The Stroke of Winter, page 17
She noticed his dogs pulled their leashes taut, straight out in front of Wyatt, as though they were pulling a sled side by side.
“They love this weather, don’t they?” Tess asked, warmed by what seemed like smiles on the dogs’ faces.
“They are in their glory in the winter,” Wyatt said. “If it’s not below zero, I’ll let them stay out in the backyard for hours. This year, there’s so much snow, both of them dug snow dens.”
“Just like wolves,” Tess said. “Or sled dogs on the trail.”
“Exactly like that,” Wyatt said.
Snow began to fall then, a light, dusty snow that clung to the branches of the majestic pines lining the streets and settled on Tess’s hat and eyebrows. She put her head back and stuck out her tongue to catch a few flakes. Wyatt did the same.
“December snow,” he said, grinning. “Nothing better.”
The two of them stopped for a moment, there on the sidewalk, and took in the scene around them. Snow frosting the pines and the malamutes’ fur. Lights burning in the windows of the grand and not-so-grand homes in the neighborhood, evoking thoughts of happy families enjoying meals around the table together. Utter silence—not a car or a pedestrian or even another dog traveling on the streets of town—as the snow fell lightly around them. It was like Tess and Wyatt were in their own magical, snowy world, inside a snow globe depicting the perfect winter night.
“This is so beautiful,” Tess murmured in a whisper.
“Yes, you are,” Wyatt said. He pulled her into a kiss, their mittened hands curling around each other as the snow fell. A surety descended upon her then, a certainty about what was electrifying the air between them. This is the man I’m going to grow old with. It was early in their relationship, and despite Tess thinking it was foolish to rush in so quickly, she simply knew he was the one for her, as surely as she knew Eli and her parents would love him. His humor. His steadfastness. His love of and loyalty to family. How easy he was to talk to. How she wanted to hear his voice first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And the intangibles, too, like the way he made her feel, deep inside.
As they walked, then, arm in arm, toward La Belle Vie, Tess silently decided she would ask Wyatt to stay. It had been a long time since she had slept next to a man, let alone done anything else, and a sizzle of nervousness flashed up her spine. She hoped her bathroom was clean and that her bedroom wasn’t strewn with yesterday’s clothes and underwear. But even if her bedroom was a mess, she knew she didn’t want this day, and evening, to end.
Tess realized it was time to get on with it, already. She had left the false hopes of reconciling with Matt well behind her. Now it was time to admit there was more to her life than being a single mom to a now-adult son, and begin to live again with, perhaps, this incredible man who was right in front of her. As the snow fell around them, it seemed like a blessing of that realization, an impossibly romantic blessing.
She and Wyatt shared a smile, and she wondered if he was thinking the same thing.
Two blocks away, they rounded the corner to Tess’s house, and the magic that had been swirling in the air between them took a dark turn, as magic often can. Whatever enchantment had been floating around them vanished. The snow globe fell onto the sidewalk with a thud and cracked.
All the lights in La Belle Vie were off, except one. The studio. The light was blazing there, and it shone through the whole wall of windows. It stopped Tess and Wyatt in their tracks. Even the dogs stood still.
“Wyatt,” Tess said. “I don’t remember leaving the light—”
Just then, Tess’s phone rang. She grabbed it out of her purse and slid her hand out of her mitten to answer it.
“Hi, Tess, it’s Jim,” he said. “This may be an odd question, and I hate to seem like the nosy neighbor, but are you in the house? I thought you were out today.”
Tess locked eyes with Wyatt. “Yes—I mean no,” she said. “Yes, I was out today, and no, I’m not in the house. In fact, if you look out your side window, you’ll see Wyatt and me with his dogs.”
A moment’s pause, then. “Okay, yes, there you are,” Jim said. Tess spotted him in his window, waving. She waved back. “Again, an odd question, but do you have any houseguests?”
Tess locked eyes with Wyatt. “No. Why do you ask?”
