The Stroke of Winter, page 26
Jill had followed Tess into the room and was standing there, wide eyed.
“Indigo!” she said, her voice harsh and low. “Indigo, my love.”
Tess shook his arms. “Dad! Wake up!”
Indigo slumped to the floor, moaning. “No,” he said, drawing the word out. “No, Daisy, no.”
Tess grabbed her mother’s hand. She had no idea what else to do.
Indigo cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair. He shook his head and pushed himself up to a sitting position. Whatever had taken ahold of him was gone. He looked around the room. “What in the devil is going on?” he asked.
Tess helped him to his feet.
“You were sleepwalking,” Jill said. “Now, let’s get you out of these wet pajamas. Then you can curl back down into bed.” She caught Tess’s eye as she threaded her arm through his and walked with him out of the room.
“That’s the damnedest thing,” Indigo muttered.
There would be no more sleep for Tess, she was certain, so she stepped into a hot shower and let the water rush over her for a long time. She didn’t know what to make of her father’s sleepwalking. Was it the beginning of dementia, like Joe’s nightly episodes signified? Or was it something else? Tess’s own dreams had been disturbing, to say the least, ever since she had come back to this house. Maybe that was what was going on with her father as well.
Or maybe it was something more sinister. Something inside that room, taking hold of him. Compelling him to clean the mess it had left behind.
Dressed in a comfy sweater and jeans, Tess padded down to the kitchen, lit a fire, and brewed a pot of coffee. She sat at the table with a steaming cup and watched the sun rise over the lake. It was just as spectacular as the sunsets in Wharton, but she couldn’t say she had seen it rise very often over the years.
When she heard her parents scuffing about upstairs, she started prepping breakfast. She knew her dad always loved pancakes, but not the traditional fluffy kind. He loved thin pancakes that were more akin to French crepes. She mixed up the simple batter for those—one cup flour, two eggs, one and a half cups milk, a pinch of salt, and a quarter cup of sugar—and let it set. She used that same batter to make oven pancakes in muffin tins—another good breakfast option for her guests, she thought. She hunted for some breakfast sausage in the freezer and put it in a pan to steam, then whisked some eggs.
They were coming down the back stairs as she was frying the first of the pancakes.
“What is all this?” Indigo said, a broad smile on his face.
“I thought you could use a nice hot breakfast after the day you had yesterday,” Tess said.
“Honey, you didn’t have to do this . . . but I’ll take it!” Jill said as she poured cups of coffee for Indigo and herself.
Tess put a platter piled high with pancakes, eggs, and sausage on the table, and they all dug in. As they were chattering away, Tess was biding her time. She hated to break this happy mood, but if she was going to get any more answers out of her father, it was now or never.
“I know you don’t believe any of this, but I’ve been having a problem in this house with, well I know it’s going to sound silly to you, but—a haunting,” she began.
“Oh, honey, not this again,” Indigo said.
“No, Dad. You have to hear me out. I’m not going to be able to open this place until we get it resolved. That’s what everyone was doing here last night.”
“Ghost hunting?” Jill asked, an amused look on her face. She and Indigo shared a grin.
“You wouldn’t laugh if you had been here,” Tess said, as she eyed the door. Jane and Wyatt were standing outside of it. “I knew I wouldn’t get very far with this without proof, so I called some people over to show you.”
Tess ushered them in, “good mornings” were said all around, cups of coffee poured, and Jane slid her laptop out of its case and opened it.
And so, in the bright light of day, as the sun streamed into the kitchen at La Belle Vie, they watched the video of what had happened in the studio the night before.
Tess’s parents were stunned into open-mouthed silence.
“There has to be some kind of reasonable explanation . . .” Jill said.
But Indigo was shaking his head.
“That song,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth, as if he were searching his memory. “Grey used to sing it all the time. To Daisy.”
A shiver shot through Tess, and she and Wyatt exchanged a glance. But Jane just gave a knowing smile.
“That does not surprise me,” she said. “You may know I’m a little . . . sensitive. A feeling overtook me last night that I couldn’t shake. I’ve been turning it over in my mind. And I’m pretty sure that whatever happened in the studio all of those years ago happened between Grey and Daisy.”
She turned to Indigo. “Can you tell us everything you remember from that time? It would be a great help.”
Indigo raised his coffee cup to his lips and eyed his wife over the rim. She nodded. “It’s time, Indy.”
Time? So, they did know something they weren’t sharing.
Tess’s father took a deep breath and then began to speak.
“Somewhere, buried down deep, I had the idea that it would turn out this way. That’s why I didn’t stop you from opening up the studio. I had the feeling the truth might be lurking in there, dormant, silent after year upon year.”
He took a sip of his coffee, pausing for effect.
“During the summer of my junior year of college, I had an internship at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I knew I couldn’t be a great artist like my father, but I loved it all the same, and I thought learning the business of art, how to run a museum and a collection, would let me be part of his world in a way that he needed. I was right about that, by the way. In any case, one afternoon, the director of the museum came and found me to tell me I had a phone call.
