Relief. Whatever weirdness she’d been a part of last night, at least she hadn’t done a number on Caleb’s room.
She closed Caleb’s door and went downstairs for her breakfast.
While Jeff Channing had known Etta Jellin for years, it never occurred to him to turn to the realtor for information about previous occupants of the red-brick house on Legare Street. Instead he did what his legal training had taught him to do, searching the house’s title. He’d done this sort of thing any number of times in connection with real estate transactions, and there was no particular difficulty now in tracing the ownership of the house down through the years since it was built in 1822 by a Colonel Joseph Warren Clay.
The house had changed hands half a dozen times during the nineteenth century. A man named James Petersmith had bought it in 1903. His children had sold shortly after the 1929 stock market crash, and since then the house had never remained in the hands of a single owner for longer than seven years. Several owners had bought and sold the place within periods of less than a year.
A curious history, he thought. Americans were a mobile lot, certainly, especially since World War Two. He recalled reading somewhere that twenty percent of the nation’s families pulled up roots and moved every year. But homes in Old Charleston didn’t tend to turn over quickly. The sort of people who were attracted to them tended to stay put for a while.
Maybe there was something about the house, something vaguely disquieting that made its occupants sufficiently uncomfortable to sell and move on. The Traphagens, who had sold to the Jardells, had been transferred to another location, and no doubt other residents had had similarly sound reasons for moving. But it seemed a fair assumption that at least a few of the house’s recent owners had been made uneasy by the night sounds and had shrunk from the damp. Perhaps they’d seen things in the corners of the bedrooms too. Perhaps their noses had wrinkled at the smell of gas when the stove’s pilot lights had refused to stay lit. After a while people could weary of rationalizing the peculiar and just get out... unless, like himself, a person was concerned about one of them and was drawn in, out of curiosity and concern, to probe further, regardless of realistic skepticism... in spite of it...
Odd, too, that no one had even gotten around to replacing the old gas range. Odd, for that matter, that so many owners had made so few changes in the old house.
Odder still that the portrait had lain unnoticed for years until Ariel came on it. You would have thought some previous owner would have cleaned out the attic.
By the time he left the Deeds Registry, Jeff had covered a sheet of paper with names running all the way back from Traphagen, Carl and Julia, to Clay, Colonel Joseph Warren. He scanned the list, unsure that it represented anything beyond busywork. The subject of the portrait in Ariel’s room might be on the list, and if so hers was very likely one of the first six or eight names on it. But it seemed even more likely to him that some recent tenant had picked up the portrait at an auction or garage sale, then stowed it in the attic and forgot it at moving time. The painting needn’t have anything to do with Bobbie’s house; indeed the woman it depicted might well never have been within five hundred miles of Charleston in her life.
Fool’s business, he thought. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything better to do. He’d been letting his work slide shamefully lately, staying away from the office for long stretches every day and finding himself incapable of concentrating during those rare hours that he did spend at his desk. The informal title search he’d just conducted was the first genuine legal work he’d done in far too long.
It was, no question, getting to him and he didn’t know just what to do about it. His inability to work was just a symptom, and not the worst of the lot. His mind was acting strangely, hurling uncomfortable thoughts at him, leaving him anxious and jumpy inside however calm the exterior he managed to present to the world. His perceptions were askew, his judgment unreliable.
He kept a lid on this most of the time. When Bobbie had shown him the portrait, he’d been strong and logical and reassuring, the apostle of pure reason.
Yet he’d looked at the portrait and had seen, instantly. Ariel’s face. Ariel as an adult, strong and seductive, pale face shining and damned eyes burning hypnotically as they had burned when they had held and looked into his. That was what he had seen — but he had given no sign, and a later glance told him, all reasonably, that the portrait was merely a portrait, the woman in it merely a long-dead flower of the south.
Sometimes it seemed obvious to him that the only answer lay in breaking things off with Bobbie once and for all. The hours they spent in interchangeable motel rooms, for all the frenzy and heightened tension, were increasingly unsatisfying, leaving him time and again with a feeling not unlike a hangover, dry of mouth, short of breath, determined never to touch the stuff again. That he elected to continue the affair sometimes seemed to him the clearest evidence of all that he was indeed losing his grip on things, that he was truly losing his mind.
And yet something inside him kept insisting that Bobbie was the core of his life, his destiny — she was the mother of his dead child... they’d shared life and death, after all — that the hours he spent away from her were unbearably flat and lifeless. Just the other night he’d been sitting in the basement recreation room with Elaine and the girls, watching something unmemorable on the tube, glancing from time to time at the wet bar and the knotty pine walls and the recessed lighting, then at his wife and daughters, then once more at the oversize color television set. The good life in the suburbs, he had thought, and all of it hollow, pointless, and he found himself yearning to be away from all of this, away from it and from them forever, alone somewhere on an island or in a city or off in the middle of the desert with Bobbie — her pull was that strong, however much she upset him.
There was a time, he thought now, when that might have worked. When she was pregnant with his child, that would have been the moment for them to turn their backs on everything and just go. But instead it was the moment that had just gone, and he had stayed with Elaine while she had stayed with David, and Caleb was born and died and—
Well, fool’s business, he told himself, was better than no business at all. He left the Deeds Registry, strode on foot to his office and past it, and headed for the newspaper offices.
Erskine was waiting for her when school let out. “Well, we’re on our way,” he said. “Got busfare?”
“Oh.”
“Nice day for an expedition, isn’t it? Sunny, not too cold out.”
“Maybe we should forget it.”
He looked at her.
“Well, I haven’t even seen him around the past few days,” she said. “Maybe Roberta just had to see him for some reason or other, and then we happened to see him a few times out of coincidence.”
“Some coincidence.”
“It’s possible.”
“Why would she be seeing some lawyer, anyway?”
“Maybe to get a divorce.”
“From David?”
“Well, who else is she married to, birdbrain? Of course from David. She’d be glad to get a divorce from me but you can’t divorce children. It doesn’t work that way. The only way she can get rid of me...”
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say the only way she’ll get rid of me is by killing me, but I don’t want to say it too loud. I wouldn’t want to give her any ideas.”
They walked as they talked, heading automatically for the bus stop on Meeting Street. Erskine pointed out that Channing had been at the funeral, that he had been cropping up in their lives too frequently for his connection to be merely professional.