Later, they lay silent in the moonlight that shone from the uncovered window, and Shane wondered if this was the real reason they had come together on this night—this tangle of arms and legs, warm under the sheets and blankets, quiet and close, cocoon-like.
He concentrated on the sound of her breathing again as she drifted to sleep. As she did, he stared at the ceiling, and the horrors tried to come back. He’d have to deal with them sometime, but not now. He caressed her shoulder, focused on the warmth of her skin pressed up against him, on the rhythmic, slowing tide of her breathing. Maybe Marlena would come in the night. Maybe she would be irate, terrible with ghostly rage, but Shane didn’t think so. She had spent her fury for the night. She, like him and Christiana, was done for awhile. He could sense it. The cottage was empty. Or at least, empty of her.
In the wee hours of the morning, however, Shane awoke to the sight of the bathroom light methodically turning itself on and off, slowly, almost thoughtfully. Shane watched it, snuggled up with Christiana, his arm curled around her as if she was a teddy bear. On and off went the light, and then on and off once more. Christiana was warm next to him. He felt her breath on his arm, and thought fleetingly of Steph, feeling a pang of stale guilt. Steph was the one who’d come up with the name for their light-switching, toilet-flushing mischievous spirit.
Smithy
, he thought, drifting back to sleep.
Smithy’s up to his old tricks again.
And on the heels of that, already half-dreaming, he thought of Christiana opening the front door, letting the two of them back into the cottage, leading them to the bedroom. He’d been too distracted to notice it at the time, but that door had been locked. It was habit, pure and simple. He’d locked the front door as he had left with her earlier that night, in spite of his urgency. He remembered doing it. And yet Christiana had opened it easily, without a key, without even thinking about it.
Marlena hates her,
Shane mused through a haze of sleep,
but Smithy likes her. How about that? He unlocks the door for her. Smithy likes her, and so do I. That helps things, a little. I guess two out of three ain’t bad.
The next morning, Shane got up and made coffee. Christiana put on one of his old NYU tee shirts and joined him in the kitchen, perching on the narrow counter and kicking her legs idly, squinting in the early sunlight that streamed through the kitchen window. Mist rose from the river in thick white clouds, burning brightly as the sun climbed over the trees.
It was cold outside; somehow Shane could tell it just by looking at the blinding whiteness drifting between the trees. The furnace thumped and kicked on and Shane could feel the warmth as it began to push up through the kitchen floor vent.
They sat in the sunroom, sipping coffee and eating melon slices, and Shane began to speak. He told Christiana everything. It was discombobulated, confused, with a lot of backtracking to fill in missed details, but he didn’t spare anything.
He started with Steph’s final phone call, and her subsequent fateful collision with James Herk in his speeding GMC pickup truck. Of course, she’d heard a lot of it the night before, when Shane had been explaining his recent history to Detective Weekes, but that had been a sanitized version. It hadn’t included Steph’s doomed last meeting with Shane at the Spring Garden, for instance, or the bit about Steph’s purse, unpacked on the law firm’s conference table like a time capsule. Shane hadn’t told Detective Weekes about the Paddington Bear rattle, but he told Christiana about it now. It probably wasn’t really necessary—it didn’t have anything specifically to do with the cottage and Earl’s death—but it did seem relevant somehow, like a thread in a long tapestry, one that runs from one end to the other, connecting everything along the way.
Christiana showed surprising sympathy. For some reason Shane had expected her to simply listen, her face set in that grave, inscrutable expression she so often wore, but that face seemed to be absent today. She set her coffee down at one point and touched him, lightly, on the shoulder.
This,
Shane thought,
is the difference between having a cathartic conversation with one’s psychologist and one’s girlfriend. For one thing, the psychologist doesn’t normally sit on the couch with you, touching your shoulder lightly, occasionally twisting a finger in your hair, nodding and sympathizing and occasionally saying commiserating phrases like “That’s awful,” or even “Poor baby.”
Dr. Taylor had had his own way of empathizing, but he’d never once said “poor baby.” In any case, Shane thought, it wouldn’t have sounded the same coming from him.
Shane went on, then, and the story got decidedly weirder. He shied away from cleaning it up, or leaving out the most bizarre bits. He told Christiana about Smithy first, about how he and Steph had come to name the quirky personality of the cottage. He told her about the path, and the silver rattle, and the first appearance of Marlena, wraithlike and angry about the destruction of her home, the Riverhouse. Christiana still touched him, but she no longer stroked the back of his head or curled a finger into his hair. He continued, describing the process of painting the Riverhouse, how the imagery came to him as if from some source outside of himself, perhaps even from Marlena herself. She was acting as his muse, plugging into his creativity and feeding the pictures to him, giving him details he couldn’t possibly have known otherwise.
He told Christiana about Marlena and Wilhelm, about Madeleine and baby Hector, retelling as much of Earl’s tale as he could remember. Christiana listened now without touching him, her brow furrowed, interested but somewhat repulsed. It wasn’t a very nice story, after all; the affairs and the insensitivity that Wilhelm had shown his wife, the mystery about who’d really born baby Hector, and the final betrayal on the night of the storm, when Wilhelm had run off with Madeleine, taking Hector and leaving Marlena with the house and the property—with everything and nothing.
Finally, he told Christiana about the Riverhouse, about how it seemed to be there again sometimes, ghostly and faint, as if conjured by his strange painting. He explained how the painting itself had been returned to him by Penn Oliver. Christiana had seen the painting on the mantel, of course, but had never asked about it. After all, many commercial artists painted multiple copies of their favorite works, adding them to their personal collections. When Shane told Christiana that the Riverhouse painting was the original, the one she had sold at her gallery show, Christiana surprised him by rolling her eyes derisively.
“And Penn told you to call her? Offered to send you an advance copy of her review?”
