Portrait of Death: Unforgotten, page 1
Portrait of Death
UNFORGOTTEN
By Isabel Wroth
Copyright © 2019 Isabel Wroth
All rights reserved.
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More Books By Isabel Wroth
The Sarazen Saga
Sarazen’s Claim
Sarazen’s Vengeance
Sarazen’s Betrayal
Sarazen’s Hunt
Sarazen’s Fury
The Etheric Travelers Series
Awakening
Beguiling- Coming Soon
Perdition MC
Never Ever
Athena’s Raid
Ripley’s Saint
Dillon’s Universe- Coming Soon!
The Golden Bulls of Minos
Queen’s Ransom
The Valos Of Sonhadra
Shadowed
Portrait of Death
Unforgotten
Uncovered: Coming Soon
CHAPTER ONE
“Welcome to my crypt. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I’ve been waiting to say those words for nearly twelve years.
I stepped aside to let a two hundred plus pound, pissed off, offensive, hostile, suspicious, homicide detective into the room I’d been keeping a secret for the better part of a decade.
The brick-lined room, which once hosted an underground speakeasy during Prohibition, was the sole reason why I’d bought the six-story warehouse in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.
The entrance to the sewer, where patrons had snuck in to drink, dance, and meet in absolute secrecy, had long ago been bricked off, and the only access to the thousand square foot room was via a metal spiral staircase accessible from the warehouse office—now my sitting room—upstairs.
The ceilings reached a lofty twelve feet—an unusual feature for the era, according to the realtor—but the height made no difference to me.
This room is the closet where I keep my skeletons. My secrets hide down here, away from the light and prying eyes.
Eyes like those of Detective Graham and his partner. They don’t understand me.
Or my paintings.
How could they understand when I didn’t understand it myself? Three of the four walls were covered in sketches and paintings I had no memory of painting.
I mean, I know I painted them.
I sat down at my easel with the intent to begin a new project, only to blink, and hours later realize I completed something entirely different.
An extraordinary set of circumstances had to occur for me to create, what I called, a POD. A Portrait of Death.
I had to pick up an object recently touched by someone who would soon die.
The first time it happened, the object was a lock of hair from the tail of a stallion I’d been commissioned to paint.
His owner, Mrs. Linfield, paid my parents an ungodly sum for me—a child prodigy becoming well known in the art world—to paint her beloved horse.
Red Moon Rising was one of the most gorgeous animals I’d ever seen. He was a thoroughbred legend, a Triple Crown winner, and I was excited to get to work on the project.
I spent the whole day at Mrs. Linfield’s farm grooming Red, taking hundreds of pictures, and learning about what it meant to be a Triple Crown winner.
His coat had been described to me as sorrel, but to my artistic eye, it shined crimson with fascinating hints of shimmering gold and copper, and I asked if I could take a lock of hair home to make sure I got the paint color just right.
Mrs. Linfield braided a piece of his tail and cut a section for me.
When I got home, I clipped the hair to my sketchpad and set pencil to paper. I don’t remember anything after that. Only that hours had gone by until I blinked and came out of my fugue state, horrified and scared at what stood in front of me.
Instead of a beautiful horse, standing majestically beneath an ancient oak tree, I’d drawn a gorgeous horse impaled on a broken piece of fencing. Dead.
In tears, I tried again and again to draw Red—his face, one of his wild eyes, a hoof—but over and over, for three days straight, my hand refused to cooperate.
I painted his death fifteen times before I stopped and frantically hid the macabre sketches and paintings beneath my bed.
Or rather, before my mother knocked on my locked studio door and told me to stop working so hard. Red had passed away, and Mrs. Linfield was too distraught to accept delivery of the painting.
The blood in my veins froze as my mom gently explained how Red died. He hadn’t been adequately secured in his stall the night before and had gotten loose.
He tried to leap the fence into the broodmare paddock, but didn’t make it, and impaled himself on a broken piece of fencing.
As time went on, and no more macabre incidents happened, I began to think the case of my possessed hand was just some random fluke. A strange, unexplainable event that came and went.
Until two years later, when I accidentally picked up my baby brother’s washcloth, which had made its way into the rag bin.
I wiped the paint off my fingers with the yellow duck-print cloth and came out of a trance hours later to see what I’d done.
The beautiful painting of a Koi pond I’d started working on had transformed into another scene of death.
Only this time it wasn’t a horse majestically standing in a meadow, but my one-year-old brother, floating face down in a pool of water.
That time, I told someone…I told everyone who would listen to me.
I showed my parents the painting and explained about the one I’d done two years previously of Red and how that turned out.
