Now You See Her by Linda Howard

was married, he was married to a business associate of hers, and now the two were involved in an acrimonious divorce, which was an even better reason to stay the hell away from him.
    Okay. Her mind got the message. Now, if the word would just seep farther down, she might be able to get some work done.
    The rain had stopped but the day remained cloudy, and though she had installed bright lights in her studio, it wasn’t the same as sunlight. Normally that wouldn’t have bothered her, but today it did. She wanted bright sunlight. She had been working from a photo she’d taken of the St. Lawrence, which remained one of her favorite subjects, but without sunlight she couldn’t get the colors right. Disgusted, she thrust the brush into the can of turpentine and swished it around. Who was she kidding? She couldn’t get the colors right anyway. She hadn’t been able to get the colors right for a year.
    She wished she could put her finger on any one event that had obviously triggered the change, but she couldn’t. Nothing stood out in her mind. Why would she have noticed Clayton’s lone traffic light turning green? It did on a regular basis. She hadnoticed that her plants looked unusually happy, but at first had simply written that off as acclimation or her having stumbled across some hardy plants that could withstand her haphazard care. Maybe that was still all it was. Before, though, she had had to replace them on a fairly regular basis, but now, no matter what she did, they were thriving. Not even the move to the city had disturbed them. The Christmas cactus was blooming merrily as it already had several times this year, her bromeliads were fat and succulent, her ferns lush, and the finicky ficus kept its leaves no matter how often she moved it around the apartment.
    She didn’t want to be different. She had seen her parents use their talent as an excuse for all sorts of god-awful, selfish, self-aggrandizing behavior, and seen the havoc they had wrought in other people’s lives. She didn’t want to be like that. She wanted to be a perfectly normal person who happened to have a talent for painting; that was different enough, but she could handle that. But an artist who screwed up electronic timers, affected nature, and saw ghosts—whoa, that was way out there. Not even her mother had gone that far, though she had gone through a period when she sought inspiration in the metaphysical. As Sweeney remembered it, that had consisted mostly of toking on a joint. Excuses were where you found them.
    She sighed as she cleaned her brushes. The St. Lawrence was out of the question today, not that she had been making much progress anyway. The river didn’t fascinate her the way it once had, didn’t hold the lure of even the most ordinary face.
    The hot dog vendor’s face popped into her mind, complete with sweet smile. Sweeney cocked her head, considering the image. He looked so young in her mind, despite the gray hair. How had he looked when he was twenty? Or ten? She thought of him as a six-year-old with here-and-there teeth, beaming at the world.
    Absently whistling through her teeth, Sweeney reached for her sketch pad. It would be interesting to do him at different ages, a collage of faces on the same canvas and all of them his.
    Some artists only did rough blocking to get the right proportions, but Sweeney was a good sketch artist, too. She usually spent more time than she should on the preliminary sketches because she couldn’t resist adding in shadings and details. To her delight, the vendor’s sweet expression didn’t elude her pencil this time. Everything fell into place, in a way it hadn’t done in a long time.
    *   *   *
    The vendor’s name was Elijah Stokes. Today he closed his stand at the usual time, counted the day’s take, and made out a deposit slip, then walked to the bank and stood in line for maybe fifteen minutes. He could