Tess noticed Jim at the window of his house. He waved. A moment later, he appeared through his side door.
“Everything okay?” he called out.
“C’mon over,” Tess called back. “I have a question for you.”
Jim didn’t bother with a coat, and as he crossed his sidewalk and onto her driveway, Tess could see he was wearing slippers. This brought a smile to her face. It was below zero. A true northerner.
By that time, Storm was satisfied that the threat—if there had been a threat at all—was gone. He was once again his old friendly self, standing at Wyatt’s side. But Tess had noticed that the dog had patrolled the driveway and sidewalk, sniffing carefully, before coming back up to the house.
What had he been looking for?
Tess ushered Jim, Wyatt, and Storm back into the kitchen and shut the door behind them.
“What’s up?” Jim said, scratching behind Storm’s ears. “This fella was barking like the house was on fire.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Tess said, and then told Jim the story of how the crew had opened the sealed door earlier in the day.
“Considering the scratching I heard, and Storm’s reaction, I thought maybe an animal had slipped out of the room unnoticed and somehow gotten out of the house or . . .” Her words dissipated into the miasma of unreality that surrounded them. She didn’t think that at all. But she was hoping Jim would corroborate it all the same. Maybe he had seen something that would make sense of all this.
But he shook his head. “I haven’t seen anything, or anyone, around the house at all,” Jim said. “Although, I trust dogs’ reactions to things, and this guy was alerting you something wasn’t right.”
“Exactly my thought,” Wyatt said. “We just don’t know what that ‘something’ is.”
Tess sighed. But then, she had a thought. “Jim, do you have a security camera?”
He shook his head. “I have them all around the store, but here at the house? No. We’ve never needed one.”
Tess made a mental note to get cameras for her front and side doors.
The three of them chatted for a bit about other things, then, but Tess wasn’t really listening. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, had happened. Her mind was going in so many directions at once, and she didn’t like any of them.
The only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to get back into the room. Despite all this strangeness—the scratching, Storm’s reactions—she was more concerned with something all too real. She had to know if those canvases were undiscovered paintings by her grandfather.
But at the same time, her stomach knotted at the idea of exploring the room by herself, at night. Even with Storm here, that room held too many strange and unsettling vibes for her to feel comfortable going back in there alone.
As she looked from Wyatt to Jim, she wondered whom she would trust to go into that room with her, given the very real possibility there would be artwork worth multiple millions stacked haphazardly there. She didn’t know these men, not really. They were friendly strangers, who, she hoped, would become true friends. But she wasn’t about to risk trusting either of them with a fortune. There was only one person to trust with the notion there could be undiscovered Sebastian Bells lying around, she concluded, and that was Eli. And he wasn’t here with her. She would have to go back into that room alone. But during the light of day.
“Well, I think I’ll head back home,” Jim said, touching Tess’s arm. “You call me if you get the feeling something’s not right. Anytime. Jane and I are just a few steps away.”
Tess pulled him into a hug. “Thank you,” she said.
He shook his head. “Think nothing of it. Dinner at our place next week?”
“I’d love that,” she said.
And then he was off, scuffing across the snowy driveway in his slippers.
“Okay, so that was a whole lot of nothing,” Wyatt said, pulling out a kitchen chair and sinking down into it. “We don’t have any answers, do we?”
“No,” Tess said, shrugging. “So much is running through my mind right now, I can barely form a coherent thought.”
“I get that,” Wyatt said. “The scratches. The stains. Storm’s weird behavior.”
“All of that,” she said. “Plus, I’ve always felt a little weird about that door. That room behind it. Now we’ve opened it, and it’s given us nothing but more questions.”
Wyatt glanced at the clock. “I hate to say this, but I really need to get going,” he said. “The dogs are going to be wondering about their supper.”