by Luanne Rice
“Are you okay?” Conor said, taking a step closer to her.
Kate nodded. She felt light headed.
“You look pale.”
Now he was inches away. She could feel waves of energy between their bodies.
Her skin tingled. She realized Conor was attracted to her. Maybe he had a hero complex, or perhaps it was the smell of her hair. Was she mistaken, or did he want to kiss her? For weeks now, she had sensed him nearby, watching her, even when he didn’t let himself be seen.
She never had these instincts—she’d been frozen solid, and the ice had started to form right here in the gallery when she was sixteen. What would happen if she touched him? She tried it, just one finger at first, tracing the back of his hand. Her skin burned.
“You knew I’d be here, didn’t you?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Did you follow me?”
She watched him staring at her. Electricity tingled through her body, taunting her to collapse, to quit holding it all together, to give in to something sublime and terrible. She felt overcome with desire. Was this how Beth had felt when she’d gone to the brook with Jed?
“Yeah,” he said. “I did follow you.”
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” she asked.
“I was concerned,” he said.
“About what?” she asked.
“About Pete. He lost face with anyone connected to the gallery; you’re letting his girlfriend and son stay in your family house. He might be very angry.”
“I can take care of myself,” she said, but now, in contradiction to her words, the pressure of her finger on his hand was stronger; she was holding herself up, balancing with one fingertip on Conor Reid. Blood was rushing in her ears, a roaring brook, melting the ice in her body.
“I’m messed up,” she said out loud.
“No, you’re not.”
She pulled herself away and walked across the room. She sensed him right behind her. He wasn’t touching her, but she felt warmth pouring off him. Now his hand was on her shoulder. Her hair was pinned up, and he brushed a tendril aside. She was numb. Would he notice? Would the ice really melt? Did she want it to?
“Kate,” he said, and his breath was warm on the back of her neck. She felt more than just a breeze, movement of air. He was going to kiss her. She felt everything he wanted, as if her own desire had become his.
She turned to accept the kiss. His lips nearly brushed hers. She bowed her head, shook it hard.
This doesn’t happen to me. I don’t do this, she said, but only to herself, not out loud.
She took one step away from him, then another. As she did, the longing that had rocked her a moment ago felt more like a dream; it wasn’t real. The sound of the blood in her ears, the rushing brook, stopped.
She took a deep breath. She knew she had to be brave—face what had happened here twenty-three years ago, here and now, if she wanted to move on with her life. She walked to the basement door, pulled by the force of the past. She turned the knob and walked down the stairs.
In the late 1800s, the basement had had a dirt floor, but Mathilda had redone it with concrete. Despite that improvement, this was New England, and basements were often damp, so chill and a musty smell hit her when she opened the door.
“Kate, why are you going down there?” Conor asked. “You don’t need those memories.”
“I do,” she said quietly.
She heard his footsteps on the stairs behind her. Beth had trained Popcorn well, and he didn’t follow them down. Kate felt daring, entering the place of so many nightmares. The odor and the clammy feeling of her skin brought everything back to her. She had actually desired Conor. She wanted that feeling back, right now, but first she had to break the spell of the past. Maybe her body could be her own again.
Conor had been here that day. He had found Kate and Beth and their dead mother. Had he heard Beth whimpering, speaking gibberish, a language that she’d invented during that long night?
At the foot of the chestnut plank stairs, she turned in a circle. The basement held all the systems—furnace, hot water heater, electrical panel. One wall was covered with shelves filled with bronze and stone sculptures. There were three six-by-six-inch load-bearing support posts set into cement piers, original to the 1890 house. The edges of the cement were crumbling slightly, eaten away by time and moisture.
Kate, Beth, and their mother had been tied next to one post, the rope looped around and around, anchoring them to the building. They had tried changing positions, this way and that. They tried to saw the ropes against the rough edges. Each of them stretched as far as possible, trying to wriggle free. Kate’s left side had been scraped raw. To this day, she had fine, threadlike, horizontal scars on her hip from scraping against the ragged concrete.