Jim took an audible breath in. “Tess, I don’t want to alarm you, but there is someone inside your house.”
His words were calm. Measured. Careful. So as not to cause panic. “In the back room. I can see him—or her—clear as day. A dark figure, silhouetted. I knew you had gone out earlier and wanted to check with you before calling the police, just in case you had a houseguest.”
Tess looked up at the studio, and there it was. She saw what Jim was seeing. A person, a figure, standing in one of the windows.
She pointed to the window. “Do you see what I see?” Tess whispered to Wyatt.
Wyatt nodded, slowly and deliberately. “We’re calling Nick.” He slid his phone out of his jacket pocket to contact the town’s chief of police.
“We see them,” Tess said to Jim. “I’m going to call Nick Stone right now. Stay tuned. And please keep watching.”
Tess rang off and was ready to make that call when she noticed Wyatt’s phone was already at his ear. “Hey, Nick. Wyatt Templeton. We need a squad at La Belle Vie. Tess and I are outside walking my dogs and we can see somebody walking around on the second floor of the house.” Wyatt put the call on speaker so Tess could hear the chief’s response.
“La Belle Vie,” Nick repeated. “I’ll be there in a minute. And I’ll call for backup on the way. You two stay outside until I get there.”
As they both watched the figure moving around near the second-floor windows, Tess tucked her mittened hand into Wyatt’s. They stepped closer to the house, until they were standing on the sidewalk just past the driveway.
A moment later, Nick Stone pulled up.
As he jumped out of the car, Tess pointed to the windows. “Look,” she said. The figure was moving back and forth along the wall of windows, as if pacing.
A loud, long scream pierced the night air.
“What the hell . . .” Nick growled, his eyes trained on the window. “What in God’s name is that?”
The three of them hurried toward the kitchen door as Tess fumbled with her keys. The scream continued, a screech of the damned. Tess’s shaking hands dropped the keys in the snow. Wyatt scooped them up and unlocked the door.
“You two stay out here,” Nick said, drawing his gun.
But the dogs had other plans. They followed Nick inside the house, pulling Wyatt as they went. He tried to hold them back, but they broke free from his grasp on their leashes and bounded into the house. Tess watched as they raced around Nick to the back stairs as though they knew the layout already, and pounded up the stairs. Nick followed closely behind.
Tess looked around wildly for Storm. He was nowhere to be seen. The screaming that came from upstairs rang in her ears, as though someone were being mauled alive. Or burned.
A cacophony of barking and snarling and rage then. Tess and Wyatt locked eyes, and despite what Nick had said, they ran up the stairs and down the hallway toward the studio.
The noise was unbearable.
They burst into the room to see Nick standing there, gun in hand, but his arm hung limply by his side. His mouth was agape, and he was shaking his head.
All three of the dogs seemed to have an invisible enemy cornered on the back wall. Storm, Maya, and Luna were standing in a row, snarling and barking, biting the air, shaking their heads back and forth like they had caught something in their jaws. The screams rang out, like the wail of a demon on a dark night.
And then it was done. Silence fell across the room, an eerie, empty silence. The three dogs sniffed the air. Storm patrolled the perimeter of the room, sniffing and emitting a low growl. Maya and Luna gazed around, their ears up.
Tess’s heart was pounding in her throat.
Nick shook his head. “I know some pretty odd things tend to happen here in Wharton,” he said. “But I’ve never experienced anything like that.” He turned to Tess and Wyatt. “Nobody was here.”
“We all saw—” Tess began.
Nick cut off her words with a raised hand. “I know. I saw a person at the window, too. Plain as day.”
“What was making that god-awful noise?” Tess squeaked out, her voice wavering. Tears were welling up in her eyes. Wyatt wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close.
Nick ran a hand over his closely cropped black hair and sighed. “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard. Like someone was being tortured.”
“Or attacked,” Wyatt said, raising his eyebrows. “By a pack of dogs.”