I implored them to protect Elliot because he was in danger and couldn’t be let anywhere near water.
Instead of believing me, they took me to a psychiatrist upstate.
Feeling helpless, ignored, and invisible, I listened to Dr. Banes explain my condition to my parents. According to him, I suffered from visual hallucinations brought on by stress, coupled with sibling displacement syndrome.
He explained it was common for older siblings to feel a sense of abandonment for having been replaced by a new baby in the house and convinced my parents to leave me in his care for no less than three months.
Concerned I was a threat to Elliot’s safety, my parents agreed. They acted like they were dropping me off at a sleepaway camp, when until that night, I hadn’t even had a sleepover at a friend’s house.
The loneliness and isolation I felt in the asylum was indescribable. I couldn’t believe my parents would just leave me or for one second entertain the idea that I would ever hurt Elliot.
I quickly learned to tell the nurses what they wanted to hear and hide what I knew was the truth in order to avoid painful treatments meant to ground me in reality and banish my hallucinations.
Three days into the treatment with Dr. Banes, and he came into my room to deliver the grave details.
Elliot had somehow gotten out of the house and found his way into the fountain in front of our home.
Dr. Banes wouldn’t confirm or deny it to my face, but I overheard him speaking to someone in the hall about how eerie it was that I’d managed to paint—down to the last detail—how my brother died.
Doctors, priests, and scientists tested me, and no one could explain what I’d done. I couldn’t explain it either.
It was like being able to do a long division math problem in my head, but being unable to write down, step by step, how to solve the problem on paper.
Once released from the asylum two years later, I struggled to acclimate, or find the sense of safety in what had once been my childhood home, but everywhere I looked, I saw a reminder of my brother.
A reminder of my failure to save him, and my parent’s refusal to believe me.
After Elliot’s death, I thought the curse had ended. I went six years without painting another portrait of someone’s death, and moved to Manhattan the year I turned seventeen.
I hadn’t been there for six months before I tore a stub of paper off a flyer advertising puppies for sale and came to hours later with a brand new, gruesome painting drying on my easel.
I still didn’t know how or why, but several times a year, I’d carelessly pick up something without even thinking about it, and a few days later, there would be a new painting down here in my crypt.
It was my secret.
One I hadn’t ever intended to share with the world, but thanks to a backstabbing, money-grubbing, coke-snorting, no good son of a bitch ex-boyfriend, my crypt and my paintings were the hottest tabloid story to hit the stands since Lord Cheeto made office.
In the last week, everyone I considered a friend abandoned me like rats fleeing from a sinking ship.
<
He’s just trying to keep me from running off to a deserted island in the Caymans.
Did I forget to mention the POD paintings are all murder victims?
Yeah. That’s a treat, huh?
Once the initial panic and feelings of betrayal faded, and after I changed the locks and updated my security system, I knew someone would come to investigate.
I had a room full of dead people, murdered people, framed on canvases in my basement.
I just didn’t expect the person to be the older brother of a murdered woman whose Portrait of Death hung on the wall in my crypt.
I waited at the foot of the staircase as Detective Callum Graham prowled around my crypt. With his broad shoulders and muscled thighs, he looked like a man who could have gotten into college on a football scholarship. Or rugby, since he seemed the type to be above such trivial things as padding and helmets.
His simmering rage made my secret room feel like a closet, thus lending to the illusion of his enormity. He had thick, dark brown hair cut for business, but it must have been some time since his last haircut as a few stubborn curls had formed and were creeping across his forehead.
His deep-set eyes were a luscious whiskey color, filled with a wildness that reminded me of Red. They were currently narrowed between his pinched eyebrows as he looked from one row of paintings to the next, scrutinizing them in furiously fascinated detail.
I ached to paint him, alive, and with much less clothing.
“What’s this?” he half snarled at me, pointing to the small case beneath each painting that held whatever object I’d picked up.
Along with it, a piece of notebook paper with all the details I could remember about where I’d been that day and where I might have picked up the object pinned beside it.
A death diary for each painting, as a way to keep myself sane.
Cursed with the most terrible psychic ability in history, I knew someday I’d be in this exact situation and have to prove I was innocent of involvement in the crimes themselves.
“It’s hard to explain.” I bit my lip to stifle a wince when Detective Graham sharply turned his head and glared at me with enough force to make me shiver.
“Try!” he ordered harshly.
I nodded and anxiously came toward him, stopping just out of reach, and looked at the painting he was pointing to. It was an older POD of a businessman slumped over his desk with blood pooling beneath his cheek as he stared sightlessly out the window of his high-rise office.
