House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance)

by McSparren, Carolyn

  “You said maybe baseboards. Should we try to loosen them? Or tap the backs of the cupboards?”

  “Guess we’ll have to. You don’t have to stick around if you’ve got stuff to do and if you’ll give me leave to do things on my own. I may have to be destructive.”

  “I’ll stay,” Paul said. As if he could have been driven away by a tank. “Shall I go get us a couple of crowbars?”

  “In a minute. Buddy says this place will probably have to come down, but I’d rather not start destroying it right now if we can help it.” Ann folded her arms across her chest and frowned at the room. “I know where people hide stuff. I’ve done this for years. I ought to be able to figure it out.”

  She hopped up on one of the counters that was free of painting gear. He leaned against the wall beside the door and simply watched her.

  He enjoyed watching her under any circumstances. This, however, was different. It was like watching a football coach plan a touchdown drive, or a pilot plot cross-winds so that he didn’t land in the sea, instead of on the deck of his carrier. Paul knew better than to break her concentration.

  She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and began to swing her legs.

  Suddenly she straightened and opened her eyes. “Oh, my.”

  “What?”

  “Look, I may be wrong. He would have wanted easy access, right? He needed to stash stuff where he could take it out again. He was probably too drunk half the time to unscrew baseboards or build hidey-holes in the backs of his cupboards. Even his sketch pads are fairly large and unwieldy.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “I’ve a good mind to tell you to go outside while I look so I can say ‘ta-da’ like a magician if I’m right and not get your hopes up if I’m wrong.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Okay.” She hopped off the counter. “Hand me that palette knife, will you?”

  He did.

  She moved to the space heater, raised her hand and whacked the stove pipe. Instead of the metallic ring that should have come from the pipe, Paul heard only a thunk.

  Ann turned around and bowed. “Ta-da. There is something in there. It may be rotten, it may have disintegrated, it may be the carcass of a possum long deceased, but something is definitely there.” She began to scrape the rust around the end cap with her palette knife. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  He moved her out of the way, wrapped his handkerchief around the metal cap, put both hands around it and twisted. He felt a tiny movement and heard an even tinier metallic squeal.

  “Come on,” Ann said. She sounded excited.

  He planted his feet and twisted harder, ignoring the pain in his shoulder. He felt the cap give a centimeter or two, then without warning, it simply twisted loose. He wasn’t expecting it and nearly fell over the space heater. She grabbed his arm.

  Nothing had fallen out except a shower of soot. His lungs deflated.

  The stove pipe was broader than the diameter of a hand—six or seven inches—and ran straight up the wall for a good four feet before it made a right-angle turn to cut through the wall.

  Ann gave the pipe a couple of hard whacks with the palette knife. “Get rid of any varmints,” she said. Then she stuck her gloved hand up the pipe. “Damn!”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, there’s something. I can’t quite reach it.”

  “My arm’s longer than yours. Let me try.”

  She stepped aside.

  This time he managed to grasp the edge of whatever it was. At first he thought he wouldn’t be able to budge it, but it began to slide and suddenly fell to the floor at his feet.

  It was some sort of plastic mailing tube nearly as big as the pipe and almost as long. It was filthy and covered with cobwebs, but as far as he could see, it had escaped the teeth of rats and mice.

  Ann picked it up and took it to the counter under the skylight. A plastic cap had been plugged into the end of it. She grasped it with her fingernails, pulled it out and upended the tube. The tiniest edge of white paper showed. She grasped it carefully and began to pull. “I can feel sketch paper and what feels like watercolor paper. Maybe there are some canvases rolled up inside,” she said. “It seems perfectly preserved. Hand me a couple of those cans of turpentine. I need something heavy to set on the edges while we unroll it.”

  Paul leaned over her and held down one side as Ann gently rolled the paper out. The sheets inside were of differing textures and sizes. The one on the top was a charcoal drawing of a street scene in the rain. He recognized the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe. A standard subject for an art student in Paris.

