“Not really,” Wyatt said. “It was common back in the day, especially if something scandalous happened. Or if someone had cancer. Or even had an accident that would sort of bring shame to the family. I know of a guy who had always heard that his grandfather died in the Cliffside tuberculosis sanatorium that used to be just outside of Wharton. Truth was, the grandfather was coming home from a tavern in the winter after having one too many, or several too many, and he froze to death in the snow. Back in the day, people covered up things like that. Spoke about it in whispered tones. As though if you spoke of death, it would hear. And come for you.”
It made a strange kind of sense to Tess. She thought of a friend from college whose grandmother had cancer, but the friend didn’t even know what type. In some families, that just wasn’t spoken of. Something like this? It certainly would have been covered up.
“And about your grandmother closing off the studio,” Wyatt went on. “You don’t know when she did it. And you don’t really know why, right?”
“Exactly right,” Tess said. “She always had these flimsy excuses about it being too expensive to heat. When I was a kid, I never thought twice about it. But now? That’s just ridiculous.”
“I think so, too,” Wyatt said. “I mean, it could be nothing more than grief. Her beloved husband had died, and she wanted to close that room off, just as he left it, as a sort of—I don’t know—shrine that would live out of time. Or something. I know that sounds dramatic. But what if that’s not the reason. What if—”
Tess could almost see his thought coalesce into a tangible play in front of her eyes. “What if,” she said, “my grandmother found those paintings and shut up the room to keep them from the world? That would certainly explain the studio’s state of disarray. She did it in a hurry and didn’t even take the time to clean up.”
“That sounds right to me,” Wyatt said. “Not that I know anything. But as someone just hearing it for the first time, it sounds sensible. She found the paintings, realized what they were—a confession—and locked everything up tight to make sure that confession never saw the light of day.”
“She couldn’t have the world knowing her husband, the great Sebastian Bell, was a stalker. Or worse.”
Wyatt sighed. “If all of that is true, you have a decision to make.”
Tess’s stomach knotted up. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Given that your grandmother went to all of that trouble to make sure the world didn’t ever see these paintings—she didn’t destroy them, she couldn’t bear to, it seems to me—but she made sure they stayed hidden.”
“Yes, she did,” Tess said, her mind flying in many directions at once.
“Are you going to show them to the world in defiance of those wishes?”
Those words wrapped around Tess and constricted. She hadn’t considered that. “You’ve already seen them,” Tess said, weakly.
“I’m not exactly the town gossip,” Wyatt said. “If you decide you want to permanently shut that door again with the paintings inside, I won’t say anything to anyone. It’s not my place. This is your family’s decision.”
Tess thought about this. Somehow, she believed Wyatt. He was a good man. A man of his word, it seemed to her. If he said he was going to keep quiet about something, she trusted him to keep quiet. It made her wonder what other types of secrets, whose secrets, he might be keeping, but she was sure she’d never know.
Tess’s train of thought seemed to have hit a snag. If she wasn’t prepared to share all this with the world, should she call the police about a possible murder, even if that murder had taken place decades earlier?
But then, she thought back to her conversation with Wyatt at lunch. And just like that, the light bulb went on above her head.
His family had been in Wharton since before there was a town. They would know about a decades-old murder, if indeed there had been one.
“Wyatt,” she began. “It seems to me your family knows Wharton’s history better than most people.”
“I’d say that’s true,” Wyatt said. “My parents and grandparents for sure.”
“I’m sorry if this sounds indelicate, which it will for sure, but . . . are they still alive?”
“And kicking,” he said. “My parents go to Arizona every winter for a few months. My grandma passed about a decade ago, but my grandpa is still with us. He’s in the assisted-living complex in Salmon Bay.”