A Frame of Murder : A Cozy Summertime Murder Mystery (Claire Andersen Murder for All Seasons Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) Read online

  A FRAME OF MURDER

  A Cozy Claire Andersen

  Murder for All Seasons Mystery

  By

  Imogen Plimp

  Copyright 2021 by Imogen Plimp

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without express permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any entities, current or historical, or any persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  eBook cover by: Carrie Peters @ Cheeky Covers

  Dedication

  For Seth, whose fault it always is

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Prologue

  Cal Olmstead didn’t mean for it to go this way. To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t the type to plan for much of anything at all. When he left Dubuque as a teenager, he did so with exactly three necessities stuffed inside his pack: a bundle of mismatched socks, enough underwear to last a week, and his trusty sketchbook. He figured he’d ride the rails until he’d made it to somewhere impossibly exotic—romantic, even. Somewhere like Vancouver or New Orleans. Maybe he’d even wind up working on a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska.

  Instead, he found himself here. Stranded—for only a few days at first (ain’t that the way it always is?)—in search of enough work to fill his belly with sandwiches, re-up his tobacco pouch, and be on his way again. He swung a hammer for Ray Hamilton on a barn renovation, and then he lucked into a gig washing dishes at the Barking Tarantula. It wasn’t until he found himself tending bar at the restaurant in Goshen Ski Resort that the stuck-for-good trouble started. Just one more season, he’d tell himself, and then I’ll skip town...

  That was ten years ago.

  He’d stayed because he loved the people he’d met—and the idyllic Appalachian landscape surrounding him. That, and, he’d never before managed to find so much time to draw. In a single month, he’d filled up more of his sketchbook couch-surfing around Warren County than he had during the entire previous year of traveling. And to him, that was worth something.

  It was four years ago that Ray Hamilton mentioned to him—offhanded over coffee and with a knowing twinkle in his eye—that the cavernous abandoned antique store on Main Street was up for auction. At the time, Cal was perfectly happy selling his sketches as greeting cards at two different art galleries in town. Sure, he’d recently started branching out to larger sculptures … and he didn’t have a studio … but his tiny one-bedroom apartment was big enough for all his supplies—and besides, he was paying rent off sales of his art, alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  “What would I do with that gargantuan old place?” Cal had asked.

  “Work on your sculptures in the back—that office would make a fine studio—and sell your work out front,” Ray had said—like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Cal hadn’t been able to put it together in any sensible fashion at the time. “Sell … my work? But … who’d want to buy enough of my work to pay for a whole gallery?”

  Ray had just chuckled and shook his head. And then he’d left Cal to mull it over. Cal had tried to put the idea out of his mind—but it had dug its claws in, and it wouldn’t let go. (It hadn’t helped matters that nobody in the right mind had any interest in buying that old antique shop besides Cal. It was huge. It needed a load of work, and it would take a fortune to heat in the winter.)

  Finally, Cal warmed to the idea. There was only one problem: he didn’t have enough money for a down payment on the place. So Ray Hamilton offered to loan him the rest. Ray, as it turned out, had been right to invest in Cal—he managed to recoup the entirety of his loan within two years of Cal’s opening.

  Cal named his gallery A Frame of Mine, a name his mother had suggested would be “so cute.” Whether he’d named it so ironically, even Cal couldn’t say. But what he knew for sure was that he’d never been happier.

  Most of the work on the floor was his. He reserved a small corner to sell pieces made by friends and, sometimes, submissions he’d received from artists from all over the country. Once a year—in the winter—he’d put on an opening of his newest work. And once a year—in the summer—he’d host an opening of the work of an artist dear to him. This summer’s guest opening was on track to be the best one yet: Cal had nabbed a booking of a never-before-seen series by famed conceptual artist Judd Muchesco, a notoriously reclusive creative who rarely showed work outside of the Lark Foundation—an artist community he’d founded deep in the Poconos Mountains.

  Mr. Muchesco and his agent hadn’t exactly been a breeze to work with. They’d so far been condescending. Primadonnaish. At times even downright insulting. But Cal didn’t care. His was the kind of glee made possible by youthful exuberance and an unadulterated love of a craft.

  Cal smiled to himself, thinking about how it had all played out. He looked down at his drawing desk—and frowned slightly at the shading he’d rendered sloppily on the sketch he’d been poring over. Then he looked up at the big red-and-yellow clock that hovered over his desk watchfully. He’d altered it with black-and-white swirls, so that it looked like it belonged in the Mad Hatter’s lair. Three in the morning, it said. Cal exhaled—and grinned. He’d been at it since midnight. It hadn’t seemed like he’d been working for three hours … but that was how he often felt while he was drawing.

  He dropped his pencil into a tin cup, stretched his arms up above his head, and yawned. Then he hopped up off his stool, threw on his mustard-coloured cardigan (it was always chilly on the mountain at night, even in summer), and flipped off his desk lamp. “We’ll call that a full day,” he said to himself, satisfied.