She walked over to the pole now, leaned against it, and stared at the floor. She pictured her mother, blood streaming from her nose, vomit from choking on the gag. Kate and Beth had struggled to get free so they could save her. The harder they’d thrashed, the deeper the ropes had cut into their wrists.
“Do you remember what it was like that day?” she asked Conor.
“Yes, everything,” he said. “Do you?”
“I think so. It’s hard to tell whether the memories are real or dreams. Sometimes I think I turned into a ghost that night. That I left the earth.”
“You didn’t,” he said, reaching for her hand. “You’re not a ghost. You’re right here.”
“I don’t always feel alive,” she said, staring at the way his fingers were clasped with hers. “But I want to.”
After a moment she pulled her hand away and turned around. A framing workshop occupied the basement’s east wall. A pegboard with hooks for tools hung above a long rustic workbench. Vises, a mortar board, and saws covered the wooden bench. The family had scoured estate sales for antique frames, often with inferior paintings still intact. The canvases, if they weren’t interesting, would be cut out and discarded. Several large, ornate gilded frames leaned against the wall.
“He made himself useful at one thing,” Kate said.
“Who?” Conor asked.
“Pete. Building frames.”
Standing by the bench, Kate noticed a print by Thomas Nason. Beside it were four lengths of black-painted wood, corners mitered, ready to become a frame. Conor leaned over to examine a wood engraving of a Colonial house on a low hill, surrounded by pine, maple, and birch trees. Kate found it haunting; she wondered if Conor did too.
Kate remembered how Mathilda had told her Nason had etched thousands of fine lines in the block of wood to create depth and shadows. He’d then rolled the block with a thin layer of ink and printed the work. The print was painstakingly detailed, right down to the textures in pine needles and maple bark, the house’s shingles, a glint of dying light in the window glass.
“Looks as if Pete was in the middle of building a frame for this one,” Conor said. “It’s Mathilda’s house, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Kate said. “The artist used houses and barns and land along the Connecticut River as his subjects.” Just as Ben Morrison had used the island and the brook.
“Did Nason know your grandmother?”
“Yes. She said he was the most poetic artist in America. She meant it literally. Some of his prints illustrated books by Robert Frost.”
“I can’t picture Pete feeling the poetry, working on this,” Conor said.
“Trust me; he didn’t. But Beth . . . ,” Kate said.
“Beth, yes. She would,” Conor said.
Kate nodded. “Frost was her favorite poet. His poems evoke New England, the places we grew up and loved.”
And then it hit her: Frost’s “West-Running Brook.” Beth had always been haunted by it, the poem about contraries in love. Most brooks ran east toward the ocean; one streaming west was rare. Kate knew Beth had related the poem—with its dialogue between a couple questioning what they were to each other, whether to follow expected routes i
n life—to their parents’ difficult love. She pictured Morrison’s painting of the brook, so close to Beth’s desk she could touch it. The stream that ran past Jed’s tent. Beth’s contrary love for him. Everything was connected.
“I’m glad we came down here,” Conor said. “It helps me with Pete’s state of mind.”
“In what way?”
“I think this is where he formed the idea to kill Beth,” Conor said, chasing away any feeling of redemption. “Working on the frames right here in the space where your mother died. Where the three of you suffered. It got him thinking. Even though your father hadn’t intended Helen to die, he had made a plan to get himself out of a situation. Pete did something similar, only murder was the whole point.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” Kate said. The cellar was closing in on her, the damp smell filling her throat and choking her like the gag.
Turning fast, she bumped into the post where she’d been tied. The boiler was halfway between it and the stairs. She tripped on a wooden crate, kicking over bottles of chardonnay and pinot noir, served at gallery openings. One shattered, and when she looked down, she saw glass shards, red wine streaming across the floor. It was just like blood, just like her mother’s.
