Moonstone Shadows Page 8

  “Because a twelve-year-old little girl inherited the collection. She was the same age I’d been when my parents died. At that point, I’d decided to burn the damned thing. So I told her family it had sentimental value, asked if I could hang it at Natalie’s funeral, and switched it out. I didn’t want another death on my conscience.”

  “You were grief-stricken and half-crazed,” Hannah translated for him.

  “Yeah, that, too.” Aaron got up to pour more coffee but the machine was empty. He dumped another shot of Scotch into the mug instead. “The collection was appraised and the fraud uncovered. I refused to reveal the whereabouts of the original, and I had no money to repay the estate. I went to jail. Used the time to get a doctorate. The painting didn’t get burned. By the time I got out, I decided Natalie shouldn’t have died for nothing. The painting had to have some purpose. I’m still looking.”

  “And you won’t let anyone else touch it because you fear we’ll die.” Hannah rose from her chair. “But I have reason to believe the painting holds a clue to stopping the evil polluting Hillvale, and that it can save lives too.”

  Hannah helped herself to a swallow of the Scotch. She had never meant to tell her tale, but Dr. Aaron Townsend had just stripped himself bare in front of her, a complete stranger. She could see the suffering in his dark eyes. He’d deeply loved his wife and her death still tortured him. She had to word her story carefully, so he might see hope.

  That was a bit hard to do with Carmel’s body lying on a slab and evil haunting the hills.

  She weighed whether Aaron could be lying, but Keegan and Mariah seemed to trust him. They had gifts far greater than hers. Her knowledge was of the written page, no more. For the most part, lies and emotions escaped her.

  She looked for a kettle for tea, but apparently her hosts were coffee drinkers. Unable to leave everyone hanging any longer, she took her sip of Scotch back to her chair. “I researched the painting hanging in Keegan’s study.” She didn’t have to tell them why. “There’s a knight with a jewel casket at his side, with his hand out to a lady. They’re standing in front of a stone well. He’s wearing a sword with an enormous ruby in the hilt, but he’s handing her what appears to be a rock. I’ve compared it to other images, and I think it may be a moonstone.”

  Everyone listened without helping her along here. Keegan knew the painting. For all she knew, so did Mariah. Photos were in the Malcolm files. Anyone could look it up.

  “Anyway, I found a Malcolm journal related to the scene. The painting depicts what appears to be late medieval era, probably the 1400s, judging by the knight’s rounded sabots and etched mail, similar to the cuirass in Aaron’s window.” She cast a quick glance at Aaron but he seemed lost in black thought.

  She continued. “There’s a tiny sketch of the knight in a Malcolm journal from that period. The journal is in Latin. There’s no mention of the lady, just a note that Sir Geoffrey retrieved the Healing Stone, and the plague had been conquered.”

  “Healing Stone?” Mariah had produced a laptop from a hidden pocket in her chair and was already cruising through files.

  “You won’t find much in the journals,” Hannah warned. “Women were called witches and killed back then. A literate woman in the 1400s would be instantly considered suspect. So any notes were limited, and an artifact that might be called magic would be concealed by innocuous terms—in between recipes, in this case.”

  Hannah finished her sip of whiskey and heard the infant stirring. She needed to speak quickly. “The tiny sketch of the knight and the note were from the 1400s, but the painting itself wasn’t completed until much later, in the 1600s, by another Malcolm ancestor who apparently painted her dreams.” Vivid dreams, like hers had been lately. Except Hannah couldn’t paint. “The artist’s notes about the painting are equally limited, but she appeared to know where the Healing Stone was located, so it might have generated the dreams.”

  “A touch of psychometry involved, perhaps?” Aaron asked, apparently riveted by her tale. “A powerful object would leave strong impressions.”

  “There were still gifted male Malcolms at the time,” Hannah said. “And yes, one had your talent. He was in the same household as the lady painter. He seems to be a priest who used the stone to combat what they called evil in his parish, so the painter would have been familiar with the stone. The priest’s mentions were brief. He was less likely to be burned at the stake, but healing stones and the like are pagan, a relic of our Celtic origins. He probably told no one else but his journal—and the painter who had dreams about it.”

