The Painted Smile excerpt
Chapter One
“Magnificent.” Breathed a middle-aged woman, gazing upon the painting in a plain black frame. Evelyn Blackwood sent the woman a strange look, her brow quirking in distaste. “Maybe.” She crossed her arms over the sleeveless silver summer dress. “If Mona Lisa wore a Glasgow Smile.” She offered a smile to the art critic’s sudden offended look.
“Well, I never-!”
Evelyn released a quiet laugh as the woman bustled off, high heels clicking along the track lit floor of Paper Moon Galleria situated on a promenade of artsy galleries catering to lesser clientele than the New York City Museum of Art. She vividly remembered her mother’s patronization of drug-addled beatniks dreaming of days gone by. Ruefully, her eye dragged over the vibrant hues splashing the cream white base into a lush palisade of gore. Her stomach mildly clenched. The image depicted a seated young woman visible from the laced bodice up. Fine of pale white skin and flaxen curling hair against the base of her delicately turned head, her eyes were closed, her lips composed into a vague half smile, dipped on one end from the vicious red slashing of her jaw. A single black fly perched on the painted girl’s exposed collar bone.
Her skin prickled. Evelyn tensed ever so subtly. She could feel someone watching her. It was not akin to the delirious rush of fear preceding the hunted. Still maintaining her lax, almost indolent pose, she cast her sights around the mutely lit gallery, noting the few avant-gardes had wandered away in search of more neon pastures. Past the glass walls of Paper Moon’s outer facade, she glimpsed the sheen of a black car parked beneath the green renaissance streetlamps.
The feeling intensified.
Behind.
She knew even as his light, slight drag on the left side, step, approached.
“Farramonde.” Evelyn murmured, running her gaze casually as she turned, over the dark-haired male.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever had the occasion to introduce ourselves, Miss-?”
She smiled deprecatingly, her blue eyes crinkling in mirth. “Come now, this face is worth a million dollars. Everyone knows who I am.”
Aidan Farramonde adopted a pleasant smirk, rising to her subtle bait. “Come to think of it, a little bird told me Mr. Marius Eden sent in his stead a lovely young lady looking to offer patronage to struggling artists such as myself.” He gave her a polite mock bow.
“Don’t flatter yourself.” But, she couldn’t resist grinning. “Patronage is a strong word for only having seen one painting.”
Farramonde straightened, his light-filled green eyes twinkling. “In that case may I rectify your lack of knowledge, Ms. Blackwood?” He offered his arm gallantly enough so that she had to repress a laugh. “Sliding her hand through the crook of his arm, she felt a sudden burn of the metal band around her middle finger. Surprised, she restrained from glancing down at the polished dome ring.
“Something wrong?” Farramonde asked casually, steering her down the long hallway lined with surrealist paintings. Evelyn wondered perversely if he had felt anything, though from his outward expression of bland civility, she doubted it. “No, not at all. I was just curious how you received the monthly spotlight when your subject matter seems vaguely disturbing.” She frowned, “Marius never mentioned you before.”
The artist’s smile was a touch cooler than before. “There are many great minds whom never see the light of fame. I am one such man.”
She noted the smaller rooms farther on the L-bend in the hallway, small plaques detailed temporary exhibits. Farramonde smile ruefully. “Was. Pardon my forgetfulness. I dare say exposure is an all new thing for me.” With evident pride, he presented her to a small square room lined on three walls by seven paintings. In the center of the room, a small Doric column held a guestbook with space for comments. There was only one other person in the room. Evelyn recognized the conservatively-dressed woman as the one whom had spoken of the Glasgow Smile. Evelyn caught her eye as they walked in. The woman gave her a haughty sniff, expression changing to warm acknowledgement beholding the artist.
“Pleasant night, Mrs. Spicer.” Farramonde flashed the elder woman a lush smile. Bemused, Evelyn watched the woman flush, murmur something along the same lines, glare in her direction and walk quickly away to hide her jealousy.
