Forever Family (Forever #5) (11 page)

“I hate this room,” Tina said. “But there are creepier ones.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see them. I forced myself to look away from the mirror as the room narrowed and funneled us into a hall out the back. This led to a large open area with a staircase going upstairs. Everything in it was red. The floor, the walls, the doors leading in three directions. Even the metal rails circling up to a landing.

On a glossy red table in the center of the room sat a lacquered red vase with stiff, twisted sticks shooting out of it like bloodstained party decorations.

“Albert had some issues,” I said.

“You don’t even know the half of it,” Tina said. “We all knew the kinder, gentler version of him.”

I didn’t want to know anything else. I could still picture him the few times I had seen him, his wild gray curls, his friendly expression. And the adoration for Tina always on his face, as if she might have somehow been his lost daughter.

“The studio is this way. It has its own exterior door, but it’s been blocked for years, apparently. I’ll get it opened up again so that when we start accepting artist fellows they don’t have to tromp through the evil mansion.”

“Probably a good idea,” I said.

We took one of the hallways leading from the red room. This one had ordinary muted gold wallpaper and was a relief from the intensity of the first rooms. Framed paintings lined the walls, a completely random assortment of everything from still-life works of fruit to landscapes to classical portraits. A few abstract pieces with blocks of color were mixed in.

“This is his hall of contemporaries,” Tina said. “He bought a lot of art to support people he had met or gone to school with. Some were former students. He had a lot of friends in the early days, before the bad stuff happened.”

“And after?”

“He built this place and closed himself up. There are rooms for every mood, none of them happy.”

“Art wasn’t an escape for him, then?” We paused by a set of double doors at the end of the hall, and Tina sorted through the keys again.

“He tried to make it one, but he just couldn’t get the pain out of his soul,” she said. “The evil clowns came easily to him, so he just kept doing them, over and over, sort of like a child who might rock back and forth when distressed.”

I thought about my old habit of holding my breath to pass out when life got too hard. Maybe it was the same thing. The stuff we did to make it through.

Tina opened the door. The studio was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was a wing off the main house, and the top was all skylight. The far wall was also all windows.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah, a lot of light for someone who was obsessed with one dark subject. He could have painted so many amazing things.”

Several easels stood around, most empty. Cabinets and drawers covered one entire wall. Parts of the room were tidy with blank canvases and clean paint palettes. The rest was chaos, with drops piled up and brushes stuck to dried spatters of paint. Discarded canvases were stacked haphazardly, some of the stacks falling over.

“I started the process of picking up, but I might hire a service in the end,” Tina said. “Long way to go before we can make this a working space.”

“What happened to the assistant who found him?”

“She got spooked after she realized he wasn’t dead and she’d started a bad rumor. Nobody’s heard from her. She abandoned her Facebook pages.” Tina shrugged. “I had the locks rekeyed and the security changed.”

I walked around the room, dodging jars of oils and tin cans of turpentine. I paused by a table with a half-finished sculpture of a woman. “Was this Albert’s?”

“I don’t think so,” Tina said, coming up on it. “He really only did the clowns once he lived here. I’d guess it was the assistant’s or maybe some art student who was around. A few were still coming to work here occasionally.” She touched the base. “I don’t want to move anything that is unidentified, though, for the estate. Albert was big. Big enough that his last incomplete works are very valuable.”

She walked to a corner where a desk with a computer felt out of place, black and modern among all the easels and paints that could have come from almost any era.

I looked at the sculpture again. The woman wore a dress, and the bottom hem looked odd, like it wasn’t hanging down. Like maybe it was floating. I peered at her head. There was no hair yet, just an unformed block. “You think she’s underwater?” I asked Tina. I remembered my coat floating around me in the ocean from that terrible day I walked into the water.

Tina walked back over, holding an envelope. She bent to stare at the statue. “You might be right.” She kneeled down to get super close. “And the way this foot is kicked out. She could be swimming.”

