The silvery stain on the living-room floor surfaced in Lance’s mind. He could see the speckles radiating out around the main mass—the splatters. Lance felt like he might be sick. All at once he felt too hot, his light clothes clinging to him, suffocating him. He almost told John he needed to use the bathroom when the caretaker continued.
“Annette saw the whole thing. She shut right down, never spoke again as far as I heard. Couldn’t do much for herself after that. Your father came back for the funeral but didn’t stay. Annette ended up at the retirement home just south of town, needed care and medication, I believe. They buried Erwin at the place there, just like he wanted. Said so in his will, as much as I gathered. His grave is off on the north side of the property, just a little trail leading into the woods. You can see the lake from there. Not a bad place to rest.”
Lance sat absorbing everything that had flooded into his life in the past two hours. It became a mountainous pile of intermingling information. As soon as he began to climb, trying to unthread a single strain of reckoning from it, he would fall back to the bottom. As he fumbled within his mind, another aspect began to take flight in the midst of all the confusion. Something whispered to him that everything that had happened since he had moved into the house now had an explanation. He was meant to come here. Something had pulled him to the house and had shown him things. The locked door, the opalescent stain, the night visitations, Andy’s trance, and now the revelation that the estate had been in his family before. He had finally come home. No matter what, you always come home.
Lance’s eyes fluttered and he felt John’s hand on his forearm.
“Thought I lost you there for a minute.”
Lance tried to smile and drank the last of his whiskey. “Just a lot to comprehend.”
“I can’t even imagine, son. I know it’s a shock to you, and that’s why I had such a hard time coming out with it. That, and the guilt I felt every time I looked at you.”
Lance sighed and bowed his head. “It’s not your fault, and thank you for telling me. It wasn’t easy on you, either. When did this happen?”
“Nineteen-eighty,” John replied.
Lance closed his eyes, the number already having formed itself in his mind. The year he had been born. Of course.
“And what happened to this Aaron, the murderer?”
John rubbed his brow. “The police caught him. In fact, he sat right down on the sofa after he killed Erwin, like he was spent. They put him in prison but never got a reason out of him, wouldn’t talk to anyone. He died a few years back down in Illinois—that’s where they shipped him after the trial.”
Lance exhaled. Another dead end. He had been hoping that the man could’ve possibly answered some more questions that would inevitably pop up when all this sunk in. “So is my grandmother buried next to my grandfather?” Lance asked.
John stared out of the darkened window in the kitchen before swallowing and gazing at Lance. His eyes looked strange, and it had nothing to do with the broken vessels surrounding the pupils. Lance could see a wavering there, like a candle held before a breeze.
“She’s still alive.”
Chapter 9
“A man’s conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn’t do—but it does not keep him from doing it.”
—Frank Howard Clark
Riverside Serenity Home sat several miles to the south of Stony Bay and was tucked off the road so that all one could see when passing was a corner of the main building and several cars on the edge of the parking lot. Lance vaguely recalled seeing it on his drives to and from the house during the buying process and the move. Several acres of manicured lawns rolled against one another, dotted here and there with strategically placed hardwoods. The building itself hid behind multilayered rows of towering pines that swayed in the early-morning wind.