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“You should hear this. You will be caring for this painting, and I want you to know how I feel.”
    Ginny settled them all in the “living room” area of the shop, where the upholstered chairs and a faux fireplace created a cozy nook. She offered coffee or a soda from the deli, but Jenna declined. It was a Tuesday, usually a rather slow day when few customers came in and the staff could count on getting a lot of framing done. “I’m glad you decided to go ahead,” Ginny began.
    Jenna shrugged. “Well, I sort of feel I have to. I almost feel like I owe it to this painting.” She held it up on her lap, studying it for a moment. “I didn’t like it at first. I’ve never been very fond of nudes. And to think of a woman naked in the woods like this, and an artist sitting there doing her portrait—well, it makes me rather uncomfortable.”
    “If it’s any consolation,” Ginny interjected, “Jerry—if this really is his, which I think it is—Jerry usually worked from photographs. He would have taken pictures of the rocks, maybe when she was with him, maybe not. If she was there, she was probably clothed. Then he would have photographed her in his studio and combined the two. I don’t think he would have made her sit for hours out in the woods.”
    Jenna considered that, nodded, and continued. “The more I looked at it, the more I came to like it. It isn’t—naughty, you know. She’s quite pretty really. Then when I heard about how she died…I did some research and looked at his other paintings. I like them. I read about how he killed her and then himself, and I wondered why he would have done it. Then I thought, maybe she deserves to have her side of the story told.” She ran her fingers along the edge of the canvas and laid the painting on her lap. “I’ve just about decided to go ahead, but I want to know as much as possible about it. About her and the artist, I mean. About how they died. What can you tell me?”
    Ginny settled deeper into her chair. She had half-expected this request for more information. People were endless gossips, and a murder was juicy enough without adding in the suicide bit. She cast back in her mind. “It was a long time ago, the year we had so many big snowstorms early in the winter, everyone thought we’d be buried until Easter. The first I heard of it was when the newspapers reported Abby Bingham missing. I couldn’t believe it. She was such a nice lady. Always doing things for the community. Anyway, it was right after a really big storm, and at first, the police thought she’d gotten into some kind of accident in the snow. So they were checking all the hospitals and so on. Then they thought maybe she and her husband Mike had been fighting and she ran away, but that turned out to be a dead end. The story faded away for a while, a couple of weeks at least. You know how it is: new stories get the front-page coverage, and it was right before Christmas. Mike kept bugging the cops, I heard.”
    Elsie stirred, but kept quiet. Mike had done a lot more than bug the cops, but Ginny wanted to stick with a sanitized version of the story.
    “Then, I think it was the day after Christmas, or maybe it was right after New Year’s, a couple of hunters were out in a field up north of here, tracking some deer, and they practically fell over the bodies. There had been a light snow, so they were covered, but it was obvious they were dead. They had, um…been there a long time, long enough for the coyotes to get at them.” Ginny swallowed hard. “The hunters called the cops right away. The cops came and got what they could, and eventually figured out it was Jerry and Abby. From what they could piece together,” she grimaced at her choice of words, “he shot her and then himself. But I never understood it. I never would’ve pictured him with a gun.”
    Jenna nodded. “But it’s so mysterious, what people do. It could have been a murder/suicide. The cops thought it was.” It sounded as