Page 56 of Drawing Home
“Why can’t you look on the bright side? I just said I’m going to spend the day with you tomorrow. You don’t have to go to the historical society. We’ll do something fun.”
“I don’t want to spend the day with you.”
“Penny, I’m really trying here. I need you to meet me halfway. Come on. What do you want to do?”
Penny looked up at her. “I want to go to the house. And I want to move in.”
Bea rested on top of the bed, pushing aside herNew Yorkerand her reading glasses. She couldn’t stop thinking about the drawings.
Why had Henry left them scattered around town? Surely he would have known that she would make the trip to Sag Harbor after his death. He knew she would notice the drawings, and he must have understood that she would not stop until she’d seen them all.
Up until today, the ones she’d found had been innocuous. But those drawings of that uncomfortable night? It was a provocation. Was he trying to remind her that she’d rejected him romantically and she’d rejected his move to the country, so she shouldn’t expect to inherit his estate? Or were the drawings confirmation of his intention to leave her the house and his art, reinforcing that while their relationship had always been simply professional, at least in the end he’d left his legacy in her hands?
It was maddening.
The house had to yield more clues. She stepped out of bed; the bones of her feet felt fragile against the hardwood floors, and she put on her slippers.
She knew everyone thought she was crazy. This whole business with the house had even driven Kyle to quit! But then, none of these people had known Henry. If they had, they would’ve understood that Henry Wyatt was not a man to leave his entire life’s work to a virtual stranger.
There must be something in that house that would help her case. But what? And where could it be? She’d already searched his desk. Henry, with his devotion to the spare and the aesthetically pleasing, had nothing as pedestrian as a filing cabinet. His paperwork was minimal. Bea had decades’ worth of business documents pertaining to his work in her own office in Manhattan, and he’d never had an interest in having his own copies. Victor had been in possession of the damn will.
She made her way down the hall to the office and rechecked the room, but she was confident she’d been thorough the first time, and she found nothing new.
Downstairs, she wandered aimlessly. Funny; Bea had been called the architect of Henry Wyatt’s career, but no one understood that Henry had been calling the shots all along. And was still calling them.
In the living room, shelves were embedded in the stone walls behind nearly invisible cabinets that were spring-activated and took only the lightest touch to open. She’d gone through these her first week in the house, but perhaps less carefully than the office and the bedrooms at this point. She checked them again, but they yielded nothing useful.
Frustrated, she walked back up the stairs to the bedroom. She sat on the bed, trying to think like Henry. What were his principles of design? Minimalism. Form follows function.
In Windsong, nothing looked like what it actually was; walls were windows, stairs floated, cabinets were invisible. But then, wasn’t that function following form? Oh, it was maddening, the whole thing. If she were a different type of person she would simply retreat back to Park Avenue. But she’d never given up on Henry.
She paced the room and then paused at the foot of the bed. The form always came first. Nothing was exactly as it appeared.
The wood base of the bed was thick and blockish, a few feet off the ground. Slowly, her back protesting with every inch, she lowered herself down, got onto her hands and knees, and examined the bed frame. Sure enough, she found two long, thin horizontal seams inches apart. She gingerly pressed the wood between them and jumped when a drawer slid out.
The drawer was shallow but functional enough to hold a few used DayMinder calendars, blank sketch pads, and graphite pencils. In the back, she found a thick comic book of some sort,The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl,volume 1. Strange.
She pulled out the book and flipped through it. Why was it tucked away here and not in Henry’s library? And since when did he read such juvenile material?
And then, a folded sheet of paper stuck between the last two pages. She shook it loose and spread it out on the floor. There, in Henry’s neat cursive writing, the words she’d been looking for:Last Will and Testament of Henry Wyatt.
I, Henry Joseph Wyatt, being of sound mind, leave my artwork and my house on Actors Colony Road, Sag Harbor, New York, to Bea Winstead of 720 Park Avenue, New York City, New York. It is my wish that the house at Actors Colony Road be turned into a permanent installation of my work and a public museum. The exception to this are the pieces noted below, which are to be donated to the Ellen Noel Art Museum in my hometown of Odessa, Texas. I also name Bea Winstead as executor of my estate.
Bea could scarcely breathe. It was dated May of 2000. It was old, but it was something! She closed her eyes, clutching the paper to her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
While Emma waited for Penny to get dressed, she watched Angus sprinkle brown sugar over thick slices of bacon. He lined them up a few inches apart on the baking sheet and slipped it into the oven.
“No good can come from that house,” he said, peeking through the oven window.
“Please don’t say that around Penny. She’s excited about it.”
Emma had been thinking long and hard about how to let Penny “have” her house without turning their entire lives upside down, and she’d decided they would use it the way other people used a vacation house.
“It’s our stay-cation house,” Penny had said gleefully.