Folded up in the case beside the index card with the description of that unintentional meeting, was the handkerchief he’d used to wipe the coffee off his face before angrily throwing it at me.
“My curse doesn’t work unless I’ve touched something the person about to be murdered has touched. I try not to pick things up that aren’t mine, but in this man’s case, I didn’t have a choice. We collided in a coffee shop on a busy morning, and after calling me a dumb slut, he threw his hankie at me.
“I thought I threw it away with my broken to-go-cup, but when I got home and changed, I realized it was in my pocket. Several hours later, I came to, and this painting was sitting on my easel.”
“Some people might call this entire crypt of yours a trophy room,” Detective Graham’s partner drawled from the other side of the room.
He was about five-four to his partner’s six-five, lean as a whip, with a wild shock of red hair he’d tried and failed to slick back with pomade. He reminded me of Ron Weasley’s skeevy older brother.
He had thin lips, a broad face, a nose that would one day be bulbous with age, and lines around his blue eyes, from what I hoped, was laughter.
Though, Detective Moran wasn’t laughing right now.
“I know, but the only people who’d consider me a serial killer are the family members of the spiders I’ve killed down here.”
Why is he making that face? Too soon with the serial killer joke? Oops.
Detective Moran grunted, turning on his heels with his hands shoved deep in his pockets to give me a profoundly thoughtful look.
“So, let me see if I’ve got this right: you’re an internationally known artist, a child prodigy who became a millionaire by age eight, and have a psychic ability that allows you to predict how a person will die just by touching their stuff?”
Detective Graham’s gaze bored into the side of my face as I scrunched my nose and absently rubbed at my chest, struggling to find a way to answer Detective Moran’s question.
No doubt he read into my body language as all kinds of fucked up, but I was feeling cornered, threatened, embarrassed… I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, and neither of the detectives would allow Nigel to come down here.
I was alone and a suspect in nearly two hundred murders.
“No,” I said and up went Moran’s flaming red eyebrows. “I mean, yes to the internationally known artist thing, and the prodigy, and millionaire part, but I’ve never considered what pseudo-psychic thing I have to be a gift.”
“Pseudo-psychic thing? Is that a technical term among your people? And when you get together with other psychics, is it in person, or do you view each other remotely?”
I sent a withering glare Moran’s way, choosing to ignore the sarcasm. He was making fun of me, and it was on the tip of my tongue to make a comment about gingers…but I admirably restrained myself.
“I couldn’t take your car keys right now and tell you the date of your death or how it will happen, unless— somewhere in the grand scheme of fate, destiny, God’s plan, or whatever the hell you want to call it— you’ll someday be murdered.”
“Is that a threat, Miss Beauchene?” Moran scoffed.
Not unless you suddenly sprout a crap ton of that greasy minge you’ve got going there, six more legs, and start blowing webbing out your ass, Detective.
No, don’t engage, Jo. He’s trying to throw you off balance. Don’t fall for it!
“Shut it, Moran. Let her explain,” Detective Graham snapped, his patience clearly wearing thin as he waved at the painting again expectantly.
I took a long, patient breath and struggled to ensure my tone remained informative and blank of the anger swelling inside me.
“I’ve never painted an old man dying of natural causes in his bed surrounded by loved ones—not one time.
“I don’t know any of these people personally, other than to have passed them on the street, the subway, the library, or just happened to pick up the penny that fell out of their pocket three days ago when they gave the bum on the corner some change on their way to work.
“I can’t explain how I do this because I truly have no idea. It literally just happens, and I keep the things I’ve picked up, I write down what happened to me the day of, and where I went, so I have a record for myself that I’m not completely crazy.”
“Right. You uh, ever consider telling anyone about this?”
Moran gave me a dubious bounce of those brows and waved a finger around at the many paintings.
I snorted sarcastically and stuck out my thumb and pinkie to pretend I was making a call.
“Hi, 911? Yeah, some asshole ran into me in the coffee shop today and spilled my latte all over both of us … He called me a dumb slut and threw his hankie at me like I was the garbage bin. When I got home, I painted a picture of him. He’s dead, or he’s going to be dead very soon,”
I told the imaginary dispatch confidently, my brows shooting up in mock-surprise as I glanced from man to man.
“What’s that? How do I know? Well, I’m a psychic, but not the typical kind of psychic. See, I touch shit and see the person dead on whatever surface they’ve been murdered on.”
With huge sigh of relief and an excited flap of my free hand, I rolled my eyes upward as though having heard exactly what I was hoping to hear. I should have been an actor. “Oh yes, a padded cell sounds lovely. I haven’t been on vacation in ages!”