  “Or dreams about him,” Mariah said with a snort, apparently finding the painting in their online library. “That’s one hunky knight. I wonder if the painting looks like the priest or the original knight.”

  Hannah didn’t look at Aaron. If no one else saw the resemblance, she wouldn’t draw attention to it. She might be the only one dreaming of a knight in shining armor carrying a stone that healed—a stone she prayed might heal her.

  “What does this have to do with my painting?” Aaron demanded, still focused on his goal.

  Hannah curled up in her chair. “The stone was mentioned again in the 1800s, by a Victorian spiritualist who claimed to have sent the family’s famous Healing Stone with her sister to the Americas. That was circa the 1870s. If the sister kept a journal, it’s been lost.”

  “None of these journals mentioned how the stone was used or if it actually worked?” Keegan asked, rising and heading in the direction of his mewling daughter.

  “With no written instructions from the original time periods, that information is lost too,” Hannah admitted. “The spiritualist who left the journal wasn’t a healer. She talked to ghosts and acted as a medium. Her sister wanted to take it to Lily Dale, the spiritualist colony in New York, to see if anyone knew how to activate it. Unless you count the description of the Eversham painting, there was only one more mention of the stone—one of the Lily Dale psychics decided to take it with her when she took the train to California.”

  She stared pointedly at Aaron, who grimaced. Even Keegan halted in the doorway and waited.

  “There is no stone in the Eversham that could be held in the hand,” he protested.

  “But in his journal, Eversham specifically said he’d painted a Healing Stone, and he was a Lucy painting a vision of the past,” Hannah insisted. “It’s far-fetched as a coincidence, unless there was an oral tradition we don’t know about, and he was painting what he’d been told.”

  “There are no photos of the Eversham painting online,” Mariah said in disappointment, typing rapidly on her keyboard.

  “Because it’s in Aaron’s shop hidden by an ugly piece of kindergarten paint,” Hannah declared, making a not-so-wild guess.

  “I promise, the only stone depicted in that scene did not kill Carmel,” Aaron said, standing. “If I show it to you, and you take a photograph to show the others, will you leave it alone?”

  Thank all that was holy, he gave in before she had to reveal the reason why she wanted to see that painting.

  Even she knew it was insane to believe she’d find a stone that could heal the walnut in her brain.

  Nine

  The librarian’s face lit with such hope and excitement that Aaron didn’t have the heart to point out the fallacy in their fairy tale. The oil he hid represented the Americas in the early 1700s. The Healing Stone they talked about had been in England in the 1600s and 1800s. The casket and the stone had obviously parted ways at some point.

  He had other reasons to doubt his painting had anything to do with the stone in Carmel’s box, but he’d let them see for themselves.

  He was grateful Hannah didn’t seem eager to hang around for infant feeding time. After admiring the wailing infant one more time, they said their farewells and headed back to town.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” Hannah said, hurrying down the dusty lane. “I understand the date discrepancy, believe me.”

  Well, faex, there went that ho
pe that he could persuade her to leave the painting alone.

  “I’ve studied this,” she continued relentlessly. “It’s possible, unlikely, perhaps, but possible. Ships crossed the Atlantic regularly. The Spanish and British were at war most of the time, but we’re talking about Malcolms and maybe Ives. They used to get along way back when.”

  “You’re more steeped in family history than I am,” he reluctantly agreed. “But I think even you’ll give up when you see the painting.”

  Aaron had left Harvey in charge of the shop while he’d shepherded the librarian around all morning. The musician gratefully fled once they returned. Harvey wasn’t much of a salesman, but he knew how to operate the cash register, which was all that really mattered. Hillvale didn’t provide much of Aaron’s income. The objects stored here were mostly his private neurosis and not worth a lot of salesmanship.

