Sketch of a Murder

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Nita arrived at her door five minutes before Daniel got there, Dawn tagging along behind. "Hope you don't mind another set of hands. Dawn's had practice packing paintings."

The reporter playfully slapped his shoulder. "Yeah, slave labor."

Hours later Nita looked around, silently blessing the builder who believed in the 'open space' floor plan. Even with the kitchen simply a corner of the living space, there was still barely enough room for Molly's cedar chest, all of her canvases, and the three of them. As it was, she had been forced to move her father's trunk to her bedroom. "Good thing I don't have much furniture," she commented as she studied another canvas.

"Yeah, I'll say!" Dawn glanced up from the sketchpad open on the small dining table. "Hey, thanks again for letting me help out. I seriously love Molly's work!"

Nita glanced up. "I appreciate the help." Having Dawn in her apartment wasn't as tense as she'd thought it would be when Daniel had first shown up with her in tow. That woman knows how to fit in. Something I've never been good at.

She meandered a twisting trail across the room and placed the canvas she was studying into the 'Go with Daniel' stack leaning on the left side of her couch. Back at the 'Unseen' stack, she picked up the next canvas. "Molly was a prolific artist."

"She told me once that she was drawing her life," he said as he pounded in another nail on the safe-transport frame he was building around a canvas.

Dawn patted the stack of sketchpads on the chair next to her. "I think she was telling you the absolute truth. The oldest pad here contains sketches of a farm with people in clothes that look like something from a time warp." She turned the pad she had browsed through over and carefully affixed a number to the hard backboard.

"Let me see," Daniel said as he ambled over. Dawn flipped the front cover open. "Cotton fields. They're hoeing in cotton fields."

Nita left the canvases to peer over Dawn's other shoulder. "Maybe that's why she left." She pointed at a sketched figure. "Wonder who the poor, lynched guy was?"

"Her older brother," Daniel stated flatly.

Dawn twisted her head to look up at him. "How do you know?"

"One of the first paintings she let me see had the lynched victim in it. But in that earlier painting, he was standing in front of a rundown cabin, smiling at an old woman. I asked Molly who they were. There was such love and longing in that painting...," he shook his head at the memory. "She told me the painting was of her brother, Angus, and her Grandmother Elizabeth. Said her brother died a hard death. I didn't press for anything more. Felt bad that I'd made her think about it."

Dawn returned to inspecting the picture. "What happened to that painting?"

He stepped back and spun away from the kitchen. "Sold. Molly wanted me to sell it. Said it hurt her heart too much to look at it anymore."

"The sketchpad in her backpack must be the more recent part of her history." Nita drifted over to the small couch that was barely bigger than a loveseat. She unbuckled the top of the worn backpack and carefully extracted the sketchpad from the threadbare clothes. "I haven't had time to go through much of Molly's stuff." She made her way over and laid the pad on a corner of the kitchen table.

She leafed through, turning each page with care. Near the back of the tablet she stopped, staring at a scene sketched in wicked lines of charcoal. "Sonofabitch! She saw it. She saw the whole thing!"

"Saw what?" Dawn laid aside the pad she had and hurried around the table. "That's Benning. It's exactly like The Avenger described in the first letter."