The Stroke of Winter, page 13
Wyatt gave a small smile. “Just another day in Wharton.”
They sat in silence for a moment, sipping on their drinks, Storm curled up at their feet. Then Wyatt turned and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“I’m not crazy about everything that happened here today,” he said, narrowing his eyes.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was really bizarre. I mean, there I was at lunch questioning your story about John Wharton and whether or not that village really vanished, and we get back here to find . . . whatever this was.”
“Did you notice any evidence of a break-in?” Wyatt asked. “I’m assuming you didn’t, or you’d have said something before now.”
Tess shook her head. “Nope. I even looked outside for tracks in the snow.”
“Nobody hiding in the closets upstairs, either.”
Tess sighed. “I guess we might as well admit that this is . . . weird. I asked my dad this morning if this house was haunted. He laughed. I chuckled along with him. But now I’m not so sure it’s funny.”
“I also didn’t love the way you zoned out in the studio,” he said. “Do you remember that? I said your name a couple of times, but it was like you didn’t even hear me until I took hold of your arms.”
The thought of it was rather hazy, as if it had happened in a dream. Tess shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “I can’t explain it. I just sort of . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know. I felt happy.”
Wyatt furrowed his brow. “Happy?”
“I know,” Tess said. “A completely out-of-place feeling. Considering the circumstances.”
“There might be a very plausible, real-world explanation for it all, but whether it was a ghost or a person, there’s one thing for sure,” Wyatt said.
“What’s that?”
“They wanted you to notice the story told by that series of paintings.”
Tess nodded. He was exactly right. It was the only thing that made sense out of all this.
But who? And why?
Wyatt took another sip of his beer. “Do you feel safe staying here by yourself?” he asked.
Tess didn’t quite know how to answer that. If she was honest with herself, and with Wyatt, that answer would be no. But what was the alternative?
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I guess if I had to put it into words, I’d be more afraid of a real-life threat than a ghostly one. And I just don’t think there’s any sort of real-life threat here.”
Wyatt nodded. He was eyeing her as though sizing her up, judging the truth of her statement. “I’d have to agree with you,” he said. “Give me a ghost over a live person any day.”
As Tess sipped on her wine, she thought about that. “How about neither?” she said, grinning at him. “Neither would be good.”
“Listen, I should be getting home to feed the dogs,” Wyatt said. His witching hour, Tess was noticing. “But I just want to make sure one more time. I’m not crazy about leaving you here by yourself, but I don’t quite know how to convey that. I’d ask if I could stay, but you’d think I was terribly forward, and plus we don’t really know each other very well. You could be just as nervous having me in a room down the hall as having a ghost in the studio.”
Tess chuckled. But he was right. She really wouldn’t feel comfortable being alone with Wyatt all night under her roof. Yes, she was going to be an innkeeper, so strangers would be sleeping under this roof regularly. That was the point. But it was also the point of making the owner’s suite.
“And I’d ask you to come back to my house, but you’d think that was even creepier,” Wyatt went on.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, his concern warming her from the inside out. “I have my bodyguard, remember?”
She reached down and gave Storm’s head a pat.
Wyatt pushed himself out of his chair and set his beer glass in the sink. As he was pulling on his coat, he turned to her. “Thanks for coming out to lunch today. I hope I didn’t yammer on too long about my family.”
“Not a bit.” Tess smiled. “I hung on every word.”
He pulled her into a hug, his arms around her waist. As she slipped hers around his shoulders, their cheeks touched. A sizzle of electricity shot through Tess, and she closed her eyes for a moment, remembering what it was like to feel that way. It had been such a long time. Opening her eyes, she pulled back slightly and put a hand on his cheek. And then she raised up onto her toes and put her lips on his, pulling him into a kiss that was, at first, hesitant, and then deepened into something real and tangible and important. Tess felt as though she should remember this kiss. It was a beginning.
“Tess,” Wyatt said, his voice rough and low.
They stood there for a moment, their faces close together, gazing into each other’s eyes. It was as though they were both recognizing and marking the same moment in time.
Wyatt cleared his throat. “Why do I have my coat on again?”
Tess smiled. “You were leaving. Something about the dogs and food.”
“That’s right,” Wyatt said. “I’m going to call you later. You have been warned.”
“First the unauthorized stop-by and now this,” she said.
After she closed the door behind him, she turned to Storm. He was standing by his food dish. A not-so-subtle hint. She scooped some food into it, poured herself a second glass of wine, and settled back down into the armchair by the fire.
Just another day in Wharton, indeed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Later that night, after she had lit a fire in her bedroom fireplace and switched off the light, Storm curled up at the foot of her bed, and Tess lay back thinking about the events of the day.
Her familiar routine with Eli, their “so what?” exercise, ran through her mind. The wisdom gleaned from simply asking “so what?” had guided her through many hard times in her life, opened up ideas, and showed her the way when she thought she was at a dead end. She’d lean on it now to unsnarl the thoughts that were knotting up in her head.
She had found a treasure trove of unknown paintings by one of the world’s most celebrated modern artists. So what?
