The Riverhouse (42 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Earl’s funeral turned out to be a crowded and boisterous affair.

The funeral home was packed with people of all ages, all chattering loudly, as if it was a family reunion. Children chased each other through the throng of legs, followed by the stern calls of their mothers. Shane had been to funerals like it before. Earl had been very old. Even though he’d been rudely pushed into the afterlife, no one doubted that the Reaper had had Earl’s name on his short list anyway.

Shane moved through the crowd, brushing past a dozen conversations, and stopped in front of the closed wooden lid of Earl’s casket. He touched it lightly, and said in a low voice, “Sorry, Earl. I didn’t know what I was stirring up. I should’ve taken your advice after all. I should’ve stopped asking questions when I could.”

“How did you know Mr. Kirchenbauer?” a voice asked. Shane turned to see a man in a prim black suit standing nearby, the look on his face a carefully tailored mask of polite sympathy—obviously the director of the funeral home.

“He was a friend,” Shane replied, taking his hand off the casket lid. “I hadn’t known him for very long. But he made an… impression on me.”

The director nodded, smiling meaningfully. Shane glanced away, unable to look at the man’s practiced sincerity any longer. Brian was standing near the doorway, looking red-faced and uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit jacket and tie. Shane made his way toward him.

“Thanks for coming, Mr. Bellamy,” Brian said somberly. “Especially since it was you who… you know.”

Shane nodded. “I know. I’m sorry it turned out this way. What a mess.”

“A goddamn mess,” Brian agreed in a low voice. “But it’s all over now. You know they took Mr. Stambaugh away? He’s in a psychiatric home up in New Haven now, doped all to hell and back. I’d guess that’s how they’ll keep him until he finally kicks the damn bucket. None too soon, if you ask me.”

Shane didn’t want to talk about it, but he felt drawn into the topic. “Will there be a murder trial or anything?”

Brian shrugged as if he didn’t care. “What’s the point? Everybody knows he did it. What are they gonna do? Give him life in prison?” He laughed darkly. “Or the death penalty? That’s a joke. It’d probably be a relief to the old coot. If it was me, you know what I’d do? I’d make him young again, just so he had a long, long life to live, knowing what he’d done.” He nodded to himself, looking askance at the closed casket. He cleared his throat and swiped once at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “That’s what I’d do,” he said again, and sighed.

Shane left shortly thereafter, taking off his tie as he climbed into his pickup. He didn’t go to the graveyard for the burial. He didn’t figure Earl would mind.

On the Monday before Halloween, Shane delivered the final painting in the Florida series to Greenfeld. Christiana took it in the white Sprinter van and Greenfeld called once she arrived at his office.

“I’ve already got the check in hand,” he told Shane. “You want me to send it back with your girlfriend here?”

Shane smiled. “Sure, thanks. You aren’t jealous are you, old boy?” If it had been anyone else, he’d never have been so bold as to mention it, but in Greenfeld’s case it was hard not to.

“Bite me,” Greenfeld replied amiably. “She’ll get tired of you as soon as that old Bohemian artist shtick wears off. Besides, I’ve got my cats and my afternoon stories.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“So are you ready for some more work? Or are you going to take a little lover’s vacay or something?”

“No lover’s vacay. I think I am going to take a short break, though.”

“You sure? I have some more studio work on the table, based on the success of your matte painting. Sony needs something for a kid’s movie. Sort of a martial arts fantasy thing, with dragons and anime princesses with eyes the size of softballs, that sort of thing. Straight to video, but it’s got some big name voice talent in it, not that it matters to you. They need a whole series of background plates. You could do it in your sleep.”

“What’s the deadline?”

“End of November. No problem for a machine like you. What do you say?”

Shane considered it, looking out the kitchen window at the dim afternoon light. The sky was low and dark, churning slowly. “I think I’m going to pass this time, Morrie. The machine needs a breather.”

Greenfeld was a sharp guy. He asked, “You got another project in the works, maybe?”