“It was my mother. The great Sebastian Bell was dead. He died of a heart attack, she said, and I needed to come home quickly. Of course, I dropped everything and rushed to my mother’s side. When I got here to La Belle Vie, I found my mother alone and grieving and the studio boarded up. The whole house was shrouded in black cloth.
“My father had already been cremated, per his wishes—or so she told me—and she gave me strict orders to never enter the studio again. It was to remain as it was when he took his last breath, at the easel, forever, throughout time.
“What I didn’t know then was, Grey had gone missing. Of course, I asked her where he was, why he wasn’t with us, and she said he had been gone for days. Daisy, too. She speculated they had run off together.
“It didn’t make any sense to me. So, I asked around. His friends, her friends. Nobody had seen them. Nobody knew anything. I even talked to Frank, whom I had always hated, but I have to admit feeling a little sorry for the man. His wife had apparently run off with my brother, leaving two young children for him to raise alone.”
Indigo took another sip of his coffee.
“After my father’s funeral—hundreds of people attended from all over the world—I went back to my internship in the Twin Cities. I didn’t know what else to do. My mother was grieving, but she pushed me away. She needed time to herself, she said. I should go and finish my education, she said. And then I could come home and take up the business of tending to my father’s legacy. It was in my hands now.
“And so, I did. I graduated from school with degrees in art history and business, and you know the rest. We never heard from Grey again, despite looking for him for years. Frank moved from Wharton, and we never saw him or Daisy’s children again, either. Your mother and I got married, you came along, and I spent the rest of my life running the foundation. Now Eli is set to take it over.”
“But that’s not all there is to the story. Isn’t that right?” Jane asked.
Indigo let out a dejected, defeated sigh. “No,” he said. “That’s not the whole story. Because, you see, I couldn’t just let it go. I couldn’t just accept what my mother had told me. Grey, suddenly disappearing without a trace? It was preposterous. If he and Daisy had run away together, he would’ve contacted me. Would’ve told our mother. And more than that. The more I thought about it, the more I realized they didn’t even need to run away to be together. My father, with all of his power and influence, could have forced Frank out of the picture. A million dollars to walk away? Frank would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.
“But the bigger thing that kept nagging at me about the whole thing was—Daisy.” Indigo shook his head. “She loved those kids. No matter how much she loved my brother, she loved her children more. She would not have left the kids. Period.”
Tess felt a whoosh of cold waft over her, even there, in front of the fire. She caught Jane’s eye. Jane felt it, too.
“And, there’s something else. Something worse. When Daisy and Grey broke up before she married Frank, it was for a good reason. A very good reason.”
Wyatt, Tess, and Jane were all leaning forward, hanging on Indigo’s every word.
“What reason?” Tess whispered.
Indigo closed his eyes for a moment. “It was the madness, my dear.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
It was like his words had sucked the oxygen from the room. Nobody said a word. Nobody even breathed. Jill put a hand over her husband’s.
“It’s okay, honey. It’s time they knew.”
Indigo turned to his daughter. “When you told me you had found some finished paintings in the studio, as I said last night, I knew they couldn’t have been my father’s. My mother never would’ve kept them from the world, and neither would he. I highly suspected they were Grey’s, and one look at them told me I was right. You can see the desperation running through them.
“He was born that way, with that undercurrent. Nowadays, we have other names for mental illness, other forms, medication that can help people suffering from it. But . . . to tell you all the truth, I don’t think it was about that. I think it was something else. Something deep and primal that ran through Grey. Something evil that slipped through the veil and into him, somehow.”
“It was always there?” Tess shook her head. “But from what you’ve told me, you had an idyllic childhood here in Wharton.”
Indigo nodded. “That’s right, honey. In a sense we did. But if there was anyone who experienced childhood trauma in this house, it was me.”
Tess gasped aloud. Indigo patted her hand. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago. But I’m not talking about trauma at the hands of my parents. They were wonderful, loving as could be. It was Grey. It was always Grey. Some days, he would be my best friend, and we would have endless adventures together on the lakeshore and in the woods around town.
“But other days . . . it was like he was a different person. Angry. Hostile. Cruel, not only to me, but to animals. To other people. He would sneak out of the house at night and roam the streets alone. My parents were beside themselves, wondering what he was doing out there, in the dead of night.
“I started calling him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was almost as if he would really change into another person. An evil person. Morph, like a werewolf during a full moon. When he was in one of his ‘episodes,’ as my mother called them, even his voice wasn’t his own. It was awful and almost demonic sounding.”
Tess and Wyatt exchanged a glance. He took her hand. She knew he was thinking the same thing she was. That was the voice they had heard in the studio the night before.
“I half expected to wake up one morning to hear he had killed someone the night before. It got that bad. He’d fly into these incomprehensible rages. With me, with our parents, even with Daisy. Although, I have to say, when they were together, she had a calming effect on him. She loved him deeply, and when he was with her, he was happy. Himself. His true self. Not the shadow-self he became. Daisy was the antidote to whatever was poisoning his soul.
