Immortal Sins

If the horse knew, it wasn't saying.

After giving the animal a last pat, Kari returned to the castle. With a sigh, she went into the scullery and sat at the table. For a kitchen, it was surprisingly unkitchenlike. There were no cupboards, no oven or stove, no sink, no food that she could see. So what was the table for?

She had to be dreaming, she thought again. That was the only plausible explanation. She would just sit here until she woke up and...was that a door?

Rising, she hurried across the room. It was, indeed, a door, a very small door. Maybe it was a way out, she thought, a way back to reality! Feeling suddenly like Alice lost in Wonderland, she reached for the brass knob. It was hard and cold beneath her hand. The portal opened with a creak and she peered down a flight of uneven stone steps. Certain she was doing the wrong thing, she nevertheless found herself carefully descending the narrow stairway.

She shivered when she reached the bottom. It was colder down here, though she saw no reason why it should be any colder than the rest of the castle. She was about to hurry back up the stairs when she felt the hair rise along her nape. Slowly, so slowly, she turned around.

At first, she didn't see anything, and then she saw a tall shape rise up out of a dark corner. A pair of unblinking red eyes stared at her, growing larger, coming closer. Spooked as never before, Kari opened her mouth and screamed bloody murder.

She woke with the sound of her own cries ringing in her ears. A dream. Of course, she thought, relieved; that's all it had been, just a dream.

Sliding out of bed, she pulled on her robe and went downstairs. She told herself she was going into the kitchen for a glass of grapefruit juice, but some invisible power drew her toward the living room, and the painting.

After switching on a light, she walked toward the hearth.

The man was in the castle, looking out of a tower window. He seemed to be staring at her, his deep blue eyes filled with a silent plea for help.

Kari wrapped her arms around her waist as she looked at the painting, unable to draw her gaze away from the figure in the window.

Help me.

She heard the voice inside her head, deep and decidedly male. His voice.

Startled, she backed away from the hearth, a cry escaping her lips when she hit a corner of the coffee table and almost fell.

Great! Now she wasn't just seeing things, she was hearing things as well.

Tomorrow she would call Tricia and ask her to come over, take a look at the painting, and tell her what she saw.

Tricia McPhee was Kari's best friend. Tricia was cool, calm, and level-headed. She had the imagination of a tomato yet she attracted the strangest people; people like Mel Staffanson, who kept a hearse, complete with a full-sized coffin, in his garage. Mel drove the hearse around town on Halloween and rented it out for parties. Then there was Sheri Hunt, who only wore green and had dyed her hair to match. Sheri raised silkworms. Angie Delgado was another of Tricia's eccentric friends. Angie had been married and divorced six times and now lived with four Pomeranians and five Siamese cats, declaring they were easier to get along with than men.

It always amazed Kari that she and Tricia were friends, because they were so different. Tricia was an only child. She had been spoiled and pampered from day one. She had gone to the best schools, graduated at the top of her class, married a surgeon, had two adorable children and lived in a big house. Kari had been poor her whole life. She had been an average student with a vivid imagination and had managed to get into college only because she won a scholarship.

Yes, Tricia was the answer.

Tricia arrived the following evening. She spent several minutes studying the painting and then she looked at Kari.

"All right," Tricia said, her hands fisted on her slim hips. "I give up. What am I supposed to see?"

"The man in the painting."

"I see him. He's right there, in the woods," Tricia said, pointing with a long, well-manicured finger. "So, what's the big deal?"

Kari let out a sigh of resignation as Tricia confirmed her worst fears. She was losing her mind. This morning and this afternoon, there had been no sign of the man. She had searched the painting a dozen times during the day and he had been nowhere to be found. The horse had been grazing in the field, the dog had been asleep in the shade, the kitten had been playing in the flowers, but the man had been gone, as if he had never existed.

She had checked the painting just before Tricia arrived and the man had been in the castle, staring out the tower window. In the time it had taken Kari to open the front door and return to the living room with Tricia in tow, he had moved back to the woods, where he belonged.

Tricia tapped on a corner of the frame. "Did it come this way?"

"What way?" Kari asked, frowning.

"Framed like this. Oil paintings aren't usually framed under glass."

Kari shrugged, surprised she hadn't wondered about that before. But then, she wasn't an expert in such matters. Besides, she'd had other things on her mind, like a one-dimensional painted figure that refused to stay in one place.