Shane smiled again. “Yeah, I guess I do. One more, just for me.”

“For you and maybe your artsy girlfriend?” Greenfeld said.

“You just can’t let that one go, can you?”

“Behold, your Morrie is a jealous Morrie,” Greenfeld said, sighing loudly into the phone. “I care a lot less about you taking her away from me than I do about
her
taking
you
away from me. Twisted, isn’t it? Come to think of it, that’s probably the biggest reason I’m still in the place I am. But what can I say? As the Chairman of the Board used to say, I gotta be me. Go ahead and finish up whatever you’ve got going. Good luck with it. But don’t expect me to stop calling, eh?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Shane said, still smiling. It was hard not to like Greenfeld, in spite of his rough edges.

A moment later, Shane hung up the cordless and stuck it in the charger in the library. He’d been planning on going out for a short bike ride, but the darkening sky made him think otherwise. He peered out the front window. Wind switched and flicked over the yard, whipping the grass and swirling dust eddies on the gravel drive. The weather guys on KMOX had been predicting storms off and on all through the week, issuing flood warnings for most of Jefferson and St. Louis counties, but Shane took it all with a grain of salt. He’d lived in the flood valley long enough now to know that the news people tended to cry flood at the slightest warning, apparently believing it was better to err on the side of alarmism than to be caught with their pants down by a sudden deluge.

Shane opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. Wind sucked at the door as he closed it, making it slam behind him. It was hot outside, but gray and dark, the air humid and thick with electricity. Shane guessed that today, at least, the weather guys had it right on. Even if it didn’t rain, the gusting wind would make for a challenging bike ride, carrying the trail grit and dead leaves in its arms, flinging it all into Shane’s face like a playground bully.

He walked around to the shed anyway, peering at the trees along the edge of the yard, eyeing the entrance to the footpath. He hadn’t been along the path for a few weeks. Not, in fact, since the day he and Christiana had kissed on the portico of the Riverhouse.

Once, before that, Shane had taken Christiana for a short walk along the path. They hadn’t gone the entire way, but Shane had told her where it ended up, about the angel statue and the stepping stones across the stream, about how it had once connected both properties. She hadn’t seemed particularly interested, and Shane had been secretly glad. They’d sat on the wrought iron bench for a while, with that careful, deliberate distance between them, watching the river where it peeked through the trees at the edge of the gully. She’d never mentioned it since.

The path could be seen now, dark, full of shadows, like a tunnel mouth in the corner of the yard.

Shane touched the doors of the shed but didn’t pull them open. It really wasn’t good bike-riding weather. Maybe he’d go for a walk along the path instead. It’d been awhile, after all. Maybe he should check to see if any weeds were growing up again, undoing all of his careful work. He started toward the path, dreamily, as if drawn to it by something outside himself, and then stopped.

He turned and looked back over his shoulder. The little window above the shed was mostly obscured by the swaying leaves of the magnolia tree. Shane squinted, watching. Sure enough, he could see it. The candle flame was tiny but bright, unmoving despite the switching wind. Beyond it was seamless dark.
Go on,
the flame seemed to say.
Walk the path. Keep it clear. Go all the way to the end and visit the Riverhouse. It’s lonely. It misses you. It
loves
you.

Shane squinted up at the candle. Like the flame, its voice was tiny but bright, pervasive. Its suggestion was very hard to ignore. Hard, but not
impossible
. Shane turned around and walked back toward the front of the cottage. The footpath could wait, and so could the Riverhouse. He’d decided to go upstairs instead.

He’d decided to paint.

The painting was going to be called the Sleepwalker, but that was about the only thing Shane knew for sure about it.