  “Lovely,” breathed Ann. “Leave it flat. We shouldn’t roll it back up again. Don’t want to break any more fibers if we can help it.”

  Paul gently moved the single sheet of paper to one of the countertops and used another pair of cans to hold down the edges.

  “Oh, look at this one!”

  Paul peered over her shoulder. It was a pastel portrait of a boy about two years old. The blue eyes were mischievous, and a shock of unruly blond hair fell across the forehead. Paul had seen that shock of hair. The blue eyes were still mischievous, although there were fine lines around them. Trey Delaney. Couldn’t be anyone else.

  “It’s charming. Why would he hide this?” Ann asked.

  “No idea. It’s really good.” He thought for a moment. “Do you think your aunt Karen might want it?”

  “You know she would! I don’t think she has any of Uncle David’s work.” She grasped his arm. “Would you give it to her?”

  “Of course. But I’d like to present it in person.”

  “Sure. When?”

  “As soon as possible, don’t you think? Where does she live?”

  “In town. She remarried not long after Uncle David was killed. Trey has a half brother and half sister. They’re much younger. I don’t think they communicate much—at least I didn’t see them at the Fourth of July barbecue. Any mother would love to have a picture like this. He’s captured that catch-me-if-you-can look Trey still has.”

  “Would you call her for me? Maybe come along to introduce me?”

  “Perfect. I’m dying to see her face when you give her this.” She sounded excited. “How about I find out if she’s free tomorrow afternoon? Assuming you are.”

  “Where else would I be? It’s too early to start crop dusting. Yeah. Tomorrow afternoon would be fine.” He kept his tone even although his heart was in his mouth at the prospect of interviewing the woman who’d taken his mother’s husband from her. He laid the pastel carefully on top of the Paris scene and moved the cans to keep it flat.

  “Whew!” Ann said from behind him.

  He turned back and his breath caught.

  The girl his father had sketched looked back over her shoulder, laughing. Her long dark hair blew in the wind. For a moment he didn’t recognize this laughing innocent, so full of life, so joyous. In the only photo he had of her, she looked as though she’d been through a war—tired, much too thin, older than her years, unsmiling, and that wonderful hair dragged back into a tight chignon at the back of her neck.

  “She’s lovely,” Ann said. “I wonder who she was.”

  He nearly said, My mother. He stopped himself just in time.

  “Let’s see if he did any more like that.”

  As each sheet peeled away, they saw pose after pose of the same girl, joyful, in the rain, in the sun, laughing up at the snow, eating an ice-cream cone, licking the stuff off her nose. Some were fast charcoal sketches, but many were watercolors. In all of them only the figure of the girl was finished.

  “He put the landscape on top so that if anybody found them, they might not look any further,” Ann said. “Poor guy. I don’t know who she was, but he was obviously nuts about her.”

  Maybe in the first flush of their relationship he had loved her. That made his betrayal even more hateful. How could he have drawn her like this with something akin to worship and yet ha
ve run away to hide in America only a few months after they’d married?

  They were down to the last four of five sheets. Paul didn’t think he could endure even one more sketch of that laughing girl. He had never heard her laugh. Not once in the six years she’d been with him.

  “Here we go,” Ann said as she used her hands to spread the picture. “I was wondering why they were all just head-and-shoulder portraits. These make Wyeth’s Helga portraits look chaste.”

  The watercolor took his breath away. The girl was no longer a girl. She was a woman, beautiful, passionate, sated with love, naked on her lover’s bed, open, vulnerable. Her hair lay tossed against the pillows, her lips were swollen, her eyes drowsy.

  “Roll it up,” Paul said. He turned away quickly.

  “I never pictured you as a prude,” Ann said. “This is lovely.”

  “It’s intrusive.”

  “It certainly is. There was nobody else in that room except the woman and the painter. Obviously she was Uncle David’s mistress.”

