“Really? I’d better not get in any trouble,” I quickly joked.
“Funny you should say that. God—he was a naughty little shit, growing up. I never imagined him as ‘the law,’ but I guess that just happened by accident.” She carried on walking up the hallway and I followed behind her. “So what do you do?” she asked me.
And, before I could make something up, I said it: “I’m a writer.”
“Really? Wow!” Ash spun around and looked at me with a smile.
I quickly played it down. “I should sayaspiringwriter. I’ve written a few articles, some blog stuff . . . not much else.” I shrugged.
“Still, that’s amazing. Well done!”
“Huh?” I looked at her, confused, taken aback. She just smiled and kept on walking. No one had ever just saidwell doneto me.What the hell was going on?I had known this woman less than a day and she was being nicer and more supportive to me than anyone in my life. And I was trying to use her for information . . . God, I was a bad person. Truly, I was horrendous. And there is no need for you to dislike me right now, because, trust me, I disliked myself enough.
We continued walking and I looked around. This house was configured in exactly the same way as the other one. “This place feels like two houses that were joined together by a passage,” I said.
“They were,” she said, over her shoulder. “The one you’re staying in was the original family home where my grandmother lived as a child, and this one was built a little later. I’m not really sure why, to be honest.”
“Are all of these paintings of the family?” I asked.
“Yes.” She stopped and pointed at one.
It was definitely the man from the letter, right down to the scar on his cheek. I shivered as I looked into his icy blue eyes. “Scary,” I said, without even realizing it.
“Apparently he was. A very, very hard and difficult man. We don’t really talk about him much, and some of his pictures were taken down because we didn’t want them up.”
“Why?” I asked.
She shrugged and suddenly looked embarrassed. “He was very . . .” She paused and swallowed hard—I could hear it. “He was, uh . . . very . . . racist,” she said quietly.
“Oh. OH!” I said, although this wasn’t news to me.
“His daughters were all scared of him; I think that’s why they all moved away. Except for my grandmother, Edith—she was the only one who stayed here. But I don’t think she stayed of her own free will.”
“Really?” The pennies began dropping. I could almost hear them in my head, the sound of them falling into a tin can. “Can I see a painting of her?” I said quickly.
“I can do better than that.” Ash walked further down the hall and I followed her. “There’s a beautiful photo of her from her wedding day.”
My heart thumped in my chest as Ash stopped at yet another gold-framed picture. I was so eager to see her, but, when I finally did, I felt like crying. She looked so beautiful in her vintage wedding dress, holding her bouquet of white flowers that hung all the way down to the floor. She stood next to a handsome man. There was no doubt about it, he was very good looking—clean cut and smiling from ear to ear. Edith was smiling too, but her smile was different from his. She had a Mona Lisa smile, the kind that concealed something. And her smile certainly didn’t extend to her eyes, which seemed distant and far away, as if they were looking at something else.
“She looks sad, right?” Ash said, leaning closer to the picture.
“Yes, she does,” I immediately returned. “Why?” I asked.
“It was basically an arranged marriage. Her father organized it. I think she was terrified.”
I leaned in and looked closer. She wasn’t terrified. She was heartbroken. She didn’t know how she was going to live without the man she loved, let alone breathe without him.
“But I guess they grew to love each other. They had three kids,” she said. “My mom was one of them. Apparently, I got my artistic abilities from my grandmother; she was an artist.”
“Oh? Do you have any of her paintings?” I asked.
“There was a fire and they were all destroyed.”
“Really?” I perked up.
Ash looked over at me. “She never painted again, after that. Who knows, maybe she had an artistic temper and burned them all herself because she hated them. I can relate to that,” Ash said, dismissively.
But that wasn’t what had happened at all. I knew that. I looked back at the photo of her.
