A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  Before I could make it to the exact page, Andrews lumbered into the kitchen, hair wild, eyes to match.

  “Must have coffee.” It was almost a prayer.

  “Ah!” I’d found it. “Duncan L. Spivey. The only one.”

  I reached for the phone.

  “Stop,” Andrews commanded. “It’s not yet eight o’clock. And I’m not certain, frankly, what day of the week it is.”

  I thought, but I couldn’t recall the day, either.

  “Well, what time is it?” I glared in the direction of the little clock set into the stove but couldn’t make it out.

  “It is seven-forty-seven.” He pulled his Mr. Coffee machine toward him on the counter by the sink.

  I was very glad to see that he also had a bean grinder and fresh black beans. While he busied himself with the coffee, I tried to imagine what I would say to Mr. Spivey. Everything I could come up with at that moment only made me a lunatic—even more so than usual.

  By the time the coffee was placed before me only a few moments later, I was regretting the entire trip to Atlanta.

  “How am I going to explain anything to Spivey?” I stared down at the red coffee mug.

  “Don’t try.” Andrews leaned on the counter. “He doesn’t need your life story. Keep it simple: ‘My father sold you a painting and I’ve never seen it. I wonder if it would be possible to pop by—’”

  “All right.” I reached for the phone. “But I’m at least going to tell him that the proceeds put me through college.”

  “Why?”

  “So he’ll know it’s not just idle curiosity. He’ll understand why I want to see it.”

  “No he won’t.” Andrews sipped the brew he’d concocted.

  I was already dialing.

  “You know he’ll have a machine,” Andrews mentioned casually. “He won’t answer the phone. Not at this hour.”

  “Hello.”

  Someone had answered, and after only one ring—an older man, by his voice.

  “Hello,” I stammered, “I’m calling Duncan Spivey.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately, “I’m expecting a very important call from my doctor.”

  “My name is Devilin.”

  There was a dark pause at the other end of the line, and then the man let go a breath as heavy as the silence had been.

  “Fletcher?” he asked.

  My father’s name.

  It was a ghost question, and the man’s voice was mostly air.

  “No.” I struggled with what to say next. “Fletcher was my father—he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  I instantly wished I had said it better.

  “I’m Fever.” I cleared my throat. “Dr. Fever Devilin. I believe my father—”

  “You’re Dolores’s son?” he interrupted, barely comprehending.

  My mother’s name.

  “I’m afraid so.” I tried to regroup.

  His voice sounded so…shaken.

  “Your mother—,” he began.

  “My mother’s dead, as well,” I said quickly.

  Andrews looked up from his coffee, but I avoided eye contact.

  “I was only going to say,” Spivey began, “that I knew them both, a number of years ago.”

  “Yes.” I was absolutely at sea as to how to proceed.

  “You’re probably calling about the portrait that put you through college,” he said, every syllable hollow.

  I looked up at Andrews then, eyes wide.

  “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly why I’m calling.”

  Andrews set down his cup. “No,” he whispered.

  I nodded.

  “How could you possibly guess—”

  “I have been waiting for this phone call for a great many years,” Spivey said, tone unchanged. “I thought you might call me when you were in college, or even when you were teaching at the university. But now here you are.”

  “I meant—”

  “When Fletcher sold me the painting, he told me what the money was for.”

  “Oh.” I stared at the phone.

  “So.” He sighed. “I suppose you’d be wanting to know why he sold it to me. Or why I bought it. It’s not, as you may know, a particularly interesting painting. As a portraitist, in my opinion, Cotman made an excellent landscape artist.”

  “You didn’t care for the painting?”

  “No, I liked it. And I supposed that it might be worth something one day. I had heard Cotman’s name. But upon further investigation—after I purchased the piece—it wasn’t as valuable as I’d imagined.”

  “What investigation?” I didn’t want my voice to sound as dull as it did, but I couldn’t force it to be anything other than colorless and plain.

  “I contacted a gallery in London that specialized in Cotman.” He, too, seemed almost completely uninterested in this particular part of the conversation.

  “Wait,” I said suddenly. “Was it the Ashton Gallery?”

  I couldn’t say what had made me remember the name of the gallery from the file I’d seen in Taylor’s office.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, a bit energized.

  “They said it was nothing of value.”

  “They did indeed.” He blew out his breath; it was like thunder in the phone. “Look. You may be wondering why I paid so much money for a painting that was of little genuine worth.”

  “I’m calling—,” I began, hoping just to get to the part where he’d let me come to his house to see the thing.

  “I gave Fletcher a lot of money,” Spivey said, voice torn, “because I knew it was for you—and I thought I might be your father.”

  There it was: the exact sentence I had been hoping to avoid, not because I thought this man might actually be my father, but because I wanted to avoid the part of the conversation where I had to explain to him that any one of two or three dozen men might have had the same suspicion about me. Around the time I was born, my mother had been in a prodigiously promiscuous period. The fact that I looked almost exactly like Fletcher Devilin—and, from evidence of old photographs, a good bit like Conner—belied all such suppositions. But Spivey had never seen me, at least as an adult, and so would not know that.

