“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.”
“Apparently she passed her gift on to you,” Evan said, motioning to the walls.
Cecil shook her head, slowly, deliberately. “I received but a fraction of what she possessed. If you could’ve seen her work, if you could’ve seen that painting in the room before—”
She stopped, her small face crinkling with lines.
“What happened there?”
His initial excitement at opening up a channel for answers wasn’t as strong. Something dulled it, clouded over it like the weather outside cloaked the sky.
“To understand what happened, you must first understand what Abel Kluge was.”
“What was he?”
“A madman, and a cruel one at that. If he hadn’t needed a maid that could also cook when my mother came calling, he would have turned her away, battered and bruised, no matter. He was not unfamiliar with women looking like that anyway, since he sometimes administered beatings to his wife as well as the rest of the staff.”
Evan waited, not knowing what to say, and decided not to say anything, in hopes that Cecil would keep talking.
“You see, Mr. Tormer, work was scarce in the early 1900s, and an employer that paid steadily was even more of a rarity. The staff at Kluge House got room and board, pay, and Abel’s knuckles if he became displeased with any of them.” Her eyes trailed to the window and grew distant. “I have no doubt my mother would have died there had she not met my father.”
“He worked there too, I’m assuming?”
Cecil turned back toward him and dipped her chin once. “Yes, he was the groundskeeper and the head butler. He and my mother fell in love shortly after she arrived there, and they began to make plans to leave the awful place as soon as they could afford to, but the money didn’t ever seem to add up and they were forced to stay.”
Cecil finished her coffee and scooted forward to the edge of her chair, pensive, staring into his eyes. Evan could see the old woman was working something out inside her head.
“I suppose that woman was the final piece of the bizarre puzzle assembled in that home,” Cecil said quietly.
“Allison Kaufman,” Evan said.
Cecil half smiled, without humor, and he decided it was a terrible thing on her tired features.
“I see you’ve been somewhat successful in your research, or deductions.”
“It was the only thing that fit,” Evan said. “Two people die and one disappears on the same day in a small town? Not likely.”
Cecil shook her head, like a pendulum. “Not likely at all. If Abel Kluge was a madman, Allison was his equal. She was orphaned young and grew up in a small church south of Mill River. No matter how strict the nuns were back then, they were no replacement for parents. She turned to mischief at an early age—stealing, drinking, even prostitution before she met Abel. From what I know, she showed up at the gates one day, long, brown hair most of the way down her back, eyes conniving. Something about her must have flipped a switch in him, for she was immediately given a room, and was his mistress within days.”
“Right in front of his wife?” Evan asked, taken aback.
Cecil gave him the half smile again. “Oh yes. By then, Larissa wasn’t much more than a husk of her former self. He’d hollowed her out with beatings and mistreatments for so long, I’m not sure she even realized what was going on.”
Cecil sat back in her chair, her spine still rigid, as if the telling of the history wouldn’t let her relax.
“But Allison, on the other hand, put up with nothing from him. In a matter of months, most of the staff answered to her as the lady of the house. My mother told me some nights the staff was unable to sleep, for the sounds of their carrying-on in the upstairs bedroom would filter down through the house, sounds of sex, pain, hissing, screaming. I shudder to imagine what really went on in those rooms.”