“I suppose your female fan base isn’t lacking.” Evelyn tilted a brow toward the door. He laughed richly, taking her small hand. Again, Evelyn felt a sudden flare of warmth rather than the sharp pang of burning. Glancing up into his face, she saw nothing amiss in his smile, following the lower of his gaze to the first painting.
“May I introduce you to Miss Saliee Leng?”
She had prepared herself beforehand, reading of his unusual style on online indie blogs. After viewing Glasgow’s Beauty, she had thought she was quite armed to survey the rest of his work with ease. She was wrong. A shudder crawled down her spine. The painting showed a moon-washed window pane shattered outward, a middle-aged woman wore a twisted smile as she pitched dangerously close to the blackness of the city void below.
Attempting to control her gut reaction, Evelyn breathed in and out slowly. Closing her eyes briefly, she remembered a jagged flash of newspaper headlines from six months ago. “Concert Pianist Falls To Her Death.” Ripped from the headlines indeed. She recalled vaguely the other details. Miss Lang was a has-been star on the Rockefeller Center Circuit. In youth, she had squandered her sizable talent in drugs and booze only to return, performing at mediocre concert halls attempting to regain something of her lost youth.
The nausea passed. Evelyn opened her eyes to feel the artist gazing upon her speculatively.
“Sickening, isn’t it?” He asked quietly, sympathy burning in his gaze. Momentarily distracted from the art depicting the end of life, she felt herself compelled to stare back. “Strange,” she agreed, uncertain as to why she felt there was a method to his madness. Farramonde led her to the next of a man bursting into red-gold flames.
“Spontaneous combustion,” she said without thinking.
“No,” Farramonde’s sympathy had been replaced by subtle amusement. “A self-suicide.”
Skeptically, she turned back to the static image on the wall. There was nothing in the fat man’s expression to support the artist’s claim. Evelyn read nothing but agony as layers of fatty tissues fused with dirtied garments. The man’s eyes were round orbs of bulging fright, his mouth a reddish hole of flame tongues, in the background a rusted bedstead could be seen as well as emptied tin cans. A homeless man.
She remembered the small news article about a fire in an untenanted apartment building on Coney Island. Dimly recalling the loss of one of many of the island’s indigent population. “Ignis Inferium,” she nodded to the nameplate. “Nice.”
He made no comment to that other than a slight smile. Moving onto the next, the subject was Asian in origin, kneeling beside a cherry blossom tree in partial bloom. At first her eye detected nothing out of the ordinary from the image other than refined peace. She started to smile, about to comment on the ordinariness of the painting until she glimpsed the faintest trace of red staining the man’s tan suit. More bubbled a crimson stain beneath his knees and the suggestion of a slim blade lay in the grass beside his hand. Seppuku.
“I never heard of this,” she looked to Farramonde sharply.
“Not all are tawdry New York Times headlines.” He said with a nonchalance to the subtle depiction of honor-slaying. She winced at her previous thoughts, silenced. The fourth painting depicted a car accident victim impaled by shards of tinted windshield glass. The fifth was a jogger set upon by muscular pit bulls, slavering red-gummed beasts gnashing fiercely at his face and clothing. The sixth was of a child falling down a flight of Brownstone stairs, an illusion of helpless motion in the thrashing limbs.
Evelyn wondered at the senseless depiction of violence and loss, ever aware of the artist’s arm twined in hers, the steadying warmth of a being whom she wasn’t sure found compassion in his subjects’ plights or a release from the horrors of life in depicting his mind on canvas. Farramonde smiled upon each of his creations, benevolence of a father’s pride in his look and gaze.
Her eyes momentarily widened at the seventh. A slim woman clad in a Victorian wedding dress of lace bent over a sleeping man. One would’ve thought immediately a wife and husband had not the illusion of another shape filled the edge of the blue velvet duvet. It was not the addition of a third which induced her shock, no, it was the sheer black veil shielding the woman’s bound hair and discernible features from sight. Evelyn traced the silky outline of a slender jaw, the curve of a cheekbone, the pale mass of upswept hair and the dark glittering of an upturned eye.
