Page 87 of Memories of the Lost

“I reckon it was a magic spell.”

“I’m falling in love with you,” she said. “I mean, for real.”

“Me, too. But you already know that.”

She realized that it had the weight of something she could trust. “Maybe.” She sipped the sweet, hot tea. “Tell me what happened with Krish. Did you fire him?”

“I did. We don’t have to talk about that now, though. Let’s focus on you and what you’re trying to find.”

“But I don’t even know what that is, and you’ve spent a lot of time helping me. Give me a chance to be present for you.”

“Fair enough.” He paused. “I fired him.”

“What will that mean for your business?”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “I dunno. He’s been the linchpin, honestly.” He brushed grains of sugar from his fingers. “I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but he really crossed a line a few days ago, and he’s been manipulating me in other ways, too. I owed him a lot, but ... I think that debt is paid now.”

“Who will do the work he was doing?”

“There’s a woman who’s been with us a long time, almost since the start. Yolanda. I reckon she can do the job, and she’d welcome it.” He paused. “But I might be ready to change this business model, anyway. The travel is too much. I don’t want to live my life on the road.”

“I can understand that.”

“Anyway, that’s catching you up. Let’s not talk about anything work related for tonight. Did you find anything interesting today?”

“Not really. I had a ripple of something at the ford, but it was brief. I was hoping to find something substantial, but I haven’t yet.”

“Something in particular?”

“Maybe the house in the painting. A forest ... but there’s no forest around here that I have seen.”

“Clare, my aunt, has lived here most of her life. She’d probably know where it was. I do know they’ve done some clearing and building.”

She nodded, a whisper of yearning running over her nerves. She wanted to tell her mother about him, about this strange quest she found herself on. She wanted the spell of strangeness to be broken.

Or did she? What if when she found the answers, the spell around Liam was broken, too? What if the quest left her even more alone than she’d been before?

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

They weren’t expected for another couple of hours, and Liam wanted to have a nap. Tillie curled up with him, glad for the company, but she only dozed. Something restless kept chasing itself around her mind, showing blips of a dark wood and then a cat, a chocolate bar layered with oranges, a child opening her hand to show a perfect chocolate with the stem of a cherry sticking out of the top.

When she sat up an hour later, all the noise that had been swirling around—an almost whisper, the snippets of pictures—was gone.

It was, she realized, the first time her brain had been silent since she’d seen the painting that first night.

To give herself some space to enjoy it, she took a shower and washed her hair, wanting to look good for her meeting with Liam’s family. She let it dry naturally in soft waves, and left it loose.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she peered into the background behind her, seeking some answer she hadn’t turned over, as if she were a being in one of her paintings. It wasn’t a particularly appealing mirror, a plain, modern bathroom style, but she remembered the oval in the other room and, wrapped in a towel, went to stand in front of it.

The mirror had a baroque frame, imitation gold leaf, and it was old enough to be a little discolored in places. With her wet hair and towel, she stood in front of it with a sheet of plain paper, just the roominstructions turned over to the blank side, and a pencil she took out of her purse. Looking beyond her reflection in the mirror, she held her hand over the paper and waited. What could be there? What would be there if she painted this mirror, this face, this place?

She saw a forest. A cat wandered out, that very big cat she’d seen so many times now. He moved without hurry, and sat to lift his nose to the air. A woman slid between the shadows, the witch from her fugue painting, skinny and sharp. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Tillie, watching. For a long time, she only looked at her, then slipped into the forest. The cat licked a paw.

Without rushing, Tillie sketched the scene, waiting to see if anything else appeared. An orange rolled out of the shadows, and she heard laughter.

And that was all.

She looked at the sketch.Soon,it seemed to say.Soon.