“But he couldn’t sustain it, the happy Grey. Hyde always found a way out. The night she left him, he had come out. It had been a long time since any of us had seen Hyde, but he really frightened Daisy with his rage. He started to strangle her, and I believe he would’ve killed her if my mother hadn’t intervened. Little woman that she was, she dragged him off her so Daisy could get away. She ran from this house and, in a sense, right into the arms of Frank Erickson. And there she stayed.”
“What did Grey do then?” Tess asked.
“It wasn’t good,” Indigo said. “Not good at all. You mentioned the word obsession, and that’s exactly what it was. He would sneak out at night, and I knew he was going to look for her. I followed him more than once, terrified of what he’d do. It was exhausting for all of us, to tell you the truth. When I got accepted to the university, I was hesitant to go, but my parents, my mother especially, pushed me. They wanted me to get on with a normal life. To find happiness.”
Tess looked at her father with new eyes. What a nightmare he had lived through. “You never really believed Grey and Daisy ran away together,” she said.
“That was the official story my mother spread around town, the rumor,” Indigo said. “But no. I never believed it. I have come to believe he killed her. And then, perhaps, himself.”
“Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry,” Tess said. “I stirred up all of this stuff. I wish I had never opened that door.”
“No, darling,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Families can try to bury secrets. But in the end, truth scratches its way out of the deepest, darkest of holes. And we may never know what really happened.”
“I may know of a way,” Jane said, producing a small silver box from her bag.
The box was covered with curlicues and magical symbols, like something the Wizard of Oz would have on his nightstand. She opened it to reveal a large purple crystal on a long silver chain. She held it up, and the crystal caught the sunlight and reflected purple splashes of color all over the room.
“It’s a pendulum,” she said. “We didn’t have a chance to use it last night. It’s another way to communicate with the other side. Grant can have his recorders and clicking meters, but this can give us some direct answers without all of that hoopla. I’m fairly certain that the spirits haunting this house are the ones that experienced trauma—and bloodshed—in the studio. They’re the only ones who really know what happened there. Why don’t we just ask them?”
They made a plan to meet back at La Belle Vie when the sun went down, which was around four o’clock on these December evenings.
In the meantime, Tess and Wyatt went for a long walk with the dogs—they had made the decision to leave Storm at Wyatt’s house until this pendulum business was finished—and Indigo and Jill retreated to their room to rest. Tess could sense the whole ordeal had taken a toll on her father. The coming night would only add to it.
As the four-o’clock hour neared, they gathered in the kitchen. Indigo was dressed in a black turtleneck and tan slacks, and looked much refreshed from his afternoon respite. Jill was wearing a deep-purple dress with silver chains wound around her elegant neck.
“We didn’t know how to dress for a haunting,” she said, shrugging.
“You look great, guys,” Tess said, giving them each a kiss on the cheek.
“I still think this is all rubbish,” Indigo said, in a huff.
“Oh, Indy, have an open mind,” Jill said. “You never know.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “For you, anything.”
As they settled down at the kitchen table, Jill turned to Tess. “Tell us about Wyatt,” she said. “It seems to us that there’s more going on than just friendship between you two.”
Tess smiled. “There is,” she said. “I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s headed somewhere.”
“You two seem like an old married couple already,” Indigo piped up. Funny, Tess thought. That was just what Jane had said a few days earlier.
“I approve,” Indigo went on. “He’s a solid person. Kind. Caring. Like his parents. And grandparents.”
“We’re glad you’ve found someone, honey,” Jill said, taking her daughter’s hand in her own. “You deserve all the happiness this world has to offer. Of course, nobody is good enough for our daughter, but he’ll do in a pinch.” Her eyes twinkled.
Soon enough, Jane was knocking on the door, followed by Wyatt. It was time.
The group assembled in the studio and stood in a circle. Jane had brought sage packets and candles, and they lit up the room with both the soft glow of their flames and the scent that wafted through the air.
She was holding the pendulum by its chain, which was draped over one outstretched hand.
“We use this to ask yes-or-no questions of the spirits,” Jane explained. “I’ll give instruction, ask some questions, and we’ll see how it goes. No guarantees.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out. “Let’s get centered. Breathe in and out, in and out.”
Wyatt squeezed one of Tess’s hands; her mother squeezed the other.
“Let’s begin,” Jane said to the group. And then: “To the spirits who are with us. We are here to talk with you. We come with pure intention and love in our hearts. We know you are restless. We can help you go home, if you’ll let us.”
Tess felt a whoosh of cold waft through the room. She caught Wyatt’s eye. He felt it, too.
“You have gone through an awful lot of trouble and fuss to communicate with us,” Jane went on. “Why not make it easy? We don’t need all of the drama. Neither do you.”
Tess was slightly amused by this. Jane was talking to supposed spirits as though they were just people, standing before them. Maybe, in a way, they were.
“I’m going to ask questions. Others may have questions. I want you to swing the pendulum to the left for yes. To the right for no. In between questions, I’ll ask you to stop the pendulum from swinging. That way there won’t be momentum, and we won’t get your answers wrong.” She dangled the pendulum from her hand. It was still.
“My first question is: Do you understand the rules of this game?”