  “Mr. Spivey.” I struggled to sound reasonable and, somehow, professional. “I really only want to see the portrait, strictly idle curiosity. I happened to be in Atlanta visiting a friend—”

  “Oh.” Such a hopeless syllable.

  “So I was wondering—,” I tried again.

  “I sold the painting.” He said it as if I should have known. “I didn’t even hang it in the house when I brought it home. I sold it several years ago when I was cleaning out a part of the house so that—I was doing some renovation, and making a master suite in the upstairs part of the house. Doesn’t matter. I came across the painting, advertised in the proper places, then sold it to a private collector.”

  “I see.” I bit my upper lip. “You wouldn’t mind telling me how to contact that person, then, would you? So I could see the picture.”

  “What?” His mind was obviously elsewhere. “Wait, yes. I think perhaps—” And he set the phone down without further words.

  “He sold it,” I told Andrews, still staring at the phone.

  “Sold it? When?”

  “Couple of years ago.” I swallowed. “He’s gone to find the name of the—”

  “Hello?” Spivey’s voice was harsh in my ear.

  “Yes.” I sounded calm.

  “Diana Dandridge and Kristin Shaunnesy,” he said quickly, “at Seventeen Amsterdam Place. It’s in midtown, I think.”

  “No phone number?” I barely recognized my own voice.

  “No.” He hesitated. “Look. Fever. Dr. Devilin. I’d like to see you.”

  “If only I had the time this trip,” I told him as breezily as I could manage, “but my schedule’s really tight at the moment. I just have time to pop by and see the painting before I’m called hence. But the very next trip to Atlanta—
”

  “We could have dinner,” he finished the sentence.

  “Absolutely.” I leaned my head nearer the phone, ready to hang up. “The very next time I’m in Atlanta.”

  “This isn’t the conversation I was hoping to have,” he began.

  “All right,” I sang into the phone as if I were brushing off a telemarketer. “I have to run.”

  His silence made the phone heavy in my hand.

  “You’re not going to call me.” His voice was a vapor.

  “Bye now.” I hung up.

  Andrews stared.

  “You’re white as a sheet.” He seemed a little alarmed.

  “I’m certain,” I told him in some misguided attempt to maintain a carefree facade, “you’d come up with something less of a cliché if it weren’t so early.”

  “What was all that with Spivey?”

  How could I tell Andrews that I’d spoken with a particular kind of ghost—not someone who was dead and had come back to haunt me, but someone who was alive and had been haunted by my existence, a man turned into a ghost by guilt and longing, by half a lifetime of unanswered questions: a distant past, barely remembered but vividly painful? There was no explanation for that kind of suffering. And I only that moment realized he’d been waiting for a call from his doctor, a fact I had not remotely addressed or even acknowledged.

  “I told you,” I managed. “He sold the painting.”

  I reached for the phone book.

  “It had something to do with your father. Your mother.”

  One of the problems with having a good friend is that it’s difficult to hide something from him even when you want to.

  “He told me where the painting is.” I looked through the D listings.

  “You’ll tell me eventually.”

  “Because you’ll needle it out of me,” I agreed. “But could we let it go for the moment? I don’t think I can—”

  “Where’s the painting now?” he said instantly.

  “In midtown.” I was very grateful, in that moment, for a friend’s willingness not to pry.

  Even if it was somewhat predicated on a very short attention span.

  Diana Dandridge and Kristin Shaunnesy lived in a particularly nice midtown neighborhood, on a hill, with a view of the Atlanta skyline through tall pines. My phone call had roused them, but Diana was astonishingly kind about it, and once I explained my situation, she practically insisted that I come right over. At least that’s what I told Andrews.

  “This is outrageous, you realize,” he said as I pulled my truck up in front of their house.

  The front yard was surrounded by a black iron fence and the walkway to the door was lined with huge rosemary plants, flowering blue.

  “She said it was all right.” I climbed out of my seat.

  “She was being polite. Christ. I wasn’t even born here and I can recognize southern hospitality.”

  “We’ll only be a moment.”

  I was already headed for the iron gate.

  I realized as I trudged headlong toward a stranger’s house at 8:30 in the morning that I was almost overcome with a desire to have a look at the portrait. The feeling had come on gradually, a slow dawning, but the light was hard and clear now. I was about to see the painting that had changed my life.

  Andrews followed behind reluctantly as I stumbled through the gate and up the path.

  Before I was halfway to the door, I heard the dogs.

  Dogs.

  I turned.

  “They have dogs.” I glared at Andrews.

  “Serves you right,” he said as he nudged past me on the path.

  He knew my fear of the animals. He’d seen it in action. All canines belonged to Satan; nothing could have been clearer to me.

  Andrews had achieved the front steps and tapped the doorbell before I could tell him I’d changed my mind about the entire matter.

  The door flew open and a hundred dogs appeared, teeth gleaming in the early-morning light.

  “Dr. Devilin!” The woman offered one hand and held the hounds at bay with the other. “I’m Diana.”

  “I’m Dr. Andrews,” he corrected, taking her hand. “The wee timorous cowering beastie behind me would be Dr. Devilin.”