She recoiled from the painting. Was it an illusion?
“Lady Margret.” Farramonde whispered softly in her ear.
For an instant she had thought that someone had learned of her family’s secret, their own veritable hell of a skeleton in the closet. Then, with his words, she realized with a swoop of relief, he hadn’t. “I don’t know it,” she commented offhand, becoming lax against his side, the long line of her supple body encased in the metallic shimmer of the maxi dress, provocative with each movement. Deliberately dropping her gaze, she flickered back to his temptingly.
“It’s an old poem,” Farramonde continued in soft overtures of intimacy. “‘God give you joy, you two true lovers. In bride-bed fast asleep. Spoke the ghost of fair Margret. Loe I am going to my green grass grave, and am in my winding-sheet.”
“I see the penchant for morbidity never dies in you.” Evelyn rejoined lightheartedly, averting her gaze from the painting. There was something vaguely menacing in the abandoned bride, a long dormant fear of hers, resurfacing at the subtle suggestion of veiled animosity - motion wavered at the fringes of her sight. A slim hand crawled from the bride’s side, threading pale ivory fingers through the slumbering man’s hair.
Evelyn wondered if it was a trick of the subdued lighting, that slightness of a chest rising and falling with breath? Aware of his observation, she forcibly looked away again. “You paint with a realist’s eye. Why, I could almost swear they breathe with life.”
He nodded somberly, motioning for her to sign the guestbook. “I am glad you see as I do, my dear Ms. Blackwood. For a creator like myself, I give them form and they live with a permanence that eclipses the human experience of life and death.”
***
She had excused herself with a plethora of compliments, paying the respective dues to the gallery’s Director. Walking alone across the lobby, Evelyn’s thoughts remained a confusing mixture of images and feelings. The Glasgow Beauty remained alone, centered in fluorescent floodlight. Evelyn’s eye was caught ruefully again by the subject’s enigmatic smile.
That was the defining trait of all of Farramonde’s works, smiles worn by the painted people even as they came to their imminent demises. Approaching the sole painting adorning the coveted monthly spotlight, she thought that in certain lights the girl’s smile appeared a ghastly montage of pain.
Spur of the moment, she took out her Blackberry, snapping a few pictures, thinking it would make an interesting conversation piece. For the briefest of seconds between flashes, Evelyn heard a soft sound not unlike a human sob. Curious, but unafraid, she glanced around the deserted lobby. She didn’t remember seeing anyone else other than Farramonde and Director Harnois. It had been female, she was certain. Had she imagined it? Fleeting unease prickled her skin, replacing her phone in her bag, she headed out the doors into the cool autumn night.
Dual clicks sounded as the side of the black Porsche Panamera slid apart like the wings of a bird. She had received the car fresh off the 2012 autoshow floor as a late birthday gift, customizations had of course been desired, styling the car in the tradition of the classic racer Mercedes Benz Gullwing.
The driver’s side opened, a tall man clad in a trademark black and silver jacket, pants and freshly shined loafers stepped around to offer his hand. The uniform hadn’t changed much since her grandmother had first designed it for Blackwood personnel. Evelyn ran her gaze appreciatively over the silver buttons and tailored coat. The man in question wore his good looks well with dark brown hair flipped boyishly over a broad forehead. Light blue eyes twinkled merrily in response.
“I presume your evening went well, Ms. Blackwood?” He inquired delicately as she placed her hand in his. Evelyn feigned frailty, inclining the natural curve of her body against the hardness of the chauffer’s toned abs. From a young age, she had learned the best way to manipulate a man was through feminine weakness. Paul Ross’s arm snaked around her slim waist, steadying her with a touch less formal. Ross had been in the family’s employ for the past five years. At first deflecting any notion he had been hired as a bodyguard, they had eventually reached an understanding where each other stood. Evelyn regarded him as her backup in difficult times, deep down wishing it was the quasi bond between her grandmother and Julian Reno.
“Take me home.”
