Unbind (66 page)

It was when I got back to my hotel that my thoughts turned back to that rose.

As I paced my room, I said to myself out loud, “Beauty masks a truth sometimes… oh no that’s not it. A rose… is perfect. Everybody loves a rose. The rose is beautiful and inoffensive. It’s love and passion, desire and…romance?”

Romance, romance, romance.
I repeated inside my mind.

“Nothing sadder than the end of a romance,” I told the room. “When the romance is over, what is there left? Unless you really love that person.”

It hit me like a sledgehammer.

She had given me plenty of hints. She wasn’t operating without motive.

The expense. It wasn’t money. It was the rose… the family rose. A family secret. Some sort of mystery… something.

I slept fitfully and woke with a mind to end this once and for all. I ordered a car to drive me up to Connecticut later that day and hoped I might find answers there. I needed to find out what was in that house.

I didn’t intend on staying the night but when Claire greeted me warmly and asked if I would, I sent my car away and agreed to one night. No more. I shouldn’t have even agreed to that—after all, evidence of my investigations languished in that hotel bedroom—unsecured. Yet I knew something rested in that house and if it meant me finally pulling this thing apart, that could only be good, right?

At dinner that night, which was just Claire, Dirk and me sat in the kitchen eating soup and bread in our skivvies, I watched them both carefully. They must have wondered what I was doing there but neither of them questioned it.

Finally Dirk said, “Does Cai know you’re here, Chloe?”

“No, he doesn’t.”

The elderly people exchanged glances I couldn’t interpret.

I made small talk. “No wedding or other function this week?”

“No, darling,” Claire explained. “Slow this time of year. Which is nice. We’re getting old, after all. It’ll soon be time for us to slink off, I think.”

“I agree, Claire. Not that I think either of you are incapable. Just deserving of a well-earned rest.”

“Thanks,” she replied warmly, but looking at Dirk, he looked suspicious.

“Do either of you know where you might retire?” I pushed on with the niceties.

“Kansas. It’s where Claire’s from,” Dirk began with a smile, finally, “I ought to go with her. After all we’ve been working together all these years and I have no place better to be.”

“You wouldn’t ever get married, the pair of you?” My smile, genuine.

Claire giggled. “Oh no. Dirk likes men, dear.”

“Oh, oh, I see! Oh! Good for you.” I hid behind my hand. I guess there were things that could still shock me.

Outside, it was a damp, cold March night. We were almost into spring but out in the country, the air seemed much cooler. I watched the elements beat against the windows and tinkles of rain hit panes of thin glass.

“What have you come to find, Chloe?” Claire smiled, drawing me from my thoughts.

I smiled back. I couldn’t help but like the woman. “Answers. I think. I’m not sure.”

“More than they’re worth, Chloe,” Dirk added to the conversation.

“Perhaps I might agree with you. However, I love Cai. Truly, I do. When you love someone, you know, you can’t help but want to save them.”

Claire raised her brows whereas Dirk could no longer look at me. Instead, he gazed at the table and his empty plate and bowl.

I pushed crumbs of crusty bread around my plate and found they wouldn’t form a pattern that pleased me. I lost myself in looking at the dregs of my minestrone, imagining pictures from what was left.

“Where did you hide her last work?” I lifted my head to look directly at Claire, who was surely friendlier with Claudia than Dirk was.

How did I know there was a last work? Or that she’d hidden it? Let’s just say, too many things pointed there. Two old people left running an old house… one woman’s reluctance to sell that place. One man’s indifference to what was rightfully his. Too many hints about art hiding history. Secrets.

“Hmm,” Claire smirked, a genuine fascination in her eyes. “I see why Cai loves you, Chloe. I do. However, your curiosity will only hurt someone in this case.”

There wasn’t a chill in that room, but there was a barrier put up. By them. Two people put in charge of a secret.

“You can be sure I won’t ever tell.”

Claire and Dirk stared at one another, considering their options. Neither of them wanted responsibility, I knew, so I made a guess. I asked them both, “Claudia’s old workroom?”

They didn’t deny it so we all stood and left the kitchen, heading upstairs together.

Claire unlocked the room with a skeleton key and I walked around, trying to imagine where you might hide something so precious yet so dangerous.

The floorboards were my first thought, but as I marched around, I realised they were all too well shined and uniform to have been recently pulled up or put down. They were as original.

The furniture was so sparse and the room so empty, there weren’t many places it could hide. There was no wood panelling that could perhaps be pulled back to reveal a secret cupboard. The empty easel stood right before the fireplace still and I felt the urge to pull it out of the way, getting Dirk to help me shift the heavy frame.

When I looked at the fireplace, I really hoped it wasn’t up the chimney. It looked as though a hundred spiders had a home in there.

I looked at Claire and she was biting her nails. I was close. So close. I knew it.

Feeling my discovery was near, I stared hard at the wallpaper and on closer inspection it seemed too much of a botch job. Done in a hurry.

I pressed a nail to a join in the black paper with white roses and found it was weak, not pasted down to last. I scratched and it peeled away easily to reveal something else beneath. Something much more beautiful. I scrambled fast, pulling and throwing large sheets behind me. Before long, a different picture stared back. I was amazed.

