Midnight Valentine(49)
Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
“No,” I say aloud to that nagging voice in my head. “It doesn’t.”
Sure. That’s why you’re here. Because you’re not wondering.
I mutter, “Shut up,” and get back into my car.
Portland is a beautiful city, but the traffic sucks. I circle a trendy shopping area for twenty minutes, looking for a parking spot, until one opens up. Then I wander aimlessly through crowded streets lined with shops, hoping something of interest will jump out at me.
The only thing that jumps out at me is the growing list of odd happenings and strange coincidences that have occurred since I moved to Seaside.
I’m a list maker by long habit. My brain enjoys order, planning, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from checking things off a to-do list. But the series of events my mind stacks up one after another as evidence of a strange power at work leading me straight to Theo Valentine is anything but satisfying.
It’s ridiculous. A total waste of time and energy.
And yet.
And yet you want to believe there’s something more than the nothingness that swallowed you whole five years ago.
“Don’t be a fool,” I whisper, standing stock-still in front of a small art gallery.
In the window hangs a large, beautiful oil painting. It’s a landscape, done in bold colors. Slashes of purple and indigo depict a mountain range in the background, its tips as serrated as the edge of a hunting knife. In the foreground, a dry riverbed is a stripe of dusty yellow meandering through an arroyo of shadowed green. Red flowers crown giant saguaros on a brown desert mesa that stretches far into the distance, leading the viewer’s eye to the brilliant bursts of white cutting across the canvas from the thunderclouds over the mountains to the ground in a spiderweb of jagged, forked lines.
The piece is titled Lucky Strike, by an artist with the initials T.V.
I tell myself the title means nothing, the initials mean nothing, the painting itself means nothing, but the flesh of my arms has pimpled with goose bumps and my heart is up in my throat.
My phone chimes with an incoming text.
There’s a shipment here for you. Should I sign for it?
It’s Theo. I laugh, breathless, because of course it’s him.
Yes, please. FedEx?
No, something called Craters and Freighters. It’s big.
My laugh dies in my throat. I have to lean against the window of the gallery because my knees have suddenly gone weak.
Craters and Freighters is the company I hired to ship Cass’s paintings from Phoenix. Part of the collection was in an art storage facility, but a few pieces were on display in the lobby of a local resort hotel. I’d made an agreement with the hotel that they could keep them through the end of the year, and then Craters and Freighters would pack up the whole collection and ship them to me in Seaside in January. By that time, the renovations on the Buttercup would be close to completion.
But now the paintings have arrived.
Three months early.
On the morning I’ve visited Capstone’s headquarters, destroyed by an unusual lightning strike. At the exact moment I’m standing outside an art gallery, looking at a desert storm landscape exactly like the ones my late husband used to photograph, created by an artist with the initials T. fucking V.
At what point does a string of coincidences gather significance and add up to something more than chance?
I stuff my phone into my handbag and head back to my car. Suddenly, I can’t wait to get home.
* * *
When I arrive, the guys are out on the back patio, eating their lunch. In addition to Coop and the ginger-haired Toby, Theo’s brought two burly Latino guys who look like brothers, and one tall, wiry fellow with tattoos all the way up both arms. They all stop and look at me when I appear in the open doorway.
“Hi, guys.”
Coop and Toby grin, the Latino guys nod respectfully, and the wiry guy waves, then immediately goes back to eating his sandwich.
Theo looks at me with slightly narrowed eyes. Like the others, he’s sitting on an ancient Adirondack, but somehow, he manages to make it look like a throne.
Coop introduces the men I don’t know, then asks, “You want a baloney sandwich? I’ve got an extra.”
I haven’t eaten yet, but I’m not hungry. My stomach is too twisted in ropes to handle food. “No, thanks. How’s it going with the rewire?”
Coop shrugs. “Piece of cake. For us. Because we’re awesome. Obviously.”
That tugs a smile from my pinched lips. I glance at Theo. He’s still staring at me with that assessing look, as if he knows there’s something wrong. “Where’s the delivery from Craters and Freighters?”