The Art of Inheriting Secrets(91)

Maybe, I thought, feeling a bit lighter, some of these would be worth something.

I almost didn’t run an image search on the painting of my uncle. It seemed unlikely the portrait was worth anything. In the end, I fed it in and clicked search and sat back, taking a sip of tea while I waited.

The search populated with a dozen matches. One was to a Dutch portrait of a noble in seventeenth-century dress, and it was startling how close the resemblance was. Another was to the portfolio of the painter, long dead, who had painted many of the English gentry in India. So this painting had been done before they’d left.

All of the others were connected to actual stories of Roger Shaw, Earl of Rosemere. I clicked through to the Wikipedia article I’d already read, which was very sparse, just birth–September 9, 1939, and basic facts. Born in India, immigrated to England when his mother inherited. Then a short paragraph on the disappearance. “In 1977, the house was abandoned and has stood empty ever since.”

The search brought up several minor newspaper mentions of Roger, of the same type I’d found of my mother. Social pages, a dance, a ribbon cutting. In the early seventies, he was in his prime, a very good-looking man with his mother’s sensuality and a mouth that was somehow cruel.

Or maybe I was just projecting.

I looked at the portrait again, then abruptly stood up and went to the box I’d brought from my grandmother’s room. There were hundreds of photos in the box, and it took a little while to find some of Roger. The first I pulled out wasn’t one I’d seen before—this one was in England. I recognized the house in the background. It must have been one of the picnics. Violet stood next to a tall, lean man with a craggy face—of an age to have served in the war, which would have made anyone weary. Roger, a little over twenty, held his little sister in his lap. My mother. She looked ready to cry. He smiled into the camera. The camera had caught the exact second that Violet’s husband—really, he was my grandfather; why didn’t I feel any connection?—had swung his hand toward Caroline, as if to pick her up.

The little girl was reaching for him. Or Violet. Roger clung to her waist.

I swallowed a sick feeling. Here was the evil in the forest. Everyone said Roger was cruel, controlling. Had he abused her? Physically? Sexually? Mentally?

Carefully, I leafed through the photos again, sorting them into piles. Roger; Violet in India, Violet in England; Caroline; Nandini. I tried to blur my eyes respectfully over the nude photos, but again, my heart was captured by her lush beauty and even more so by the knowing, powerful connection she’d made with the person who had snapped the photos. Violet.

Very few of my grandfather. He was the Shaw. I fed his name into Wiki and came up with nothing except the acknowledgment of his once having been married to Violet. He’d died in 2001, married to someone else.

I tapped my fingers on the keys, feeling as if I was missing something, something just in the edges of my peripheral vision. On impulse, I paused and typed into the search engine, “Sanvi Malakar.”

Nothing. No match at all, only “Did you mean Sanjaya Malakar?” who had, evidently, been a contestant on American Idol.

Frustrated, I closed the program and looked again at the paintings, JPEGs lined up on my screen. I played with last names making words and first names making words. Nothing.

My phone buzzed, and I picked it up. No, I snatched it up, which made me feel embarrassed, even more so when I saw that the text was from Samir: Might I stop by on the way home?

Everything in me wanted to say yes. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in twenty thousand years. And yet I couldn’t shake the way his mother had looked at me. I also had to be honest enough to admit that my feelings were hurt. Not because he hadn’t brought me to a family dinner. But maybe the feeling that he was hiding me.

Which was completely ridiculous. We’d been dating for five seconds. It wasn’t like me to be so . . . dramatic.

As I considered what to type, a knock sounded on the door. “It’s me, Olivia.”

I opened the door, and Samir stood there, looking like six feet of dessert. His hair was smoothed a bit, and he wore a dress shirt with tiny blue stripes, open at the throat. He carried a package of food, which he lifted with a wry smile. “Pavi sent a peace offering.”

“I already ate dinner.”

He grinned. “I assumed you had.”

I shrugged a little.

“Was my mother terrible?”

“Yes!” I stood in the doorway, half-torn as I eyed the box. “What is it?”

“You’ll have to invite me in to find out.”

“Why should I?” I said, and to my horror, there was more emotion in the words than I had meant to show.

Samir flowed over the threshold. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” He gathered me close, and I let him, my defenses melted by the smell of his skin and the smell of whatever was in the box he carried. Just the solidness of his chest rocked me, opened me, and I pressed my face into his shoulder. “She hated me on sight. I felt about thirteen.”

He kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry. She is sometimes difficult.” Against my hair, he said, “It’s coconut asparagus. She said you would love it.”

“Coconut, really?” I stepped out of his arms and let him come in, closing the door as I took the box of food, spinning around to take a fork out of the drawer. Leaning on the counter, I opened the box to taste the asparagus. “Mmm. That’s very fresh!” I could pick out black mustard seed and cumin, garlic, chilies, but the flavor of asparagus was the main event—big and so perfectly itself. “Your sister is . . . an extraordinary chef.”