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Inside, Alex stopped in front of the painting. The random collection of red slashes dripped red paint down the face of the canvas.
“What?” Jax said.
Alex pulled out the piece of paper and handed it to her. “Look at the handwriting on the paper. Don’t read the cities, just look at the handwriting.”
She studied the list of cities for a moment, then looked up at him again. “What about it?”
“Look at the signature on this painting.”
Jax squinted at the muddy-white, precisely done R. C. Dillion.
“Dear spirits,” she whispered. “They’re the same hand.”
“R. C. Dillion,” Alex said as he finally looked over at her. “R.C.—Radell Cain. He’s been right under my nose the whole time. He’s been there watching me, playing with me.”
“Quite a stunning piece of work, isn’t it?” a woman in a tightly buttoned dark gray suit said as she came up to them, smiling, clasping her hands before herself.
“You can’t imagine,” Alex said.
“He’s an up-and-coming midwestern artist who is becoming a national figure at the forefront of a new reality in art.”
Alex recognized the words Mr. Martin, the gallery owner back home in Orden, had used to describe R. C. Dillion. He wondered if R.C. himself had given them that description.
“A new reality,” Alex repeated in a flat tone. “Yes, so I’ve heard. How much?”
She was a little taken aback that he so immediately demanded the price. She fingered the small white collar folded over the suit at her throat as she ran figures through her head.
“It’s well worth—”
“How much are you willing to sell it for? Cash. Right now.”
The woman smiled. “R. C. Dillion has recently arrived in town for a little rest and seclusion, he told me, and only just placed this with us. We’re honored he allowed us to offer one of his pieces. The price is twelve thousand dollars.”
Doing his best to contain his rage, Alex pulled one of the fat envelopes stuffed with cash from his pocket. He started counting out one-hundred-dollar bills as the woman stood in mute shock to see him paying cash on the spot.
It was the money from the settlement for the fire that had destroyed his grandfather’s house. Alex thought that Ben would have approved of what he was doing.
When he had handed over the whole twelve thousand dollars, he asked, “Do you have a black magic marker? The fat kind, with permanent ink?”
A little confused, she half turned and gestured toward an old oak desk sitting behind a furnace grate, back against the white plastered wall. “Why, yes, I believe I have one like you’re talking about. It’s the kind of marker we use to write signs for the window. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. May I borrow it, please?”
The woman went to the desk and searched through a couple of drawers until she found the marker. She returned, her heel strikes echoing off the warped, wooden floor, and handed it over.
Alex picked up the painting he now owned and in big letters across it wrote “R.C.—I will be at the gateway. Come and get me.” He signed it “Lord Rahl.”
He handed the painting to the stunned woman. “Please give this to good old R.C. when he returns, will you? My treat.”
The woman stood slack-jawed and speechless as Jax and Alex walked out.
55.
AFTER LOCKING THE GATE, Alex walked back to the truck. Beyond all the official signs on the other side of the formidable gate warning people not to enter the property, it felt as if he were standing in the narthex leading into a grand cathedral. In the uncanny quiet he looked around at the gloomy shadows, searching for any eyes that might be watching back.
The highway was too far away for them to hear any traffic, if there was any. The remote road had been virtually deserted on the way up from Westfield. Once past a few clusters of camps and some logging roads, they had seen only a few trucks.
Standing in the silent, ancient forest, Alex felt as if he were in another world.
He could see by what lay ahead that the road into the property was hardly what he was used to thinking of as a road. It looked like little more than a cut though primordial woods. Here and there trees crowded in tight right up to the edge of the road. Out ahead lay an open chamber cast in the gloom beneath the big pines. The thick overcast and mist only added to the sense of foreboding.
Immense trunks of monarch trees rose up through the underlying regions of the forest where only muted light penetrated. It was as if there were two worlds: the open, lush vegetation on the forest floor, and the world of the towering pines overhead. Nurseries
of small, waist-high spruce huddled in clusters here and there in the understory. Swaths of ferns nodded under falling drops of water combed from the mist by the pine needles above. The ferns creating feathery beds in places throughout the quiet forest floor lent an exotic, spicy aroma to the place.
Alex climbed back in the Jeep and shut the door. Jax carefully watched out the side windows for any signs of trouble.
“Can I ask you a question, Alex?”
He turned the key and the Jeep started without him holding his breath, for once. “Sure.”
“When you wrote on that painting, why did you sign it ‘Lord Rahl’?”
Alex shrugged as he eased the truck ahead into the woods. “I don’t know. I thought it might rattle Cain, maybe distract him. For some reason it just felt like the right thing to do. Why?”
“I just wondered, that’s all.”
“Does it bother you, because of what it meant in the past?”
“No. I don’t care so much about what went on in the past. I care about what’s happening now and what’s going to happen.”
“I know,” Alex said, thinking about all the helpless, innocent victims who had died that day because of Radell Cain and his people.
As they crawled along, moving ever deeper into the somber woods, Alex wondered what Jax was brooding about. Since it didn’t seem like she was going to say anything, he finally asked.
“What’s going through your head, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She stared out the side window for a time. She finally answered without looking at him.
“I was just weighing the worth of worlds.”
Alex glanced over at her. “What does that mean?”
“I came here for a reason. I came to fulfill prophecy, to save the innocent people in my world from the threat looming over them.”
Alex shrugged. “Go on.”
“I don’t know if I can do that anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“A lot of people died today, Alex. What do you think I mean?”
“You mean you’re thinking of quitting?”
