The Body in Bodega Bay: A Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery

Chapter 14

187 14 WE CLEARED THE TABLE and laid out the storyboards again. This time it seemed to me that one felt thicker to the touch than the others. I ran my fingernail along the edge and felt a slight indentation, like a tiny groove. “Look at this, will you? Am I right that this one’s thicker than the others?” Toby held a corner of the board between his fingers, rubbed them, squinted at the edge, and confirmed my guess. “I think these may be two illustration boards pasted together. If so, I may be able to pry them apart.” He fetched his toolbox and came up with a box cutter. Inserting the sharp edge of the razor blade into the groove, he exerted pressure in a smooth downward-slicing motion. To my surprise, the two sides separated easily, as if they had been pried apart recently and then squeezed back together. Yellow gobs of hardened old paste dotted the exposed interior surfaces. Sticking to one of the sides was a newspaper article clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle. It was dated April 16, 1962. The headline read: “Hidden Treasures of Russian California.” I’d seen it before on microfilm in the Santa Rosa library. It was the story that outlined the legend of a lost Andrei Rublev triptych and 188 encouraged descendants of Russian immigrants to search their attics for forgotten heirlooms. It was the story that had spurred Andrew Federenco to renew his campaign to get the family triptych back from his cousin. And that was when Peter took the triptych apart, gave each of his girlfriends a panel, and hid the remaining one. “Okay, I think I know what happened. Peter must have pasted this story between the illustration boards, and Charlie must have found it when he got the boards home from the auction. The story about a valuable long-lost icon sparked his curiosity. He went back to the auction catalog and noticed that a Russian icon was for sale the next day and guessed it was from the same consignor. He figured there was a connection , so he bid on it and then confirmed the connection when he spoke to Rose Cassini on the phone.” “That sounds right,” said Toby. “Then this Russian thug shows up and pressures Charlie to sell him the icon, probably threatens him and scares him into hiding it, along with the storyboards. Meanwhile Charlie was trying to work out the relationship between the icon and the Hitchcock set, just the way we are. He checked out the DVD of The Birds on the day before he was killed.” Toby agreed. “That explains why Charlie was at the site of the old Gaffney house on the night of the murder. Either the Russian forced the story out of him and made him go there, or he followed Charlie to the site. I think Dan figured that part correctly. A fight broke out, Charlie was stabbed, and the killer stowed his body on the abandoned boat in the harbor. It all fits.” “Which brings us back to the storyboards,” I said. “They hold the answer to the missing panel, but we just can’t see it. Yet it’s there right before our eyes.” “You said earlier that we have to find another way of looking,” said Toby. “How else can we look?” Yes, I thought, how else? Already I had looked at the drawings every which way—up close, from a few steps back, from each side—every which way except one, I realized. Now I walked around the table and 189 looked at them upside down. It was a trick I’d learned in graduate school while studying art composition. If you’re trying to analyze the formal construction of a work, it sometimes helps to disorient yourself from your normal point of view. Seen upside down, the abstract forms and volumes become more obvious. That’s because the eye isn’t distracted by the subject matter. And that was the case now. Something I hadn’t seen before became obvious. There’s a principle of composition known as “the rule of thirds.” The artist or photographer who wants to use it is told to imagine a tick-tack-toe board imposed over his picture. Where the lines cross to establish the middle box is the center of interest. That’s where the subject goes. It’s...