“We didn’t go.”
“Does Erich know you called me?”
“Erich’s away. He took the children.”
He whistled. “That’s what Dad . . .” Then he stopped. She felt his glance, was acutely aware of his wind-tanned skin, his thick, sandy hair, the long capable fingers that gripped the steering wheel. Erich always made her uneasy; his very presence charged the atmosphere. Mark’s presence had exactly the opposite effect.
It had been months since the one time she’d been in his home. At night it had the same welcoming atmosphere that she remembered. The wing chair, its velvet upholstery somewhat worn, was drawn up to the fireplace. An outsized oak coffee table in front of a Lawson couch held newspapers and magazines. The shelves on either side of the fireplace were crammed with books of every shape and size.
Mark took her coat. “Farm life certainly hasn’t fattened you up,” he observed. “Have you had dinner yet?”
“No.”
“I thought not.” He poured sherry for them. “My housekeeper was off today. I was just about to cook a hamburger when you phoned. I’ll be right back.”
Jenny sat on the couch, then instinctively reached down, pulled off her boots and curled up. She and Nana had had a Lawson sofa when she was growing up. She could remember wedging herself into a corner of it on rainy afternoons and happily reading the hours away.
In a few minutes Mark returned with a tray. “Minnesota plush,” he smiled. “Hamburgers, French fries, lettuce and tomato.”
The food smelled delicious. Jenny took a bite from hers and realized she’d been famished. She knew Mark was taking his cue from her, waiting for her to explain to him why she had called him. How much should she tell? Would Mark be horrified to know what Erich believed about her?
He was sitting in the wing chair, his long legs stretched toward her, his eyes concerned, his forehead creased in thought. She realized she didn’t mind being studied by him. Oddly it was comforting, as though he would analyze what was wrong and make it right. His father had much that same look. Luke! She hadn’t asked about him. “How is your father?”
“Coming along, but he gave me a real scare. He wasn’t feeling well even before he went back to Florida. Then he had the attack. But he’s in his own place now and looks good. He really wanted you to come visit him, Jenny. He still does.”
“I’m glad he’s better.”
Mark leaned forward. “Tell me about it, Jenny.”
She told him everything, looking straight at him, watching his eyes darken, watching as tight lines formed around his eyes and mouth, watching as his expression softened when she talked about the baby and her voice broke.
“You see. I can understand why Erich believed I’ve done these terrible things. But now I don’t believe I did them. So that means some woman is impersonating me. I was so sure it was Rooney but it can’t be her. Now I wonder . . . Do you think Elsa? It seems so farfetched that she’d hold a grudge for twenty-five years. . . . Erich was only a child. . . .”
Mark did not reply. His face was troubled now, grave. “You don’t think I could do those things?” Jenny burst out. “My God, are you like Erich? Do you think . . .”
The nerve under her left eye began to jump. She put her hand up to her face to stop it, then felt her knees start to tremble. Throwing her head down on her lap, she hugged her legs. Her whole body was shaking now, out of control.
“Jenny. Jenny.” Mark’s arms were around her, holding her. Her head was against his throat. His lips were on her hair.
“I couldn’t hurt anyone. I can’t sign and say that I could . . .”
His arms tightened. “Erich is in . . . insecure. . . . Oh, Jenny.”
Long minutes passed before the trembling stopped. She made herself pull away. She felt his arms release her. Wordlessly they looked at each other, then Jenny turned away. There was an afghan draped over the back of the couch. He tucked it around her. “I think we could both use coffee.”
While he was in the kitchen, she looked into the fireplace, watched as the log split and broke and caved into glowing embers. Suddenly she felt exhausted. But it was a different kind of fatigue, not tense and numbing but relaxing, the kind that came after a race had been run.
Unburdening herself to Mark, she felt as though she had rolled a stone off her shoulders. Listening to the clink of the cups and saucers in the kitchen, smelling the perking coffee, hearing his footsteps as he walked between stove and cabinet, remembering the feel of those arms . . .