  Paul wanted to scream, She was his wife! Instead, he gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut.

  “Okay,” Ann said. “I’ve rolled it back up. Be careful. It’s beautiful and possibly valuable.”

  He turned away after a single glance at the next picture. How could his father have seen this woman’s love for him so clearly, put it down on paper so perfectly, and then left her? His love for her was in every brushstroke. How could he have deceived her so viciously? Destroyed her? Because that was what he’d done. The woman in these pictures had truly died in spirit long before her son had been born, when she realized she’d been abandoned. She might have breathed afterward, but there was no real life in her.

  Ann unrolled the last watercolor. He heard her breath catch. “Okay, this one you can look at.”

  He glanced at it, then moved closer. Her head drooped forward. Her long hair curtained and concealed most of her face. The picture spoke of sorrow and loss.

  He caught his breath. Could his father have drawn this from memory? Could he have sketched it just before he left her in Paris to come home?

  Or did he sketch her from life just before he killed her?

  PAUL SPENT the afternoon flying his Cessna. He hadn’t done much flying since he’d flown his plane down, and he needed to clear his head. He’d wanted to find his father, learn what made the man tick. Now Paul had to accept the evidence of his own eyes, even if it didn’t jibe with what he wanted to believe. Maybe a couple of hours in the clouds would help him focus.

  He definitely needed to avoid becoming too involved with Ann. Not only for his sake, but for hers. At the end of this quest, he, too, would have to walk away as his father had done. He must not leave a brokenhearted woman behind.

  Not that avoiding a relationship with Ann would be easy. The more he knew her, the more comfortable he became with her, the more he wondered whether, if there was a woman in the world for him. Ann was that woman.

  The question was, should he give up his desire to punish his father and find his mother’s grave to pursue Ann on the off chance they could be happy together?

  No. This mission had been the driving force in his life for too long. In school, in the academy, afterward in the air he’d tried to let it go. Sometimes he wouldn’t think about his mother’s death for weeks at a time, then something would trigger his anger. He’d see Tante Helaine’s face begging him to avenge his mother’s death, to give her a decent burial in consecrated ground.

  His anger had been less than useless until he’d seen the evidence Tante Helaine had kept hidden all those years, but now, he had a real goal in life for the first time. Not revenge, but justice.

  Justice? For whom? His mother? She was beyond caring. His family? Tante Helaine was also beyond caring. Giselle wasn’t interested in revenge. And as for Trey, Paul didn’t truly believe the sins of the father should be taken out on the sons.

  But wasn’t that what had happened to him all his life? His father’s sins had shaped him, walled him off from any real intimacy.

  He wanted the whole affair over. Maybe then he’d be able to find some peace.

  Without Ann? Without Rossiter? Without these people who were, whether they knew it or not, his family?

  The only alternative was to drop the whole thing now, sell the house and find himself a desert island somewhere.

  Not good enough.

  He’d bull his way through and hope to God there would be some forgiveness for him in the Rossiter hearts. In Ann’s heart. But he didn’t think there would be.

  When he got back to the house, the workmen were packing up for the day. Buddy met him in the front hall. He was wearing his police uniform. “I’m about to go on patrol. all the chimneys are in good shape, apparently,” Buddy said cheerfully. “They need cleaning, of course, but the tuck pointing’s fine. I’ve got the plans for your new kitchen and some sample cabinets and countertops. They’re in the kitchen. Look them over tonight, why don’t you. Then tomorrow we can make any changes and start tearing out the wall between the kitchen and the butler’s pantry.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And I’ve got Jim Bob, the landscaper, coming at eight in the morning. He’s going to look over the garden and design a plan. Time to start clearing and planting.”

  “Fine.”

  “Wiring’s just about done. Heating and air-conditioning should be installed by the end of the week.”

  “Telephone lines?”