  Illuminated by the emergency lighting system, he walked—stretching his arms behind his back—toward the showroom. Then he pried open his office door and peered expectantly out into the gallery. Just one more look before bed, he thought giddily.

  Suddenly he was filled with the kind of excitement children know on Christmas Eve. He flicked on the back row of showroom spotlights and gazed about in awe. Judd Muchesco’s series adorned his walls, basking in glory, looking even more superlative than Cal had remembered from earlier in the evening—when it was first hung. The series started here, in the back of the room—small square paintings, dull and monochrome. They morphed gradually into bigger paintings, growing more vivid in colour … wrapping around the front wall, the east wall, the center divider … growing all the while in size and scope. Cal was surprised at how much detail he’d missed the first time he’d glimpsed the collection: a strange brush stroke here, an iridescent shimmer there…

&nb
sp; He took his time, pausing at every piece, absorbing details like he would in conversation with an old friend. He rounded the east wall, turned right to cross the center divider, and . . . He stopped dead in his tracks. Incredulous, he did a double take. Then he spun around. As if he couldn’t be seeing it right. As if—if he were to just spin ‘round—his entire reality would morph into another. But it was still gone. The “it” in question was an enormous painting with protruding globe-shaped knobs, opalescent in reds, yellows, and blues. It was titled #41, and it was the centerpiece of Muchesco’s whole series.

  Numbly, Cal dropped his gallery keys to the floor. He ran back to his office studio, his heart racing. Maybe they moved it back into the storage room for the night, he thought feebly. But it wasn’t there, either. He checked the bathroom, the entryway to the alley, and—hope against hope—the front showroom coat closet. But it was nowhere to be found.

  He stood, dumbfounded, in the doorway to his office—his mouth agape, his palms sweaty, his heart pulsating a mile a minute. “But it can’t be gone,” he said into the empty gallery.

  As if in a trance, he looked up and to his right—to the alarm panel he set each night before he went home. It had seemed silly to install it at the time, in such a tiny town where he’d never even locked the door to his own apartment… “Better safe than sorry,” he’d told himself when he’d made the purchase and paid for a professional installation. The action now seemed fortuitous—and a little bit spooky. For, as Cal gazed up at the alarm panel, he realized that it was armed. He’d turned it on the moment Muchesco’s staff had left for the evening.

  That’s when he realized it: the piece wasn’t being hidden until the opening. Nor was he the victim of a cruel practical joke being played on him by one of his craftier friends.

  He swallowed—his mouth dry, his tongue brittle.

  He’d been robbed.

  Chapter One

  I spoke as calmly as I knew how. “Let’s start again at the very beginning,” I said, patting Cal reassuringly on the back.

  He sighed—and stuffed his hands nervously into his trouser pockets. “We installed the entire new series—every single painting, from the beginning to the end—and finished at around 11:45. And I’m sure it was right before midnight, because Mr. Muchesco said he wanted to grab a coffee before the café closed, and they close at midnight on Fridays.”

  I nodded.

  “So then we—”

  “And at this point, who’s ‘we’?”

  “Judd Muchesco and his—er—I call them his ‘harem’,” Cal mused, blushing.

  I guffawed.

  “I know it’s kind of rude, but … everywhere he goes, he always has this group of girl-assistants with him,” Cal shrugged. “Anyway, it was him, his agent Fannie, and her assistant Juliet. The other two girls left much earlier to grab dinner at the brew pub—maybe at 9:00 or so. But I know the whole series was still hanging when they left, because that’s when I did my first sweep from start to finish. The whole series is … magnificent!”

  I smiled warmly. “And Mr. Muchesco and Fannie plus Juliet were still in the gallery while you looked at all the paintings?” I asked.

  Cal was nodding furiously, his disheveled chestnut hair bouncing atop his head. “Yes. It was just us four. We all wandered around looking at the work for a while in silence—maybe thirty minutes or so—” he began pacing, his Chuck Taylor sneakers squeaking against the gallery’s scuffed-up hardwood floor “—and then Mr. Muchesco wanted to lower a couple of the smaller pieces to below eyeline, and Fannie wanted to swap the positions of a couple paintings … and then they had a disagreement about the lighting, and eventually Muchesco demanded a particular kind of lighting—so I had to scramble around for some LED bulbs…” he gestured in the general direction of his studio office “…and by the time it was all sorted, it was almost 12:00 and Mr. Muchesco needed his midnight coffee.”

  As if triggered by Pavlov’s bell, I took a sip of the cardamom latte Cal had brought me as a gentle bribe when he’d raced to my bed and breakfast, frantic, begging me to look into the mysterious disappearance of his new client’s work. I’d told him to call the police (he already had) but said I’d be happy to poke around—so long as it wouldn’t interfere with the official investigation.

