Page 56 of Haunted By You
He must have zoned out while scrolling, because her voice gave him a jolt.
“I think I found something.”
Nineteen
Erielle’s heartwas pounding as she studied the symbol painted onto the tree. It was one of the same symbols carved into the window frames, and unique enough that it couldn’t just be a swipe of a paintbrush.
Samson’s chair scraped against the linoleum and he rounded to look over her shoulder. He’d showered that morning and still smelled of his soap and shampoo, and her biscuits. It was an oddly arousing combination.
“Does that look intentional to you?” she asked, forcing her mind back to the business at hand.
“It does. But the question remains. What does it mean?”
“Do you have any paper?”
He patted down his chest through his T-shirt, as if to ask where he would keep it. She jumped up from the table and went to the foyer, ripped a flap off one of the boxes and returned to the kitchen. She dug through a couple of drawers before she found some pens. Hoping they weren’t too dried out, she plopped back onto the chair and, after a bit of scribbling to get the ink flowing, sketched out a rough copy of the painting. Once she had the scale down, she drew the image in the approximate location on the sketch that it was on the painting.
“I don’t want to draw on the painting,” she explained as she did it.
“Let’s see if it will show up in a picture on here,” he said, and handed her the phone.
She snapped, then zoomed in, and shook her head. “I don’t see it in the picture.” Already she was anxious to see if she could find other hidden symbols, so she moved the napkin guide over. And over. And over.
A thrill raced through her as she found another hidden in the Spanish moss, another in the moon’s reflection on the surface of the swamp. She noted them dutifully on the sketch.
“Who’s the artist?” Samson asked from behind the laptop screen. “Maybe I can look him up. Maybe that can give us some answers, since I’m not making any progress with the symbols. I mean, I thought I had it, but it turned out to be a made-up language from some fantasy novel.”
“I mean. This could be made up, but I don’t know about a fantasy novel. My grandfather loved to read, but that wasn’t his genre.” She lifted the corner of the napkin, not wanting to lose her place. “The signature is partly hidden by the frame. Hard to read.”
“Why would any of this be easy,” he muttered, rising and walking over. “Let’s see if we can get it out of the frame.”
She held up a marker over the painting, ready to mark her spot, thought better of it, and marked the spot on the sketch instead.
Samson slid the painting in front of him, turned it over and pried it from the frame. Part of the signature peeled off of the painting and stuck to the frame. She turned to a kitchen drawer and came up with a butter knife, which she used to chisel the stuck paint from the corner of the frame.
“Why would someone put a wet painting into a frame?” she muttered as she slipped the blade along the wood.
“Seems like something an amateur would do.”
She peered at what remained of the signature on the painting, then carefully placed what she peeled from the frame, lining it up with the painting. “Can you make that out?”
He leaned closer. “I can’t tell if that’s a C or an A.”
“Alvin, maybe? Alvin Doctorow?”
She seemed like she was stretching on that last bit, because it was a D and a squiggle and a t, sure, but then practically a straight line.
“So what are we going to do when we find this guy?” he asked. “Go to him and demand to know why he painted a haunted picture?”
“I mean.” She lifted a hand after setting a mixing bowl on the counter. “We can find out more about him, if it could be the painting or something else, you know? Some other reason?”
“Let’s see what we can find.”
As much as Erielle wanted to keep researching, every day she kept the dumpster cost money, so she had to at least cart some stuff out to it. At least hauling junk freed up her brain, gave her restless thoughts somewhere else to go.
“Hey, so Allison has a New Age shop,” she said, walking back into the library where Samson was working
Samson was balanced on the stepstool, tugging at the books along the top shelf. His white T-shirt was streaked with grime, clinging to his chest and shoulders thanks to the swampy humidity. The fan in the corner only stirred the thick air, sending his dark hair into his eyes until he pushed it back with the back of his wrist.