The three of them stood silently for a moment, looking from one to the other. Tess was shaking. She felt cold on the inside.
Just then, a police car pulled into the driveway—Nick’s backup squad. He slipped his gun back into its holster. The simple reality of it, a car pulling into the driveway, broke the otherworldly spell that had descended around them.
“So, let’s go down this path,” Nick said, clearing his throat. “We all saw a person in the window. But nobody was here by the time I entered the room just a moment later.”
“Right,” Wyatt said.
“Okay,” Nick said. “How could that possibly be? The dogs got up here before I did—this white dude was already in the room, I’m thinking.” He nodded his head toward Storm. “In theory, someone could have run out of here and down the hallway toward the front stairs as I was running up the back stairs. But, if that happened, how did they get past the dogs?”
Wyatt shook his head. “They couldn’t. There is no possible way an intruder got past a German shepherd guarding his home. And if, in the highly unlikely event that he did, the dogs would have chased him, not stayed in the room barking at nothing.”
Nick nodded, considering this. “Absolutely right.” He squinted his eyes and walked to one of the walls, running his hand along it.
“Many of these grand old Wharton homes have things like secret passageways and false wall panels. Does yours?” he asked.
Tess shook her head. “No,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I remember my dad telling the story about how, when he and his brother were little, they wished there were secret passageways. But there weren’t. So instead, they used to climb into armoires, pretending they were the gateways to Narnia. They drove my grandma crazy with it all. Every time she’d open an armoire to get a sweater or something, she’d find my dad and his brother huddled in the back of it. Nearly scared her to death.”
“Okay then,” Nick said, with a slight smile. “I don’t see how someone could’ve gotten out of this room without me seeing them or the dogs chasing them. But I’m going to have my officers search the house anyway.”
“Great,” Tess said. “Thank you, Nick.”
“I’ll go fill them in,” he said over his shoulder on his way out of the studio. “And then, let’s meet downstairs to talk a little bit more.”
With Nick occupied, Wyatt enveloped Tess in a hug. She rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re shaking,” he said, his voice low in her ear.
“What just happened, Wyatt?” Tess whispered.
He shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “But I do know one thing. There is not a chance in hell a person could’ve gotten out of here past the dogs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Downstairs in the kitchen, Tess put on the tea kettle with shaking hands. Her heart was still racing. Wyatt had snapped off his dogs’ leashes, and the three of them—Maya, Luna, and Storm—were curled up by the fire. So different from the snarling three-headed Cerberus they had been moments before.
“I guess we shouldn’t have wondered if these three would get along,” Wyatt said. “It’s like they’re family already.”
Tess managed a smile. “Comrades in arms.”
Wyatt raised his eyebrows. “That’s right. They were battling something. The question is, What?”
Nick came through the kitchen door to join them.
“Okay,” the chief said, pulling out a chair and sinking into it. “My guys are looking around the place. I don’t think any of us has any idea what was making that noise.”
Tess shook her head, looking from Nick to Wyatt and back again. “What do you think it was?”
Neither man spoke. Nobody knew quite what to say.
“How about we start at the beginning?” Nick said, finally. “When did you leave the house today?”
Tess winced. “That’s not really the beginning,” she said.
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
All at once, Tess wasn’t sure how much to tell the chief of police. Should she mention the paintings? It seemed to her that something wholly otherworldly was happening, but . . . what if it wasn’t? What if a real person was creeping around inside the studio? There could be only one reason. The paintings. And there were only two people in Wharton, other than Wyatt, who could potentially know about them. Hunter and Grant.
Should she say all that? Should she cast those doubts on these men who were, in all likelihood, guilty of nothing but helping her with some demolition?
She looked at Wyatt, trying to somehow project her thoughts into his.
He nodded, as if reading them. “It started a couple of days ago when Tess asked me to help open up the back room of the house, which we now know is the studio, which we were just in.”
