The Stroke of Winter(28)

“Good. Please keep it that way. Have you called Grandpa?”

“Not yet,” Tess said. “I’m planning to call them in the morning.”

“Mom, this goes without saying, right?”

She knew just what he meant. “Yes. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it. Nobody is getting a look at those canvases but me. And you, if you want to come up.”

“I can be there this weekend,” Eli said. “Is that soon enough?”

“Sure,” Tess said. “In the meantime, I’m going to find out what, if anything, they are. I’ll do that tomorrow morning. I didn’t really want to go back into that room at night by myself.”

“Worried about disembodied heads?”

“Something like that.”

After they said their goodbyes, Tess snuggled down in bed. She reached over to turn off the lamp on her nightstand but then thought better of it. The light stayed on. If anything was planning to creep out of that room in the middle of the night to bother her, she wanted to be able to see it.

Tess slipped into a hazy dream, images coming one after another, like a slideshow. She was wandering through Wharton at night, the streets wet with rain. She could feel the dampness seeping through her clothes, into her skin.

Then she was outside a house, peering through the windows at the family inside. A woman was at the stove in the kitchen, her husband relaxing in an armchair in the living room. But her eyes turned back to the woman. A butcher knife glinted in her hand.

Next, she was on the wooded cliff outside of town, looking down toward the rocks below. The moon was reflecting on the deep, dark water in a long shaft, and the sky was filled with stars. A rumpled heap lay on the rocks, waves lapping at it.

Next, she was inside the studio. But it didn’t look anything like it had the day before. Paints were on the table, an easel set up by the window. Everything was orderly—not neat as a pin, exactly, but not the haphazard chaos they had found when they opened the door. A young woman came out of the bathroom wearing a silk robe with a paisley pattern and walked toward a settee that was positioned in the middle of the room. She reclined on the settee and pushed her hair back from her face. Somehow, her neck seemed to be throbbing with life. And then, a tiny trickle of blood appeared there, growing wider and deeper until it was a red gash.





CHAPTER TWELVE



Tess’s eyes shot open. She was confused for a moment, her dreams still hanging in the air, swirling around her. She was damp with sweat, and her comforter and sheets were tangled around her legs, as if she had been thrashing around in the night.

She pushed herself up and reached over to the glass of water on her nightstand. She took it with shaking hands and drank a big gulp, the cool water slipping down her throat, calming her. It was just a strange and upsetting dream. That was all. Nothing more. She was in her own house.

Then she noticed Storm. He was staring intently at her bedroom door, which was closed. A deep, low growl rumbled in his throat. And then she heard what he was growling at.

Scrrrr, scrrrr, scrrrr.

Not again, she thought. Was this how it was going to be now? Every night? They had opened that door and found nothing that could have been scratching. Not one shred of evidence that an animal had been trapped in there. If not an animal . . . what was it?

Fear sizzled through her body. She slipped out from under the covers and stepped out into the hallway.

All was dark, except for a shaft of light seeping out around the studio door. The light seemed to radiate, vibrate with life. But . . . hadn’t she turned on all the lights before going to bed?

And the scratching was unbearably loud. As though it came from the house itself. Or inside her own head. She had to make it stop.

“Stop it!” Tess shouted. “Stop that scratching! Stop it right now! I mean it!”

The scratching noise went silent. Storm went silent. Tess held her breath.

All at once, she was a woman on a mission. She disassembled the “noisemaker alarm” that she and Wyatt had set up earlier that evening. Lamps went on the floor, candelabra beside them, along with all the other items. That done, she shoved the steamer trunk out of the way and opened the door.

The room was buzzing with energy. Or maybe, Tess thought, it was she who was buzzing. She didn’t remember leaving the light on, but it was blazing. The studio was bright as day.

“Whoever is making that noise, you really need to stop it,” Tess said, in a loud voice, turning in a circle and getting a good look all the way around the room. “It’s disturbing me, night after night. That’s unkind. I am the owner of this house, and I demand that you stop it.”

Nothing. Maybe it was a futile attempt, but she tried.

Something compelled Tess to move across the room. She stepped carefully, slowly, with Storm at her heels, to the little bathroom in the corner. She opened the door and peered inside. Canvases, just as she had last seen them. Stacked together, turned against the wall.

She took a deep breath and took hold of one of them, lifting it up and turning it around.

And there it was, just as she knew, somewhere deep in her soul, it would be. An undiscovered painting by Sebastian Bell. She had been right. She carried it out into the main room and laid it on the table to get a better look.

The painting depicted a woodland scene, high on a hill overlooking the water. An image much darker than the lakescapes he was best known for painting, both in color and in tone. It was the view through the trees at night, tall jack pines with gnarled trunks. Fireflies dotted the dark spaces between them. The inky lake lay at the bottom of a cliff, the moon creating a pool of light on its black surface. Tess thought she knew the area he was depicting. It was the cliff outside of town, the treacherous stretch of road on the way to Salmon Bay.