Darkening Around Me. Barbara Hancock J.

      Chapter Two

      It was late and I was hungry. The lunch I’d eaten on the flight from Denver was a vague cardboard memory. This I told myself as I bathed and changed for dinner though my empty stomach had little to do with the vanilla chai lotion I rubbed on my legs or the soft touch of coordinating perfume I dabbed on my wrists. Considering the curiosity that Miles O’Keefe had piqued, I probably should have nibbled on stale mints from the bottom of my purse and stayed in my room. The furnishings were dated, but, all the heavy, dark furniture aside, it was clean and the bathroom well equipped.

      I didn’t nibble mints.

      O’Keefe had made me curious and I wanted to see him again. My interest had begun with the statue at La Roux. It had grown with the gift of the charcoal sketch. And, yes, even the mystery surrounding his “ghost.” Meeting him earlier and discovering the macabre statues in the garden hadn’t caused my curiosity to lessen.

      The storm outside had strengthened rather than abated. The lamplight flickered as I dressed. There was no harm in seeking companionship on a stormy night, but I try not to lie to myself if I can help it. I was compelled to seek out O’Keefe and it had nothing to do with hunger or the storm. Slightly to do with electricity, but not the kind lighting up the sky outside my window. He was the first mystery I’d allowed in my life in a very long time. Challenges, yes, left and right. But never the unknown. I’d made sure my life was carefully organized and mapped for so long. Miles was a sudden, unexpected gasp in my steady respiration.

      At least I could blame my aunt for the dress I wore to dinner. She had given it to me in the hope that I would wear it to a show of my work that had never been. I hadn’t been to my workshop since the attack and was living off the income of pieces I’d previously sold. I had only packed the dress because the tags still attached to its bohemian skirt had fluttered at me from my closet. It was longer, softer and more artfully flowing than I would have chosen for myself. But the modest neckline covered my scars and the sleeveless bodice showed off my toned shoulders. Besides, the thin sweep of skirt seemed somehow appropriate for Thornleigh. It was a casual dress but a pretty one, and I wouldn’t allow it to be a weakness for wanting to look attractive in front of the handsome artist who unsettled me so thoroughly.

      I walked downstairs on ballet flats that made nothing but quiet swishes on the carpeting while thunder shook the house around me.

      There’s nothing like walking through an old, empty house in the dark with only an occasional flickering lamp and flashes of lightning to illuminate your way. Everything was odd, jagged shadows from unfamiliar objects. I was constantly startled by misshapen furniture revelations down every hall and around every corner.

      As far as I knew, there were no other guests in the house, so any movement I saw at the edges of my perception were tricks of light and dark and all the gray spaces in between.

      I came upon a portrait that dominated one nook down a narrow hallway. It was a painting of a handsome middle-aged man whose attractiveness was marred only by a hard, piercing gaze and a mouth that was pressed into a thin line. The tiny gold plaque on the elaborate frame read “Dominick O’Keefe”. I paused because the look in his eyes bothered me even though the breadth of his shoulders and the sweep of his hair reminded me of his nephew.

      Dominick’s eyes burned with an intensity I was surprised the painter had been able to capture with oil on canvas.

      The painting solidified my impression of the original O’Keefe’s desire to be seen as important and powerful. The whole of Thornleigh was new money masquerading as old. Never mind that when this giant, imposing portrait was painted he could have been photographed. That he’d commissioned such a large oil was telling.

       He’d wanted to be the master of all he surveyed.

      That odd certainty claimed me as I stood there staring into long-dead eyes.

      The painting, the carpeting, the paneling, the lighting—all of it was “Victorian” by way of 1963. The effect was creepily off-kilter. Thornleigh had a dollhouse quality to it, as if everything was a not-quite-right copy of what it should have been.

      As I stood there in the on-again, off-again flash of lightning and electric wiring that had seen better days, I had the fierce desire to fix and to freshen. To repair. Hadn’t I been doing the same for myself for months? I wasn’t the only soul in the world that needed healing. But the same desire to heal rising here made my heartbeat quicken and my breath catch.

      Because I didn’t think it was Thornleigh that I was compelled to save.

      With that thought came the sudden slam of a door down a hallway that intersected the one where I stood. The loud impact of heavy wood against wood made me jump. I turned to the black opening of the other corridor and waited. Long seconds stretched by, but no one revealed themselves. Who else was in the house? I assumed my host waited for me downstairs. It probably shouldn’t have bothered me that I wasn’t alone, but it did. Especially when the door slamming was only followed by the distant rumble of thunder from outside. Part of me hated to turn away from the direction of the slam to continue toward the stairs, but, of course, I did it anyway. I couldn’t stand there nervous for no good reason all night. Still, as I did turn and continue on my way, my neck prickled and my pace quickened.

      * * *

      O’Keefe had told me how to find the small morning room where we would eat dinner. It was off the grand dining room, which stood empty and cold save for dozens of ghostly draped chairs and a massive cherry table that could have accommodated fifty. I couldn’t walk quickly and quietly enough past chair after empty chair as their sheets gleamed in the dark.

      The smaller and brighter morning room beckoned, but even so I paused again as Miles O’Keefe came into view. He stood by a fireplace, looking down at the flickering flames, his skin alight with its glow but also shadowed where the glow failed to touch. He startled me again with his height and the lean quality of his form. How anyone so tall and obviously strong could also give off an air of vulnerability I don’t know, but it was there in his dark, dark eyes and the