Chapter 22
ERRATIC BEHAVIOR
Jude thinks Tulane might be in the conservatory, so we descend the spiral staircase inside the east wing turret. When we reach the bottom, the sound of raised voices greets us.
Jude pulls me to a stop.
The door is ajar, allowing us to see a sliver of the unfolding scene. Isabel faces off with Rafe, the two of them surrounded by exotic plants as rivulets of rain run down the glass walls.
The first time I saw Jude’s stepmother, I thought her a beauty.
Then I met her up close and realized it was a trick of her meticulous grooming.
In actuality, her face is too narrow, her lips too thin, her nose like a beak.
A combination of features that could either be described as striking or off-putting, but certainly not pretty.
At the moment, her cheeks have gone blotchy pink.
She stands like a frightened deer with her hand pressed against her clavicle.
She’s covering a necklace.
Rafe faces away from us. I can only see his back, but I can tell from his posture that for once, he isn’t being playful or coy. There is nothing cryptic about the anger radiating from him now. It’s as obvious as Isabel’s fear.
As quick as a viper, he grabs Isabel’s arm so hard, she gasps.
“Rafe,” she pleads. “You’re hurting me.”
I move toward the door to stop him, but Jude wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me into shadow.
“Tell me where you got this,” Rafe demands.
“In the family safe,” Isabel whimpers.
“Liar.”
“I’m not lying. It was part of Maureen Vandenberg’s collection.”
“This,” he curls his hand around her necklace and yanks it toward him, eliciting another gasp as she’s pulled forward, “was not part of Maureen Vandenberg’s collection.”
I want to move.
Crane my neck.
See if the necklace is the locket.
But I also don’t want to move.
Maybe not ever.
Not when I can feel the tautness of Jude’s muscles, his breath against my ear, his hand on my hip, his beating heart against my back.
“Please, Rafe. I’m only telling you what Denis told me.”
Rafe lets the necklace go.
Isabel stumbles backward and I catch a glimpse of a glimmering ruby pendant resting just above her décolletage.
It’s not the locket, but it is familiar.
I recognize it just like I recognized the symbol, only this time, I know where it’s from.
I can still remember it—holding a little boy, shielding his body as sirens blared and bombs rained from the sky.
I was wearing that necklace in a dream. I wrote about it in the journal on my nightstand.
“I was only going to borrow it,” Isabel says tremulously. “For dinner tonight with town council.”
Rafe steps closer.
Isabel flinches, but his touch is gentle as he brushes his knuckles down her cheek.
She sniffs. “I promise I would never do anything to upset you.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” he says. “Which is why you will give me the necklace now.”
She looks up at him, crestfallen. Hesitant. But then her attention drops to the ground. She turns obediently and lifts her hair. Rafe unclasps the necklace, his lips so close to her neck, he’s practically kissing her skin. “I never want to hear you mention this necklace again, do you hear me?”
She nods.
He curls his fingers around the pendant. The chain dangles from his fist. His face is a mask of mutiny as he turns on his heel and storms away.
As soon as Isabel flees, we make our decision.
Jude and I follow Rafe.
Down the corridor and into the ballroom where his footsteps echo.
We catch a glimpse of his polished boots as he exits through a set of doors on the opposite side.
We hurry after him on quiet feet, into the antechamber opposite the foyer, out into the gloomy afternoon, where the hedge maze stands centerstage—a horticultural masterpiece that has consumed Dad’s attention as of late.
Rafe is striding around it, toward the woods beyond.
The sky rumbles.
There’s no time to converse. No time to consider. Rafe’s moving too fast. We follow him into the woods, down a shadowed path where the rain is a soft drizzle misting through the trees. Rafe doesn’t stop until he reaches the small clearing with the well.
We hunker behind a tree, watching as he yanks a stone from the well and removes a small pouch from behind it. He pours three gemstones into his palm. One is red, like the ruby necklace. He compares the two, and whatever he sees sends him into a rage.
Rafe roars at the sky.
Birds take flight.
I flinch.
Jude’s hand circles my wrist—a silent reminder to stay still, stay quiet as Rafe hurls the gems into the trees. He crumples the pouch in his fist and stalks away.