Tricia stepped up on the raised hearth, her eyes narrowing as she studied the painting. "This is a Vilnius!" she exclaimed, gesturing at the signature scrawled in the lower right-hand corner. "Good grief, Kari, this looks like an original. Did you rob a bank, or come into an inheritance or something?"

"Of course not. What makes you think that?"

"Karinna, this painting is at least three hundred years old, and it's worth a small fortune. Maybe even a big one."

"How do you know that?"

"Hello? I majored in art, remember? Anyway, I remember seeing a picture of it in a book about little-known artists of the Old World. As far as anyone knows, Josef Vilnius painted only a handful of canvases. Three of them were supposed to have been lost or destroyed in a fire or a flood or something. One of them, The Wizard's Daughter, is located somewhere in Romania. Bucharest, if I recall correctly. This is the only one that's unaccounted for. Most experts assume it was destroyed, too."

"You must be mistaken," Kari said. "If it was valuable, it would have sold for a lot more than I paid for it."

Tricia shrugged. "Maybe the art dealer wasn't aware of its value. After all, Vilnius never made it really big, what with only five or six paintings to his credit. Or maybe the dealer thought it was a fake, since its whereabouts have been unknown for so long."

Kari looked up at the painting, imagining the nice profit she could make if the canvas was a genuine Vilnius and as rare as Tricia seemed to think.

"It was rumored that Vilnius was a witch or a warlock or something." Tricia waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "Of course, that was a lot of nonsense. Whoever started the rumor probably thought it would jack up the price, you know?" She shook her head. "Girlfriend, you are so lucky."

Kari forced a smile. She didn't feel lucky. She felt like she was slowly going insane, but then, maybe she wasn't. After all, crazy people never thought they were crazy. But maybe that was only after they lost their minds.

"Listen, I'd love to stay and chat," Tricia said, "but I've got to go pick Brent up from work. His Hummer's in the shop." She gave Kari a hug. "Let's do lunch one day next week. My treat."

Later, after Tricia had gone home, Kari busied herself with housework. She washed the lunch dishes, mopped the floors in the bathroom and the kitchen, vacuumed the rugs and dusted the furniture in every room but the living room. Time and again she was tempted to go in and look at the painting to see if the man was still in the woods, but for her peace of mind, she refused to do so.

She told herself that the pretty white horse was grazing in the field, the shaggy black and white dog was asleep in the shade, the cute little gray kitten was curled up in the flower bed, and the man was in the woods, where he belonged. She had seen him there earlier and that's where he was now, because painted figures didn't move and certainly didn't speak. She wouldn't look at the Vilnius again. Monday morning she would take the accursed thing back to the Underwood Gallery and put it, and the man, out of her mind once and for all.

When she finished cleaning the house, Kari changed her clothes, grabbed her handbag and her keys, and left by the back door.

Getting into her car, she drove to the grocery store to pick up a quart of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, and some fresh fruit and vegetables. On the way home, she stopped at Mama Wong's for some Chinese takeout, then stopped at Polly's and picked up a lemon meringue pie because, well, just because.

At home again, she put the groceries away, poured herself a glass of milk, then sat down at the kitchen table and ate dinner, even though she usually ate in the living room in front of the TV.

With dinner over, she rinsed her dishes and put them in the dishwasher, then looked out the kitchen window, her fingers drumming on the countertop. What was she going to do now? It was too early to go to bed.

Keeping her head turned away from the painting, she went through the living room and up the stairs, grabbed the book on her bedside table, then went into the bathroom to take a bath. She added a generous amount of lavender bubble bath to the running water, lit a candle, and stepped into the tub. She sat there a moment, thinking there was nothing more relaxing than sitting in a nice warm bubble bath. She read until the water was cool and her skin was pruney, and then, reluctantly, she got out of the tub.

Drying off, she blew out the candle, then slipped on her nightgown and robe. Now what, she thought? She was tired of reading. It was still too early for bed. Her computer and the big-screen TV were both in the living room....

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Kari, you can't stay out of the living room for the rest of the weekend!" she muttered, even though it seemed like a good idea.

Squaring her shoulders, she walked briskly down the stairs and into the living room. Sitting on the sofa, she picked up the remote. Keeping her gaze fixed squarely on the screen, she turned on the TV.

It took all her concentration to keep from glancing up at the Vilnius. Was it her imagination, or could she feel the man gazing down at her, willing her to look up?