When Mark brought in the coffee, she was able to make practical statements that helped dispel the emotionally charged atmosphere. “Erich knows I won’t stay with him. The minute he brings the girls back I’ll leave.”
“You’re sure you’re going to leave him, Jenny?”
“As fast as I can. But first I want to force him to bring the girls back. They’re my children.”
“He’s right that as their adoptive father, legally they’re just as much his as yours. And, Jenny, Erich is capable of staying away indefinitely. Let me talk to a few people. I have a lawyer friend who’s an expert in family law. But until then, when Erich phones, whatever you do, don’t antagonize him; don’t tell him you’ve been talking to me. Promise me that?”
“Of course.”
He drove her home, stopping the car at the millhouse. But he insisted on walking with her through the quiet fields to the house. “I want to be sure you’re in,” he said. “Go right upstairs and if everything is all right, pull down the shades in your room.”
“What do you mean, if everything is all right?”
“I mean that if by any chance Erich decided to come back tonight and realized that you were out, there might be trouble. I’ll call you tomorrow after I speak to a few people.”
“No, don’t. Let me phone you. Clyde knows every call I get.”
When they got to the dairy barn, he said, “I’ll watch you from here. Try not to worry.”
“I’ll try. The one thing I don’t worry about is that Erich does adore Tina and Beth. He’ll be very good to them. That at least is a consolation.”
Mark squeezed her hand but did not answer. Quickly she slipped along the side of the path through the west door into the kitchen and looked around. The cup and saucer she had left draining on the sink were still there. She smiled bitterly. She could be sure Erich hadn’t come. That cup and saucer would have been put away.
Hurrying upstairs, she went into the master bedroom and began to pull down the shades. From one of the windows she watched as Mark’s tall form disappeared into the darkness.
Fifteen minutes later she was in bed. This was the hardest time of all, when she couldn’t walk across the hall and tuck Tina and Beth in. She tried to think of all the ways Erich would find to amuse them. They had loved going to the county fair with him last summer. Several times he’d spent a whole day with them in the amusement park. He was endlessly patient with the children.
But both girls had sounded so fretful when he let them speak to her that first night he’d taken them away.
Of course by now they’d be used to her absence, just the way they’d gotten used to her being in the hospital.
As she had told Mark, there was the one consolation that she wasn’t worried about the girls.
Jenny remembered the way Mark had squeezed her hand when she said that.
Why?
All night she lay awake. If not Rooney . . . if not Elsa . . . then who?
At dawn she got up. She could not wait for Erich to come to her. She tried to close off the terrible nagging fears, the awful possibilities that had occurred to her during the night.
The cabin. She had to find it. Every instinct told her the place to begin was in the cabin.
35
She began looking for the cabin at dawn. At four A.M. she’d turned on the radio and heard the weather report. The temperature was dropping sharply. It was now twelve degrees Fahrenheit. A strong cold wind from Canada was driving it down. A major sno
wstorm was predicted. It should hit the Granite Place area by tomorrow evening.
She made a thermos of coffee to take with her, put an extra sweater under her ski suit. Her breasts were so sore. Thinking of the baby so much during the night had been enough to start them throbbing. She could not let herself think about Tina and Beth now. She could only pray, numb, pleading words. . . . Take care of them, please. Let no harm come . . .
She knew the cabin must be about twenty minutes’ walk from the edge of the woods. She’d start at the spot where Erich always disappeared into the trees and crisscross back and forth from that spot. It didn’t matter how long it took.
At eleven she returned to the house, heated soup, changed her socks and mittens, found another scarf to tie around her face and set out again.
At five, just as the shadows were lengthening to near darkness, just as she was despairing that she would have to give up the search, she skied over a hilly mound and came on the small, bark-roofed cabin that had been the first Krueger home in Minnesota.
It had a closed-up, unused look, but what had she expected? That the chimney would be capped with smoke, lamps would be glowing, that . . . Yes. She dared to hope that Beth and Tina might be in here with Erich.