  Aaron assisted a tourist in opening the locked drawer of a bureau using one of the skeleton keys he kept for the purpose, while keeping his eye on Hannah. She was poking around his inventory, studiously avoiding the wardrobes. It was apparent she didn’t have any feel for the objects she touched.

  So why did the painting set her off? And him, apparently.

  She’d fainted every time he’d touched her. For reasons he didn’t understand, that annoyed the hell out of him. He had a “friend with benefits” in the city. He didn’t need to obsess about sex. It was just that—there was just something. . . ethereal. . . about the librarian that brought out his protective streak, he supposed. That was foolish. She seemed quite sturdy.

  She’d told him she’d seen a doctor, and there wasn’t anything they could do. Damnatio et infernum. He wanted no more sick or dying women in his life. He needed her gone soon, if not sooner.

  Once the customer left, Aaron crossed to the wardrobes. Hannah left the bookshelves she’d been perusing to produce her cell phone and warily watch as he opened the wardrobe doors.

  “You might want a better camera,” he warned. “This is the one and only time I’ll do this.”

  “I’m a librarian, not a photographer. This is all I have. Do you have better?”

  Muttering curses, Aaron returned to his desk and produced the miniature camera he carried with him when assessing an estate. “You’ll have to trust me to send the photo to you,” he reminded her.

  “I’ll have mine,” she said complacently.

  Nothing disturbed the damned woman. Shoving the camera in his coat pocket, he took the frame from the top of the wardrobe. Flipping it over, he used a screwdriver to pry off the glued paper concealing the hidden canvas. He’d mounted the aging canvas on a treated board that removed easily.

  He swallowed hard as he lay the oil face up on the settee.

  The painting was riveting in its simplicity. A Spanish knight in bloody armor, a Franciscan priest in a tattered brown robe, and half a dozen dark-skinned natives kneeling, standing, watching as one native carved a rock with a chisel-like tool. The figures surrounded what appeared to be a crumbling well. In the distance, smoke rose and clouded the sky. In the foreground, the medieval casket rested near the native carver.

  The expressions of anger, pain, and despair on their various features told a horrifying story.

  Even without touching it, the painting of Hillvale’s past compelled him.

  “I see what you mean,” she said softly. “There is something in the stance of the natives—”

  She reached to touch the oil. Instinctively, Aaron caught her hand. For a moment, both their fingers brushed the canvas. A moment was all it took.

  Nighttime. Stars high above on a crisp cool evening. Smoke from a wood fire mixed with the mouth-watering scent of grilling meat. People—everywhere. Some stoned, sitting around the fire. Others molding clay. Painters packing away their brushes for the day. The farmhouse glowed from candles behind the windows.

  A small hand clutched his. Blinking, not understanding, Aaron glanced down at the woman beside him—the Librarian. She was almost transparent. For all that mattered, so was he. He studied his translucent hand in disbelief where it held hers.

  She was staring at their joined hands in equal shock. And then her eyes widened, and she eagerly scanned the setting. He didn’t need to study it to know they were on the commune property above Hillvale, with the mountain looming over them and the redwoods lining the bluff in the distance. And the bearded young hippy artist packing up his paint was Eversham.

  Aaron yanked his hand from Hannah’s, fearing she’d faint in this weird scene where he had no one to help her.

  The painting slid off the settee and hit the floor. Aaron glanced hurriedly at Hannah, but she was still standing, still staring at her hand in shock. “Can we do it again?” she asked, reaching for the oil.

  He used his stick to shove the frame from her grasping hand. “That’s what got us in trouble last time. Are you insane?”

  “We weren’t in trouble,” she said primly, exactly like a spinster schoolteacher, crossing her hands in front of her. “We were observing.” But another thought worried her, he could tell. Her pale brow puckered in a frown.

  “We just had an out-of-body experience,” he practically shouted. He didn’t usually lose control like that, not anymore. He bit his tongue and tried to analyze what he’d seen. They’d seen. Apparently it wasn’t just him, which was weirdly reassuring. “And you want to risk it again?”

