Art Capers: Short Story Collection

By Heather Ormsby

When you look up the definition of a caper, you see that it can either mean to playfully skip and dance about; or it means an illicit or silly escapade or activity.
These stories are a mix of silly, strange, miraculous, dangerous, supernatural and hopeful tales. But they all involve the arts. From sculpture, design, painting, music, and even perfume making, these stories are about the makers of art or the consequences of their making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moonlit Skies
• Release date: Oct 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005257965

Heather Ormsby

Heather Ormsby lives in Denver, Colorado. A former library supervisor, she has spent most of her working life surrounded by books and likes it that way. She is currently a full-time writer and photographer.

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Art Capers

Art Capers

Short Story Collection

Heather Ormsby

Moonlit Skies Press

Copyright © 2021 by Heather Ormsby

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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For my DAM family. Thank you for inspiring so many of these stories.

Contents

Introduction

The Sands of Time

Atelier Dreams

The Shopkeeper’s Hoard

Le Tigre

Dance of the Animals

With Expression

Strange Romance

Like Water on Chalk

The Memory Collector

Saturday Night Harvest

El Santuario

About the Author

Also by Heather Ormsby

Introduction

When you look up the definition of a caper, you see that it can either mean to playfully skip and dance about; or it means an illicit or silly escapade or activity.

These stories are a mix of silly, strange, miraculous, dangerous, supernatural and hopeful tales. But they all involve the arts. From sculpture, design, painting, music, and even perfume making, these stories are about the makers of art or the consequences of their making.

The Sands of Time

The Sands of Time

The old man was dying. The hospital room had a window with some sun coming in from the west, but the blinds were half closed. The skin under his nose was red and peeling from the irritation of the oxygen tubes. A quietly beeping monitor measured his blood pressure and heart beats.

I sat next to the bed in a chair covered in fake leather, waiting for him to wake up. We were the same age, but Miles’s years of smoking had accelerated the aging process. Even so, I could easily imagine myself in this same bed in a few years.

Miles coughed, the sound wet and phlegmy, and blinked open his eyes.

Hey, Miles, I said, glad to see you’re still with us.

He looked at me with a squint. His face relaxed when he recognized who I was.

Robyn. You’re still around asking the same old questions? Aren’t you retired?

I smiled. You know me. I’m like a terrier with a rat. I just can’t let it go.

Fifty years ago, I had been working as a detective for the San Francisco police department, back in the day when the department’s officers and detectives could still afford to live in the city. We had been called in on a robbery. Eli McGinnis had had a family heirloom stolen from his home. It was a platinum necklace of pearls, diamonds, emeralds and rubies. A real stunner from what I could tell from the photographs.

His family had made a fortune providing services for miners back in the Gold Rush days when San Francisco was still young and wild. They were almost American royalty now and had to be handled carefully.

His fiancée, Maggie Tyrole, had worn the necklace the night before at their engagement party. She had put it in the safe that night before retiring, but in the morning the safe door was open, and the necklace was gone.

Eli’s first words to me were Miles took it. You need to arrest him.

Miles who?

Miles Connor. An old friend. Eli pushed at the sleeves of his sweater and paced in front of the wide window of the sitting room in his Master Suite. The safe door was still hanging wide open. There was still a pile of money and some papers inside of the safe.

Why would a friend steal your family heirloom? I asked while jotting down the name in my notebook.

We had a falling out. It’s not important why, you just need to know that he was angry with me and my fiancé, and he has taken it out on us by stealing the necklace. He’ll probably sell it for the money.

I pointed with my pen to the safe. He didn’t take the cash there. If he needed the money, why didn’t he take that pile? It would be easier than trying to pawn jewelry.

He could use the money, but he took the necklace to spite me.

Was your dispute over the necklace itself?

No. But I’m telling you that he took the thing. Just go question him.

I asked if I could speak with Maggie.

No, he said. She is too distraught. She’s blaming herself or the loss. I really don’t want to put anymore strain on her before the wedding.

When me and my partner found Miles, he was painting in his studio. His art studio was in an old warehouse. There was a lot of light coming in the windows, even with some of the small panes broken and taped over with newspaper. The place was cold and uninsulated and had a concrete floor. A mattress with a pile of blankets and a hotplate in the corner of the room made me suspect he was also living there, against City regulations.

He denied taking the necklace and a thorough search of the place never turned one up. We put a watch on his bank accounts, but without any evidence, and nothing turning up at the pawn shops, there was nothing we could do beyond coming ‘round every once-in-a-while to question him again and again. The pressure from the McGinnis family never let off, but we had nothing to show them.

My partner eventually retired, but I would still call on Miles. Over the years we became friends in a way. I would take him out for coffee or for a beer. I would always ask about the necklace and he would always deny knowing anything about it. But we would also talk about baseball, politics, and art. He also finally came to have a reputation as an artist.

When a gallery started to represent him, he began to have a lucrative career after about ten years of living rough. Perseverance is the way to make it in the arts game, I guess.

I liked his paintings. For a time, his signature was in affixing found and natural objects into thick swathes of oil paints, glue, and polymer clay. The pieces were large and heavy. They also looked extremely fragile.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had ended up buying one of his pieces. I had gone there to see it when the purchase was publicized. It was a seascape, but the scene was mostly of a night sky, a thin line of ocean, and a large swath of sandy beach glittering in the starlight. An hourglass figure is carved into the thick paint so that the top half is full of stars and the bottom half is full of the beach sand. The piece was called ‘No Love Outlasts the Sands of Time’.

When looked at closely, you could see actual pieces of sand in the piece. The painting’s label said that shards of mica and shell were set as the stars in the sky.

So, here we were, two old friends at the end, and still me asking the same old questions. Eli and Maggie were both now dead and gone – they died in a small airplane crash five years earlier. The mystery of the stolen necklace was a dead cold case with no one caring, but myself.

Can you not tell me, here at the end, what happened around the necklace? I leaned forward and put my hand on his. At least tell me why Eli blamed you?

Miles coughed again, then wiped spittle from his mouth with his other hand with a tissue. Why not, he rasped.

---

His tale was the typical love triangle. Eli and Miles had been school friends all through junior high and high school. But when Eli went away to Yale, Miles rebelled against his family and took up painting and indulging himself in the counterculture of the bay area.

Maggie had come to a group show of the artwork of him and some friends. She liked his work and offered to buy him a drink afterwards. What self-respecting bohemian artist could say no to that?

Maggie believed in his art. She became a muse for a while and would spend long hours in his studio posing for him until her cold and aching muscles begged for release. Then he would cover the two of them with a blanket and make love to her until hunger brought them out again.

This could have gone on forever, as far as Miles was concerned. Maggie, however, was more practical and she began to organize his finances and contact agents and studios for showings. She had her own job at a local library, but she wanted Miles to do well professionally, and she didn’t want to have to support him all herself.

That was when Eli came back into the picture. Eli came