The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller(46)
“Speak fast and clear, and if this is any kind of trick, things will not end well,” Cecil said.
Evan didn’t doubt her a bit.
“I’m staying at the house on the island, the Fin. The clock is in the basement. I started off wanting to write an article about it, about its history, but now ...” He shifted and glanced into the woods surrounding the house. “Now I need to know.”
Cecil studied him for another moment, then let the gun point fully at the floor. “It’ll rain soon, come inside before it does.”
She stepped aside, and Evan moved past her, into a comfortable foyer lined with paintings on each wall and wooden benches. Cecil shut the door and locked it.
“I haven’t had another person in my house for five years, and it would’ve been more if the electrical panel hadn’t shorted out.” Cecil walked past him, her slippers slapping against the wood floor as she went. “I pride myself in being able to fix most things. Saves money, saves time.” She gave him a disdainful look over her shoulder. “Saves conversation.”
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Evan said, following her into a warm kitchen with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long breakfast bar at its center. “I got your name from the twins in town, Arnold and Wendal—”
“Peh!” Cecil swung her hand through the air in a violent motion. “Insolent old men have nothing to do besides meddle in others’ affairs and rest their sagging bottoms in chairs all day.”
Evan couldn’t help but smile at the old woman’s vehemence. She turned on her heel and went to an industrial-looking stove, where she banged a pan onto the top and began to heat water.
“You like coffee?”
“Yes, that would be great.”
“Good, because coffee and wine are all I drink, and it is too early for wine.” Cecil’s hand’s worked fast in the cupboards and drawers, but her eyes remained on the clouds outside. “But I may regret that later.”
Within a few minutes, she handed him a cup of coffee the color of tar poured from a brass pot that chugged merrily on the stove.
“This is the only way to make coffee, everything else is barbaric.”
Her slight accent became more noticeable, and Evan paused, his cup halfway to his mouth.
“You’re French?”
Cecil shot him a glance and then drank a sip of coffee. “Half. My mother came from France, my father was English, but born here.” She looked around the kitchen and shook her head. “The kitchen is no place for talk. Only gossip and food is made in kitchens.”
She led the way out of the room through an archway that opened up into a sitting room with an elegant glass table over ten feet long and several overstuffed leather couches. Every wall in the room held at least two pieces of art, and all had the same sublime look to them, their colors meshed and flowing in brushstrokes both bold and gentle. Evan studied the painting closest to him, a beautiful scene set beside a waterfall with stones of all colors bathing in its swirling pool. A boy lay on his side, dragging a flower in the flowing water, his eyes on the sky above him.
“I call that one A Day’s Dream, for nothing like it could exist in this world,” Cecil said, as she settled into a comfortable-looking chair.
“You painted this?”
“I painted everything in this house. Call me egotistical, but I like my paintings more than anything else I’ve seen.”
Evan took a drink of his coffee and felt a disconsolate wave wash over him, knowing that he’d been drinking swill labeled as “coffee” up to this point in his life.
“That’s amazing,” he said, then took another sip.
Cecil nodded. He set his cup down on the glass table and sank into the couch nearby. He folded his hands, then refolded them, not knowing how to begin. Cecil saved him the trouble by speaking first.
“So you’ve seen it.”
It wasn’t a question but a condemnation.
“Yes, I happened on it as soon as we moved in.”
“‘We’?”
“My son, Shaun, and I. We’re house-sitting for a friend who owns the island.”
Cecil said nothing, only watched him.
“I didn’t know what to think at first.”
“And you still don’t, that’s why you came here, correct?”
“Yes.”
Cecil sighed and looked down at her coffee. “My mother came from a village outside of Paris. She spent her first fifteen years there before her father shipped her off to America, to a better life.” Cecil made a disgusted look, then continued. “She moved in with her aunt in Wisconsin, a cruel woman who drove her out of the house almost as fast as she’d taken her in. My mother wandered. For a while she worked as a pastry chef’s assistant in a small bakery, until he died of a stroke. After that, she begged for change and rode short distances on a railroad. But after almost being raped and killed, she took a job cleaning and cooking at the house you’ve no doubt just come from. That’s the only way you would’ve known my mother’s name.”
Evan nodded. “The painting.”
“That was her true calling, the art that made several men from her country famous. She spent every free moment either drawing or painting on anything she could find. Her hand was true, and her mind had an inner vision most others can only dream of.”