  “Like time travel?” she asked uncertainly. “Because that wasn’t here and now. That looked like. . .” She hesitated. “A commune? Beards and long hair and vests and bell bottoms—the seventies, maybe? I don’t have out-of-body experiences. But. . .”

  Too much hung on that one word, and she was too close to nailing it on the head. “Tea?” he suggested, remembering she’d not drunk the coffee earlier.

  She nodded doubtfully and stared at the canvas on the floor, which had landed face up.

  “Don’t touch it,” he warned. “Get pictures. Study the stone and see why it isn’t what you want.”

  Snapping pictures to cover her intense disappointment over the subject matter, Hannah considered the strange painting and the scene she’d just. . . experienced. Dreamed? She saw no link between this scene from the distant past and the weird one she’d shared with Aaron. If he had seen it too, it couldn’t be a dream or a brain lapse, could it?

  Malcolm abilities didn’t normally manifest so late in life. Did she dare hope that she was a late bloomer and not dying? Or maybe the walnut in her head had stimulated a previously unknown gift—or she was groping for hope now that there was none. She was pretty certain that Aaron had inspired this particular adventure.

  The Spanish soldier in the Eversham painting looked dutifully authoritative. The priest appeared downtrodden, upset, not in the least happy as he laid his hands on what appeared to be a round, rough boulder, the one the native carver worked on. The brown natives crouched in the shadows of an even larger rock, watching intently.

  The jewel casket sat in the dust between the priest and the soldier. It was open but the contents weren’t visible at this angle. She saw nothing that resembled the stones they’d seen in Carmel’s box or the ones in the knight painting. Maybe jewel caskets like this one were a dime a dozen back then, who knew?

  The tale of the healing moonstone was apparently just that—a good tale.

  Determinedly maintaining her focus so she didn’t collapse and weep, she snapped photos from every angle, making certain she got a good shot of the artist’s signature. She had no way of knowing if this was the original. She was no expert. But if the weird scene they’d experienced meant anything at all, she’d have to say there was a strong association between the work and the artist.

  Which probably meant that she’d enhanced Aaron’s normal psychometric abilities to see what the artist was seeing and nothing more.

  Aaron returned with a tea tray. He’d been raised by British parents. He must recognize that tea was better than Valium. She drank hers black. Her hand shook as she
took a cup and saucer, so she sat on the settee to steady herself. She hadn’t realized she was so rattled.

  “I have no Malcolm gifts other than carrying a library in my head,” she said as firmly as she could, if only to reassure herself that she was in the here and now and capable of speech.

  He leaned his hip against a heavy carved game table and drank from a large handcrafted ceramic mug. With his neat goatee and tailored jacket, he gave the appearance of elegance and assurance. But his dark eyebrows drew together over his formidable roman nose, and his chocolate-brown eyes looked troubled. “We saw Eversham,” he said bluntly. “I never see more than impressions, usually generated by strong emotions. I have never seen the person leaving the impressions.”

  “We had a joint hallucination?” she asked. “Perhaps there was something in Keegan’s whiskey we responded to? Should we experiment?”

  She really wanted to experience that moment again. It might have been the most exciting event of her entire lonely life. If she had to die young, then shouldn’t she cram as many experiences in as she could?

  “That was not whiskey. That was the cursed damned painting. Burning may be necessary.” He glowered at the painting and sipped his tea. “You have to admit that neither the boulder or the rock depicted can be the Healing Stone some Victorian lady transported across an ocean and a continent.”

  “Why can the stone not be in the jewel casket?” she argued. “If we could speak with Eversham—”

  “That is not happening.” The bell rung over his door, and he turned his formidable glower on the tourists daring to venture in.

  They hastily backed out.

  “We time traveled,” she insisted. “There are incidences in the Malcolm records.” Incidences in her own family, but if she told him about those. . . He really would burn the painting.

  “More likely, something in that damned painting sucked us in. It won’t happen again,” he said with finality, setting down his mug and rummaging in a chest of drawers until he’d produced heavy-duty work gloves. “I’m wrapping this thing up and locking it away.”