He didn’t know what the subject matter would be, or what style it might be in. Both the Riverhouse painting and the Marlena portrait had been done in a sort of weird fusion, mixing photo-realism with a sort of tortured abstract-cubism that looked like something out of Picasso’s nightmares. He assumed this final painting would be of the same style, and sure enough, as he held the brush over the canvas, he could feel that strange compulsion coming over him again, that weird mix of calculating angles and hot scribbles, all welding together, forming a bizarre stylistic alloy that seemed to both complement and contradict itself.

The brush strokes nearly vibrated as they began to come, slowly this time, but confidently. This time, the painting had nothing to do with the muse. She wasn’t directing the brush strokes, or dictating the final image on the canvas. She had shown Shane the way to this particular well of creativity, and he’d remembered it. Now, just like he had with the newsprint sketch pad and the crayons, he was tapping into the well all by himself, independent of her.

The crayons had been a shortcut, of course, giving him a greater degree of control over the portal, but the images he had created with them had been imperfect; cloudy and incomplete, rushed to the point of childishness, skipping over the story like flat stones on the river.

The Sleepwalker, however, was not going to be rushed. It was going to go deep into the story, just as Shane had originally suspected; maybe deeper than he was truthfully comfortable with, and certainly deeper than Marlena wished. The knowledge of that—of her stern, ghostly disapproval, perhaps even her fury—gave him a sort of dizzying dread every time he settled the brush to the canvas.

The image began to form, sketchy but certain, and yet Shane could make very little sense of it. He painted in drab browns, blacks and mossy greens—storm colors, he thought, probably influenced by the churning sky outside the studio window. Indian summer had descended with typical Missouri suddenness, turning the autumn air hot and still, making the remaining leaves hang from the trees like washcloths dried out on the kitchen faucet. Shane had opened the window over the stairs, but the thin curtains hung dead, with barely a breath of breeze to push them. Shane’s forehead was beaded with sweat as he painted.

He could feel the story coiling in his chest, pushing through his arm, straining at the feeble medium of the brush, suddenly anxious to get out onto the canvas.

He remembered when he’d first begun the Sleepwalker, weeks earlier. It had been a slow, frustrating process. The image had been like a deer at the edge of the woods, timid and tensed, ready to flee at the slightest false move. He’d been forcing it then, trying to make it show him what he wanted to know. Now, however, he thought he finally had his answers, or at least enough to make sense of Marlena’s malevolent moodiness.

She was jealous. It was as simple as that. She’d thought Shane was hers, the replacement for the husband who had abandoned her and taken away everything that mattered to her. But then Christiana had come along, threatening to steal Shane away from her.

And worse, she had succeeded. Shane was indeed in love with Christiana. He hadn’t said those words to her yet—nor had she to him—and yet they were there, waiting just offstage, listening for just the right cue. That cue would come, and the tension of waiting for it was both frightening and delicious.

Shane felt it. He thought Christiana probably felt it, too. But most importantly, he thought Marlena felt it as well. It was probably like a knife in her dead heart, waiting to be twisted. That was her secret misery, the source of her rage and pain, the spearhead of her hatred for Christiana. It was Madeleine and Wilhelm all over again. Some stories, Shane thought as he painted, were cyclical; some histories just couldn’t help repeating themselves.

Now that he knew the source of Marlena’s torment, he approached the Sleepwalker with a calm patience, ready to let it tell its own story, in its own time. And somehow, the painting responded to that, turning from a trickle into a pipeline, pushing the story through him, out onto the canvas, with sudden, almost startling urgency.

Even still, the image that was forming, sketchy and frantic, didn’t make any sense. The first line, the up-stroke with the gentle, feminine curves, had indeed become a sort of figure, but then the story had leapt away from that shape, filling in the sides of the wide canvas.

A large, blocky shape had constructed on the right side, complicated and busy, making Shane think of the uneven stack of bricks from his crayon drawing vision. This shape was flatter, though, and softer, somehow. A piece of upholstered furniture? Or maybe a bed? He tried to focus on the shape, to force his hand to produce the necessary details, but the story refused, impatient, brushing off his questions and moving to the opposite side of the canvas, taking his hand with it.