  “That’s going to take some time,” Buddy said apologetically. “Have to work by their schedule, and sometimes they’re slow as molasses in January.”

  “What about the work on the house itself?”

  “Termite inspection was this afternoon while you were gone. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought. Probably take us a couple of weeks to get all the bad wood replaced.”

  “Plumbing?”

  “You did say you wanted to keep the bathrooms as close to the period as you could, right?”

  Paul nodded.

  “That means replacing the broken tile, one toilet and matching a couple of pedestal sinks. When we open the wall we can create a dressing room, as well as a closet for the master bedroom.”

  “Frankly I’m overwhelmed. In any case it sounds as though you have everything in hand. How’s Ann doing?”

  “I haven’t seen her all day. I think she’s been out there in that summer kitchen.”

  The pager on Buddy’s belt buzzed. He clicked it on and read the message. “Damn! Some idiot just drove off the road east of town. I’ve got to go.”

  Paul walked through the back hall, out the back door and onto the brick patio. He could see a faint shimmer of light coming through the dirty skylight and the grimy side window of the studio. He picked his way to the door and knocked on the frame. “Just me.”

  “Great,” Ann called.

  He walked in.

  The windows weren’t the only grimy thing in the studio. Ann’s jeans and shirt were covered in splotches of white paint. Her face and hair were smudged, too. The dirt from the room seemed to have gravitated to her. He thought he saw a cobweb hanging from the bedraggled scarf she’d used to tie back her hair.

  The face she turned to him, however, was radiant. So radiant he felt a jolt when he looked at her. She shared none of his ambivalence. She knew nothing of the quandary he was in. She was simply delighted with a good job.

  “It’s the other canvas—the big one,” Ann said. “It wasn’t completely set when it was painted over, so I had to be very careful not to smear the paint underneath. I think you ought to see it.”

  Paul wasn’t certain he wanted to, but couldn’t think of an excuse to avoid it. He moved slowly to Ann’s end of the room. What he really wanted was to bury his face in her hair, wrap his arms around her and walk away from this whole thing. He couldn’t do that, either.

  “Look at the picture,” Ann said quietly.

  He blew out a breath and walked around the canvas. He felt his stomach
lurch. It was a self-portrait that might have come out of Dorian Gray’s attic. The only photo he had of his father showed a young man full of energy and drive. And love.

  This was the portrait of a man in mortal agony.

  His mouth was open and slack. His left hand reached forward as though to save himself from falling. Paul didn’t recognize the woman he reached out to. She was turned away, unseeing of his gesture.

  “Who is she?” he asked.

  “That’s Aunt Karen, his wife. They seem cut off from one another. It’s so sad.”

  His father had barely begun to sketch in another figure behind him, reaching out to him. The figure was still without a face, but Paul felt certain it was to have been his mother. The man in the portrait was turned away from her and toward Karen. He didn’t know that she was there.

  Had his grief over the murder he’d committed driven him to paint this picture? The man in the painting was in pain, but he was also guilty. Paul looked away, unable to bear the suffering in the figure’s face. How could he hate a man who’d been in such pain?

  Easy. Paul’s father might have suffered, but he suffered in luxury surrounded by wealth, privilege, approbation.

  While Paul’s mother lay in an unmarked grave.

  While her sister died, still mourning her.

  While her son grew up with people who were not his parents.

  No. Even from beyond the grave, his father had to pay for what he had done.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT to bring these sketches and paintings to your house?” Ann asked. She was folding up the dingy sheets that had covered the pictures.

  “They’ve been safe in the studio all these years. They should be safe another couple of nights.”

  “From mice? I don’t think so. Not any longer.”

  He sighed. “All right. We’ll move them into the house.”

  “They’ll get filthy with all the work going on. How about I take them to my place? I’ve got closed cupboards in the workroom where they’ll be safe. I can flatten the sketches out properly and keep the paintings out of direct light. I don’t have mice. Dante and the local cat see to that.”