“I do, actually,” Jim said. “Wyatt Templeton. The guy with the malamutes. I’ll give him a call and tell him to call you.” Jim squinted at her. “Did you check the pilot light?”
Tess shook her head. “I wouldn’t even know how to do that, so . . . no.”
“I’ll run down and check it real quick,” Jim said. “It might be as simple as that.”
Jim trotted down the back stairs. He was back in the kitchen a moment later, shaking his head. “Nope,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He called his guy and arranged for him to be at the house in the morning.
Great, thought Tess. One thing handled.
Tess gave the stew a stir. “I think we’re about ready,” she said. She retrieved the salad from the fridge and set it on the table, along with plates, bowls, and silverware. “I thought we’d just eat in the kitchen instead of in the dining room. It’s so cozy here with the fireplace and the AGA.”
“Perfect,” Jane said, clearing the cheese board. Jim put the baguettes on the cutting board and set it on the table, along with the wine.
Tess cut three pieces from the baguette and placed one in each bowl, ladled in the stew, and topped it with cubes of the swiss, which she stirred into the hot liquid.
“This looks absolutely incredible,” Jim said, blowing on a cheesy spoonful before slipping it into his mouth. He closed his eyes. “Oh my.”
Tess chuckled. It was nice, having friends in for dinner again. This was one of the first times in a very long time she had cooked for anyone except Matt and Eli.
After dinner, Tess suggested they take their drinks into the living room, where she had already started the fire. As they followed her down the chilly hallway, Jane said, “I haven’t been in this part of the house before.”
“Really? That surprises me, you two living next door and all,” Tess said, but upon thinking about it for a moment, it made sense. Jim and Jane had moved to Wharton a little more than a decade prior, and after her grandmother died, her family vacations had sort of petered out. Eli had been getting to the age where he wanted to spend more time with his friends, and her parents had been spending more time at their place in Florida and were only in Wharton sporadically during those years.
Jane took in an audible breath as they entered the living room, the fire glowing in the fireplace and illuminating all the woodwork. “This is gorgeous,” she cooed, running her hand along the fireplace mantel.
The house really did have some beautiful features, including its original woodwork, like the ornately carved mantel. Tess saw it anew as she watched Jane admire it. Tess had spent a good bit of time polishing the woodwork throughout the house until it gleamed like new, dusting off the years, coaxing it back to its deep, rich beauty. Seeing it through someone else’s eyes made her heart swell with pride. It was all too easy to take a thing for granted, even something beautiful, when you lived with it every day, she thought. The extraordinary faded into ordinary, even mundane.
“That painting above the fireplace,” Jane said, squinting and taking a few steps nearer to it. “That’s one of your grandfather’s, isn’t it? I’d know a Sebastian Bell anywhere. Is that your father, as a boy?”
“It is,” Tess said. “My uncle and grandmother, too.”
Jane was right; Tess’s grandfather’s style was distinctive. He painted scenes of life in Wharton—the lake, the cliffs, the ferries, the beaches, the wildlife, the people—his watercolors and oils blurring the lines of familiar images into his own personal dreamscape. Northern Impressionism, an art critic had once dubbed Sebastian’s style, and it had stuck.
This painting, Picnic at Mermaid Cove, depicted the family relaxing on a beach, not a care in the world, the vastness of the lake shimmering like diamonds before them. Her father, Indigo, and her uncle, Grey, were small, playing in the sand with pails and shovels, the beginnings of a sandcastle rising up between them. Their mother, Serena, sat on a beach blanket next to a picnic basket. She was wearing a white cotton dress, her feet bare, her wavy brown hair cascading down her back and blowing slightly in an unseen breeze.
But there was something sinister underlying the idyllic scene, as there was in many of her grandfather’s paintings. In this one, the water seemed almost alive. Faces gazed out of the waves—malevolent faces—watery tentacles curling up onto rocks on the shore in a way that almost surrounded the unsuspecting family, as though, in an instant, the lake could send a massive wave to engulf them all on a whim.