She touched a bit of the statue, then jerked back as if she was burned. “I recognize the marks now from the one he did for me.” Her face was pink from excitement. She ran over to the desk and pulled out a magazine. She turned to an image inside, a picture of Albert when he was young, with a woman.

“Do you think this face looks like her?” Tina asked.

I held the page next to the unfinished sculpture. “Look at the nose,” I said. “I’d say it’s very likely.”

She pressed her hand against her throat. “This might have been what he was working on. What sent him over the edge.”

We stared at the woman a little longer. On the table next to it was another block of wrapped clay. “He was going to add to it,” I said. “There was more.”

Tina set down the magazine and laid her hand on the top of the block. “I bet he was going to try to do his daughter.” Her voice faded to a rasp. “He was trying to do something else. Break out of his rut. Face his demons.”

She took a step back and sat on a tall stool. “I knew when the Parkinson’s started getting to him, he felt this compulsion to finish the things he needed to do.” She reached out to touch the block of clay again. “But with the shaking he wasn’t able to do it the way he wanted. He didn’t think he ever would.”

Tina stood back up. “I’ll call the lawyer. Ask what to do with this. It’s significant.” She headed to the desk again, then stopped. She picked up an envelope from where it rested on an easel and handed it to me. “This is for you.”

I took it and watched her pick up a camera to snap pictures of the location of the sculpture. Then she carefully moved it to a cabinet on the wall where it was less likely to get bumped or damaged.

I turned the envelope over. On the outside was a printed label with the simple word “Corabelle.”

It was not sealed. I lifted the flap and pulled out a sheet of paper folded into thirds. Inside was a legal bit about the will. Then a small bit of paper that said, in shaky handwriting, “For the babies sure to come. Undo the hurt. Albert.”

I glanced up at Tina. She was watching me now, her face serious. She didn’t say anything but pointed at my hands to indicate, keep looking.

Behind the note was a check.

A check for twenty thousand dollars.

Chapter 13: Tina

I couldn’t stop looking at the unfinished sculpture.

I had moved it out of the studio to one of Albert’s private rooms a week ago, the day after Corabelle realized how important it was to the estate. It was now safely housed in a room I could hang out in without feeling squeamish. Albert’s study was steely and impersonal, from the stiff navy leather sofa to the frosty gray shelves filled with clear crystal.

But at least it didn’t look like a fun house or a murder scene.

The statue of the woman stood on an empty desk in front of a set of bay windows. The block of unopened clay still rested in its position at her feet. I circled it, trying to figure out where Albert began and, more importantly, where he stopped. What was the last thing he sculpted on his wife? What broke him?

I remembered with chagrin finding some sculpting tools on the floor of his studio during one of the visits before he died. I picked them up with no clue. So important. The location of them could have told me his state of mind when he stopped working. I had been foolish to put them away in their tray. No matter how much I racked my brain, I could not remember which ones they were.

The question pulsed inside me, night and day. What made Albert snap? What led such a talented man to attempt suicide in his studio in the middle of an important work?

I wanted to know the tiniest detail and hovered over the statue. Had it been the uplifted foot? Or the outstretched arm? Those were complete. Maybe her hair? It was still a block of clay, not yet formed into a swirling underwater mass.

Or perhaps as he prepared to finish the woman, his mind had turned to the wrapped block that would become his only daughter, just six years old. He would watch her die in his hands as he sculpted. He would create her image in a way he hadn’t seen, couldn’t have seen, in those last moments of her life.

It would be too much for anyone.

I turned my gaze away. I had to pull myself together. I knew I was off the rails, hurtling toward disaster. I’d taken a leave of absence from the hospital, claiming I needed to manage Albert’s estate. But really, I couldn’t focus on anything else. Albert’s puzzle felt like my puzzle. It was the only thing I wanted to think about.

I forced myself out of the room and into the hall, only to spin around and go back before I had walked even ten steps away.

The afternoon light pouring in showed the dust on everything other than the desk I had cleaned before placing the sculpture there. I could fix that, tidy the room. It would give me an excuse to stay.

