The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller (20 page)

“You like coffee?”

“Yes, that would be great.”

“Good, because coffee and wine are all I drink
, and it is too early for wine.” Cecil’s hand’s worked fast in the cupboards and drawers, but her eyes remained on the clouds outside. “But I may regret that later.”

Within a few minutes
, she handed him a cup of coffee the color of tar poured from a brass pot that chugged merrily on the stove.

“This is the only way to make coffee, everything else is barbaric.”

Her slight accent became more noticeable, and Evan paused, his cup halfway to his mouth.

“You’re French?”

Cecil shot him a glance and then drank a sip of coffee. “Half. My mother came from France, my father was English, but born here.” She looked around the kitchen and shook her head. “The kitchen is no place for talk. Only gossip and food is made in kitchens.”

She led the way out of the room through
an archway that opened up into a sitting room with an elegant glass table over ten feet long and several overstuffed leather couches. Every wall in the room held at least two pieces of art, and all had the same sublime look to them, their colors meshed and flowing in brushstrokes both bold and gentle. Evan studied the painting closest to him, a beautiful scene set beside a waterfall with stones of all colors bathing in its swirling pool. A boy lay on his side, dragging a flower in the flowing water, his eyes on the sky above him.

“I call that one
A Day’s Dream
, for nothing like it could exist in this world,” Cecil said, as she settled into a comfortable-looking chair.

“You painted this?”

“I painted everything in this house. Call me egotistical, but I like my paintings more than anything else I’ve seen.”

Evan took a drink of his coffee and felt a disconsolate wave wash over him
, knowing that he’d been drinking swill labeled as “coffee” up to this point in his life.

“That’s amazing,” he said
, then took another sip.

Cecil nodded.
He set his cup down on the glass table and sank into the couch nearby. He folded his hands, then refolded them, not knowing how to begin. Cecil saved him the trouble by speaking first.

“So you’ve seen it.”

It wasn’t a question but a condemnation.

“Yes, I happened
on it as soon as we moved in.”

“
‘We’?”

“My son, Shaun, and I. We’re house
-sitting for a friend who owns the island.”

Cecil said nothing, only watched him.

“I didn’t know what to think at first.”

“And you still don’t, that
’s why you came here, correct?”

“Yes.”

Cecil sighed and looked down at her coffee. “My mother came from a village outside of Paris. She spent her first fifteen years there before her father shipped her off to America, to a better life.” Cecil made a disgusted look, then continued. “She moved in with her aunt in Wisconsin, a cruel woman who drove her out of the house almost as fast as she’d taken her in. My mother wandered. For a while she worked as a pastry chef’s assistant in a small bakery, until he died of a stroke. After that, she begged for change and rode short distances on a railroad. But after almost being raped and killed, she took a job cleaning and cooking at the house you’ve no doubt just come from. That’s the only way you would’ve known my mother’s name.”

Evan nodded. “The painting.”

“That was her true calling, the art that made several men from her country famous. She spent every free moment either drawing or painting on anything she could find. Her hand was true, and her mind had an inner vision most others can only dream of.”

“Apparently she passed her gift on to you,” Eva
n said, motioning to the walls.

Cecil shook her head,
slowly, deliberately. “I received but a fraction of what she possessed. If you could’ve seen her work, if you could’ve seen that painting in the room before—”

She stopped, her s
mall face crinkling with lines.

“What happened there?”

His initial excitement at opening up a channel for answers wasn’t as strong. Something dulled it, clouded over it like the weather outside cloaked the sky.

“To understand what happened
, you must first understand what Abel Kluge was.”

“What was he?”

“A madman, and a cruel one at that. If he hadn’t needed a maid that could also cook when my mother came calling, he would have turned her away, battered and bruised, no matter. He was not unfamiliar with women looking like that anyway, since he sometimes administered beatings to his wife as well as the rest of the staff.”

Evan
waited, not knowing what to say, and decided not to say anything, in hopes that Cecil would keep talking.

“You see, Mr. Tormer, work was scarce in the early
1900s, and an employer that paid steadily was even more of a rarity. The staff at Kluge House got room and board, pay, and Abel’s knuckles if he became displeased with any of them.” Her eyes trailed to the window and grew distant. “I have no doubt my mother would have died there had she not met my father.”

“He w
orked there too, I’m assuming?”

Cecil turned back toward him and dipped her
chin once. “Yes, he was the groundskeeper and the head butler. He and my mother fell in love shortly after she arrived there, and they began to make plans to leave the awful place as soon as they could afford to, but the money didn’t ever seem to add up and they were forced to stay.”

Cecil finished her coffee and scooted forward to the edge of her chair, pensive
, staring into his eyes. Evan could see the old woman was working something out inside her head.

“I suppose
that woman was the final piece of the bizarre puzzle assembled in that home,” Cecil said quietly.

“Allison Kaufman,” Evan said.

Cecil half smiled, without humor, and he decided it was a terrible thing on her tired features.

“I see you’ve been somewhat successful in your research, or
deductions.”

“It was the only thing that fit,” Evan said. “T
wo people die and one disappears on the same day in a small town? Not likely.”

Cecil shook her head, like a pendulum. “Not likely at all. If Abel Kluge was a madman, Allison was his equal. She was orphaned young and grew up in a small church south of Mill River. No matter how strict the nuns were back then, they were no replacement for parents. She turned to mischief at an early age
—stealing, drinking, even prostitution before she met Abel. From what I know, she showed up at the gates one day, long, brown hair most of the way down her back, eyes conniving. Something about her must have flipped a switch in him, for she was immediately given a room, and was his mistress within days.”