BEHIND THE SUPERFICIAL wallpaper was an image I had to stand back to be able to appreciate. You could see the chimney breast had once been painted grey like the rest of the room but something had been painted on top of that dull background.

A
trompe l’oeil.

It depicted the biggest, most beautiful bouquet of red roses I had ever seen. It was painted so that it looked real. As if that vase and the roses really were standing on the mantelpiece. The blooms sat in a strange, light-blue porcelain vase which had an exaggerated, curved lip resembling a calla lily—anyone who believed this was real would assume this should surely topple under its own weight. I stared, transfixed.
Those roses
. The strange thing was that there was a piece of string holding the bouquet tight shut, together.
If only I could untie that and let the flowers cascade and flow freely
. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I wanted to interact! The impulse to free those bulbous flowers and let them flow in that extraordinary vase was consuming.

You should have seen it. It was like you could smell it. The attention to detail was so fine, every little vein in those roses captured. Every thorn, sprouted. Little chips in the vase, even, and the fine threads of wear and tear captured too. The string seemed real! Those beautiful flowers eternalised.

A 3D illusion! I had to keep telling myself that! It was actually a painting!

It was magnificent, truly, it was! The attention to detail was the work of a true artist, a perfectionist only satisfied with the real deal. My mind recognised it was an act of creation but my heart felt otherwise. I saw something in that painting, a heartbeat seemingly tangible.

Unlike Van Gogh, the artist hadn’t written their name on the vase but did seem to have given the painting a title. In scrawl was the word
Unbind
hidden just beneath the thick lip of that impossible vase.

I saw something else, too. The arrangement of the flowers was done so that if you placed a mirror down the centre, you’d see exactly the same thing displayed on each side. It was a mirror image of itself, all the roses equal—if you envisaged a line running down the centre. There was nothing to distinguish these beauties then—this dozen roses, I counted—sitting here pretty.

This wasn’t just a painting but a work of trickery which some master had created.
Unbind
had mathematical substance as well as artistry.

Tears streamed from my eyes. No loveless, bereft soul could have crafted this.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” someone said, but it wasn’t Claire or Dirk.

Still, I knew that voice.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I took out a hanky and wiped my eyes, my nose.

“You can leave us.”

I determined Claire and Dirk leave the room behind us, their footsteps echoing as they walked downstairs.

Claudia stood at my side. I glanced sideways and saw her in a pink, Chanel suit edged with the classic black trim. Her hands gloveless, her fingers straight. The act, dropped.

“He painted it when he was 14. I remember,” Claudia looked vaguely winsome as she paused, “I woke up one morning and there it was. Fourteen, Chloe.”

I turned slowly to look at her head-on. I felt my lip wobble as I murmured, “I knew I could see him in it. I knew it was his.”

She struggled to smile but there was a softness in her eyes. “It was just after he got in touch with my sister. He thought he’d upset me. He didn’t know that Jenny was lost to me already and that I’d made my peace with that. She never understood me and I couldn’t blame her. After all, I’d gone off and lived a different life to her. I went my way, she hers. Like so many siblings, you reacquaint like strangers. I knew that if she came to
Sub Rosa
, she’d try to save me. Try to tell me that she was right… that Philippe was a bad apple. You know. That old chestnut. Of course I realised I’d fallen in love with the wrong man but I didn’t need her to tell me that. I also didn’t want her here. You see I feared what he was capable of. He kept us locked in this house because he had lots of people chasing him. If she’d come in and threatened him, he might have killed her. Or so I imagined. I was wrong to put ideas in Caius’s head but I was in love with a ghost… the ghost of my sister, my one true love. A lost love I missed dreadfully. He was the only one I could talk to sometimes, you see. So, to stop the youngster chasing his auntie… we made up some cruel story about Jennifer sending me roses. Roses I hated. Cai, the sensitive soul he is, painted this in response.”

Claudia held her hand out and motioned at the creation’s overall effect. She continued, “He spied on me, I guess. He snuck around, hid behind corners… we all knew he did. I once told him that I yearned to paint the roses, but I struggled. He didn’t realise that for me, they represented a time before I became driven by my darker nature. As true artists… we must remain true to our feelings at the time, not look back on fond memories with askew nostalgia. I always set out to paint the roses. I made a song and dance of it so that Philippe and the others felt sure I would implode if I didn’t get the chance to paint. Yet the roses never manifested.” Her face fell, and she flicked her eyes back to
Unbind.
“Worse things did make their way onto canvas. Dark creations from my deepest depths. Pictures I had to paint but had to be destroyed afterwards. Surely, they’d have caused a storm out there in the art world, but I didn’t want my son to see what his mother was like inside. Abused. Traumatised. Wronged. Broken and pretty much, darn right sick.”

She walked closer to the fireplace and stroked the painting, sighing. “There is much more to this tale, Chloe. Shall we go down and have a brandy? You look like you could do with one.”

I was totally bloody freaked out if I were honest. Who was this woman? I babbled, “Sure, yeah, sure.”

Why not. I mean, it wasn’t like she had humiliated me not so long ago
…

I nodded slowly and she gestured we leave the room. I walked the staircase numb, totally bamboozled. Surely, revelations on an epic scale were a hair’s breadth away.