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“Uh-oh, mate. She’s heard you,” Jamie warns, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he drives. “Better keep your door locked while you’re sleeping, Abbs.”
“It’s a painting, not a cursed doll,” I grumble at them. “Unless I wake up tomorrow with gray hair, I’m sure it’s harmless.”
Lee faces the front. “That’s what it wants you to think.”
We approach a set of iron gates, then proceed through a tunnel of trees that opens to a long gravel driveway that rounds a fountain in front of a palatial Elizabethan manor. Tall windows reflect acres of manicured lawns as Jamie pulls up to the front door.
“Stop it,” I blurt out, staring through the passenger window.
“We have stopped,” he says, puzzling over me.
“You just, like,livehere? Like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do.”
He smiles, at least a little charmed by my astonishment. “No, I live two doors down from your bedroom. My family lives here. Occasionally.”
“Occasionally,” I repeat as we get out of the car.
“There’s the flat in London and summer home on the continent,” he says with a British upper-crust poshness that has Lee rolling his eyes. “This here is nearly a relic. Kent Manor has been in the family since the Napoleonic Wars. The story goes our ancestor had some quarrel with the patriarch of the previous occupants. During the wars, the man lost three heirs to the fighting, a brotherto sickness, and the aging patriarch himself was robbed and stabbed to death in London.”
I look at Lee. “And you’re worried about a painting?”
“In the end,” Jamie continues, somewhat smug, “Kent offered to keep the man’s widow comfortable until her death in exchange for assuming the responsibilities of the manor.”
“How generous,” I say, grinning.
He smirks. “Wasn’t it.” With his expensive sunglasses reflecting the sunlight, he leans against the side of his Jaguar. “We do get the occasional special guest. Elton John stayed here once.”
He says it with such gravitas that I’m compelled to burst his bubble just for fun. “I met Elton once. My dad opened for him a few times during the Asian leg of his tour back in the day. He was huge in Korea.”
Lee huffs. “Am I really the only gay man in England who doesn’t know Elton John?”
At home that evening, I take my haul up to my room. The painting goes atop the dresser, and I sit back on my bed watching it watch me. Lee wasn’t entirely wrong about her eyes. They’re intelligent and perceptive. She knows you’re there, wondering who she is, asking questions she won’t answer. Who is she, and how did she end up an anonymous figure inside a frame, forgotten and discarded?
The grim thought sends an odd shiver running up my spine. I think that’s what my dad feared most of all, what propelled him through his career: a persuasive phobia of obscurity. And it’s what made him give it all up too. Fear of never knowing his daughter, of her not recognizing him. Memory controls us more than we realize.
“Souvenir?”
I jerk at the sound of his voice.
Jack leans against my doorframe in a pair of plaid pants. His hair’s wet, and beads of water still cling to his bare chest. He smellslike man soap. The scent fills my room in an instant—thick and humid—like I’m standing with him in the shower. A thought that runs rampant through my brain until he nods at the painting like snapping his fingers in my face to see if anyone’s home.
“Who’s the lass?”
“Yeah, uh, I don’t know.” I recover myself, hoping he doesn’t pick up that every time he wanders half-naked into my field of view, I lose track of time and space. “We stopped at an estate sale. I picked it up more out of curiosity.”
Jack bobs and weaves his head as he enters, examining the painting from different angles. “The eyes. I swear they’re following me.”
“Lee doesn’t like her.” I grin. “He thinks she’s going to crawl out of there and end up standing over his bed with a butcher knife.”
Jack shudders. “Thanks for the nightmares.”
“I’m supposed to come up with a research project for one of my classes. Solve a mystery of sorts. I figure this qualifies.”
He approaches the painting again. “She’s a stunner, that one.”
How absolutely typical that Hot Jack would have a crush on a painting I bring home. Eliza will love this.
“I want to find out who she is, but I’m not sure where to start.”