“Right in front of his wife?” Evan asked
, taken aback.

Cecil gave him the half smile again. “Oh yes
. By then, Larissa wasn’t much more than a husk of her former self. He’d hollowed her out with beatings and mistreatments for so long, I’m not sure she even realized what was going on.”

Cecil sat back in her chair, her spine still rigid
, as if the telling of the history wouldn’t let her relax.

“But Allison
, on the other hand, put up with nothing from him. In a matter of months, most of the staff answered to her as the lady of the house. My mother told me some nights the staff was unable to sleep, for the sounds of their carrying-on in the upstairs bedroom would filter down through the house, sounds of sex, pain, hissing, screaming. I shudder to imagine what really went on in those rooms.”

Cecil paused, pursing her lips while her eyes found the painting over Evan’s shoulder.

“My mother and father lived in constant fear of them, for Allison only heightened the violence and mistreatments that went on there. In fact, it appeared that her cruelty rivaled Abel’s in many ways. My mother said that more than once a servant was randomly called to her room, strapped down, and then whipped within an inch of his or her life, as Abel and Allison took turns behind the leather strap.”

“God, why?” Evan said, feeling a lurch of revulsion in his stomach.

“Because they were able to, Mr. Tormer. I assume it made them feel powerful, as we crush a spider that crawls onto our pillow. They were merely full of hate and needed someone to unleash it on. But fate, it seems, is the great equalizer. Nothing in this world goes unnoticed, no deed, good or bad, remains unbalanced. Less than a year after coming to Kluge House, Allison became sick. It was soon clear she had the consumption.”

“Tuberculosis.”

“Yes. It was still a very prominent disease in those days, taking bloody bites out of the population whenever it could. No one knows how Allison caught it or why no one else became infected, but it sealed all three of their fates.”

Evan’s heart picked
up speed. A picture formed in his mind, the room that he and Selena had stood in rearranging itself into a scene he could almost touch.

“He built the clock for her, didn’t he?” Evan asked, knowing he was right.

“Yes. My mother told me he was completely devastated by her prognosis, which deteriorated each week, so he started to work in the basement of the house. He spent hours upon hours down there, and the staff was forbidden to enter, to see what he slaved over day and night. When he wasn’t working, he was at Allison’s bedside, watching her, or contacting every doctor within six counties to come and see her condition. But there was nothing anyone could do.”

Cecil grimaced as
though tasting something bitter.

“The day Allison fell into a coma, he had four men haul
the clock up from the basement. One of them was my father. That clock ... No one wanted to touch it, for anyone could see it was an evil thing, unnatural and ugly even in the light of day. They placed it in Abel and Larissa’s bedroom, against the wall.”

“I saw where it
stood, there was a shadow still there.”

“I don’t know wha
t that is, but it is no shadow. That night the staff lay awake in their beds, with a storm roaring outside the windows and Abel’s voice coming from upstairs, chanting words that weren’t words. Near morning, the storm broke and a single scream came from the room—Larissa’s last sound on this earth. My father ran to the room, gripping a pistol, ready to do what needed to be done if Abel had finally gone too far, but when he burst inside, it was already too late. Larissa and Allison were dead, and Allison’s hair had gone completely white.”

The entire room seemed to shift a little, and Evan swallowed, trying to push away the image of the long
, white hair in the dustpan.

“But what chilled his blood more than anything, my mother told me
much later, was that clock, sitting there against the wall, all of its hands running
backward
.”

Evan blinked. “Backward?”

“Yes.”

“But what was he
trying to accomplish with it?”

“Only he and God know that for sure, but one night when I was very young
, I heard my father and mother speak of that morning in whispers they thought I couldn’t hear. My father said he was sure that Abel had tried to reverse Allison’s condition somehow with the clock.”

“Reverse? Like turn back time?” Evan said.

He noticed his voice sounded far away, like it came from another room in the house, and the words in Bob’s shaking hand kept surfacing from the deep tidewaters of his mind:
IcangobackIcangobackIcangoback
.

“Like I said, Mr. Tormer, he was a madman
, and there is nothing more dangerous than a lunatic in love.”

“But how did they die? The article I read said there weren’t any marks
on Larissa’s body and only a small pool of blood on the floor.”

“Of that
, we know the same. There weren’t any weapons present, nor was there any trauma done to either of them. It seems Abel may have sliced himself on the center pendulum, for they found a small amount of blood on its edge and inside the clock.”

Evan let the information soak into him. The coffee had elevated his senses and sharpened his thoughts, but the harder he tried to assemble the facts into something cohesive, the more they swam into a blurry jumble like Bella’s painting in the room. As if reading his mind, Cecil spoke.

“She told me it was a field of flowers, daisies.” Cecil glanced at him. “The painting. She’d given it to Abel and Larissa before Allison arrived at the house, perhaps to put her and my father in better favor.”

“Did it?”

“No, but Abel knew talent when he saw it, and hung it in their room nonetheless.”

“It was glued to the wall
—why did he glue it to the wall?”

Cecil cast her eyes downward,
grimacing again. “It wasn’t, it was simply hung there. But the morning after my father found them, it was stuck in place like someone had welded it.”