“Open it up?” Nick asked. “Why? It was locked, and no key?”
Tess shook her head. “Not exactly. It was locked, yes, but my grandmother had shut off that part of the house a long time ago. There wasn’t even a knob on the door. So, it had to be opened by force, so to speak.”
Nick looked at her and then cast his eyes up, as if remembering the room. “Why did she shut it off?”
“That’s unclear,” Tess said. “She always said it was because the whole house was too expensive to heat, but that never really made a lot of sense to me.”
“Okay,” he said. “And you wanted it open now because . . . ?”
“Because I’m renovating the house into a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “And I thought of turning that area into an owner’s suite. A sort of living room–bedroom–bathroom arrangement, even eventually putting in back stairs going outside, so I could stay out of the guests’ way.”
Nick nodded. “Got it. Then what?”
Wyatt picked up the ball from there. “I had two of my buddies, Grant and Hunter, help me open up the door.”
Nick nodded. “I know those two clowns,” he said, grinning. “They’re good folk. Help a lot of people here in town.”
“Hunter was included, actually, because Tess had heard some . . .” Wyatt’s words evaporated.
“Some what?”
Tess picked up where he left off. “I had been hearing noises coming from that room,” she said. “Loud scratching. At night. I thought an animal had somehow gotten in there.”
“What kind of scratching?” Nick asked.
Tess shrugged. “I don’t know. But it was really loud. As though something was trying to claw its way out. So that’s why Wyatt called Hunter. He specializes in getting animals out of houses, I guess.”
“Did he find one?”
“No,” Tess said. “There was no animal. And no place for it to have gotten in or out.”
“So, what was causing the scratching?” Nick asked.
“We don’t know,” Tess said. “We haven’t been able to figure that out. But according to Hunter, it wasn’t an animal.”
“Okay, this just keeps getting weirder,” Nick said. “Not that I haven’t done ‘Wharton weird’ before. Trust me. I have.”
Tess raised her eyebrows. With all these old houses and the town’s long history, she didn’t doubt it.
“But let’s get back to some more real-world stuff,” he continued. “Let’s talk about today. When did you leave the house?”
“About eleven,” Tess said. “We went to Salmon Bay, had lunch with Wyatt’s grandfather, brought him back here for a bit, and then took him home. We were walking back to the house with Wyatt’s dogs when we saw the person in the window.”
“Okay, so from about eleven to what time were you out of the house?”
“From eleven until about two,” Tess said, trying to remember exactly. “Then from about three until now.”
Nick turned to Wyatt. “And you were with her the whole time?”
“Yes,” he said.
Nick took a deep breath. “Did Grant or Hunter have any reason to want to get back into the house? Did they leave any tools or . . . anything?”
“If they had left any tools—which they didn’t—they’d have called me or Tess,” Wyatt said. “Neither of them has keys to the house. I know people sometimes give them to workmen, but not this time.”
“So, to your knowledge, there was no reason for either of them to come back to the house.”
Tess caught Wyatt’s eye. Neither knew quite what to say, but they both knew what the other was thinking. Tess’s father had made it abundantly clear to her that she was to keep quiet about the paintings. But now things had changed. In a frightening way. First the paintings being arranged like a storyboard the day before, and now this.
It might be best to let the police in on it.
“Okay,” Nick said, “you know that when people are looking at each other with guilty, secretive glances, the police know something is up, right? I mean, come on, guys. What’s going on?”
Tess managed a weak smile and took a deep breath. “I’m not sure,” she said, finally. “But we discovered something when they opened up that room.”
Nick leaned forward. “What was that?”
“Paintings by my grandfather. Previously unknown paintings.”
Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Wow, I really lost my poker face on that one,” he said, giving a small smile. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about that?”
“I’m under strict orders from my dad to keep this quiet,” Tess said. “It can’t be getting out all over town that I’ve got some undiscovered Sebastian Bell paintings here.”
