Chapter Three
Jillian set what she called her WIP—work in progress—on the floor.
It wasn’t quite finished, but she had to get the rough sketch of the old car on canvas before the details slipped her mind.
She set a new blank canvas on the easel and fully intended to sketch in the first lines of the old car, but that’s not what happened.
A fuzzy visual popped into her head of one of the first memories she had.
Dirty handprints had been left up and down the door that opened into a bedroom with barely enough walking room between two sets of bunk beds.
She was somewhere between three and four when the first authority figures in uniforms took her away from her dead mother and gave her to the woman in that house.
“The evil that I knew was in some ways worse than the unknown one,” she whispered. “Why is this coming back to my mind now? I haven’t thought of that day in years and years.” Was it because she had said that word her therapist seemed to like so well: closure?
She didn’t pack the memory away in a box, lock it, and ban it to the backside of her mind.
She let it play out as she drew the picture.
Bunny was the new person in her life and told Jillian that she was her new mama.
Bunny washed her hair with funny-smelling shampoo and chopped her long locks off right below her ears.
The secondhand pajamas had stains on them, but they were clean and soft against her skin.
She didn’t make a sound until Bunny put her dirty things plus her coloring book and broken crayons in the trash.
That’s when she threw a screaming, kicking fit that lasted until Bunny gave the coloring book and crayons back to her. She clutched them to her chest and stood in the doorway facing those bunkbeds and three other girls, all older than her.
She had locked all those memories away and wondered why the cabin was giving them buoyancy to rise to the top.
When she looked at the first few lines she had drawn, she was shocked that the lines on the new canvas were sharp and straight instead of rounded like the old car.
The filmy outline of a little short-haired girl stood in the foreground, a ghost of the past looking over the first step in her new and unwanted journey.
“I guess my muse has a different idea of my next project,” she said, and replaced the drawing with the one of Rascal and Wyatt.
The unfinished projects lined up on the floor testified that she had a bad habit of being excited about a blank canvas and then getting bored with it.
Her therapist said that stemmed from trust and commitment issues.
“I liked being with him today, Molly. He’s easy to talk to, and we are both artists of a sort, and …
” She paused and smiled. “And he’s damned easy on the eyes.
” She used her finger to smudge the details slightly to make it appear that there was fog around them.
“That’s the future anyway, huh? You never know what’s around the corner, or what you are walking into.
This cabin and the experiences we’ve already had here are positive proof of that,” she said as she nibbled on a handful of potato chips.
Somehow, looking at the picture and thinking about the past didn’t make her sad like it usually did.
Like a phoenix, she had risen from the ashes and made a brand-new life that she loved.
That gave her an idea for another drawing.
She hopped off the edge of the bed and hurriedly rummaged through one of the storage bins for her notebook.
She found a blank page and roughly drew the big bird with his wings unfolding as he rose from a blaze burning down what looked like the whole world.
She sent a quick message to her agent: How many of these charcoals can we take to the showing? I’m on a roll.
The message came back before she walked across the room: As many as you can produce. Can I see the second one?
She took a picture of the beginnings of the bunkbed scene and sent it to her with the explanation that it was in the bare-bones stage.
The next message told her that these works were going to put her on a whole new level, and she might see a seven-figure profit at the showing.
“I guess we will be working in shades of gray while we’re here, Ms. Molly,” she whispered. “I hope that Natalie is right about my showing being a slam dunk.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “From her lips all the way past the clouds to the powers that be.”
She chuckled at the words, the powers, because that’s what she called the police and case workers until she got old enough to know better.
In her mind, the term suited them better because they had the authority to take her from one home to another, and to ask questions that she nearly always refused to answer.
Her back ached and her fingers were black when she finally put away the canvas and brought out an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies. “Dessert,” she said, and headed for the shower to wash off the sweat from her earlier run and scrub the black stains from her fingers.
She hummed the whole time that she lathered up with a rose-scented soap and washed her long, thick hair with lavender shampoo. Even though this place was not what she thought she was getting, she was happier than she had been in years.
Wyatt didn’t only bring his novel closer to the final pages, he knew that his characters were as happy as he was with what was coming at the end.
He had written so fast and furious since coming home from his run that he hated to set his computer to the side and light the charcoal for the steaks.
But he couldn’t disappoint his new muse, or she might disappear from his life.
“That would be disastrous,” he told Rascal as he fastened his long leash to one of the legs of the picnic bench. “I’ve gotten more done since meeting her than I have in two weeks, and all without music.”
Rascal yipped a couple of times and ran out to the first tree to bark at a squirrel.
“Does that mean you like her, too, since you hate my loud music?” Wyatt asked.
The squirrel inched his way down the tree to fuss at Rascal, who met every twitch of the animal’s fluffy tail with growls and high-pitched barking.
“Guess you are too busy to have a conversation with me.” Wyatt chuckled. “I understand. I haven’t been much company for you lately either.”
He went back into the cabin and brought out foil-wrapped packages of potatoes, green beans, and onions and laid them on the grill. When he returned with the steaks and two tall glasses of iced tea, Jillian was sitting at the picnic table with Rascal in her lap.
“Welcome to the Creswell mansion,” Wyatt said. “He usually doesn’t like anyone but me.”
“Animals and kids love me,” Jillian said.
“You must have magic in your pocket for him to leave his mission to get acquainted with you.”
“What mission is that?”
“He was busy putting the fear of a half-poodle, half-teacup Chihuahua into a full-grown squirrel,” Wyatt answered as he set the glasses on the table and then slapped the two steaks on the hot grill.
“So that’s what he is? I thought at first he was a cross between an exotic rat and steel wool,” Jillian said.
“Don’t tell him that he’s exotic or he’ll expect that high-dollar food,” Wyatt teased. “How is the painting coming along?”
“Very well,” she answered, and took a sip of the tea. “How’s your writing?”
“Excellent. I may have the rough draft ready by the end of the week if the characters keep talking to me,” he answered.
“I read a meme once that said: I know the voices are not real, but they have really great ideas. Is writing a book like that?”
He closed the lid on the grill and sat down on the other side of the table. “More than folks realize. If they aren’t talking to me, telling me which path to take at a fork in the road, I struggle. How about art? Does it have a voice?”
Jillian took another drink of her tea. “I suppose it does. I intended to sketch the old car when I got home but found myself doing something else and thinking of another work beyond that, even.”
“What do you work in? Oils? Watercolors?”
“Mostly oils, but I have dabbled with watercolors a few times. Right now, I’m doing black and whites, or maybe I should say grays, since very little is actually pure black or white.”
“Is that philosophical or a painting term?” He admired her intelligence and self-awareness.
Very few women he had been around had ever intrigued him as much as she did.
Add in that she was beautiful as well as smart and easy to talk to, and he wished that she lived closer to Dallas so he could see her every few days even after their time at the cabins was over.
“Probably both,” she answered.
“Can I see them sometime?”
“Maybe when they are all done. I only let my agent see anything that’s just a work in progress.”
“Why?” Wyatt asked.
“I’ve been known to trash a painting that I worked on for weeks because I couldn’t see anything resembling emotion in it,” she answered.
He sat back down. “Same here. I’ve worn out delete buttons. Hey, I should ask, how do you like your steak?”
“Medium rare, but there’s no wrong way to cook a steak except well done. That’s animal cruelty. That steer gave his life for me to have a steak or roast. It should not be like chewing on a chunk of jerky.”
“I agree one hundred percent. Have you ever left civilization before and gone away to have the peace and quiet to do your art stuff?”
“Why do you ask? Are you going to put me in a book?” Her tone said she was teasing, but her words came close to hitting a home run.