Available for purchase here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/331615
“Magnificent.” Breathed a middle-aged woman, gazing upon the painting in a plain black frame. Evelyn Blackwood sent the woman a strange look, her brow quirking in distaste. “Maybe.” She crossed her arms over the sleeveless silver summer dress. “If Mona Lisa wore a Glasgow Smile.” She offered a smile to the art critic’s sudden offended look.
“Well, I never-!”
Evelyn released a quiet laugh as the woman bustled off, high heels clicking along the track lit floor of Paper Moon Galleria situated on a promenade of artsy galleries catering to lesser clientele than the New York City Museum of Art. She vividly remembered her mother’s patronization of drug-addled beatniks dreaming of days gone by. Ruefully, her eye dragged over the vibrant hues splashing the cream white base into a lush palisade of gore. Her stomach mildly clenched. The image depicted a seated young woman visible from the laced bodice up. Fine of pale white skin and flaxen curling hair against the base of her delicately turned head, her eyes were closed, her lips composed into a vague half smile, dipped on one end from the vicious red slashing of her jaw. A single black fly perched on the painted girl’s exposed collar bone.
Her skin prickled. Evelyn tensed ever so subtly. She could feel someone watching her. It was not akin to the delirious rush of fear preceding the hunted. Still maintaining her lax, almost indolent pose, she cast her sights around the mutely lit gallery, noting the few avant-gardes had wandered away in search of more neon pastures. Past the glass walls of Paper Moon’s outer facade, she glimpsed the sheen of a black car parked beneath the green renaissance streetlamps.
The feeling intensified.
Behind.
She knew even as his light, slight drag on the left side, step, approached.
“Farramonde.” Evelyn murmured, running her gaze casually as she turned, over the dark-haired male.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever had the occasion to introduce ourselves, Miss-?”
She smiled deprecatingly, her blue eyes crinkling in mirth. “Come now, this face is worth a million dollars. Everyone knows who I am.”
Aidan Farramonde adopted a pleasant smirk, rising to her subtle bait. “Come to think of it, a little bird told me Mr. Marius Eden sent in his stead a lovely young lady looking to offer patronage to struggling artists such as myself.” He gave her a polite mock bow.
“Don’t flatter yourself.” But, she couldn’t resist grinning. “Patronage is a strong word for only having seen one painting.”
Farramonde straightened, his light-filled green eyes twinkling. “In that case may I rectify your lack of knowledge, Ms. Blackwood?” He offered his arm gallantly enough so that she had to repress a laugh. “Sliding her hand through the crook of his arm, she felt a sudden burn of the metal band around her middle finger. Surprised, she restrained from glancing down at the polished dome ring.
“Something wrong?” Farramonde asked casually, steering her down the long hallway lined with surrealist paintings. Evelyn wondered perversely if he had felt anything, though from his outward expression of bland civility, she doubted it. “No, not at all. I was just curious how you received the monthly spotlight when your subject matter seems vaguely disturbing.” She frowned, “Marius never mentioned you before.”
The artist’s smile was a touch cooler than before. “There are many great minds whom never see the light of fame. I am one such man.”
She noted the smaller rooms farther on the L-bend in the hallway, small plaques detailed temporary exhibits. Farramonde smile ruefully. “Was. Pardon my forgetfulness. I dare say exposure is an all new thing for me.” With evident pride, he presented her to a small square room lined on three walls by seven paintings. In the center of the room, a small Doric column held a guestbook with space for comments. There was only one other person in the room. Evelyn recognized the conservatively-dressed woman as the one whom had spoken of the Glasgow Smile. Evelyn caught her eye as they walked in. The woman gave her a haughty sniff, expression changing to warm acknowledgement beholding the artist.
“Pleasant night, Mrs. Spicer.” Farramonde flashed the elder woman a lush smile. Bemused, Evelyn watched the woman flush, murmur something along the same lines, glare in her direction and walk quickly away to hide her jealousy.