Shane nodded, mystified, and Christiana roller her eyes again, shaking her head. Finally, she flapped a hand at him, telling him to go on. Somewhat confused, Shane did so.
He described Marlena’s increasing rage, specifically directed at Christiana, despite the fact that Smithy himself—if there really was such an entity—seemed to like her, going so far as to unlock the doors for her, letting her into the cottage. He tried to explain his fears for her safety, his suspicion that Marlena meant to harm her somehow, for her own nameless reasons.
Finally, he stood and led Christiana to the corner of the sunroom that overlooked the patio. He pointed toward the leaf-strewn stone floor outside, and she looked, her brow furrowed, thoughtful, obviously struggling to keep up with Shane’s fantastic tale. The leaves of the patio floor were peppered with dingy white sheets of paper, blown hither and thither, now damp with cold dew. Each page was covered with a crayon drawing. The newsprint doodle pad was still laying in the leaves beneath one of the deck chairs, surrounded by a scattering of fat, half-used crayons. Shane saw the drawing of the Insanity Stairs. It was stuck to a leg of one of deck chairs, flapping wetly in the breeze. He shuddered.
“Marlena saw me,” he finally said. “She found me tapping into the story, and it made her mad. I was about to find something out about her, something Earl had seen, but she shut it down. And then she went after Earl, using Stambaugh. It’s just like Earl told me: crazy is contagious. Somehow Marlena planted the suggestion in Stambaugh’s mind, sending him after Earl before I could get there, before he could tell me whatever it was that he’d seen on that day, decades ago.”
Christiana had that hard, grim look on her face now. “So I’m trying to understand all of this,” she said, still looking out at the patio floor. “You thought you could use your drawings as a… a sort of doorway. That you’d be able to look into the past through what you drew. Right?”
Shane nodded, sighing. It sounded unutterably stupid when she said it.
She went on. “Because you wanted to find out why the woman who used to live here—Marlena—why her ghost might have it in for me? But she saw you, knew what you were doing, and then she sent her old caretaker off to kill the only other person who might have known her secrets.”
Shane nodded again, looking aside at her.
She raised her eyebrows and met his gaze. “If you want to know if I believe you, I’d have to say I’m about fifty-fifty at this point. I’m not going to say things like this don’t ever happen, I’m just saying that none of them have ever happened to
me
. I’ve had enough problems with the living. I’ve never really had the luxury of worrying about the dead.”
“I wouldn’t call it a
luxury
,” Shane began, feeling that she was missing the point, but she raised a hand and shook her head.
“Sorry. Strike that remark from the record.”
“I don’t think that that works outside of the courtroom, counselor,” Shane replied, perturbed.
“The point is,” Christiana said, plowing on. “You did this because you were worried about me, right? And you were worried because you didn’t know why this woman’s ghost might hate me. Is that it?”
Shane exhaled wearily and nodded again.
“You can’t be this dense, can you?” she said, not meanly. “You’re a sweet man, Shane, but you’re pretty naïve about women. You know that?”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” Shane said, turning and heading back to the sofa. He plopped down onto it and picked up his coffee mug. It was cold.
“Sorry, babe,” Christiana said, and smiled a little. The smile didn’t reach her eyes, however. “The Riverhouse painting, for instance. You totally missed that one, didn’t you? I mean, talk about a softball.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Penn Oliver wanted you to call her. Didn’t she spell it out for you pretty plainly? She
likes
you. She collects artist boyfriends like trophies. You’re the flavor of the month, as far she’s concerned. She sent the painting back to you to get your attention, because you didn’t take her up on her offer of an advance copy of her review. She’s not used to getting blown off like that. It probably drove her completely crazy.”
Shane frowned at her, incredulous. “How can you possibly know that?”
“Well, the
man’s
answer to that question is that Morrie told me all about her. Like I said, they used to date, and Morrie gossips like a school girl. But the
woman’s
answer is that I just know. Come on, you expect me to believe that this place is haunted by two ghosts—a woman and some weird little sneaky imp—and that your painting of that damned house somehow brought the house itself back to life, but you yourself doubt something as simple and obvious as woman’s intuition?” She shook her head, smiling ruefully.
“All right, all right, I get it,” Shane said, patting the sofa next to him, summoning her to rejoin him there. “So what’s the point?”
“The
point
is, you completely missed Penn Oliver’s hints, and that tells me everything I need to know about how it is you don’t understand what might be going on right here in the cottage.
If
everything you say is true, which I am not quite ready to accept. Yet. Sorry.”
“That’s fine,” Shane said as she settled down next to him again, “just so long as you don’t think I’m crazy.”
“You may
be
crazy,” she said lightly, but not quite jokingly, “but that won’t change how I feel about you, and that’s what your real concern is. Don’t worry.”
Shane relaxed. She was right. “So what am I missing?”
“You are a sweet man,” she said, leaning close to him and looking him in the eye. “But you are a bit clueless in some ways. Frankly, I like that about you. You risked everything—in your own mind, at least—trying to find out what it is that this Marlena spook might hate about me, why she might have it in for me, when the answer was right there in front of you.”
“What?” Shane said, not really sure that Christiana knew what she was talking about, but willing to indulge her anyway. “What am I missing?”
She raised her eyebrows again. “It’s us, silly,” she said, shrugging and gesturing between them. “Our relationship.”
Shane frowned, thinking. Christiana went on.
“She thought she had you all to herself. You see that, right? You were the replacement for the husband she lost. Crazy as it sounds, she fell for you. I mean, look at you. You’re about the right age, I’d guess. You’re an artist. You live in the cottage where her husband did all of his painting. And you yourself were alone, recently abandoned by your own wife. It was perfect. It was a match made in hell. Sorry,” she said, smiling crookedly, “couldn’t resist.”