  “That’s Robert Burns,” Diana announced proudly. “‘To a Mouse’—what you said.”

  “Absolutely correct!” Andrews beamed. “Very impressive for this time of morning.”

  “We play a lot of Cranium,” Diana explained. “Come on in.”

  “Come on in, Dr. Devilin,” Andrews called, mocking me.

  “Yes.” I didn’t move. “Absolutely.”

  “He’s afraid of dogs,” Andrews confided to Diana.

  “Oh. God. Right. Kristin!”

  There was a commotion from within, and short moments later, the dogs had vanished.

  “It’s safe now.” Andrews indicated the way.

  Diana appeared in the doorway again.

  “Well, then.” She held out her hand.

  I moved as quickly as I could to take it.

  “You can’t possibly imagine,” I began, squeezing her hand a bit too hard, “how much your kindness means to me in this regard.”

  “Please.” She dismissed the entire notion of our boorishness. “This is kind of exciting, knowing something more about the painting. Kristin bought it, really. Kristin!”

  “They’re put up,” a voice called from another room. “The dogs are all in the basement.”

  “No. Come here and meet Dr. Devilin.” Diana pulled me into her house.

  Andrews followed, all smiles—mostly at my expense.

  Kristin came into the living room as I was getting my bearings.

  Diana’s chestnut hair fell over one eye, a dark Veronica Lake. Kristen’s short blond crop was a perfect contrast. They were both dressed for work.

  The living room was a House & Garden display: perfectly filled spaces, fresh-cut flowers, original art, and a display case to the left of the door filled with, quite possibly, the most extensive collection of antique corkscrews on the planet.

  Kristin saw that I was staring at them.

  “I collect.” She smiled.

  “I see that.” I looked around the room. “This is all quite remarkable.”

  “The portrait is out here in the garden room.” Diana moved immediately to the room beyond the one we were in.

  “I’m going to be late for work,” Kristin said, delighted.

  “I’m Fever Devilin.” I offered her my hand. “I really can’t tell you—”

  “Hey.” She took my hand, still smiling. “I really want to hear the story. I’m happy to be late to work.”

  “Winton,” Andrews said, waving at Kristin.

  We were all moving toward the garden room.

  It had been a porch at one time, but it was closed in on three sides with windows and sat under the heavy shade of a flowering almond tree. The windows on the side of the room that faced the house next door were simple stained glass. The others, facing the street, were antique X-patterned affairs, giving the effect of a place from another time. There was a delightful array of plants in the room, including a huge Victorian-era palm in one corner.

  But the focus of the room was the painting on the only solid wall. Under its own light, the face, pale and fragile, glowed with supernatural aura. The skin was poreless and perfect, the eyes brimming with the overwhelming melancholy of unattainable desire. But the desire was written onto the expression as clearly as if the face had been outlined with the word passion written a thousand times in the dark background of the painting.

  She was no Mona Lisa, no mystery on her lips. Her secret—a bursting cry she had hoped to hide in the chambers of her heart—was made clear with every brushstroke. Fully clothed in a neck-high aubergine dress, she was naked—and ashamed to be discovered in such a state. Misery had swallowed her, and she was lost.

  “How could anyone think this picture wasn’t worth a million dollars?” Andrews whispered, obviously
seeing what I saw.

  “I know,” Diana whispered back. “I got it for a steal.

  “And this belonged to your father?” she asked me.

  “Not exactly.” I wanted to sit down.

  Lady Barnsley would not stop staring at me. I could feel the sting of her sorrow, the wretchedness of her regret. I understood her curse. It had nothing to do with evil events or catastrophic fates. It was much worse than that. She had bequeathed us all her pain: always wanting—seeing joy and contentment just barely out of reach—and never attaining.

  I knew that emptiness all too well.

  “Belonged to his great-grandfather, actually.” Andrews, too, was still staring at the painting, though obviously less affected than I.

  “Conner Devilin,” I began, only a little in a daze, “was born in Wales.”

  I gave Diana and Kristin the shorter, more poetic version of the story as best I could, occasionally helped by Andrews: murder in Ireland, mayhem in Wales, a family curse, the education of Fever Devilin. We omitted any reference to Shultz. A murder in the past is a fascinating story; an ongoing homicide investigation was an entirely different matter.

  “Unbelievable.” Kristin stared at the painting. “All because of her.”

  That conclusion had not gelled in my mind exactly, but I considered that Kristin’s observation was at least partly correct. Eloise Barnsley was indeed in some way responsible for even the events of the preceding days.

  If that’s not a curse, what is? I thought.

  Diana shuddered. “I need more espresso.”

  Andrews and I both turned to her instantly.

  She read our faces. “Can I offer you some?”

  “We couldn’t.” Andrews had pitched his voice perfectly. It said, Ask me again and I’ll take five, please.

  Alas, at that exact moment, the hellhounds, having burst their confinement, marauded the room.

  I was surrounded by, perhaps, seventy animals, by my now-conservative estimation.

  “Why do you have so many dogs?” I failed to keep the terror from shining through every word.

  “Five’s not that many.” Andrews had knelt and was clutching one, a Dalmatian-looking puppy, the most energetic of the lot.