and managed to get in a few bites of salad while they exclaimed over it.

  “This makes my plan all the more vital!” Her tone seemed to imply that had we turned to her for assistance last week, most of the nastiness could have been averted. “I’m going to arrange a cleansing ceremony! My students can help me make the preparations.”

  “It’s actually more or less on topic,” I said, seeing Amanda’s puzzled look.

  “I’m teaching the practical and spiritual uses of herbs,” Rose Noire explained. “And this is absolutely on topic!”

  “Just don’t get anyone upset by mentioning this latest incident. Or last week’s, for that matter. Some of them were here last week for other classes—if they choose to gossip, there’s nothing we can do, but let’s not stir things up unnecessarily.”

  “Of course,” Rose Noire said. “I’ll merely explain that the cleansing will dispel any negative energy that might be lingering from past events, and help prevent any future unpleasantness. And if we use the right combination of herbs, it will also boost people’s creativity. It’s really one of the most useful, general-purpose things you can do with herbs.”

  “Apart from putting them in food,” I said. “I’m rather partial to that use myself.”

  “And I’d already planned to take them walking in the woods this afternoon to gather native herbs,” Rose Noire went on. “We can keep our eyes out for ones we can use in the cleansing. I must run! So much to do!”

  She dashed out—though not without taking her tray up to the service hatch to drop off the dirty dishes on her way out. She might be a free spirit, but she was a very tidy and law-abiding one. She also paused to stick her head in the service door—probably to see if Marty was there so she could thank him for the excellent meal. Was it just my imagination, or had Marty begun spending more time here in the dining room since Rose Noire’s arrival? Was he about to join Rose Noire’s small but dedicated troop of admirers?

  “That reminds me.” Amanda held up a copy of our summer schedule. “Interestingly diverse selection of classes you’ve pulled together here. Goes a bit beyond the usual craft offerings.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We were going to have nothing but traditional craft classes, but my grandmother had some trouble recruiting participants until I got involved.”

  “That’s understandable,” she said. “No one knew her or had any idea if she was sane and reliable. They know you.”

  “And figured my brand of insanity was one they shared, or at least could tolerate.” I was actually pleased at the praise. “Once I got involved, we managed to reach critical mass, with enough craft instructors to make it worthwhile. But in the meantime, every family member who has teaching experience or aspirations volunteered to put on a class, and since we had enough space to house them all, we decided to go for it.”

  “I see your cousin is also doing yoga and mindfulness meditation in the evenings.” Amanda was studying the schedule. “And your mother is doing flower arrangement and principles of interior design next month. This Kevin McReady who’s teaching the computer class for kids in August—another relative?”

  “One of my nephews,” I said. “You’ve met Eric—Kevin’s one of his older brothers. If you think that’s diverse, you should see the full schedule. Come July we’ll be having a whole track of classes that law enforcement officers can take to fulfill their in-service training requirements, and believe me, getting approval for all that from the Department of Criminal Justice Services was no picnic. Kevin will be teaching a couple of classes for police officers on stuff like using online resources in an investigation and proper handling of cyber evidence. Dad’s teaching several sessions of CPR and first aid for first responders. My cousin Horace is coming up to teach some forensic classes.”

  “A pity you didn’t start the in-service classes a little sooner,” Amanda said. “I bet your vandal would think twice about doing anything if the place was crawling with off-duty cops.”

  “Cordelia and I have already noted that for the future,” I said. “Assuming we survive this summer, in future we hope to have the place crawling with cops at all times. Quite apart from the security benefits, it looks as if those in-service classes could be quite a nice profit center. And Caroline Willner—have you met her yet?—is going to help me talk my grandmother into installing a state-of-the-art high-tech security system.”

  “Good. But in the meantime, how about
a low-tech system?”

  I just had taken a bite of chicken, but gestured for her to continue while I chewed.

  “My church was having a problem with vandalism a while back,” she explained. “We were pretty sure it was a couple of wild teenagers, possibly from our own congregation. So we recruited a bunch of sweet little old grannies to sit and knit in the most vulnerable places. Not only did that protect the rooms they were guarding, but eventually they spotted the troublemakers trying to sneak away after spray painting some rude words on the men’s room wall. We almost had to rescue the juvenile delinquents from the grannies—there are few things more terrible than the righteous wrath of an upright Baptist church lady.”

  “It’s a thought.” In fact, if I hadn’t been eating, I’d have jotted it into my notebook. “Mother could probably recruit any number of volunteer security guards from our family if we could find a place to house them. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” She pushed back her empty plate and frowned at it. “I am going to gain ten pounds this week; I just know it. I’m not sure whether to thank or curse your grandmother for hiring such a good cook.”

  “Glad you’re enjoying the food,” I said. “Hearing compliments like that almost makes up for the hassle of dealing with our cook.”

  “A lot of cooks are temperamental.”

  “Temperamental is a polite way of putting it. Marty’s like a cross between a drill sergeant and a wolverine. We already had to replace two junior kitchen staffers who were terrified of him, and then he almost resigned in a temper tantrum over compost.”

  “Is he for or against?” Amanda sounded puzzled.

  “For—as are Cordelia and I. Which is why we set up a perfectly lovely garbage, recycling, and compost center half a mile downhill from here—far enough from the main building that the guests couldn’t smell anything and weren’t apt to be troubled if any raccoons or bears came scavenging. Marty begrudged the time it took his kitchen lackeys to haul the compostable trash down there—he had them flinging it in a ravine behind the building.”