children.”
She didn’t seem moved by the information, but something flickered on Julian’s face and then she rose and walked over to her bed, casting a glance at the guard by the door. She reached beneath her mattress and withdrew a large sketchpad. Some black ink pens clattered to the floor.
“She’s not allowed to have that,” said the orderly quickly, moving toward Julian.
“It’s okay,” said Lydia, reaching her hands out to Julian. “I’ll take it. Please.”
Julian handed it to her. “Now get out,” she whispered venomously. “I have nothing left to say.”
Remembering their last encounter, Lydia didn’t have to be told twice.
“I wondered when you’d find your way back to me,” he said, with just a hint of smugness. The gallery was empty and Orlando DiMarco was alone in his office. He’d risen to greet her, but she’d made it to his office before he’d reached the gallery floor. Lydia noticed that Julian Ross’s last canvas still leaned against the wall where she and Jeffrey had viewed it on their first visit.
“I thought it might be gone by now,” she said.
“No, there will be an auction when it goes on sale.”
“It’s not on sale yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’m having trouble parting with it. Afraid it might be her last. Believe me, I’m not very popular right now. There are a lot of very wealthy people who are dying to get their hands on this canvas. But I just…” His voice trailed off.
Lydia regarded him carefully. He was expensively dressed in a beautifully cut black suit, with a white collarless shirt. His dark, thick hair hung loose around his shoulders. In his handsome face, tanned dark brown, with a strong nose and thick red lips, she saw the lines of grief. It was a tightness at the corners of his mouth, a slight upturn of the tips of his eyebrows. She wondered, of the three major motivators she had recently been contemplating, which was his.
Lydia held up the sketchpad Julian had given her. He looked at her blankly for a moment and then seemed to recognize what she held.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, moving toward her quickly.
“Julian Ross gave it to me.”
“Why would she do that?” he said, and he looked hurt.
“Did you bring this to her?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I smuggled it in the back of my jacket. They wouldn’t let her have any paper or pens. She was miserable. I brought her that and some charcoal pencils and some fine artists’ pens. I thought, at least then she could draw. You cannot separate an artist from her art. It’s the cruelest punishment, like cutting out someone’s tongue.”
“Because this is how she communicates.”
“Of course,” he said, as if she were some kind of philistine.
“I’m glad you see it that way. I was hoping you might have some insight into what she was trying to tell me in giving me these drawings.”
He looked at her and then down at the sketchpad as though it were an infant he believed Lydia might drop on its head.
“An artist’s paintings are like dreams… the symbols often mean something only to her,” he said with a shake of his head. “Especially Julian’s work. Even she wasn’t always sure where those images came from.”
Lydia looked at him for a second and their eyes locked. In his face, she saw the same love she had seen when she first visited his gallery. Unrequited, she thought now. Maybe they’d been lovers once, as Ford had claimed. But Julian had never loved Orlando the way he loved her. Lydia could see the longing and the pain and she appealed to that part of him.
“But you
He looked at her, the exposure seeming to shame him. He lowered his eyes.
“It’s true,” he said slowly. “But even in love we don’t always know each other. Sometimes even less so.”
She walked over to a long table that stood covered with neatly kept bottles of paint, a jar of brushes, some folded tarps, a stack of palettes. The surface of the table was covered with thousands of drops of dried paint, leaving behind a multicolored pattern that was at once bumpy and smooth as glass. She lay the sketchpad down and opened the cover.
Outside Payne Whitney, she’d flipped through the sketchpad and saw a chaotic collection of nightmares, intricate and insane, a window into Julian Ross’s twisted psyche. But she also had the powerful sense that somewhere inside what she saw were the messages of a sane woman trying to escape her own diseased mind. She wanted to talk to someone who’d known Julian before she’d lost her mind. And she could only think of one place to go.
“Tell me what you see here, Orlando,” she said. “Tell me what you know. For Julian.”
He walked to stand beside her and she could smell the light aroma of his expensive cologne. He moved his hand and ran light fingers over the sketch. His nails were perfectly manicured. The delicate bones and thick veins of his hand danced beneath skin the color of caramel.
A naked woman lay sprawled in a sea of blackness, her hands reaching out to the image of two children who huddled together beneath a giant set of jaws. The woman’s eyes and face showed a kind of resignation, a hopelessness.
“She’s been stripped bare, left in the darkness. She’s lost her children to some danger and she feels sure she’ll never see them again. She’s never painted them before, the twins. She’s never painted anything that gives her joy, anything that she’s loved.”
He flipped the page to the image of a house. Lydia recognized it as the house in Haunted, twisted and bleeding, with fire leaping from its windows. It had the personality of pain, seemed to reach out as the fire consumed it. Drawn into the flames, the twins clung to each other, surrounded by a vast, living darkness writhing with demons. In their eyes was the reflection of the burning house.
“Hmm,” said Orlando.
“What?”
“This house has come up again and again in her work,” he said. Lydia tried to call to mind others of Julian’s paintings with which she was familiar and couldn’t remember seeing it.
“Nothing that has ever been sold or published,” said Orlando, as if reading her expression. “I’ve asked her about it. She said, ‘The past is immortal. It might be forgotten, but it never dies. It lives in us. It can live in the structures we build, in the children we bear.’ The house symbolized that idea for her.”
On the next page was the image of a man hanging by the neck from the landing above the foyer at the house in Haunted. He was young and beautiful, seemed to float in the air, the noose hanging just loosely about his neck like a scarf. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. Lydia recognized him as James Ross, the young man she’d seen in the photograph, not the monster in the large portrait that stood behind them. On the ground looking up at him was the image of a demon with wild eyes and claws, head thrown back in a violent roar. The demon’s scaled hands reached out toward James, but he was just out of reach.
“Her twin,” said Lydia.
“You know about her twin?” asked Orlando.
Lydia nodded.
“Then you know that’s him, too,” he said, using his eyes to gesture to the portrait behind them.
“Yes,” she said, thinking back to the night she came across his photograph in Haunted. “I figured it out eventually.”
“She never accepted his death,” he said, his voice sounding far away, contemplative. “She always believed she’d been lied to.”
“Why would anyone lie about that?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked her.”
