Just Like Home(23)

Daphne snorted. “Don’t be rude. You’ll have so much carrying to do, and you never were good at lifting heavy loads on your own. Always counted on your father and me, didn’t you?”

Vera’s ears burned, and she shoved a too-large bite of lasagna into her mouth to keep herself from answering.

“I think it could be good for all of us, having you home during this time of spiritual transition,” James said, his voice soft as an overripe plum. “Your mother said I could ask you some questions while we’re both here, together. I hope you don’t mind?”

Vera looked up, panicked, then glanced between James and Daphne. She was regretting that mouthful of lasagna—the overcooked pasta gummed between her teeth, the mealy cheese stuck in her throat, she couldn’t say no fast enough to stop this from happening. Daphne gave her another catlike smile.

“When’s the last time you saw your father?” James asked.

Vera swallowed hard, wishing she’d thought to get herself a glass of water, or even, god forbid, lemonade. The underchewed bite hurt going down. “I suppose…” she started, waiting for Daphne to cut her off, to forbid this conversation. But no interruption came. She decided to continue—there could be no real harm in answering this. “I suppose that was when they took him away.”

James’s head tilted forward and to one side, like a globe tipping on its axis. “You haven’t seen him more recently than that?”

Vera shrugged.

James set his plate down, leaned his elbows on his knees, steepled his fingers. It was unsettling, how easily he shifted from slick and slippery to sincere and thoughtful. Vera didn’t know which version of him was the real one. “And has he ever visited you? In the time since he passed?”

Vera stared at him blankly. “That’s not funny,” she replied, the words coming out thin.

“I’m not trying to be funny. Your father … he cared about you very much, Vera. That was clear in the interview he granted my father. You’re certain you haven’t had any messages from him since you came back? A sighting, maybe? Or even just a feeling, like a chill, or a presence—”

A snort from Daphne. “James, please. She didn’t even try to visit him while he was still alive. Why would he reach out to her now?”

Vera didn’t have anything to say to that. Daphne was absolutely right: Vera could have visited her father, at least in the time since the door to the house he built had been closed behind her.

But Vera hadn’t.

“Why didn’t you visit him?” James said. His eyes never left her face. He spoke softly, his voice almost tender.

Tenderness was a foreign, forgotten thing that she hadn’t encountered since before everything went wrong. She did not want it. Not now. Not from him.

“He didn’t want me to,” she said evenly. “He would have written if he did.” She thought, but did not say, that she had missed her father too much to risk going to see him, to risk the sting of him sending her away like Daphne had. Vera decided to be finished with this part of the conversation. “So. You’re not an author?”

“No,” he said, with a smile that told her he was letting her off the hook for now, but saw what she was doing. “I’m a spiritual rendering artist.”

She shook her head. “What does that—”

“It means I incorporate aspects of the metaphysical into my paintings,” he interrupted, gesturing at the room with a vague swirl of his hand. “I try to represent the true character of my inspiration in the work I create. It’s an intimate act of co-creation between myself and my surroundings.” He slid his fork between two layers of lasagna, gently parting a section of sauce and noodles and cheese. “I like to think of myself as working not with a subject, but with a partner.”

Vera set her fork down. “I see. Your partner in this is my mother?”

Daphne let out a strange, soft gurgle, like an infant with a throat full of milk.

“Not at all,” James laughed. “No, my partner is never a person. It’s … history, and geography, and emotion. So much emotion. I find places where those three things intersect, and I distill the essence of that harmony into the visual.”

“And people want to see that? For money?”

“Oh, everyone wants to see that. Like here, for instance. There’s so much pain, so much yearning. It’s perfect. My father always told me about how connected this house was to the other side.”

“The other side of what?” Vera said. Then, too slowly, his description of his work fell together in her mind, and she realized what it was that James Duvall painted. “Wait—history, geography, and emotion. Are you saying that you paint haunted houses?”

“Haunted is a loaded word,” he said smoothly. “And it’s not just houses. My series on abandoned hospitals in rural Canada—”

“James brings a wonderfully intimate lens to these things,” Daphne purred, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Vera. “So compassionate. He feels so deeply for those who are most affected.”

“Like Francis, for instance,” James said. “He was a deeply emotional man. When he died, he must have felt—”

“You know, we always seem to end up talking about my father,” Vera interrupted, the anger she’d bitten back struggling against her teeth. It was a fight she wasn’t winning. “What about yours, James? What kind of places do you think Hammett’ll haunt once he assumes room temperature?”