The Shape of Night(76)

    I turn to look at the second painting. It’s the same beach with the same jagged rock jutting up on the right, but autumn has tinted the vegetation in brilliant reds and golds. On the sand lies the same checked blanket, rumpled as before, with fallen leaves scattered across it. Where are the lovers? Why have they left behind their blanket?

In the third painting, winter has blown in, turning the water black and ominous. Snow covers the beach, but one small corner of the blanket has curled up from beneath that layer of snow, a startling red patch against white. The lovers are gone, their summer tryst long forgotten.

I turn to the fourth painting. Springtime has arrived. The trees are a bright green and a lone dandelion blooms in a scrubby patch of grass. I know this is meant to be the final painting in the series because once again there is the red-checked blanket on the sand. But the seasons have transformed it into a tattered symbol of abandonment. The fabric is dirt-streaked and littered with twigs and leaves. Any pleasures that were once enjoyed on that red-checked cloth are now long forgotten.

I imagine Ben setting up his easel on this beach, painting this same scene again and again as the seasons unfold. What kept drawing him back to this spot? The corner of a tag peeks out from behind the frame. I pull it out and read the label.

    CINNAMON BEACH, SPRING, #4 IN A SERIES.

Why does that name sound so familiar? I know I’ve heard it before and I know it was a woman’s voice that said the words. Then I remember. It was Donna Branca, explaining to me why suspicion had fallen on Ned Haskell. There was a woman who went missing about five years ago. Ned had her house keys in his truck. He claimed he found them on Cinnamon Beach.

The same beach that keeps reappearing in Ben’s paintings. Surely it’s just a coincidence. Others must have visited this cove, sunned themselves on this same sand.

The dog whines and I glance down, startled by the sound. My hands have gone cold.

Through the living room doorway, I spy an easel and canvas. As I move into the next room, I catch the scent of turpentine and linseed oil. Propped up before the window is Ben’s current work in progress. So far it’s just a sketch, the outline of a harbor scene waiting for the artist to breathe life and color into it. Leaning against the walls are dozens of paintings he’s completed, waiting to be framed. I flip through them and see ships plowing through swells, a lighthouse lashed by storm-tossed waves. I move to the next stack of canvases and slowly flip through these, as well. Cinnamon Beach and the missing woman are still on my mind, still bothering me. Donna had said the woman was a tourist who’d rented a cottage near the beach. When she vanished, everyone assumed she’d simply gone for a swim and drowned, but when her house keys turned up on Ned’s dashboard, suspicion had fallen on him. Just as it’s fallen on Ned now, for the murder of Charlotte Nielson.

I flip to the last canvas in the stack and freeze, the hairs on my arms suddenly standing up as gooseflesh ripples across my skin. I am staring at a painting of my own house.

    The painting is not finished yet; the background is dark blue and featureless and patches of bare canvas still show through, but there is no doubt this house is Brodie’s Watch. Night swathes the building in shadow and the turret is but a black silhouette against the sky. Only one window is brightly lit: my bedroom window. A window where a woman stands silhouetted against the light.

I stare down at my fingers, which are tacky with dark blue paint. Fresh paint. Suddenly I remember the flickers of light I’d glimpsed at night from my bedroom window. Not fireflies, after all, but someone outside, standing on the cliff path, watching my window. While I lived at Brodie’s Watch, while I slept in that bedroom, undressed in that bedroom, Ben has secretly been painting this portrait of my house. And me.

I cannot spend the night here.

I run upstairs and cast a nervous glance out the window, afraid I’ll see Ben’s car pull into the driveway. There is no sign of him. I haul my suitcase back down the steps, bump-bump-bump, and wheel it outside to my car. The dog has followed me and I drag him by the collar back into the house and shut him inside. I may be in a rush to leave, but I won’t be responsible for an innocent dog getting hit by a car.

As I drive away, I keep glancing in the rearview mirror, but the street behind me is empty. I have no evidence against Ben, nothing but a glimpse of that painting in his studio and it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to bring to the police. I’m just a summer visitor and Ben is a pillar of the community whose family has lived here for generations.

No, a painting is not enough to alarm the police, but it’s enough to make me uneasy. To make me rethink everything I know about Ben Gordon.

I’m bent on getting out of town, but just as I’m about to turn onto the road heading south out of Tucker Cove, I remember Hannibal. I slap the steering wheel in frustration. You jerk of a cat; of course you’d be the one to complicate everything.

    I make a sharp U-turn and drive toward Brodie’s Watch.

It’s early evening and in the deepening gloom, the fog seems thicker, almost solid enough to touch. I step out of the car and scan the front yard. Gray mist, gray cat. I wouldn’t see him even if he were sitting a few yards away.

“Hannibal?” I circle around the outside of the house, calling his name, louder. “Where are you?”

Only then do I hear it, over the sound of breaking waves: a faint meow.