empathy.
There was a palpable eroticism about the photo, as well.
Don’t read into it.
Alone in the house, for all those years …
You’re making up a story.
Paul Folger would have been only twenty-two when he got back from the war …
Just stop it—
Someone stepped into the doorway from the hall and she turned to see who it was.
There was no one.
Her heart leapt in her chest and her mouth went dry as a bone.
There was still a sense of presence in the room—she felt absolutely as if someone were standing in the doorway.
Impossible. You see there’s no one there.
But she was frozen, completely unable to move.
And then just as suddenly, the feeling was gone. She forced herself to take a breath in, and out, and then she could move again.
All right, look—you have got to get hold of yourself.
She turned away from the door and continued her walk-by of the photos, but found no others of Paul and Caroline. Then she remembered that there were photos in the other room as well, the fox room. She left the library with some relief and moved into the hall.
The fox room—the trophy room is what it was probably called—was painted a pale institutional green that evoked a hospital, even though Laurel could not herself remember ever seeing a hospital wall painted anything but some variation of white. French doors led out onto the round balcony over the front porch—again, with a distressingly low balcony rail. Maybe people were just shorter, then, she thought to herself. A lot shorter.
The built-in shelves were crowded with silver hunting and riding cups; in fact, the lamps in the room were themselves made of silver trophies. The walls held paintings of the hunt and riders in hunting “pinks” (though the pink was as red as blood), and strange long-billed caps. Laurel walked along this wall as well, looking over sketches and old photos, of riders and horses and dogs—dozens of dogs. She stopped still, fascinated, in front of one grisly photo of a grandfatherly man with two small children, a boy and a girl no more than six or seven years old, impeccably decked in hunting costume—both with dark smears of what looked suspiciously like blood painted on their faces. The boy held up the severed head of a fox and the girl held the bloody tail.
Paul and Caroline?
They were avid hunters, Audra said in her head.
What a way to raise children, Laurel thought, and shuddered …
“The mask and the brush,” a voice said behind her and she spun around in shock.
Tyler was draped in a tall-backed armchair in the corner, one leg thrown casually over the armrest. He must have been there all along, but he seemed to have materialized out of thin air.
“God … ,” she gasped.
He half-smiled and nodded to the picture behind her. “That’s what they call the trophies, the head and the tail. ‘The mask and the brush.’ Nice photo, isn’t it? Kinda Friday the 13th.”
Her pulse was still pounding and she sat down hard at the table, the twin of one in the library, a round one of solid oak, with a lazy Susan built into the top.
Tyler watched her with those eyes, without moving a muscle, and she could hear her heart pounding, slow, steady thumps. It couldn’t have been him, last night. He wouldn’t have dared … And tried to make herself believe it.
He tipped his head back on the chair, without taking his eyes off her. “You’re not very comfortable here, are you?”
She half-laughed in spite of herself. “You could say that.”
He shrugged. “I could stay here a while, myself. I think it suits me. My plantation-owner roots and all.”
She felt an uneasy jolt at the thought.
He laughed. “Oh, now, that’s transparent of you. Yes, you’re in the bad ol’ South, now. Soaked in blood. You shouldn’t trust him, you know.”
The segue was nonexistent, but she knew exactly what he meant.
“Who?” she said stupidly.
Tyler didn’t even bother responding, but went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I really don’t think you should. I know guys like that.” He shot a veiled look in the general direction of the door. “Always scrambling for money ’cause they never had it and don’t know what to do with it when they do get it.”
She felt a chill as he said it—there was the unmistakable ring of truth, there. She heard Brendan’s voice in her head: “A little problem with a loan shark …”
Tyler was watching her with a knowing look on his face.