She kicked off her skis and with the hammer broke a window, then stepped over the low sill into the cabin. It was frigidly cold, with the deep chill of an unheated, sunless place. Blinking to adjust her eyes to the gloom, Jenny went to the other windows, pulled up the shades and looked around.
She saw a twenty-foot-square room, a Franklin stove, a faded Oriental rug, a couch . . . And paintings.
It seemed that every square inch of the walls was covered with Erich’s art. Even the dim light could not hide the exquisite power and beauty of his work. As always the awareness of his genius calmed her. The fears she had harbored during the night suddenly seemed ludicrous.
The tranquillity of the subjects he had chosen: the polebarn in a winter storm, the doe, head poised about to flee into the woods, the calf reaching up to its mother. How could the person who could paint like this with so much sensitivity, so much authority, also be so hostile, so suspicious?
She was standing in front of a rack filled with canvases. Something about the top one caught her eye. Not understanding, she began to flip rapidly through the paintings in the rack. The signature in the righthand corner. Not bold and scrawling like Erich’s but delicately lettered with fine brushstrokes, a signature more in keeping with the peaceful themes in the paintings: Caroline Bonardi. Every one of them.
She began to study the paintings on the wall. Those that were framed were signed Erich Krueger. The unframed ones, Caroline Bonardi.
But Erich had said that Caroline had very little talent. . . .
Her eyes raced back and forth between a framed painting with Erich’s signature, an unframed one signed by Caroline. The same use of diffused light, the same signature pine tree in the background, the same blending of color. Erich was copying Caroline’s work.
No.
The framed canvases. Those were the ones he’d planned to exhibit next. Those were the ones he’d signed. He hadn’t painted them. The same artist had done all of these. Erich was forging his name to Caroline’s art. That was why he’d been so flustered when she pointed out that the elm in one of his supposedly new paintings had been cut down months before.
A charcoal sketch caught her eye. It was called Self-Portrait. It was a miniature of Memory of Caroline, probably the preliminary sketch Caroline had done before she started the painting that was her masterpiece.
Oh, God. Everything. Every emotion that she had attributed to Erich through his work was a lie.
Then why was he here so much? What did he do here? She saw the staircase, rushed up it. The loft sloped with the pitch of the roof and she had to bend forward at the top stair before she stepped into the room.
As she straightened up, a nightmarish blaze of color from the back wall assaulted her vision. Shocked, she stared at her own image. A mirror?
No. The painted face did not move as she approached it. The dusky light from the slitlike window played on the canvas, shading it in streaks, like a ghostly finger pointing.
A collage of scenes: violent scenes painted in violent colors. The center figure, herself, her mouth twisted in grief, staring down at puppetlike bodies. Beth and Tina slumped together on the floor, their blue jumpers tangled, their eyes bulging, their tongues protruding, blue corduroy belts wound around their throats. Far up on the wall behind her image, a window with a dark blue curtain. Peering through the opening in the curtain Erich’s face, triumphant, sadistic. And all through the canvas in shades of green and black, a slithery figure, half-woman, half-snake, a woman with Caroline’s face, the cape wrapped around her like the scaly skin of the snake. Caroline’s figure bending over a surrealistic bassinette, a bassinette suspended from a hole in the sky, the woman’s hands, grotesque, outsized like whale flippers covering the baby’s face, the baby’s hands thrust over his head, the fingers starlike, spread on the pillow.
The Caroline figure in the maroon coat, reflected in the windshield of a car; another face beside hers. Kevin’s face, exaggerated, staring, grotesque, frightened, his bruised temple swelling into the windshield. The Caroline figure, her cape flung around her, holding the hooves of a wild horse, guiding them to descend on the sandy-haired figure on the ground. Joe. Joe cringing away from the hooves.
