“No.” She wondered if her grimace could travel through the phone to San Diego.
“Okay.” Kaine could imagine the detective’s exasperation. Having to reopen the case already ruled an accident, then finding enough evidence to suggest murder, and at the end of it all a widow whose claims of being followed were substantiated by zero leads. “Well, I’ll still be in touch with them. Maybe we can piece this whole thing together.”
“That—would be great.” Understatement of the year. “Thank you. For everything.” And she meant it. Detective Hanson had risen to heroine status in Kaine’s eyes. Validation. Someone who believed her.
“Thanks for your time, Miss Prescott. I’ll do what I can.”
Kaine ended the call and faced the dusty, moth-damaged painting. Grant said that Patti, the librarian, had found the portrait of Myrtle Foster, the original owner of the house, in the basement of the museum and insisted it be hung in the house. A few old photographs of Foster Hill House had shown them it originally hung in the hallway. Patti’s obsession with positioning it in an abandoned house had seemed odd to Grant, he’d said, but then she’d been transfixed by this place for years.
Kaine studied the portrait. The eyes of the woman came more alive the longer she stared. Was it possible that her expression mimicked the wasteland left behind in Kaine’s soul? That burned-up blackness shadowed by the knowledge that the worst of the battle was still to come? She shook her head free of the hypnotic hold of the woman who couldn’t have been much more than five or ten years her senior when it was painted. It was silly to believe, yet Kaine couldn’t help it. This woman, whoever she was, knew what encompassed that awful stillness that fooled its victim into thinking peace had arrived, only to be stabbed by the wickedness lurking in the shadows.
Kaine’s gaze traveled down the long hall toward the attic stairs and then in the other direction toward the stairwell that took its traveler downward into the daylight of the foyer.
Foster Hill House was already written in history as the place where two women had found mercy to be far from reach. One survived, one didn’t. Kaine reached up and wiped her hand across the woman’s face. It was like the soul of the house itself stared back, a soul imprisoned in these walls, hating the misery of it.
“Did this place bury you too?” And her unspoken question was even louder. Will I be next?
Chapter 23
Jvy
Ivy’s steps through the graveyard were muted by wet leaves and grass now exposed to the air with the final melt of snow. The hem of her skirt where it dragged along the earth was soiled, and she’d long since given up trying to keep it clean. The warm air made her glad she’d traded her coat for a shawl. Many of the gravestones around her were familiar. She saw the names, recalled many of their faces, and treasured their stories. If no one else remembered them, she would, as would her children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and anyone else who would read her journal in years to come. Like the Thorpe family Bible, labeled with the names of generations, her journal recorded the memories of those who could no longer speak. Eternity had embraced them, leaving behind the chasm they once filled.
Eternity. Ivy hated the word.
She paused in front of Gabriella’s grave, the ground mounded with dirt void of grass and life. A wooden cross marked it. No name. Just Unknown. But it was the two markers at the far corner of the yard that captured her attention. One, her mother’s. Esther Mathilda Englewood-Thorpe was a memory inspired only by what her father told her. The stories of a mother who’d given her life to bring Ivy into the world. It was the stone next to her mother’s that garnered Ivy’s affection.
It had been too long since she’d visited her brother, but he was never far from her thoughts. Ivy came here every year, always one week after he died. The day of the second darkest moment in her life.
Andrew Matthew Thorpe
B. August 4, 1879 – D. March 29, 1894
Always Remembered
Ivy unpinned her hat and set it on a wooden bench. She had used her own money to have the bench built and placed beside Andrew’s grave. Some days she simply needed to sit and be near him. She liked to talk with Andrew as she always had and hoped he heard her—because it didn’t seem that the Lord did. His ears had closed the day Andrew died.
She sank onto the bench beside her hat. A squirrel scampered a few yards away and cocked its head to study her. She stared back into the beady black eyes. What did the rodent see that Ivy couldn’t? At night, when everyone was asleep. Did it witness Gabriella’s death? Or was it as indifferent as God himself? The creature scurried away, chirruping a warning to other squirrels that there was an intruder in the cemetery.
Disenchanted by her thoughts, Ivy pulled her gloves from her hands and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and memorized the scent of the musty woods, wet with the aged earth and fresh with the new growth on the trees.
“Your father told me I could find you here.”
Ivy stiffened. She bit the inside of her bottom lip and fixed her eyes on Andrew’s name etched in the gray granite. Joel lowered himself onto the bench beside her, his hat in his hands. His shirt was open at the collar, void of a necktie, its white crispness fresh and starched.
“You’re late,” she breathed.
Joel’s head dipped, and he played with the brim of his black hat. He nodded without comment.
“One week and twelve years late,” Ivy recited. “For reasons unknown.”
“You never gave me an opportunity to explain.” Joel’s statement poked at Ivy.
“I know,” Ivy whispered, a lump forming in her throat. She hadn’t. She should have. She should have asked much sooner too, as soon as they’d had a moment to discuss more than just Gabriella and her missing child.
“Will you let me explain, Ivy?”
She refused to look at the man beside her who, in her eyes, was still so much the young man from years before.
“You made a promise, and you didn’t fulfill it.”
Joel nodded, his shoulders sagging with . . . regret? Hurt? Ivy couldn’t tell.
“I was as much affected by that day—that missed graveyard visit—as you, Ivy. There were circumstances I had no control over.”