The dust wipes were by the door. I could pick them up. Do the job.

But I sat on the cold sofa instead, my gaze riveted on the woman. Albert had never told me about the statue. We’d reviewed the contents of the studio, and he had told me the names of his assistant and a couple students who might have works in there, so I’d always assumed this sculpture was someone else’s. Only Corabelle had made the connection.

It was too late to ask him now. Last week, I tried again to locate the assistant, Carly something-or-other. After a tussle with the college campus, I had finally gotten a cell phone number. She clearly didn’t want to talk to me, though, as she never called back, and I had quit trying after the third call rolled straight to her voice mail.

I wasn’t mad at her. If I’d seen Albert on the floor in front of a blood-spattered canvas, I’d have probably freaked out too. I didn’t blame her for posting that he was dead when he wasn’t.

But maybe there was more to it. Maybe she’d stolen something or embezzled money. I’d probably uncover something later.

I didn’t care about that. I wanted information. I wanted to know more. But she wasn’t giving me the chance to ask.

My fingers ached and I realized I’d been clutching the sofa cushion with an iron grip. I let go.
Calm down, Tina
.

I left the room again, this time forcing myself back to the studio. I had cleaned up another section, although my heart wasn’t in the effort. I wanted to preserve the way it had been, how it had looked when Albert was last there. I took endless pictures, documenting and cataloging. I knew his will called for this space being offered to young artists. I knew I could run a program myself or I could pay someone. It was all specified in the estate documents.

But I wasn’t ready. This was Albert’s place. Where he worked. Where he lived and almost died.

I wanted it for myself.

I’d left my bag and my phone on a stool and felt a pang of guilt at the half-dozen text messages that had come through while I brooded in the study.

Corabelle. Jenny. Darion. My important people. Checking in. Worrying. I typed something merry sounding to Jenny, let Corabelle know I was working, and told Darion I’d be home before his shift was over.

Then I circled the room again, trailing my hand along the easels, straightening small things. This always calmed me.

I sat on a stool in front of a blank canvas. I tried to imagine what would go on it. My image of me and Peanut on the cliff was still incomplete, but I no longer felt the urge to work on it.

I wanted to spatter paint on the pristine white, red and black and silver. I realized those were the colors a long-ago ex-boyfriend had always worked in and felt horror. He was the father of Peanut, who’d ditched me after the baby died. I hated that my mind was turning to that.

Each loss was every loss.

I fed people that line back in the days when I did the suicide-talk circuit. Every time something bad happened, you revisited all your bad things. This was the cycle that led you down a path to despair. Your view of life became one of those optical illusions where you could see two faces or a vase, but now you could see only the one that scared you more. It wouldn’t even occur to you to try to refocus, to see anything else.

I turned away from the blank canvas. I should get out of here, carry on, hire someone to do this work. It was dragging me down, killing me.

But instead, I picked up the outrageous key ring to try again to match up locks with keys. An entire section of cabinets was still inaccessible, and it took patience and perseverance to try each key in each lock and document which was which.

This last section was too high to reach without help. I dragged a step stool over. I pushed aside the keys that had been identified and started with the ones that hadn’t opened anything yet. Sixteen in all, and after several painstaking minutes, none of them fit the large wide cabinet I was going for.

Maybe one of the previous keys also opened this one. I stepped down and made circles with my shoulders, trying to work out the kinks from my position. Time was passing. I could see the light outside the window starting to fade. Just this one cabinet, and then I would go.

I sorted keys and headed up again. Probably the dang thing was empty or had nothing but dried-out oil paints. But I’d gotten this far.

The first key wouldn’t go in. The second one slid in but wouldn’t turn. I jiggled it carefully to be sure. Nope.

The third key was way too large. The fourth too small.

The fifth slid in again.

I dropped my arms, letting blood flow back into my hands. Still at least six of these cabinets to unlock some other day. I glanced around. Albert sure had a lot of storage in here.