“I suppose your female fan base isn’t lacking.” Evelyn tilted a brow toward the door. He laughed richly, taking her small hand. Again, Evelyn felt a sudden flare of warmth rather than the sharp pang of burning. Glancing up into his face, she saw nothing amiss in his smile, following the lower of his gaze to the first painting.
“May I introduce you to Miss Saliee Leng?”
She had prepared herself beforehand, reading of his unusual style on online indie blogs. After viewing Glasgow’s Beauty, she had thought she was quite armed to survey the rest of his work with ease. She was wrong. A shudder crawled down her spine. The painting showed a moon-washed window pane shattered outward, a middle-aged woman wore a twisted smile as she pitched dangerously close to the blackness of the city void below.
Attempting to control her gut reaction, Evelyn breathed in and out slowly. Closing her eyes briefly, she remembered a jagged flash of newspaper headlines from six months ago. “Concert Pianist Falls To Her Death.” Ripped from the headlines indeed. She recalled vaguely the other details. Miss Lang was a has-been star on the Rockefeller Center Circuit. In youth, she had squandered her sizable talent in drugs and booze only to return, performing at mediocre concert halls attempting to regain something of her lost youth.
The nausea passed. Evelyn opened her eyes to feel the artist gazing upon her speculatively.
“Sickening, isn’t it?” He asked quietly, sympathy burning in his gaze. Momentarily distracted from the art depicting the end of life, she felt herself compelled to stare back. “Strange,” she agreed, uncertain as to why she felt there was a method to his madness. Farramonde led her to the next of a man bursting into red-gold flames.
“Spontaneous combustion,” she said without thinking.
“No,” Farramonde’s sympathy had been replaced by subtle amusement. “A self-suicide.”
Skeptically, she turned back to the static image on the wall. There was nothing in the fat man’s expression to support the artist’s claim. Evelyn read nothing but agony as layers of fatty tissues fused with dirtied garments. The man’s eyes were round orbs of bulging fright, his mouth a reddish hole of flame tongues, in the background a rusted bedstead could be seen as well as emptied tin cans. A homeless man.
She remembered the small news article about a fire in an untenanted apartment building on Coney Island. Dimly recalling the loss of one of many of the island’s indigent population. “Ignis Inferium,” she nodded to the nameplate. “Nice.”
He made no comment to that other than a slight smile. Moving onto the next, the subject was Asian in origin, kneeling beside a cherry blossom tree in partial bloom. At first her eye detected nothing out of the ordinary from the image other than refined peace. She started to smile, about to comment on the ordinariness of the painting until she glimpsed the faintest trace of red staining the man’s tan suit. More bubbled a crimson stain beneath his knees and the suggestion of a slim blade lay in the grass beside his hand. Seppuku.
“I never heard of this,” she looked to Farramonde sharply.
“Not all are tawdry New York Times headlines.” He said with a nonchalance to the subtle depiction of honor-slaying. She winced at her previous thoughts, silenced. The fourth painting depicted a car accident victim impaled by shards of tinted windshield glass. The fifth was a jogger set upon by muscular pit bulls, slavering red-gummed beasts gnashing fiercely at his face and clothing. The sixth was of a child falling down a flight of Brownstone stairs, an illusion of helpless motion in the thrashing limbs.
Evelyn wondered at the senseless depiction of violence and loss, ever aware of the artist’s arm twined in hers, the steadying warmth of a being whom she wasn’t sure found compassion in his subjects’ plights or a release from the horrors of life in depicting his mind on canvas. Farramonde smiled upon each of his creations, benevolence of a father’s pride in his look and gaze.
Her eyes momentarily widened at the seventh. A slim woman clad in a Victorian wedding dress of lace bent over a sleeping man. One would’ve thought immediately a wife and husband had not the illusion of another shape filled the edge of the blue velvet duvet. It was not the addition of a third which induced her shock, no, it was the sheer black veil shielding the woman’s bound hair and discernible features from sight. Evelyn traced the silky outline of a slender jaw, the curve of a cheekbone, the pale mass of upswept hair and the dark glittering of an upturned eye.
