The Sense of Reckoning (18 page)

“Ellen.”

“Oh, alright.” She headed for the kitchen. “Maybe there’s some herbal tea. You should try herbal tea. It at least has some taste to it.”

“It’s like drinking an unpleasant potpourri,” he said.

When they were settled in the kitchen with their beverages of choice, Ellen said, “This is just like the olden days, Garrick. I had such a crush on you. You were so handsome and dashing.”

“You were just a child.”

“I was seventeen. Old enough to have money of my own to hire you.”

“Money you inherited from your father.”

She stirred another spoonful of sugar into her tea. “It made Loring crazy that I used the money that way. But I thought that if you could help us communicate with Daddy, he would give us some tips for running the hotel.”

“From what I understand, your father was probably not the best source for business advice, even if we had been able to contact him.”

“Why weren’t we able to connect with him, do you think?”

“From what you have told me, your father sounds like a man a bit disconnected, even when he was alive.”

“Yes, Daddy was sort of a dreamer. But I wish we could talk directly with him and not have to get all our information secondhand through Loring.”
 

Garrick shifted on the stool. “Ellen, is it possible that Loring doesn’t know the location of the lady—that he’s just pretending to have the information to be difficult?”

Ellen shook her head. “No, Daddy told Loring everything. I wish he had told me. Maybe he thought I was too young.” She shrugged, but the pain of not having been included was evident in her downcast eyes. “Loring told me some of the stories after Daddy died, but not this one. Not where the lady is.”

“How about your mother?” Garrick had been avoiding suggesting this on the off chance that the lady in question and Ellen’s father had had an illicit relationship, but he decided that, even as odd a family as the Lynams were, a father would be unlikely to share stories about his paramour with his son.

“Have you sensed Mother?” asked Ellen, surprised.

“No, but I haven’t tried to contact her, you always asked me to contact Loring.”

“I wish I had known her, even a little bit. Poor Daddy. He always had the women in his life disappearing. His mother ... his wife.” She sighed. “In any case, Mother didn’t know where the lady was. At least that’s what Loring told me.”

Garrick tried another tack. “Have you tried other means of locating this lady? Perhaps a private investigator. Or,” he scowled, “the internet.”

“No, Garrick, I need you to find out from Loring, it’s the only way.”

“Very well.”

Ellen sipped her tea silently for a few minutes and then burst out, “Loring certainly took the quitter’s way out!”

“Loring was always an unhappy man.”

“Did you know he killed himself when he was exactly the same age as Daddy was when he died?”

Garrick did in fact know this, but made a noncommittal grunt.

“And he must have known I’d be the one to find him!” She gripped the hot mug of tea. “It took me forever to find a knife to cut him down.” Her voice began to quaver.

“Yes,” said Garrick tightly. “That was unworthy even of Loring.”

“Daddy fought to beat the cancer as long as he could, but Loring never fought for anything! Just fought with the people around him. The people who loved him.” Ellen removed a tissue from one of the bulging pockets of her bulky cardigan and blew her nose.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” said Garrick gently.

Ellen replaced the tissue in her pocket. “Garrick, this hotel is the only tie to my family—to my heritage—that I have left. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose it.”

“I am hopeful that we still might obtain the information you need to avoid that eventuality,” said Garrick.

Chapter 23

Ann had hoped that she would become more attuned to Loring as he talked—that she would be able to pick up more of what he was communicating—but she found the opposite happened. At first, she could catch snatches of words or phrases, but after a while there were periods when she couldn’t hear anything. She could, however, still sense his ghostly presence at her side, and could often perceive his face, or at least his eyes, fading into and out of view. She strained to hear any syllable, and when that didn’t work she tried abstracting her attention in the hopes of, if not picking up words, at least picking up the overall sense of what he was saying. Neither approach was effective. There were times when his visual presence was stronger, when Ann sensed he was more animated by the story he was telling her, but this was not accompanied by a coinciding improvement in her ability to understand what he was saying. Soon, she lost the ability to discern even the occasional word and could sense that he was continuing to talk based only on a sort of modulated buzz coming from the place where she sensed he stood.

Eventually, even the buzz stopped. She could see those gray eyes, faintly luminescent in the darkness, looking at her expectantly.

“Loring, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand very much of that.”

The gray eyes registered disappointment.

“But ‘the lady’—it’s not a person. It’s a painting—is that right?”

The eyes brightened and the spirit said something unintelligible.

“I’m sorry, I still can’t—”

You ... tomorrow.
Then the voice faded back to a buzz.

“You want me to come back tomorrow?”

Yes ... light.

“Yes, a light would be a good idea, I’ll bring a flashlight—”

... daylight ...

“You want me to come tomorrow during daylight?”

Ann sensed rather than heard his affirmative response.

“Why?” she asked, with little expectation that she would understand his answer.

... show ...

“You’ll show me the painting? That would be very helpful. Is it inside the hotel?”

The spirit responded but Ann couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“I’ll assume it’s inside the hotel, or at least nearby. Any particular time?” she asked.

Anytime
, she heard with surprising clarity.

Ann pulled back the sleeve of her parka and pressed the button to illuminate the face of her watch. She was surprised that so much time had passed. “I need to leave now, but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll wait for you near the front door of the hotel.”

The spirit raised his hand to his forehead, a virtual tip of the hat, and then he was gone—a subtle change in the space he had occupied—and Ann felt herself to be very much alone.

