The Stroke of Winter(29)

And then she saw the faces in the trees and on the ground and even in the water. Wild, terrified eyes. Open mouths as if they were screaming. Or moaning.

The hairs on the back of Tess’s neck began to tingle. The image was beautiful, a true Sebastian Bell, but what it depicted made her stomach tighten.

Anguished souls.

It was familiar to her. She had seen that image before. But she didn’t quite know where. Or how.

She left the painting where it was and hurried back into the bathroom to get a look at the others. She flipped through them, as though looking at prints stacked together in a gallery.

Tess gasped when she realized it. These were all finished paintings.

She counted four. With the first one out in the main studio, five. She had no idea what they all might be worth at auction, but it would be in the millions. If not more. She stood there for a moment, wishing the hour weren’t so late—or, to be more exact, so early—so she could call her dad. She couldn’t wait to tell him about this.

Tess carried the canvases out into the studio, two by two, and turned them over on the table beside the first one. When the table was full, she carefully placed the rest on the floor side by side. Her heart was beating wildly as she drank in the images.

The colors were mostly dark—deep greens, blues, and blacks. A splash of red and white here and there.

They were not typical Sebastian Bell paintings, although his style was unmistakable. It was the subject matter that seemed different somehow. Whereas he usually depicted scenes that took place outside near the wild, unpredictable inland sea of Wharton, these were images of the city, the woods, the surrounding area. The lake was in the background of some of them, but certainly not the main focus.

As Tess looked closer, she realized some were scenes of Wharton at night. Wet streetscapes. Views of homes, as if looking in through the windows from the outside. A woman making dinner in the kitchen as her husband sat with a drink in the living room, staring off with a stony expression on his face. His mouth was a straight line. Anger seemed to radiate from him. The drink, which seemed to be a glass of scotch, was nearly empty. In the kitchen, the woman was leaning over the stove, her head in her hands. She seemed to be crying.

A family around the table, with a teen girl sullenly staring at her plate. Tense expressions on her parents’ faces. Certainly not a happy family. A sense of shame heated up Tess’s cheeks. It felt as though she shouldn’t be seeing these images. She shouldn’t be intruding on this family’s moment of pain.

Still another. In this one, a fire blazed in the living room fireplace, but the lights were low. On the second floor, a woman was reaching up to draw the curtains on her bedroom window, her husband holding her from behind.

Another painting depicted a woman, walking down the street, away from whoever was observing her. The hem of her dress blew in the breeze. It felt as though Tess, and anyone who observed this painting, were following the woman, unbeknownst to her.

These were voyeuristic images. Snippets of other people’s lives, observed in secret, with them not knowing it. Tess’s stomach turned over. This wasn’t right.

Then her eyes were drawn back to the first painting she had seen, the scene on the cliff, a vision through the pines at the moonlight shimmering on the water. The anguished souls crying out in the ether beyond. It held a horrifying beauty, a sense of tragedy in the landscape and the water, as though the very land and lake held the memories of all who had ever perished there.

Tess turned to another of the paintings. It was a woman, wearing a paisley robe, reclining on the settee in the studio. She was smiling, but her eyes didn’t smile with her. Tess detected a look of fear there, an anxiety behind the forced smile. This painting, unlike all the others, featured the subject looking at the painter. And the subject, this woman, was afraid, but trying not to show it. Her eyes held a depth that Tess hadn’t seen in her grandfather’s other works—her full face was depicted, that was the first thing. He tended to paint his other subjects from the back or the side, rarely looking straight at him. A red gash, a brushstroke, was on the wall behind her.

All the works looked so familiar to her, as though she had seen them before. Tess’s skin began to crawl when she realized why.

Her dreams.

These were scenes from the dreams she’d been having over the past several nights. Walking down the dark streets of Wharton.

Could it be? Tess ran a hand through her hair and shook her head. It couldn’t be. That was silly. She looked closer and thought back to the images that had run through her mind on previous nights.

There was the house where she had looked into the window. There was the woman she had followed. There was the cliff she had peered over. The crumpled mass she had seen in the dream was not in the painting, but she was certain it was the same location.

In her dream of the woman in the paisley robe, she hadn’t seemed afraid. Not then. But in the painting, it was clear. She was not a willing subject for the artist.

What was this? What was happening?

All at once she felt cold. It was as though the temperature in the room dropped in an instant. She breathed out and could see her breath wafting through the air.

Tess called for Storm, and the two of them bolted out of the studio. She slammed the door behind them and shoved the steamer trunk across the threshold. She stacked her “alarm items” on top of it and stood there for a moment, trying to quiet her racing heart.