Page 147 of The Seven Rings
“A responsibility,” she corrected. “But… is there anything you can tell me—the rings—how to find them? How to get them? How to stop Dobbs?”
“I don’t know the answers. The portraits… something, but I don’t know.”
“The portraits of the brides. You and Dad painted them. When?”
He shook his head. “In dreams. It feels like dreaming. I can’t stay much longer. I haven’t been able to show you, speak with you this way before.”
She saw frustration now as he lifted his hands. “It seems to me death brings as many questions as it does answers. I think, I can’t know, it takes time to come like this.”
“Johanna might know. Can you ask her?”
Grief filled his eyes. “I can’t. We can’t be together.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The curse, the goddamn curse. It must be. At times I can sense her, almost feel her. I think I hear her voice, but I can’t find her, or see her clearly, or touch her. It’s a kind of torture. She stands in the way. Dobbs stands in the way.
“So much to ask of you, my brother’s only child. Break the curse, Sonya. Find a way. You’re the hope, the key, the answer.”
The fire snapped to life, Jon Bon Jovi sang “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
Deuce lifted his hand from his knight, grinned at Collin. “Checkmate.”
Collin stared, cursed, laughed. “Well, damn it.”
And they vanished.
Sonya stood a moment, fingers pressed to her eyes.
Then she went back to her desk, sat, and wrote it all out.
“Clover, are you with Charlie? Can you be with Charlie?”
Clover went back to Carole King. “So Far Away.”
“Oh God, that’s so cruel. And that’s the damn point, isn’t it?”
She went downstairs. She needed to get out, get the air, think. But stopped by the music room.
“The portraits—two to go—but the portraits are part of the answer. The rings are in the portraits.”
She walked over, touched the ring on Johanna’s finger.
“Yeah, okay, silly to think I could just take it out of the canvas. But then again, still two to go. Maybe when they’re all here?”
She backtracked, went up to Cleo’s studio, opened the closet.
Felt her hope drop.
“Not yet. What the hell are you waiting for?”
As she closed the door, Dobbs slammed furniture in the Gold Room.
“Oh, bite me.”
She walked to the curved windows, looked out at sea and sky. Yes, a perfect day, and she’d go out and absorb just that.
As she turned, she noticed the open sketchbook on Cleo’s desk, and the figures of a hulking mass of a man, the smiling face. A handsome face until you really looked. Then? Everything about it just a little off, as if it was still being formed. And what it would become would not be handsome.
