Chapter 17

Kelly led me back across the great room and past a hallway to our left that seemed to go on forever. Off this hallway was a series of doors—bedrooms, I guessed—all of which no doubt had the same spectacular windows and views of the lake. Kelly entered the front foyer and headed for a door opposite the coat closet. This led into another, smaller foyer. Straight ahead was the entrance to the garage, and to our left was a door that led downstairs.

The basement boasted a family room, this one decorated with the same holiday decor as the living room—including a second tree—but furnished much less formally. There was a large flat-screen TV on one wall and a sectional sofa covered in buttery-soft brown leather. A wet bar was built into one corner, and there was a computer desk—very modern, with black surfaces and chrome legs—in another corner. The wall facing the back of the house was wall-to-ceiling glass, with a sliding door in the middle. A huge, snow-covered yard led down to the water’s edge with enough of a slope that I couldn’t see the shore but had an expansive view of the lake beyond.

I stood and admired the rising moon over the lake, its pale white light glimmering off the snow and the water. “I envy you this view,” I told Kelly. “It must be magical to see this every day and night.”

“I do enjoy it,” she said, “though sometimes I feel a little selfish having it all to myself and not sharing it. I used to entertain a lot, but that kind of fell by the wayside.”

“Losing your daughter . . . What an awful thing for you to go through,” I said. “No parent should have to lose a child, and to have it happen with such suddenness and violence . . .” My throat closed up on me as memories of my father’s death swarmed over me. I felt Kelly’s eyes on me and tore my gaze away from the view to look at her.

“You lost someone to violence, too, didn’t you?” she said.

I nodded. “My father,” I managed to say. “I found him . . . shot . . . dying.” I couldn’t get any more words out, and I turned back to look at the lake as I felt tears well in my eyes. Kelly placed a hand on my shoulder, and the two of us stood there like that for several minutes, staring out at that spectacular view, trying to suppress the emotions that tore at us.

Eventually, Kelly said, “Come on,” and she took her hand from my shoulder. She headed for a hallway off the family room, and I followed along behind her. She opened up the first door on the right and led me into Tiffany’s workshop.

Like every other room I’d seen so far, this one had big windows and a knockout view. On the wall opposite the windows was a row of easels, positioned so that anyone standing in front of them would have their back to the view. At first this puzzled me, but then I realized that the light coming in through the windows would be ideal for painting. At the opposite end of the room was a large wooden table with an exhaust fan above it. Scattered over the top of the table were various pieces of glass in a variety of colors and textures. In the center of it all was a half-finished project that depicted a rocky shoreline, a blue expanse of water made out of rippled glass, and a lighthouse with a red base, a white top, and gold-colored glass making up the windows in the lantern. The sky above was unfinished.

“That’s the last thing she was working on,” Kelly said, seeing the direction of my gaze. “It was supposed to be a gift for me for my fiftieth birthday. At least that’s what Aidan said.”

“You should have someone finish it so you can display it. It would look beautiful hanging in one of your windows.”

“Maybe someday,” she said wistfully. “But not yet.” She turned and looked at the four easels behind us. “These are the paintings that were left at the gallery,” she said.

It was easy to see why Tiffany’s work had been called dark. The painting on the first easel featured a woman’s face, the mouth open in a silent scream, her hair wild around her, her eyes shedding tears of blood. The background was a maelstrom of black and dark red colors.

The second painting depicted an expanse of flowers beneath a brilliant blue sky. There were trees off in the distance, the leaves painted in varying shades of green, the trunks in brown and black. This part of the painting was serene and beautiful, but the flowers in the foreground were painted in shades of brown, black, and gray, and they hung over, wilted and limp. The ground they grew from looked scorched and desolate.

I moved on to the third painting, a seascape done beneath a stormy sky. The waves peaked and splashed, breaking in curds of white foam, and dark, menacing clouds hovered in a gray and black sky. In the midst of the sea was a single flower, a bright red poppy adrift on a wave. Beneath the flower, and heading up toward it, was the vague outline of a shark—gray, menacing, its mouth gaping open, its teeth visible just beneath the flower. The clearest thing on the shark was its eye, which was open, black, and dead looking.

I suppressed a shudder and moved on to the fourth and final easel. This one was the most disturbing of all. At its center, on a sandy shore, was a small rowboat tipped up on its side. Behind it the lake glimmered and shimmered beneath a bright yellow sun. Half buried in the sand beneath the boat was the rotting skeleton of a woman, with the torn remnants of a flowery dress hanging on the bones, and long blond hair matted and splayed out from the skull. The red poppy put in an appearance again, this time resting by the skeleton’s half-buried hip bone. And off to the left, in the calm shimmer of the water, was an eye, the same dead-looking eye that had been painted on the shark.

“Wow,” I said in a low voice. “I see what you mean.”

Kelly stared at the paintings, one elbow nestled in a palm, a hand cupped over her mouth.

“When did she paint these?”

Kelly dropped her hand from her mouth. “She did these two”—she pointed at the ones with the poppies—“right after she finished high school. It was her first year of college. The others she did during the years that followed. I also have some unfinished canvases in a closet, ones that she did later. Those have . . .” She hesitated. “They have a happier feel about them.”

“Forgive me for asking this,” I said in as gentle a voice as I could muster, “but was your daughter troubled in any way? These paintings seem to suggest there was a darkness inside her.”

Kelly dropped her hand from her face and turned to look at me. Tears glistened in her eyes as she spoke. “When Tiff was little, she was a bright, beautiful kid with an infectious laugh and a sunny outlook on life. But when she hit her teen years, something changed. She would get these moods where she’d be weepy and irritable and sullen. . . .” Her voice drifted off, and she swallowed hard, looking past me to the other end of the room. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she was seeing something that was only in her mind or her memory.

She went on. “I suggested she go see a counselor, but she refused. I made her go, anyway, when she was fifteen, but all she did was sit in the woman’s office in stony silence. After four sessions of that, I gave up. It seemed to get better during her junior year in high school, but the summer after that, her demons resurfaced.” She shot me a teary-eyed, shameful look and then quickly glanced away again. “Once I caught her in her bedroom with a razor. She was cutting herself on her legs, not bad, not deep, but enough to draw blood.”

I stepped closer to her and draped an arm over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. Her pain was palpable. It seeped from her pores. I felt her shudder beneath my arm, and it made a scene of jagged, sharp rocks flash before my eyes. I blinked it away and gave her a small sideways hug.

Her next words made my body go rigid.

“You’re not really dating Clay, are you?” she said just above a whisper.