To avoid setting off the light again, she clambered over the railing at the far side of the boathouse, picked her way over the rocks that bordered the water until she reached the lawn, and then scuttled along the edge of the lawn back toward the road and the designated meeting place.

Chapter 24

Garrick stood in the chill gloom of the lounge, buttoning up his long black coat as Ellen ran her fingers fretfully through her hair. “I can’t believe he didn’t show up at all. Garrick, we’re getting nowhere. We’re going to lose the hotel, we only have two more days now.”

Garrick put his hands in his pockets and looked toward the windows where, in the daylight, he would have seen the expanse of lawn and the vestiges of the croquet court for which the hotel had formerly been famous. “You really think this lady can help you save the hotel?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you are not willing to employ other methods to find her?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Perhaps Loring wants to push his revelation of the lady’s location as close to the deadline as he can. I will bring all my resources to bear to attempt to convince him to cooperate.” Ellen followed him to the front door, where he removed the flashlight from his pocket and, with a nod of farewell, let himself out. He heard the click of the key in the lock as he descended the steps and made his way to his car, his flashlight illuminating an oval of leaf-strewn gravel.

After he had gotten beyond the drive in front of the hotel, he lowered the front windows despite the cold, in case Ann called out to him from a hiding place along the road. He scowled. They should have established a clearer landmark for their rendezvous. He began growing concerned that he had passed the point where he had dropped her off and was contemplating whether he could back up or turn around without the benefit of headlights when he jumped at a voice from just outside the car.

“Garrick!”

Garrick stomped on the brake, his heart banging against his ribs. As Ann circled to the passenger side, Garrick massaged his neck to one side of his prominent Adam’s apple.

Ann got in and eased the door shut. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing of interest.” He eased off the brake and the car glided forward.

“Guess what I found out!”

“Not now, wait until we get back,” said Garrick.
 

“Can we turn on the heat, I’m freezing,” she said, rolling up her window.

“Very well,” said Garrick, not taking his eyes off the road.

Ann pushed the heater up to high. After a minute she asked, “Can you roll up your window?”

“Very well,” said Garrick. He coasted the car to a stop, pressed the button to raise the window, and then resumed his stately progress down the road.

They wended their way back off the peninsula, and then up Indian Point Road and across Oak Hill Road to Somesville in silence.

*****

Garrick pulled the car up to a detached single-car garage behind the house and turned to Ann, the back porch light throwing the already severe lines of his face into sharp relief.

“Well?”

“The Lady isn’t a who, she’s a what,” said Ann.

There was a long silence. Finally Ann sighed. “It’s a painting.”

“A painting?”

“Yes.”

Another silence.

“That’s it. The Lady isn’t a person, it’s a painting. That’s all I got.”

“All you got or all he told you?”

“All I got. There was a lot more but I couldn’t pick it up. But I’m supposed to go back tomorrow and he’ll tell me more.”

“Really? That’s very promising,” said Garrick with unaccustomed enthusiasm. “When?”

“He said it didn’t matter.”

“Very good,” said Garrick, rubbing his hands together. “Perhaps during the day. How long were you there tonight before he appeared to you?”

“I saw him pretty much as soon as I got to the hotel.”

“Better and better. And if he is going to show you where the painting is—” He looked sharply at Ann. “Did he say he was going to show you the painting’s location, or describe it to you?”

Ann thought back to her conversation. “Definitely ‘show.’”

“And his visible presence—it is more perceptible to you than his verbal communications?”

“Yes. The visible part is sort of hazy as well, but if he leads me to where it is I feel pretty certain I can follow him.”

“Excellent. If we can devise a way to keep Ellen away from the hotel for a few hours tomorrow, that should be sufficient. Your driver can drop you off at the beginning of the road after she’s away.”

“Okay. Garrick, can we go inside? It’s still freezing out here.”

“Yes, yes.” Garrick killed the engine. They got out of the car and Garrick opened the back door to a kitchen that looked like it had been untouched by upgrades for half a century. Ann got a glimpse of a Sputnik-era refrigerator—the word “icebox” popped into her head—and an old wooden table and rush-seat chair before Garrick gestured her impatiently on to the hallway where he hung his coat on one of the pegs on the wall.

“Is your driver picking you up?”

“Oh. Yes.” Ann pulled out her cellphone and sent a text to Scott, then followed Garrick into his office, where he was lighting the fire. Ann sat in one of the leather chairs and wished he would offer her at least a mug of hot water.

Garrick sat behind the desk. “It is promising that Loring is willing to share this information with you, but disappointing that you can’t comprehend what he’s saying.” His earlier relative good cheer seemed to have dissipated a bit.

“Maybe I’ll be able to understand him better if I spend more time with him.”

“Unlikely. Or at least unlikely in the time we have.” Garrick tapped his fingers together. Finally he said, “It is not ideal, but perhaps if Loring is aware that I know that ‘The Lady’ is a painting, this game he has been playing will become less entertaining to him.”

“Maybe telling Ellen that it’s a painting would be helpful to her—maybe she doesn’t realize that.”

“Possibly. However, I believe it would be preferable to provide her with the information she ultimately desires—the location of ‘The Lady’—rather than providing her with possibly unhelpful partial information. She seems a bit overwrought about the entire situation.”

“You could try going during the day to talk with Loring. He didn’t seem to have a preference for nighttime when I talked with him. I could go with you.”