She recoiled from the painting. Was it an illusion?
“Lady Margret.” Farramonde whispered softly in her ear.
For an instant she had thought that someone had learned of her family’s secret, their own veritable hell of a skeleton in the closet. Then, with his words, she realized with a swoop of relief, he hadn’t. “I don’t know it,” she commented offhand, becoming lax against his side, the long line of her supple body encased in the metallic shimmer of the maxi dress, provocative with each movement. Deliberately dropping her gaze, she flickered back to his temptingly.
“It’s an old poem,” Farramonde continued in soft overtures of intimacy. “‘God give you joy, you two true lovers. In bride-bed fast asleep. Spoke the ghost of fair Margret. Loe I am going to my green grass grave, and am in my winding-sheet.”
“I see the penchant for morbidity never dies in you.” Evelyn rejoined lightheartedly, averting her gaze from the painting. There was something vaguely menacing in the abandoned bride, a long dormant fear of hers, resurfacing at the subtle suggestion of veiled animosity - motion wavered at the fringes of her sight. A slim hand crawled from the bride’s side, threading pale ivory fingers through the slumbering man’s hair.
Evelyn wondered if it was a trick of the subdued lighting, that slightness of a chest rising and falling with breath? Aware of his observation, she forcibly looked away again. “You paint with a realist’s eye. Why, I could almost swear they breathe with life.”
He nodded somberly, motioning for her to sign the guestbook. “I am glad you see as I do, my dear Ms. Blackwood. For a creator like myself, I give them form and they live with a permanence that eclipses the human experience of life and death.”
***
She had excused herself with a plethora of compliments, paying the respective dues to the gallery’s Director. Walking alone across the lobby, Evelyn’s thoughts remained a confusing mixture of images and feelings. The Glasgow Beauty remained alone, centered in fluorescent floodlight. Evelyn’s eye was caught ruefully again by the subject’s enigmatic smile.
That was the defining trait of all of Farramonde’s works, smiles worn by the painted people even as they came to their imminent demises. Approaching the sole painting adorning the coveted monthly spotlight, she thought that in certain lights the girl’s smile appeared a ghastly montage of pain.
Spur of the moment, she took out her Blackberry, snapping a few pictures, thinking it would make an interesting conversation piece. For the briefest of seconds between flashes, Evelyn heard a soft sound not unlike a human sob. Curious, but unafraid, she glanced around the deserted lobby. She didn’t remember seeing anyone else other than Farramonde and Director Harnois. It had been female, she was certain. Had she imagined it? Fleeting unease prickled her skin, replacing her phone in her bag, she headed out the doors into the cool autumn night.
Dual clicks sounded as the side of the black Porsche Panamera slid apart like the wings of a bird. She had received the car fresh off the 2012 autoshow floor as a late birthday gift, customizations had of course been desired, styling the car in the tradition of the classic racer Mercedes Benz Gullwing.
The driver’s side opened, a tall man clad in a trademark black and silver jacket, pants and freshly shined loafers stepped around to offer his hand. The uniform hadn’t changed much since her grandmother had first designed it for Blackwood personnel. Evelyn ran her gaze appreciatively over the silver buttons and tailored coat. The man in question wore his good looks well with dark brown hair flipped boyishly over a broad forehead. Light blue eyes twinkled merrily in response.
“I presume your evening went well, Ms. Blackwood?” He inquired delicately as she placed her hand in his. Evelyn feigned frailty, inclining the natural curve of her body against the hardness of the chauffer’s toned abs. From a young age, she had learned the best way to manipulate a man was through feminine weakness. Paul Ross’s arm snaked around her slim waist, steadying her with a touch less formal. Ross had been in the family’s employ for the past five years. At first deflecting any notion he had been hired as a bodyguard, they had eventually reached an understanding where each other stood. Evelyn regarded him as her backup in difficult times, deep down wishing it was the quasi bond between her grandmother and Julian Reno.
“Take me home.”
Available for purchase here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/331615