Sharyn McCrumb - Sick Of Shadows

Milo coughed. “I believe she got the impression that we were colleagues of hers.”

“You said you were doctors?” Another thought occurred to her. “But, Bill, Eileen was seeing everything in those days! Demons, visions, who knows what? How did you know this wasn’t another hallucination?”

“Because Eileen was dead.”

“If somebody stole the painting of the lake, and Eileen had been seeing a face in the lake, then we figured there had to have been a face in the lake for her to see,” Milo explained.

“But whose?”

“Alban’s fiancée, Merrileigh Williams. The one you told us had disappeared shortly before their wedding was to have taken place. I wondered if that had been arranged. Maybe she was out to marry the boss’s son, and Alban changed his mind, or maybe she had been fooling around with some other man. I don’t know. We found her bones, but they won’t tell us why she was killed.”

“A skeleton also won’t tell you who it was!” snapped Elizabeth.

“Oh, yes, it will,” said Milo, leaning forward eagerly. “I study that kind of thing, you know. Forensic anthropology. Mostly burial mounds and things like that, but the principle’s the same. We were lucky to have recovered the entire skeleton. He wrapped her in a sack when he dumped her, which prevented the bones from scattering. That would have been tough! Anyway, the sagittal sutures indicated that we were dealing with a person approximately twenty-two years of age. Definitely female; we found the pelvic bone; and the dentition indicated-”

“Okay, okay, I believe you. You identified her from the bones.”

“Well, we didn’t, actually,” Milo admitted. “You said a skeleton couldn’t tell you who it was, so I thought I’d explain it to you. We could have done it that way, but the fact is, Dr. Chandler identified her from Eileen’s painting.”

“You found that, too?” gasped Elizabeth.

“Oh, sure. In the lake. In a sack with some bricks. The deputy found it close to the other sack. Apparently, Alban threw it in some time after he’d killed Eileen.”

He nodded toward an object covered with a cloth on the table by the window. Elizabeth went to look at the painting. It was still damp to the touch, but because it was done in oils the colors had not run.

Eileen had painted the lake at twilight-drab green water shadowed by the gray trees surrounding the lake. In the foreground, the shallows, a woman’s face floated just below the surface of the water. Her eyes were closed, and her hair streamed out in the water like weeds.

“She must have pictured it over and over in her mind to get so good a likeness,” said Bill softly.

Elizabeth shivered.

“We think she must have actually seen the face in the water six years ago, when Alban first dumped the body there. He had probably gone back for the sack and something to weight it down. It’s a miracle he didn’t catch her then.”

“But why didn’t she say anything about it?”

“Who’d believe her? She was already beginning to lose touch with reality. She really did have schizophrenia, you know. Even if she told somebody, they would have written it off as another delusion. Later, when she began to get well, she didn’t even believe it herself. In fact, I think she had succeeded in forgetting about it completely, until she started that painting down by the lake. Staring at the lake hour after hour began to revive the memory of the face in the water. She painted it because she saw it-in her mind.”

“Is that the reason she wouldn’t show anyone the picture?”

“Sure. Do you blame her? One year out of a mental institution, still in analysis-how’s she going to tell anybody she sees a dead face in the lake? She was terrified that she’d be locked up again. And even more terrified that she deserved to be.”

“And of losing Michael,” Elizabeth murmured.

“Yes, that, too,” agreed Bill.

“Where is Michael, anyway?” asked Elizabeth, noticing his absence for the first time.

Milo grinned. “When he found out the case was over, he got Deputy Melkerson to take him to the bus station in the squad car. I think that other deputy loaned him five bucks for the ticket.”

“Why did she paint it, though?” asked Elizabeth.

“Why didn’t she just paint over the face and show everyone a nice landscape?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill. “Milo thinks she was trying to exorcise her own demon by putting it on canvas, but I think that deep down she knew that it had been real, and she was trying to let somebody know about it. Unfortunately, the one who caught sight of it was Alban. Do you know when?”

“I think so,” Elizabeth said. “He went down to the lake to get her once when she was late for dinner. He must have got a glimpse of it before she packed it up.”

“And he thought she knew. Of course! If that painting ever went on display at the wedding, people would recognize Merrileigh’s face. They might get curious enough to drag the lake,” said Milo.

Elizabeth considered this. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think they may have suspected. Captain Grandfather kept saying that he didn’t want the murderer caught. And I remember hearing that Aunt Louisa had wanted to hire a detective to find Merrileigh when she first disappeared, and then she suddenly stopped insisting on it.”

“But they didn’t know for sure,” said Bill. “Didn’t want to know. This painting would have forced them to face the unpleasant facts.”

“Did he mean to kill her?”

“I don’t know. I think so. She might have described the painting to someone. Or painted it all over again. And he couldn’t afford to have people getting interested in the lake. It was either the shock of this second murder or the fear of discovery that sent him over the edge.”

“But he’d already committed a murder. He must have been afraid of discovery.”

“Sure,” said Milo. “Six years ago. But he got away with it. Merrileigh was hardly missed; nobody suspected him; and gradually it got pushed to the back of his mind. It wasn’t relevant anymore. He’d gone on with his life, built his dream house, and suddenly-when he’d almost forgotten it-the terror of discovery hits him when he isn’t prepared for it. And he couldn’t deal with it.”

“You sound sorry for him,” said Elizabeth wonderingly.

“Well, I am for that part,” Milo admitted. “It wouldn’t be so bad to get arrested for murder while you’re still standing there holding the gun, so to speak. You’re expecting it then. But to go on with your life, to let years pass, until you can’t even remember the emotions that caused you to do it, and then to get caught for it, and have your life wrecked-that’s a nightmare.”

“He seemed so normal.”

“I think he worked at it,” said Bill. “He even made that castle sound plausible, didn’t he?”

“Where does Ludwig fit into all this?”

“He always admired Ludwig, even before, and I think it was a retreat for him. When he discovered that he might be a murder suspect, he decided to be somebody else. I got suspicious when you told me on the phone that you were his favorite cousin, since we hardly knew him.”

“Not flattering,” said Elizabeth, wrinkling her nose.

“I was right, though. When I looked up Ludwig, the book said that his favorite relative was his cousin, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria.”

“And did she have a brother named Bill?”

“No. Theodore. But when I read that Ludwig had died in a lake after strangling a psychiatrist, and then you told me that a psychiatrist was staying here, I thought I’d better come down.”

“Couldn’t you have called the sheriff?” asked Elizabeth drily.

Bill smiled. “Actually, we did stop by the office on the way in. Rountree wasn’t there, but one of his deputies-some guy named Hill-Bear Melkerson-agreed to come along with us in case there was trouble. Milo and I had worked out that Wagner thing in case he tried to reenact the death scene by the lake.”