The art world would be overwhelmed with delight. So what?
The paintings would sell at auction. Her family would come into multiple millions of dollars from the sale. So what?
So what, indeed. They already had everything they needed. Her father and Eli were running a foundation with the bulk of Sebastian Bell’s estate. More money could be funneled into that, Tess supposed. They could pay for arts education for children who couldn’t afford it. More scholarships. They could even build an artists’ retreat in Wharton. Or endow a magnet school dedicated to the arts. The sale of those paintings would be a good thing. A wonderful thing. A positive thing.
But then, Tess’s thoughts went down a different path. The paintings were disturbing. Would people think they were somehow a reflection on her grandfather? These paintings depicted someone—in all likelihood, her grandfather—stalking the streets of Wharton. She let that thought percolate for a moment. So what if it showed that? What would happen when the world realized it? When her family realized it?
His reputation, and that of the family, might be tarnished. Would certainly be tarnished. Sebastian Bell was a beloved Wharton son. The paintings might shatter his gilded image. At the very least, it would raise uncomfortable questions.
So what? What would happen then?
The family would have to deal with the aftermath.
Tess adjusted her pillows and snuggled deeper into her soft bed. There was a fine line between genius and madness. Great artists had long histories of mental illness, bad or even criminal behavior, and all manner of flaws. Genius does not preclude one from misdeeds, nor does it protect one from their consequences. Van Gogh was troubled. Picasso had his moments. Hemingway was a notorious misogynist with mental-health issues. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic. When these paintings came to light, when the world saw what Tess had seen, would Sebastian Bell be judged harshly in the face of all who had come before him? Didn’t he deserve to be if he’d been stalking some woman?
And, Tess reasoned, the paintings might not show that at all. They might simply be products of her grandfather’s imagination. Nothing more.
Tess’s eyes fluttered closed as she made peace with it. She’d call her father and Eli tomorrow, explain her thoughts, and as a family they’d move forward together. She didn’t have to bear it all on her own.
Her eyes didn’t stay closed for long.
For all her “so what-ing,” she couldn’t get one thought out of her head.
The red streak on the wall. The portrait of a woman who, if Tess was honest with herself about her impressions of the painting, didn’t seem like she wanted to be posing at all.
And then, there was the last painting, the one of the cliff. The cries of anguished souls the image seemed to evoke.
Tess realized there was another thought on her mind. One that she had been trying to tamp down. Or keep away. Or banish. But as she lay in her bed, with the shadows of the firelight dancing on her walls, she let it come.
Maybe Sebastian Bell wasn’t just a voyeur or a stalker. Maybe he was a murderer. The paintings didn’t show anything of the kind, not exactly. But the feeling that Tess got when she looked at them . . .
Her familiar “so what” exercise wasn’t going to reason that away.
Tess sat up with a start and reached for her phone. Wyatt answered on the first ring.
“Tess,” he said, his voice heavy with sleep. “Are you okay?”
“Sorry to call so late,” she said, taking a big breath in. “I think you might be right.”
“As much as I love to hear that any time, from anyone, I am getting a rather bad feeling about this,” Wyatt said. “Right about what?”
“I think maybe we should call the police,” Tess said. “Not right now. This is not an emergency. But I couldn’t get the portrait of the woman in the studio out of my mind. The red gash. And the last painting of the cliff. Wyatt, could we be looking at a confession?”
Wyatt cleared his throat. “What do you mean, a confession?”
“The paintings, the storyboard, as you aptly called it, tell a story,” Tess said. “What if that story is of a murder? What if those paintings are my grandfather’s confession?”
Tess heard Wyatt gasp. “It makes a terrifying kind of sense,” he said. “I mean, just looking at the paintings in order. Right?”
“Exactly,” Tess said.
“Do you know when your grandmother closed off the studio?” Wyatt asked.
Tess tried to think back. The truth was, she didn’t know. It had been shuttered her whole life.
“When did Sebastian Bell die?” Wyatt pressed on. “And how did he die?”
“I’m not sure the exact date, but I’m sure it’s on the foundation’s website, or any number of websites about him. He died when my dad was a young man. Away at college, if I’m remembering it correctly. It was a heart attack, that much I know, but nothing more. My dad rarely talked about it, and my grandma never talked about it. That was one subject I knew never to bring up with her. That’s odd, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Wyatt said. “It was common back in the day, especially if something scandalous happened. Or if someone had cancer. Or even had an accident that would sort of bring shame to the family. I know of a guy who had always heard that his grandfather died in the Cliffside tuberculosis sanatorium that used to be just outside of Wharton. Truth was, the grandfather was coming home from a tavern in the winter after having one too many, or several too many, and he froze to death in the snow. Back in the day, people covered up things like that. Spoke about it in whispered tones. As though if you spoke of death, it would hear. And come for you.”
It made a strange kind of sense to Tess. She thought of a friend from college whose grandmother had cancer, but the friend didn’t even know what type. In some families, that just wasn’t spoken of. Something like this? It certainly would have been covered up.
“And about your grandmother closing off the studio,” Wyatt went on. “You don’t know when she did it. And you don’t really know why, right?”
