Bad Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

Unexpected, too, was the fact that the interior was finished: sheetrock walls and ceiling, white; gray deck paint on the broad-plank floor; double-glazed frosted windows, allowing light but no view out or in; and heat, electric heat from baseboards running all around the place.
    The warmth and closeness of the air, after the sharp cold of the morning, was unpleasant, and it intensified the strong, heady smell of turpentine that rolled toward me as I came through the door. But that wasn’t what stopped me dead two steps inside. What did that was the canvas leaning on the wall before me.
    Six feet high, eight feet wide, unfinished, but already with the power of a nightmare, barely contained. Brutal, slashing lines; sullen, swollen forms whose weight seemed to threaten the canvas that held them; a darkness, a lack of clarity that made you want to shake your head, clear the film from your eyes. When you did that, when you stared long and deep enough, the thick grays and decaying browns, even the black, began to unfold, revealing the taut wires of color within them—blood red, cobalt, the green of a Kentucky sky in the minutes before a twister hits, other colors I couldn’t begin to name.
    I had seen paintings like this before. They were in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Whitney, at the Tate. There had been at least one in every large twentieth-century show at every major museum for the last thirty years. Landscapes, I’d heard them called, but that was only by people who needed distance, needed to name and so deflect the pain and anger that lashed out from these paintings to rip open the places inside you where you hid things you had let yourself believe were gone forever.
    “Jesus Christ,” I said finally, and then again, “Jesus Christ.” I looked at Eve Colgate, who was standing in front of me, a little to one side. Her back was rigid, as though she were expecting a blow, bracing herself. “You’re Eva Nouvel.”
    She turned to face me. Two hot spots of red shone on her cheeks, but her eyes were completely calm. “Yes,” she said, in a voice that matched her eyes. “And now you know something that not a half dozen other people in this world know.” She pushed past me and out through the narrow opening. I turned back to the unfinished canvas for a long look, then stepped over the threshold, joining her in the crisp, bright day.
    * * *
    In silence we skirted a pasture where black-and-white cows nosed at a carpet of hay. Beyond the pasture was an apple orchard, where new, mature, and ancient trees ran in parallel rows up and over the hillside. We walked beneath them under branches studded with buds. The dog threaded in and out as though stitching the orchard together.
    Eve Colgate, without looking at me, spoke. “You recognized my work. I didn’t expect that. It may make this easier.”
    At the edge of the orchard a low stone wall curved sinuously along a ridge. Eve Colgate leaned on the wall, her arms hugging her chest, her back to the sun. I leaned next to her, watching the shadows of the high, cottony clouds move across the hills.
    “If you know my work,” she said quietly, “perhaps you know my reputation.”
    “Eva Nouvel is a recluse. A hermit.”
    “That’s right.” She put her hands on the wall behind her and slid onto it, cross-legged. The black dog settled into a round pile in the sun.
    “I was just thirty when I left New York, Mr. Smith. I came here and bought this farm and I have lived here since, alone. I stopped painting when I came here and did not paint for some years after.” She picked up a twig lying on the wall, dug it into the joint between two stones. “That’s not quite true. Within weeks of establishing myself here I did a series of six canvases. I—” She drew a deep breath. “Before I came here I had been in the hospital for—for a long time. I had been seriously injured in an automobile accident in which my husband was killed. The accident was entirely our fault, my