After she had changed into her pajamas and brushed her teeth, Tess settled into bed, where Storm was already stretched out, occupying at least half of the mattress space. She smiled at the dog. “Please, make yourself at home,” she said.
She propped the pillows behind her and picked up the phone to call her parents. She wanted to talk to her dad about what, if anything, he knew about that back room. Had it ever been opened, that he knew of? She might not get anything from him, she thought she probably wouldn’t, but that, in a way, would give her some answers. If he knew nothing about it, had never been in the room since Serena had shut it up, that meant those really could be undiscovered paintings by Sebastian Bell. There was no way her dad would’ve let millions of dollars languish all those years.
But just as she was about to make the call, she glanced at the clock. It was an hour later at their condo in Florida. They were probably in bed.
Phone in hand, she very much wanted to talk with someone. Should she call Wyatt? Hearing his voice would be nice, but . . . it was too soon in whatever “this” was, she thought. He had just left a few hours earlier.
Instead, she dialed Eli.
“Hi, Mom,” he said. “What’s up?”
Just hearing her son’s voice brought a smile to her face. “I got a dog.”
“What?”
She turned the phone toward Storm, snapped a photo, and sent it to Eli.
“He looks great! But how did this happen? You’re not allowed to get any pets without consulting me. Or new cars. Or houseplants. I thought that was clear.”
Tess laughed. “He showed up at my back door during the blizzard. Jim—you remember, the guy next door who owns the store?—has the dog’s photo up on the bulletin board looking for his owner, but . . . I think he’s mine now.”
“Well, good,” Eli said. “I never liked the idea of you being in that creepy house all alone.”
This took Tess off guard. “Creepy? Why do you say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Eli said. “Maybe it’s the constant moaning of the undead during the night. The rattling of chains, although, sure, that’s totally cliché, but nobody told the ghosts. The odd disembodied head floating around from time to time.”
Tess laughed out loud. “You goofball. There’s no moaning. Or heads.”
Eli chuckled, too. “Yeah, I know. It’s just that the house is so old. Like, one hundred years, right? And it looks like the kind of house that would be haunted. Plus, there’s that door.”
“The door,” Tess said. “We opened it today!”
Eli went silent for a moment. “You opened it? How? And, who is ‘we’？”
“Jim recommended a guy from town, Wyatt, to come over and fix the heat,” Tess said.
“What was wrong with the heat?”
Tess realized she hadn’t been communicating with her son as well as she might have over the past few weeks. All at once, she remembered what it felt like when Eli was away at school and she was in the dark about what he was doing, with whom, and when.
She thought, not for the first time, that somewhere along the line, Eli had turned from her dependent into her protector. Their roles hadn’t reversed—yet—but, as with her own parents, Tess saw how that nearly always happened.
By the time Eli had gotten to high school, he had become very protective of his single mother. As though he felt that he was the “man of the family,” to use a rather archaic and outdated phrase. But that was sort of what it had seemed like to Tess. He had started mowing the lawn and shoveling the driveway. He did his own laundry and helped with cleaning up the house. He wanted to know where she was going on the rare occasions she had gone out at night, and he waited up until she got home. It was usually a book club with friends or a dinner out that wrapped up by about eight o’clock. She chuckled to herself. The wild and crazy life she had led.
His concern made her eyes sting with tears. “Oh, honey, I guess I haven’t kept you up to date on the happenings in La Belle Vie,” Tess said, as brightly as she could.
“Ya think?”
“Okay. So, the heat was out, but it was a really easy fix. When Wyatt—the heat guy—was here, I asked about the possibility of him opening the door. The door. He called a couple of his friends. One is an animal guy—”
“Animal guy? Do I even want to know what that is?”
Tess laughed. “He’s an animal wrangler,” she said, almost unable to get the words out because of her laughter. She imagined Eli’s horrified face and couldn’t stop it from bubbling up. “And his name is Hunter,” she squeaked out.