The Stroke of Winter(36)

Wyatt took a sip of his drink. “Yes, I do. My whole family does. We’ve still got some furs from that time and other mementoes of his. Diaries, too. That’s how we know the story. Apparently, his children were unaware of . . .” Wyatt stopped, choosing his words carefully. “Unaware of the whole village disappearing.”

“That was in his diaries?”

Wyatt nodded. “Exactly. They weren’t found until a generation or so later. He didn’t talk about that part of his life to his family. He kept it hidden.”

Tess could understand that. Every family had secrets, things they’d rather not see the light of day. Many of those secrets involved family members who had simply vanished, left for whatever reason, were never heard from again, made new lives elsewhere, with new people, rejecting what—and who—they had for the allure of something new.

She thought of her uncle Grey’s sudden disappearance, decades earlier. Her dad never talked about it, never speculated where his brother might have gone, or why. It was like he was erased, not just from holidays or family gatherings, but from existence. The only picture Tess had ever seen of him wasn’t a picture at all. It was the painting, Picnic at Mermaid Cove, that hung above the fireplace at La Belle Vie. Now that she thought about it, she wondered why her father insisted that the family hold on to it, given that he never spoke of his brother. Perhaps it reminded him of gentler times.

Tess brought her thoughts back to the moment and smiled at this man across the table. “Do you believe it? The disappearing part, I mean. One person, sure. But a whole village?”

“I don’t know,” Wyatt admitted. “You know how these tales tend to get taller over time. But I do know that he believed it to his dying day.”

He took a sip of his drink and looked off into, perhaps, the past. “I’ve always been sort of torn about it. I’m a pretty practical-thinking person, so, you know . . . Shape-shifters. Enchantment. The whole thing disappearing like Brigadoon.”

“That doesn’t happen so often these days.” Tess smiled at him.

“Not every day, no,” Wyatt said. “I’ve speculated about it a lot over the years. I’ve thought that maybe Elizabeth left him—although that didn’t happen back then too much, either. Or she died suddenly. That’s the more likely explanation. In childbirth, perhaps. Or, I mean, this is a little darker, but maybe she was killed. Maybe he killed her. Then, when more people started coming to the area, maybe the village moved on, went deeper in the woods, to not be bothered by this new town that was springing up. He could have concocted a fantastical explanation. The bottom line is, we just don’t know. It just disappeared.”

“Like Brigadoon.” Tess smiled. “And Wharton has been enchanting people ever since.”

“True enough,” Wyatt said.

“Has your family always lived here?” Tess asked him. “Or did you come back to your roots more recently?”

“We’ve always been here,” Wyatt said. “Members of my family have lived other places, of course, but there’s always somebody in Wharton. It’s as though the whole place might disappear if one of us wasn’t here anchoring it down.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN



Something wasn’t right at La Belle Vie when Wyatt and Tess returned after their lunch. She had invited him in for a cup of tea and, immediately after walking through the door, Tess felt an itchy, hot veil of unease settle around them. It lurked in the air as they hung up their coats, prickling its way through her hair, down her neck, and into her spine. Storm was nowhere to be found. No greeting when they came inside. That alone made the hairs on Tess’s neck stand up.

Wyatt looked around the kitchen. Apparently he was wondering about the dog, too, because he asked, “Where’s Storm?”

And then they heard the growling. It was coming from the hallway, toward the front part of the house. Tess caught Wyatt’s eye, and the two of them walked toward the low and menacing sound. They found Storm standing at the doorway to the drawing room, facing inside, teeth bared, a terrifying growl rumbling through the air. Tess’s heart jumped into her throat as she hurried to the dog’s side and peered into the room.

She gasped at what she saw. The wall safe was wide open, and the panel that hid it from view had been torn off and flung across the room. The paintings were laid out on the floor, side by side. As though they had been carefully placed there by a curator.

The room went ice cold. Tess could feel it penetrating her thick sweater until it reached her skin. Storm began to bark and reared up on his back legs, jumping and biting at something unseen in the air. He’d twirl around midair and jump again, barking all the while. An angry, raging-dog ballet.

She looked at Wyatt with her mouth agape.

Wyatt walked toward the dog with his arms outstretched, his palms open. “Easy, boy,” he said, his voice calm and soothing. “Easy, Storm.”

Storm stopped the jumping and crept to each of the paintings in turn, sniffing them all. His ears were pricked. On high alert.

Wyatt’s eyes followed Storm. “What is this?” he said, his voice low, as though he didn’t want whoever—or whatever—had done it to hear. “What are these?”

So much for keeping the existence of the paintings a secret, Tess thought. She stepped gingerly into the room, wincing, not quite wanting to see if the paintings themselves had been marred or defaced or destroyed in some way. She took a deep breath and looked.