CHAPTER TEN
The gift shop sat at the end of the public corridor between the visitor center and the staff exit, and Ella found it by following a hand-painted arrow on a piece of card that pointed left at the vending machines.
It was still open. That was the first surprise.
A sign in the window said WELCOME and below that INMATE CRAFTS – ALL PROCEEDS SUPPORT VICTIM SERVICES.
Ella went in.
The shop was the size of a large cupboard. There were three shelves down one wall, a glass display case along the back and a small counter where a woman of about sixty was tidying up. She looked up as Ella entered.
‘Hello, miss. Can I help you?’
‘Just waiting for my partner. You’re still open at this hour?’
‘We get conjugal visits until late on Mondays. Sometimes the wives stop by in here once they’re finished. Feel free to look around. Everything here is made by idle hands.’
Ella spotted a shelf of birdhouses. They looked like good birdhouses.
Ella wondered if any of these prisoners would ever have created an object of such beauty had they not been banished to years of confinement.
A lot of serial killers, in her experience, were good artists.
Offenders like Danny Rolling and Gary Ray Bowles drew attractive pieces that sold for thousands of dollars in underground collectors' markets. It wasn’t that murder and art were the same.
It was that the patience they took was the same patience, and a man only had so much of it to spend.
There was also, however, a lot of dreadful prison art out there.
Ella had seen quite a few John Wayne Gacy paintings, and they looked like something a child would do, only without the artistic intent.
Below the birdhouses were footstools, and the footstools were less to her taste. Each one seemed to have someone’s name carved into them, and whether that was a criminal, victim or family member’s name, it was still a strange thing to put your backside onto.
The glass cabinet at the back held paintings.
Ella drifted over to it while the woman went back to her cleaning.
The cabinet was wide and shallow and the paintings inside stood on a low ridge that ran along the bottom, leaned against the glass like books.
Most of them were small. There were watercolors of mountains, a beach, two horses in a field, a church somewhere in autumn.
She thumbed through them with one finger, not really looking and not intending to actually purchase any.
Then she stopped.
It wasn’t in the cabinet. It was above the cabinet, on the wall, in a frame that didn’t quite fit the board inside it. Her eye had gone up because the light at the top of the case had caught the varnish on something larger, and she’d looked, and now she couldn’t look away.
The painting was about the size of a folded newspaper.
It was acrylic on hardboard, and what was a lot of people would consider artistically competent.
The perspective was off in a few places, and the colors weren’t completely accurate.
However, the image made the back of Ella’s neck go tight regardless.
She was looking at a hanging.
A gallows stood at the center of the board.
Two uprights and a crossbeam, the wood painted in the brown of new lumber.
A rope came down from the beam in a single straight line, and at the end of the rope hung a man, head over to one side, feet pointed at the deck.
He had no face. Beside the rope stood a second figure.
He wore a dark tunic with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a black hood pulled down over his head.
Two ragged holes cut for eyes. None for the mouth. His hand rested on a long wooden lever.
The cold came down the back of her neck first and traveled out across her shoulders and stopped at her wrists, where the hair stood up on the underside of her arms and stayed up.
What the hell?
Ronnie Cobb’s – the worker from the faire – description came back. He was dressed up like one of them old executioners. Black hood pulled down over his head, with the eye holes cut in it. Long dark top, sleeves rolled up like he’d come straight off the page of a history book.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the woman. She pointed at the object in question. ‘Who painted that?’
‘That one up there? Couldn’t tell you, sweetheart. They come down from the workshop in stacks and I put them up. The painted ones don’t move so well. Folks want a birdhouse.’
‘There’s no name on it?’
She moved her chair towards the cabinet, climbed on it, fetched the painting down and passed it to Ella. ‘My eyes aren’t so good. Take a look.’
Up close, the painting’s imperfections became more pronounced. In the corner, where the scenery stretched off into endless grass, there were two letters.
T.G.
Ella pointed to it. ‘T.G. Do those initials ring a bell?’
‘Not to me. Those initials could be anything, though. Some guys put their wives' or kids' initials on them.’
The door went behind her. Cold corridor air came in with it.
‘Well, that wasn’t much use,’ Ripley said. She regarded Ella, then the gift shop woman, then the painting. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘A painting,’ Ella said. ‘By T.G.’
‘Who’s T.G.?’
‘No idea. Looks pretty familiar, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes and no. It could be anything.’ Ripley turned to the gift shop woman. ‘How long has this painting been in here?’
‘At least six months. It’s not new.’
She wasn’t sure what she’d do with the painting. She wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe she just liked the art style, or perhaps the story behind the painting that she might never know. She looked at the painting, and the painting looked back.
‘I’ll take it,’ Ella said.