Page 46 of One Last Secret

I regret telling Sean to call the police. I should have let someone else discover her apartment. The door was ajar. Reyes would certainly dust for prints if she hasn’t already. Someone would have realized soon enough that the two of us were there. I just didn’t think how it would look to have the two of us the first ones there.

I have to learn what really happened. I have to find the answer quickly before Reyes learns about Annie and arrests me. I may have to do it without Sean, too, since he's now suffering legal trouble on my behalf.

That thought sends a wave of guilt through me. He warned me not to go with him, and I forced him to take me. He's experienced with this sort of thing, and I'm not. Now, he's suffering because of my own stubbornness. I have to learn what really happened for his sake as well as mine.

The tea has soothed me enough that I’m able to move with only mild soreness. I head upstairs to Victor’s studio. I’ve only had a brief look at the room, but if there’s a clue to Victor’s recent actions, it’s probably hidden somewhere in the abstract drawings that to his mind transcend reality.

The room is still taped off, but at this point, the police have had their chance to look. If entering here makes me even more a suspect, so be it.

There is a thin layer of dust over everything. Dirt and leaves have blown in through the shattered window and every now and then my eyes fall on the corpse of an insect, legs stiff and curled in the throes of death. It makes the room look like a tomb. Perhaps it is.

The paintings in immediate view are unfinished. They’re mostly of the angular pseudo-men that seem to be the subject of Victor’s most recent artistic inspirations. Some of them are only line drawings.

There are several cabinets in the room. A few of these are opened and their contents scattered on the ground. Paints, brushes, oil pens, and a few other odds and ends.

Two remain closed and undamaged. Their presence is an almost stark contrast to the state of the rest of the studio. I open these and find dozens of completed paintings placed carefully into felt slides. I pull a few of these out and look at them.

They are of a different style than the other works I’ve seen. They aren’t wholly abstract the way his current paintings are. They’re not realistic or representational either. I am no artstudent, but the closest analogy I can give is that they appear to be images captured through dense fog from a great distance.

Despite the blurry impressionism of the pieces, the subject matter is clear. The paintings are of bodies of water with a figure or figures in the distance. I pull more paintings out and compare them. In some of the paintings, the ocean is a wide and flat expanse. In others, a massive rock can be seen to the right of the figures.

Again, in some paintings, there is only one figure, while in others, there are two. In the paintings with one figure, the figure is male, and in the others, a female stands next to the male. The male in the figure is either Elias Blackwood or Victor himself. The female must be Annie.

What could this mean? Is it an homage to his mentor and to Annie? An homage to Victor’s own grief and an attempt to cope with the loss of two people who were very important to him? Is it a symbol of the end he sees coming for himself, perhaps the end he wishes for?

A more sobering thought occurs to me. The female could be Celeste. This could be Victor expressing the slow collapse of his own mind, his downward spiral into grief. He could have seen himself falling faster and faster toward the “vanishing point” when his sanity would fail him. He could have seen the same tendencies in Celeste and fear that she would join him in his descent into madness.

A chill runs through me. I am not a believer in prophecy, but Victor’s self-awareness has borne itself out in reality. He may not have been kidnapped after all but simply lost himself to the vanishing point. And Celeste may not have simply run from fear but instead suffered the same collapse.

But what about Lisa? She still doesn’t make sense. Unless… perhaps Victor kidnapped her?

I shake my head. Enough speculation. I must find an answer, not try to guess it.

I look at the rock. Were there an equivalent edifice on the other side, I would say it was representative of Fairy Cove, but there is only the structure on the right. Could this be yet another vanishing point?

I look through the rest of the studio, hoping to find something, some hint that might tell me exactly where to look, but these two cabinets are the only ones that hold completed works, and all of them are variations on the same painting. There is no paperwork or writing of any kind, no journal that might give me a deeper insight into Victor’s mind.

I head to Celeste’s room. She is an extremely sensitive and intuitive girl. She may have gleaned a deeper understanding of her father’s plans and recorded them somewhere. I know I’m grasping at a straw, but I feel very strongly that I’m right on the cusp of understanding this mystery, and if I could only find the one missing piece, then everything would make sense.

The search begins much as it does in Victor’s studio. There is no journal or diary anywhere to be found, and most of the paintings are incomplete sketches that don’t seem to have anything to do with a vanishing point. The glaring exceptions are the drawings of her father stepping through a ring of light. If there’s a clue to be found in that dark blue water and the halo of brighter blue light, then it’s lost on me.

I look through her closet for other drawings. I feel a touch of guilt spying on her like this, but nothing is more important than getting her home safely, and the clue to that might be here among these drawings.

I find stacks of paper that reveal nothing. The subjects range from fantasy sketches of dragons, knights and princesses to still lifes and landscapes of everythingbuta vanishing point. When I finish looking through everything, I release a soft cryof frustration. There has to besomething! I willnotaccept that they simply vanished without a trace.

I sit on the edge of Celeste’s bed and wait for my breathing to calm. Celeste has a mirror on top of the desk in her room. The reflection that stares back at me is shocking. My eyes are wild and bloodshot, and my hair is matted. Wisps hang over my forehead, a few strands even touching my lips. I don’t notice them until I see them in the mirror.

I look back at the image of Victor stepping through the blue halo above the water. For a moment, I envy the man. Wherever Victor is now, he no longer needs to worry about his walls crumbling down. They’ve already crumbled, and he can finally be free. Perhaps I’ll be so lucky one day.

I shiver at that thought. I think myself perfectly lucid, but the woman in the mirror is not a sane woman. I can’t help but wonder how close I am to falling into my own vanishing point. How much more can I endure before I close my eyes and open them to find myself surrounded by people in white coats?

CHAPTER TWENTY

“So you just want to stay here for the rest of your life? Get your degree, marry an Ivy League brat, join a country club and chuckle at all the fools who don’t want to live like rich snobs?”

“What on Earth are you on about, Annie? I’m in school here. I can’t just leave that behind because you don’t get on with Mother.”

Annie chuckles and looks up at the ceiling. “Oh myGod!Do you even realize how pretentious you sound? ‘Mother,’ and ‘Father.’ Like we’re all characters in some Victorian novel.”

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