  I walked over to gaze at the gaping hole where Muchesco’s #41 had hung mere hours earlier. Given the context of its surrounding paintings—each of them massive and colourful—the blank wall looked vulnerable. Sad. Unbearable, even. “It’s a little odd that he’d want a coffee so late…” I mumbled, my eyes focusing on the nothingness straight ahead.

  Cal shrugged again and tugged at the raggity hole in the elbow of his mustard-coloured cardigan. “He’s a well-known night owl. He always works at night, so it’s not that unusual.”

  I nodded—my eyes mesmerized by the naked whitewash wall in front of me—and gestured for Cal to continue.

  He cleared his throat. “Muchesco, Fannie, and Juliet gathered up their things while I put the spare bulbs away in the back of the office. Fannie came back as I was putting away my step ladder to use the restroom. She said something about really liking my studio space, and we chatted for a minute or so. Then I waited out front with Muchesco and Juliet until Fannie returned. And then … I led all three of them out through the side alleyway entrance, and” —this next part he uttered emphatically— “came back here immediately to set the alarm!” He was breathless.

  I paused to think, the top of my to-go latte pressed against my lips. “About how much time passed between your leaving the gallery showroom with your guests—and returning by yourself to set the alarm?”

  Cal didn’t skip a beat. “A minute, maybe two.”

  “Hmm…” I didn’t like the sound of that. “If the thief was quick and nimble enough, that would have been plenty of time to sneak in through the front door or windows, lift the painting, and duck back out,” I suggested.

  “That’s what I thought at first, too…” Cal agreed, his voice uncertain. “The only problem is: this alarm system beeps every time a window or door opens—even if it’s unarmed.”

  I nodded. “So you would have heard a beep from the alley door if someone had come in from any point of entry in the front?”

  “Yep,” Cal said bitterly.

  “And you didn’t?” I asked.

  “Nope.” He pursed his lips and scowled.

  I sighed. My gaze dropped to the floor, where faint muddied shoeprints outlined the perimeter of Mr. Muchesco’s ill-fated series, collecting more densely where each painting had been hung. Like detective’s clockwork, my eye caught a glint as I scanned the floor beneath the empty hole where #41 once hung. I froze. And just as I was beginning to think our endeavor hopeless...

  I squatted down—and picked up a partially unwound paper clip, its tip caked in bits of dried, multi-coloured paint. I brushed at the bits of paint with the pad of my thumb.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking up at Cal.

  He shrugged, a lock of messy hair falling into his eyes. “Must just be garbage.” He gestured expansively to the dirty floor surrounding us. “I haven’t mopped up in weeks. Obviously.”

  I chuckled. “Have you or the sheriff found any other pieces of evidence?”

  “Yes!” Cal perked up, then jogged over to the end table nestled against the back wall. He returned with a small silver key. “The deputy found this in the middle of the floor. The police already dusted for prints and said they didn’t need it anymore.” He deposited the key into my outstretched hand.

  “That’s odd,” I said. I turned the key over in my palm. It was tiny and square-topped. It looked like the kind of key that would open up a New York City apartment mailbox… “It’s not yours?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t recognize it. And it doesn’t belong to Mr. Muchesco, Fannie, or Juliet, either.”

  I stood slowly, my eyeline lifting to the empty wall space before me. Then I tilted my head to one side, my gaze drifti
ng to the front door and windows and out onto Main Street beyond—it was already bustling with tourists. “Did Muchesco, Juliet, or Fannie leave here last night with any items big enough in which to conceal the missing painting?” I asked, entertaining a wild hair.

  Cal’s eyes glazed over, his memory at work. “Juliet carried all the canvas bags, which included two paintings Mr. Muchesco decided not to include in the opening.”

  “Hmmm…” I took another sip of my latte.

  “But I really don’t think it was an inside job!” Cal asserted, tugging boyishly at his ratty sweater-sleeve. “All three of them came back here early this morning for questioning with the sheriff. Fannie was furious, Juliet was bawling unconsolably, and Mr. Muchesco … well…” he sighed miserably “…I think he’s in shock.”

  I nodded—and raised an eyebrow. “Is he terribly angry at you?” I asked, my voice soft.

  Cal’s face pinkened. “I really don’t know…” he said slowly. “I know I’d be angry with me. But he just kept on saying, ‘Not to worry son, it’s nobody’s fault,’ shaking his head, his eyes all blank and bloodshot. He reminds me of, well … a ghost… And I know, I know it’s not my fault, but … honestly … well, I don’t know how I should feel!” He tried to don a brave face; but, truth to tell, he looked mortified.

  I reached out to give his hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m sure it will all work out,” I said.

  Cal looked unconvinced. He mustered a tepid smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, the finances and legality of it all will be fine. All the paintings were insured, and I have insurance for theft on this place as a safety net. It’s just that … I hate thinking that piece might be gone forever! It was … well, stunning!” Cal’s eyes widened, like he was imagining the Great Wall of China or the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. “I don’t care if this ruins me,” he said, suddenly full of angst. “I just don’t want that piece to be lost to the world.”