Jenny heard the sound from her throat, the keening wail, the screams of protest. It wasn’t Caroline who was half-woman, half-snake. It was Erich’s face peering out from the tangled dark hair, Erich’s eyes wildly staring at her from the canvas.
No. No. No. These twisted, tortured revelations, this art—evil incarnate, brilliance beside which the pastel elegance of Caroline’s talent faded into insignificance.
Erich had not painted the canvases he claimed as his own. But those he had painted were the genius of a twisted mind. They were shocking, awesome in their power, evil—and insane!
Jenny stared at her own image, at the faces of her children, their pleading eyes as the cord tightened around the small white throats.
At last she forced herself to wrench the canvas from the wall, her unwilling fingers grasping it as though they were closing around the fires of hell.
Somehow she managed to snap on her skis, start back through the woods. Night was descending, darkness spreading. The canvas caught the wind like a sail, whipped her from her own vague path, bruised her against trees. The wind mocked the constant screams for help that she heard screeching from her throat. Help me. Help me. Help me.
She lost the path, turned around in the darkness, saw again the outline of the cabin. No. No.
She would freeze out here, freeze and die out here, before she could find anyone to stop Erich if it weren’t already too late. She lost track of time, not knowing how long she stumbled and fell and picked herself up and began again; how long she clutched the damning canvas to her, how long she screamed. She only knew that her voice was breaking into hoarse sobs when somehow she saw a glint through a clump of trees and realized she was at the edge of the woods.
The glint she had seen was the reflection of the moon on the granite stone of Caroline’s grave.
With a last terrible effort she skied across the open fields. The house was totally dark; only the faint light of the crescent moon revealed its outlines. But the windows of the office were bright. She headed there, the canvas flapping more wildly without the trees to break the sharp wind.
She could no longer scream; there were no sounds left except the guttural moans she heard in her throat; her lips still formed the words help me, help me.
At the door of the office she tried to turn the handle with her frozen hands, tried to kick off her skis, but could not force the binders to release. Finally she banged at the door with her ski pole until it was flung open, and she fell forward into Mark’s arms.
“Jenny!” His voice broke. “Jenny!”
&nbs
p; “Steady, Mrs. Krueger.” Someone was pulling the skis off her feet. She knew that burly body, that thick, blunt profile. It was Sheriff Gunderson.
Mark was trying to pry her fingers loose from the canvas. “Jenny, let me see that.” And then his awed voice. “Oh, my God.”
Her own voice was a witch’s croak: “Erich. Erich painted it. He killed my baby. He dresses like Caroline. Beth. Tina. . . . Maybe he’s killed them too.”
“Erich painted this?” This sheriff’s voice, incredulous.
She whirled on him. “Have you found my girls? Why are you here? Are my girls dead?”
“Jenny.” Mark was holding her tightly, his hand stopping the flow of words from her mouth. “Jenny, I called the sheriff because I couldn’t reach you. Jenny, where did you find this?”
“In the cabin. . . . So many paintings. But not his. Caroline painted them.”
“Mrs. Krueger . . .”
On him she could vent her pain. She mimicked his heavy voice. “Anything you want to tell me, Mrs. Krueger? Anything you suddenly remembered?” She began to sob.
“Jenny,” Mark implored, “it’s not the sheriff’s fault. I should have realized. Dad had begun to suspect . . .”
The sheriff was studying the canvas, his face suddenly deflated, the skin folding into limp creases. His eyes were riveted on the upper-right-hand corner of the painting, with the bassinette suspended from a hole in the sky and the grotesque Caroline-like figure bending over it. “Mrs. Krueger, Erich came to me. He said he understood that there’d been talk about the baby’s death. He urged me to request an autopsy.”
The door swung open. Erich, Jenny thought. Oh, my God, Erich. But it was Clyde who rushed in, his expression frightened and disapproving. “What in hell is going on around here?” He looked at the canvas. Jenny watched as his leathery face drained to the color of white suede.
“Clyde, who’s in there?” Rooney called. Her footsteps approached, crackling on the icy snow.