The Stroke of Winter(86)

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.