“Kate?” Conor asked, catching her arm. “What is it?”
She didn’t reply. The floor had a slight tilt, built that way in case the basement flooded, and the wine trickled downward toward a narrow drainage trench cut along the south wall. Kate followed the flow. She blinked hard, remembering a time long before the incident, before her mother died.
She and Beth had come into this basement alone. She could see her sister, nine years old, frustration in her eyes.
“You have a hiding place,” Beth had said. “It’s not fair; I want one too.”
Set into the wall was a massive and long-unused stone fireplace and beehive oven with a heavy cast-iron door. Cut into the wall was a metal grate to allow heat to escape, and by wiggling the grate, Kate had been able to remove it and hide her treasures there: Revolutionary War–era coins, a tarnished silver spoon, a speckled black rock she was convinced was a meteorite, and three arrowheads she’d found in the rose garden alongside Mathilda’s house.
“Okay, we have to find you a hiding place,” Kate said, hugging Beth so she would feel better.
“Like yours,” Beth said.
“Yes,” Kate had said. “How about this?” She had walked over to the beehive oven, but when she had tried the cast-iron door, it had been locked. There had been a keyhole but no key.
Now, with Conor, Kate walked to the beehive oven and touched the lock. She felt hypnotized, as if the poem, the painting of the brook, the melting ice, and the old memories had put her under a spell. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key she’d been carrying since she’d found it in the box in Beth’s desk drawer.
How could she have not known until now? The heavy square key found its way into the lock, and Kate turned it. The iron door clanged open. She stood staring into the murk, at first not seeing anything.
“Beth’s hiding place,” she said.
Her fingers brushed spiderwebs as she reached inside. She brought forth a dusty packet of letters written on onionskin paper and tied with a blue ribbon. She held them in her hand, gazing at them as if unsure how they had gotten there. She glanced at one, saw that it was signed J, the same script as the signature on the small nude of Beth. All the way at the back of the oven was a brown cardboard mailing tube.
She felt Conor’s eyes on her as she pulled it out. Peeking into the tube, she saw that a canvas with ragged edges had been rolled up, stored inside. She reached in with two fingers and carefully withdrew the small furled painting. It felt weightless as she carried it to the workbench, laid it flat, smoothed the sides.
She stared at the familiar nocturne. Summer leaves cast shadows on a black lawn, the filmy light from above illuminating the graceful girl twirling in front of the great stone house.
“Moonlight,” Conor said.
41
Reid’s heart was racing—this painting hadn’t been stolen by art thieves. Its existence in the gallery was evidence that someone close to home had placed it here. Reid had mostly ruled Jed out. Although Harris was intelligent, or at least had been before he’d pickled himself, and capable of violence against Beth and stealing the painting, why would he hide the artwork here? It had to be Pete.
“Who had the key?” Reid asked.
Kate acted as if she hadn’t heard him. She leaned over, face practically touching the painting, as if she was examining every brushstroke.
“Beth,” she said after a minute. Without looking up, she tried to hand him the key. He didn’t touch it. He pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and had her drop it in.
He felt the weight of the odd, square-shaped key. “How long have you had this?” he asked, trying not to sound frustrated.
“A few weeks. It was in Beth’s desk.”
“Would Pete have hidden it there?”
“No,” Kate said. “He didn’t even know it existed. It was in a box I gave her, along with a sketch, beneath a false bottom. I had no idea it was there until that day I came back here with you.”
“Then how did Moonlight get locked in here?”
“Beth. She stole it herself,” Kate said in a flat voice. She sounded hypnotized.
Why would Beth steal her own painting? Pete staging a theft made sense, but not Beth. What was she trying to accomplish? Finding Moonlight was the most significant part of the case in weeks, and Reid knew he had to get it to the lab. But he was still overwhelmed by how Kate had acted upstairs. She’d gone into a fugue state when he’d tried to kiss her, and she’d led him down into the basement like a sleepwalker.
