Hidden Pictures(71)

Then my face is struck by a clod of dirt. I can hear the soft chop of a shovel spearing into a mound of earth—and then more dirt and rocks fall down upon me. I hear the man grunting; I can feel weight accumulating on my chest, the growing pressure on my body, and then I can’t see anymore. It’s just blackness.

Then I try to open my eyes, and I’m back in my cottage. The lights are off and the tiny clock on my nightstand says 3:03. I’m lying in bed, clutching a pencil with a broken point. Even in the darkness, I can see that my kitchen chairs are empty; I can only assume that Adrian got tired of waiting for something to happen, and he went home.

I get up to make sure the door is locked. I lift back the sheets and swing my legs out of bed, and only then do I see a bare-chested Adrian sleeping on my floor, lying parallel to my bed, using the crook of his arm and his balled-up shirt as a pillow.

I reach down and gently shake his shoulder. “Hey.”

Instantly, he sits up. “What’s wrong?”

“Did it work? Did I draw anything?”

“Well, yes and no.” He switches on the tiny lamp, then opens the sketch pad to reveal the first page. It’s nearly covered in scribbles; the surface of the paper has been obliterated with graphite. There are just two small patches of white—two places where the pencil point gouged through the paper, revealing the blank page underneath.



“It was just past one o’clock,” Adrian explains. “You’d been asleep for an hour or so. I was getting ready to give up and go to bed. So I turned off the lights and lay down on the floor. And then I heard you turn over and reach for the pad. You didn’t even sit up. You drew this lying down in the dark.”

“It’s not much of a picture.”

“Maybe Anya’s telling us she’s finished. There are no more pictures. We already have everything we need.”

But this can’t be right. Something is still missing, I’m sure of it. “I dreamed I was at the bottom of a hole. A man was shoveling dirt on top of me. Maybe this picture is the dirt.”

“Maybe, but how would that help us? What do we learn from a picture of dirt?”

I stand up to get the rest of the drawings. I want to spread them out on the floor and see how the all-black scribbles might fit into the sequence. Adrian pleads with me to get some sleep. “You need to rest, Mallory. Tomorrow’s our last chance to figure this out. Just go to bed.”

He reshapes his T-shirt into the world’s saddest pillow and lies back on the hardwood floor. He closes his eyes and I stop thinking about Anya just long enough to register his upper body. He’s tan and toned all over, the natural by-product of working outdoors all summer. I could probably bounce a quarter off his stomach. He’s been kind and supportive and he might have the best physique I’ve ever seen on a man, and like a dummy I’ve made him sleep on the floor.

Adrian opens his eyes and realizes I’m still staring at him. “Can you turn off the light?”

I reach down, skim my fingers across his chest, and take his hand. “Okay,” I tell him. “But first I want you to come up here.”





25


I wake to the smell of butter and cinnamon. Adrian’s already dressed and moving around my kitchen. He’s found the granny smith apples in my pantry and he’s standing over the range with a spatula, flipping some kind of pancake. I glance at the clock and it’s just past seven thirty in the morning.

“Why are you awake?”

“I’m driving to Akron. To see Dolores Campbell. If I leave now, Google says I’ll be there by two.”

“It’s a waste of time. You’re going to drive four hundred miles to meet a woman who can’t even recognize her own nurse.”

“It’s our last lead. Let me bring the drawings and the library book. I’ll show them to her, see if they trigger any kind of reaction.”

“They won’t.”

“You’re probably right. I’m going to try, anyway.”

He’s so determined, I feel obligated to go with him—but I’ve already committed to spending the afternoon with Teddy. “I need to stay here. They’re planning a party for me.”

“I’ll be fine. I just downloaded a new audiobook, Heir to the Jedi. That’ll get me all the way to Akron and back.” He carries over a mug of tea and a plate of apple-cinnamon pancakes and encourages me to sit up in bed. “Now see what you think of these. It’s my father’s recipe.” I sit up and take a bite and yes, in fact they are remarkable—sweet and tart and buttery and delicious, even better than the churros.

“They’re incredible.”

He leans over and kisses me. “There’s more on the stove. I’ll call you from the road and let you know what I find out.”

And I’m a little sad that he’s leaving. I have a whole day to kill before the pool party starts at three o’clock. But I can sense there’s no talking Adrian out of the trip, that he would chase every lead to the end of the earth to keep me from leaving Spring Brook.



* * *



I spend the morning packing my things. It doesn’t take long. Six weeks ago, I arrived in Spring Brook with a secondhand suitcase and a handful of outfits. Now, thanks to Caroline’s generosity, I have a much bigger wardrobe—but nothing to carry all my new clothes. So I fold her five-hundred-dollar dresses very carefully and place them inside a ten-gallon kitchen trash bag—what my friends at Safe Harbor liked to call a sober-living suitcase.