Chapter 19
Nineteen
Erielle’s heart was pounding as she studied the symbol painted onto the tree. It was one of the same symbols carved into the window frames, and unique enough that it couldn’t just be a swipe of a paintbrush.
Samson’s chair scraped against the linoleum and he rounded to look over her shoulder. He’d showered that morning and still smelled of his soap and shampoo, and her biscuits. It was an oddly arousing combination.
“Does that look intentional to you?” she asked, forcing her mind back to the business at hand.
“It does. But the question remains. What does it mean?”
“Do you have any paper?”
He patted down his chest through his T-shirt, as if to ask where he would keep it.
She jumped up from the table and went to the foyer, ripped a flap off one of the boxes and returned to the kitchen.
She dug through a couple of drawers before she found some pens.
Hoping they weren’t too dried out, she plopped back onto the chair and, after a bit of scribbling to get the ink flowing, sketched out a rough copy of the painting.
Once she had the scale down, she drew the image in the approximate location on the sketch that it was on the painting.
“I don’t want to draw on the painting,” she explained as she did it.
“Let’s see if it will show up in a picture on here,” he said, and handed her the phone.
She snapped, then zoomed in, and shook her head. “I don’t see it in the picture.” Already she was anxious to see if she could find other hidden symbols, so she moved the napkin guide over. And over. And over.
A thrill raced through her as she found another hidden in the Spanish moss, another in the moon’s reflection on the surface of the swamp. She noted them dutifully on the sketch.
“Who’s the artist?” Samson asked from behind the laptop screen. “Maybe I can look him up. Maybe that can give us some answers, since I’m not making any progress with the symbols. I mean, I thought I had it, but it turned out to be a made-up language from some fantasy novel.”
“I mean. This could be made up, but I don’t know about a fantasy novel. My grandfather loved to read, but that wasn’t his genre.” She lifted the corner of the napkin, not wanting to lose her place. “The signature is partly hidden by the frame. Hard to read.”
“Why would any of this be easy,” he muttered, rising and walking over. “Let’s see if we can get it out of the frame.”
She held up a marker over the painting, ready to mark her spot, thought better of it, and marked the spot on the sketch instead.
Samson slid the painting in front of him, turned it over and pried it from the frame. Part of the signature peeled off of the painting and stuck to the frame. She turned to a kitchen drawer and came up with a butter knife, which she used to chisel the stuck paint from the corner of the frame.
“Why would someone put a wet painting into a frame?” she muttered as she slipped the blade along the wood.
“Seems like something an amateur would do.”
She peered at what remained of the signature on the painting, then carefully placed what she peeled from the frame, lining it up with the painting. “Can you make that out?”
He leaned closer. “I can’t tell if that’s a C or an A.”
“Alvin, maybe? Alvin Doctorow?”
She seemed like she was stretching on that last bit, because it was a D and a squiggle and a t, sure, but then practically a straight line.
“So what are we going to do when we find this guy?” he asked. “Go to him and demand to know why he painted a haunted picture?”
“I mean.” She lifted a hand after setting a mixing bowl on the counter. “We can find out more about him, if it could be the painting or something else, you know? Some other reason?”
“Let’s see what we can find.”
As much as Erielle wanted to keep researching, every day she kept the dumpster cost money, so she had to at least cart some stuff out to it. At least hauling junk freed up her brain, gave her restless thoughts somewhere else to go.
“Hey, so Allison has a New Age shop,” she said, walking back into the library where Samson was working
Samson was balanced on the stepstool, tugging at the books along the top shelf.
His white T-shirt was streaked with grime, clinging to his chest and shoulders thanks to the swampy humidity.
The fan in the corner only stirred the thick air, sending his dark hair into his eyes until he pushed it back with the back of his wrist.
She’d tried to send him home, but he refused, saying he didn’t want her alone in the house. But he drew the line at going up to the attic. She didn’t blame him. The few times she’d been up there, she had moved as fast as humanly possible.
He looked up from the books he held in his hand. “She does.”
“So I wonder just how…mystical she gets? Like, do you think she could know anything about ghosts?”
“I don’t know. I think she maybe opened up the shop here because of the legends about the swamp, but I honestly don’t know her well enough to know what she believes.”
“I’ve been in there a couple of times, and she has a lot of herbs and protection type products, so maybe? Do you think she would think I was completely crazy if I went to talk to her about this? She’s not the friendliest person, but maybe she could help.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know her all that well. Like you said, she’s not too friendly. I helped her replace the glass in her shop when someone shattered it. But even then she didn’t talk much. I don’t even think she reported it to the police.”
“That’s weird. Did they ever find out who did it?”