Standing at the workbench, thinking about the wood engraver, she’d come out of the trance. But once the bottle of wine had broken, the spell had overcome her again, and she had gone straight to the metal door and unlocked it. Had she known the painting would be there? Had she experienced a waking dream?
Did Kate’s actions, like Lady Macbeth’s, reveal a guilt-ridden mind? He stared at her, wondering if he’d been blind all along. He went back to that first day, at the house when she’d discovered Beth’s body and asked if she was a suspect. Had she killed her sister and hidden the painting here? The thoughts rattled his bones.
“Kate, why would Beth steal it from herself?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“She couldn’t have put it here after she died,” he said.
“Then maybe before. I don’t know,” she said. She turned away from him, held her head in her hands, leaving him to stare at the painting. He knew that the initial examination should be done by a state police lab technician, perhaps with the help of an art conservator, but he put on latex gloves and turned it over anyway.
On the back of the canvas was a rust-colored drawing in the shape of a heart. It looked as if it had been made with blood. At the very bottom was a small smudge, barely a dot.
Kate glanced back, over her shoulder, and fixed her gaze on the heart. She stood beside him, staring down, reaching out with a trembling hand. He felt her wanting to trace the lines with her finger, but she didn’t.
Perhaps the blood—he was pretty sure that’s what it was—belonged to the artist who had painted Moonlight a century ago, but Reid didn’t think so. He believed that heart was the signature of whoever had cut the canvas free just months earlier, in July, leaving the blank frame on the wall of Beth Lathrop’s bedroom, within sight of her body.
42
Driving toward Mathilda’s, Kate needed to clear her head.
Images from the gallery came back to her in quick bursts, starting with the brook painting and poem. She felt as if Beth had been with her, guiding her. She saw herself staring at the pole, touching the wooden surface, hearing a bottle smash, following the red liquid, feeling the heavy key in her hand, unlocking the beehive oven, hearing the creak of metal hinges.
She couldn’t remember finding the painting inside, but she had definite, clear memories of seeing Conor hold it in his hands. She could see the heart-shaped scrawl of blood. It reminded her of being sixteen, when she, Beth, Lulu, and Scotty had become blood sisters, pricking their fingers with sewing needles, marking the moment in blood on the endpaper of a book in Mathilda’s library.
It always happened this way after an episode. Pictures and memories filled her mind in bits and pieces, as if they had been chopped up with scissors. Dissociation was followed by an aura, cloudiness, and sickness, physiological complications of traumatic shock. Twenty-three years ago, the murky feeling could last for weeks. But more than two decades had gone by, and she had gotten better; her spirit had knit back together. She knew from experience, even though she doubted it every time, that this feeling would pass within the day.
The Porsche passed through the stone gates, tires rumbling up the long gravel drive to Mathilda’s house. An allée of beech trees lined the road, their trunks tall blue shadows, September leaves still green but dry, rustling in the interlocking branches overhead. Rounding the last bend, she almost wished to see Pete’s black car. She wanted a fight, to discharge the terrible, sick feeling that had been building inside, that always came when she got too close to those twenty-two hours, when her mind blacked out the worst of them and she felt the vertigo of lost time.
But Pete either wasn’t here or he had hidden his car. Kate’s stomach ached at the idea of seeing Nicola, and she felt it was a mistake, bad judgment, to let her and Tyler stay here. Popcorn jumped out of the convertible and went running out of sight to investigate the paths and hedges. Kate rang the doorbell; a minute later, Nicola answered.
“Kate, hello,” Nicola said, taking a step backward and looking worried. “Pete’s not here.”
“Good, I’m glad. I’m not here to see him.”
“I’ve been looking for a place to rent; I really have,” Nicola said. “If you’re here to tell me it’s time to go, Tyler and I can stay with my mother in Groton.”