“Exactly right,” Tess said. “She always had these flimsy excuses about it being too expensive to heat. When I was a kid, I never thought twice about it. But now? That’s just ridiculous.”
“I think so, too,” Wyatt said. “I mean, it could be nothing more than grief. Her beloved husband had died, and she wanted to close that room off, just as he left it, as a sort of—I don’t know—shrine that would live out of time. Or something. I know that sounds dramatic. But what if that’s not the reason. What if—”
Tess could almost see his thought coalesce into a tangible play in front of her eyes. “What if,” she said, “my grandmother found those paintings and shut up the room to keep them from the world? That would certainly explain the studio’s state of disarray. She did it in a hurry and didn’t even take the time to clean up.”
“That sounds right to me,” Wyatt said. “Not that I know anything. But as someone just hearing it for the first time, it sounds sensible. She found the paintings, realized what they were—a confession—and locked everything up tight to make sure that confession never saw the light of day.”
“She couldn’t have the world knowing her husband, the great Sebastian Bell, was a stalker. Or worse.”
Wyatt sighed. “If all of that is true, you have a decision to make.”
Tess’s stomach knotted up. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Given that your grandmother went to all of that trouble to make sure the world didn’t ever see these paintings—she didn’t destroy them, she couldn’t bear to, it seems to me—but she made sure they stayed hidden.”
“Yes, she did,” Tess said, her mind flying in many directions at once.
“Are you going to show them to the world in defiance of those wishes?”
Those words wrapped around Tess and constricted. She hadn’t considered that. “You’ve already seen them,” Tess said, weakly.
“I’m not exactly the town gossip,” Wyatt said. “If you decide you want to permanently shut that door again with the paintings inside, I won’t say anything to anyone. It’s not my place. This is your family’s decision.”
Tess thought about this. Somehow, she believed Wyatt. He was a good man. A man of his word, it seemed to her. If he said he was going to keep quiet about something, she trusted him to keep quiet. It made her wonder what other types of secrets, whose secrets, he might be keeping, but she was sure she’d never know.
Tess’s train of thought seemed to have hit a snag. If she wasn’t prepared to share all this with the world, should she call the police about a possible murder, even if that murder had taken place decades earlier?
But then, she thought back to her conversation with Wyatt at lunch. And just like that, the light bulb went on above her head.
His family had been in Wharton since before there was a town. They would know about a decades-old murder, if indeed there had been one.
“Wyatt,” she began. “It seems to me your family knows Wharton’s history better than most people.”
“I’d say that’s true,” Wyatt said. “My parents and grandparents for sure.”
“I’m sorry if this sounds indelicate, which it will for sure, but . . . are they still alive?”
“And kicking,” he said. “My parents go to Arizona every winter for a few months. My grandma passed about a decade ago, but my grandpa is still with us. He’s in the assisted-living complex in Salmon Bay.”
Tess’s thought caught in her throat. “Can we go see him?” she asked. “Tomorrow?”
Tess didn’t get much sleep that night. She tossed and turned, and when she did nod off, her dreams were wild and unhinged and violent. And she heard the scratching, but when morning finally came, she wondered if she had dreamed it.
She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to ask Wyatt’s grandfather when they met. But one thing was for certain, the man would know Wharton’s history. He had lived at the time of Sebastian Bell’s heyday. They probably knew each other. And if there had been any disappearances or murders or scandals back then, he would know about them. Getting him to talk about it would be the difficult part.
The clock said it was six thirty-five. After trying in vain to will herself back to sleep, Tess gave up the effort. She pulled on jeans and a sweater, and bundling up in her down coat and mukluks, she snapped on Storm’s leash. Together they set out into the predawn darkness.
Jim and Jane’s lights were on. Tess figured Jim was up early to open the store. But most other houses in the neighborhood were dark. Sensible people, sleeping until the sun touched the sky. As she walked through Wharton’s dark, deserted streets, she couldn’t help conjuring up the images in those paintings. Her grandfather, or someone, had walked these same streets. They had left La Belle Vie just as she had, closed the door behind them just as she had, and had set off into the darkness.
What compelled you? What were you looking for? What made you long to observe people without them knowing it?
As an artist, her grandfather had painted moments in time. Captured those moments on canvas, interpreted through his eyes. He needed to be a keen observer, whether it was taking in an idyllic scene of his own family at the lakeshore having a picnic, or the second before tension erupted into violence in a house occupied by his neighbors.
Tess knew her mind was going in all kinds of hypothetical directions at once, but she wondered—if domestic violence had occurred, had Sebastian watched it? Had he seen what was happening in the household? Did he feed off it? Or was he repelled by it? Did he help the woman? Whether or not he felt it was for art, Tess couldn’t shake how wrong it was, watching from the shadows.
Tess sat on a bench by the lakeshore, watching the frozen lake, imagining the deep, dark water below. She was so entranced by it that she didn’t hear Jim come up behind her.
“Hey, neighbor,” he chirped. “You’re up early.” He reached down and patted Storm’s head.