My pulse pounds like a drumbeat beneath my skin, so frantically I’m positive Jude must feel it. Heat blooms where his fingers touch my wrist. Very slowly, he lets go, and I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“What was that about?” I ask.
Jude wipes the rain from his face with his palm.
And then, as though reaching an unspoken agreement, we get out our phones, turn on our flashlights, and search for the gemstones.
It takes awhile, but eventually we find them—a pearl, a triangular onyx, and a diamond-shaped ruby the same shape and size as the one Isabel wore.
Jude picks up the stone Rafe removed from the well.
“I dreamt about it,” I say, the disembodied words escaping without any premeditation. They drift from my lips and hover in the air.
He looks at me.
“The ruby necklace Rafe took from Isabel. I was wearing it in a dream. There were sirens and bombs. I was holding a little boy, using my body like a shield. There was an older couple there, too. With British accents.”
He stands very still—his hair dark from the rain, his face pale—as though carved from marble. “That’s real?” he finally says. “What you just said?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
He scrubs his palm down his face again, and when his hand comes away, he looks disturbed. Almost angry. “My great grandmother died in The Blitz. She saved my grandfather when he was only four.” His eyes meet mine. “By shielding his body with her own.”
The sky rumbles—low and long.
I close my fist around the gemstones.
Somehow, I am the subject of Ezra’s Obsession, a portrait painted centuries before I was born. And now, I’m having dreams of Vandenberg tragedies centuries after they died.
I have no idea what’s going on. But whatever it is, I think it’s time to show Jude my journal.
“Hey kiddo,” Dad says as I close the door behind me. He’s looking inside the refrigerator with his back turned. “The rain chased me inside. Are you up for an early—dinner?”
His voice hiccups on the tail end of his question as he shuts the refrigerator door and spots not just me standing in the entryway, but Jude and me, wet from the rain.
I can practically see the cogs in his brain turning, trying to catch up with the situation.
I’m sure last night’s dinner conversation is powering at least one of those cogs.
Kate called Jude my boyfriend.
Dad grabs a couple kitchen towels from a drawer. He hands one to Jude, the other to me while I make introductions and they shake hands.
“I’m, uh, just gonna show him something in my room,” I say, patting my neck dry.
Dad looks uneasy, like a man navigating unchartered territory. It’s not like I haven’t had a boy up in my room before. But somehow, Twig in my room feels very different from Jude in my room.
I give Dad a reassuring smile. “We won’t be long.”
We slip off our shoes and head upstairs.
The soft patter of rain has turned into a downfall. It pounds against the roof and blurs the grounds outside my window.
I grab the journal from my nightstand with more bravado than I feel, and when I turn around, I catch Jude surveying my room.
He looks from my daybed, decorated with vintage throw pillows from The Lucky Penny, to the handmade lanterns hanging from the window, to the modest collection of books standing at attention between mismatching bookends on my writing desk, to the Magic 8 Ball and the clamshell trinket dish on my dresser.
His attention lifts to the pinboard above it, tacked with photographs.
Polaroids mostly, taken at the Hunter’s Moon Masquerade Ball two years ago, when Harper went through her photography phase.
Jude sets the kitchen towel next to my new autumn-scented candle from the Calloways and examines the one photograph that isn’t a polaroid, but a glossy 4x6. A picture of toddler me, sitting on my dad’s knee, holding tight to my mother’s hand, like I knew even then that if I let go, she’d slip away.
I open to the journal entry in question and hand it over.
The longer he reads, the deeper the furrow in his brow gets.
When he finishes, I point him to another entry.
One I’ve read so often, I have it memorized.
A young woman in a yellow taffeta dress, her hair in ringlets, hanging from a noose.
By the end of it, his face is pale, his jaw tight, his hair dark and damp against his forehead. “You don’t think this was about …?”
“Molly Ludwig?”
His attention returns to the entry. Namely, the date of the entry. I recorded it before we researched Molly. Before we even found the sketch of her in the family archives.
I wring the towel in my hands. “Jude, I really don’t think the subject of Ezra’s portrait was a relative of mine. Or some coincidental twin stranger he loved and painted, either.”
For the first time, he doesn’t argue.