Cecil paused, pursing her lips while her eyes found the painting over Evan’s shoulder.
“My mother and father lived in constant fear of them, for Allison only heightened the violence and mistreatments that went on there. In fact, it appeared that her cruelty rivaled Abel’s in many ways. My mother said that more than once a servant was randomly called to her room, strapped down, and then whipped within an inch of his or her life, as Abel and Allison took turns behind the leather strap.”
“God, why?” Evan said, feeling a lurch of revulsion in his stomach.
“Because they were able to, Mr. Tormer. I assume it made them feel powerful, as we crush a spider that crawls onto our pillow. They were merely full of hate and needed someone to unleash it on. But fate, it seems, is the great equalizer. Nothing in this world goes unnoticed, no deed, good or bad, remains unbalanced. Less than a year after coming to Kluge House, Allison became sick. It was soon clear she had the consumption.”
“Tuberculosis.”
“Yes. It was still a very prominent disease in those days, taking bloody bites out of the population whenever it could. No one knows how Allison caught it or why no one else became infected, but it sealed all three of their fates.”
Evan’s heart picked up speed. A picture formed in his mind, the room that he and Selena had stood in rearranging itself into a scene he could almost touch.
“He built the clock for her, didn’t he?” Evan asked, knowing he was right.
“Yes. My mother told me he was completely devastated by her prognosis, which deteriorated each week, so he started to work in the basement of the house. He spent hours upon hours down there, and the staff was forbidden to enter, to see what he slaved over day and night. When he wasn’t working, he was at Allison’s bedside, watching her, or contacting every doctor within six counties to come and see her condition. But there was nothing anyone could do.”
Cecil grimaced as though tasting something bitter.
“The day Allison fell into a coma, he had four men haul the clock up from the basement. One of them was my father. That clock ... No one wanted to touch it, for anyone could see it was an evil thing, unnatural and ugly even in the light of day. They placed it in Abel and Larissa’s bedroom, against the wall.”
“I saw where it stood, there was a shadow still there.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it is no shadow. That night the staff lay awake in their beds, with a storm roaring outside the windows and Abel’s voice coming from upstairs, chanting words that weren’t words. Near morning, the storm broke and a single scream came from the room—Larissa’s last sound on this earth. My father ran to the room, gripping a pistol, ready to do what needed to be done if Abel had finally gone too far, but when he burst inside, it was already too late. Larissa and Allison were dead, and Allison’s hair had gone completely white.”
The entire room seemed to shift a little, and Evan swallowed, trying to push away the image of the long, white hair in the dustpan.
“But what chilled his blood more than anything, my mother told me much later, was that clock, sitting there against the wall, all of its hands running backward.”
Evan blinked. “Backward?”
“Yes.”
“But what was he trying to accomplish with it?”
“Only he and God know that for sure, but one night when I was very young, I heard my father and mother speak of that morning in whispers they thought I couldn’t hear. My father said he was sure that Abel had tried to reverse Allison’s condition somehow with the clock.”
“Reverse? Like turn back time?” Evan said.
He noticed his voice sounded far away, like it came from another room in the house, and the words in Bob’s shaking hand kept surfacing from the deep tidewaters of his mind: IcangobackIcangobackIcangoback.
“Like I said, Mr. Tormer, he was a madman, and there is nothing more dangerous than a lunatic in love.”
“But how did they die? The article I read said there weren’t any marks on Larissa’s body and only a small pool of blood on the floor.”
“Of that, we know the same. There weren’t any weapons present, nor was there any trauma done to either of them. It seems Abel may have sliced himself on the center pendulum, for they found a small amount of blood on its edge and inside the clock.”
Evan let the information soak into him. The coffee had elevated his senses and sharpened his thoughts, but the harder he tried to assemble the facts into something cohesive, the more they swam into a blurry jumble like Bella’s painting in the room. As if reading his mind, Cecil spoke.
“She told me it was a field of flowers, daisies.” Cecil glanced at him. “The painting. She’d given it to Abel and Larissa before Allison arrived at the house, perhaps to put her and my father in better favor.”
“Did it?”
“No, but Abel knew talent when he saw it, and hung it in their room nonetheless.”
“It was glued to the wall—why did he glue it to the wall?”
Cecil cast her eyes downward, grimacing again. “It wasn’t, it was simply hung there. But the morning after my father found them, it was stuck in place like someone had welded it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Evan said, rubbing his forehead.
“Has any of this tale made sense, Mr. Tormer?”