“Duval thinks it was kids, but like I said when you thought kids were breaking in here, we don’t have a lot of kids in town.”
“I’ve noticed that. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“I mean, there isn’t a school, so no. And people moved to Maillard when the factory closed down to be closer to the school.”
“Hattie said something about that.”
“Have you talked to Hattie about any of this?”
Erielle coughed out a laugh. “No. Do you think she would believe me? That woman is very difficult to talk to, and she already doesn’t like me. I don’t want her to think I’m crazy on top of it all.”
“Do you think you’re crazy?”
“Not anymore. It was touch and go there, for a while, but now that you’ve seen what I saw, I at least don’t feel like I’m losing my mind.”
He grinned and reached up to grab the next set of books.
“Or we’re both losing our minds.” He turned, grin morphing to a frown, his hand still wrapped around the three books.
He pulled one down, then tugged at the next, tilting it toward him, but it didn’t come free.
Instead, a grinding growl sent him leaping across the room to stand by her, between her and the bookshelf that was now sliding open.
She hadn’t realized she’d grabbed him until her palms registered the hard lines of his waist, the rapid thud of his heartbeat under her hands. She edged him aside, stepping around him toward the open entryway now revealed on the far side of the room.
“What the hell?” His voice pitched high, breathless. “Did you know that was there?”
“I had no idea.”
Before she could take another step, he caught her wrist, his hand hot, firm.
“What are you doing? We are not going in there.” Alarm jangled in his voice.
She turned to him, perplexed. “What are you talking about? Of course we are.”
He stared at her for a long minute, must have seen her determination, let out a long-suffering sigh. “Let me get a flashlight out of the truck. Do not go in without me.”
When she didn’t respond, he squared up.
“Promise me, Erielle.”
She hesitated a moment longer, then gave a short nod, though, damn, curiosity was burning through her, stronger than any fear of what she might find.
He was gone in a flash, his heavy steps vibrating across the porch. She caught herself wondering what her neighbors would think if they saw him running from her house like that.
She drifted toward the opening, drawn as questions fluttered through her brain like butterflies, none of them sticking around long enough for an answer to form.
She placed a hand on the entry, and heard Samson’s heavy steps behind her.
She turned to look at him, saw his face flushed, his mouth drawn tight with trepidation.
He held a hefty flashlight with a handle in front of him.
He wasn’t looking at her, though. His attention was fully on the space behind her.
“Stay behind me,” he ordered, thrusting an arm out to bar her from slipping past. And then he stepped through the door.
Taking a deep breath—mistake, because the musty air filled her lungs—Erielle followed, pressed against his back as she strained to see over his shoulder.
Dust mites danced in front of the flashlight beam as they crept down the short hallway, and her eyes took a moment to adjust. Then the space opened up.
Samson stopped, shining the flashlight along the wall to their left.
A spider scuttled out of the beam of light from its web in the corner, and the beam of the flashlight jumped as Samson twitched in surprise.
He steadied it again, shone it along the far wall of the windowless room, lined with wire shelves.
He moved the beam while staying in one spot, one foot turned toward the door, ready to bolt.
The light revealed a workbench along the wall perpendicular, with wooden shelves fastened to the wall above it.
She should have figured something was here.
If she thought about it, what had she thought was on the other side of the stairs?
There wasn’t a room, and the library didn’t extend to the back of the house.
So what had she thought was here? She pushed past him to the center of the room and turned in a circle, examining the space.
He stepped a bit farther into the room, and shone the light on the wall behind them, and it was covered with paintings with the same signature as the one in the foyer—paintings of the house, the bayou, the town, even Rumrunners, all at night, all marked with pale streaks—the ghosts of the bayou.
There, at the edge of the wall, was a light switch. She reached for it, flicked it on, only for the pop of an exploding lightbulb to make them both jump.
Because she wanted to explore further, she pulled her phone out of her pocket, swiped on the flashlight and crossed to the workbench.
Jars of things she couldn’t easily identify lined up on the shelves above.
Not canned fruits or vegetables or anything like that.
Dried things, twisted in unidentifiable shapes.
She wanted to pick them up, but a sense of foreboding warned her against it, so she instead turned to the wire shelves, where more jars—reused jars like empty mayonnaise and jelly jars—were filled with powders and other things not labeled.
Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. The labels had dried off and now crumbled on the floor below. She crouched to pick one up, only to have it disintegrate in her hand while some creature—possibly the spider—scuttled beneath the wire shelving.
The shelves were not old—she’d seen similar ones in the big box store when she’d shopped last. So this room wasn’t used that long ago. She turned to Samson, her brain hurting from searching for an explanation.
“What is this place?”
“I think we need to go talk to Allison,” he said, lowering the beam and heading toward the light of the library.