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Chapter Eleven
“Let me make sure I understand,” said Emma. “Dorinda was the one who was painting Rose’s face
each night on LaRusse’s paintings, changing them as he slept? She sought to drive him mad by making
sure he was constantly confronted with her dead sister’s face and when that did not destroy him as
quickly as she hoped, she blocked him in the turret room with an open bucket of lead paint and a
whole host of paintings of Rose?”
“Precisely,” Rayley said, settling back on Geraldine’s couch. “The confusion was due to the fact that
Dorinda and Rose had a strong sisterly resemblance. Or at least enough of one that when Anne saw
Rose’s face, she thought that LaRusse was drawing Dorinda and the notion sent her into a jealous
fury. I made the same mistake too, at first. Only Trevor saw the difference.”
“Anne is lucky to have such devoted family and friends. She might easily have followed in Rose’s
footsteps.”
The two of them turned their heads to consider Anne Arborton, sitting across the parlor at her
mother’s side. She had arrived for Geraldine’s annual Christmas luncheon in a loose smocked dress
of the sort a child might wear, with her golden hair pulled back in a ribbon. Rayley marveled in the
transformation the girl had gone through in merely hours, for there was little similarity between the
young woman they had delivered on Tess’s doorstep yesterday morning and the one who sat before
them now. Anne seemed to have lost five years in age overnight and judging by the sweet, docile way
she greeted everyone at the party, she was more than happy to have her wild adventures behind her.
She is all contrition and submissiveness, Rayley thought. And she shall be the model daughter, at
least for a while. But by spring I have no doubt that our little Anne shall have thought of an
entirely new way to torment her mother.
“When I think on the matter long enough, I almost begin to feel sorry for LaRusse,” Rayley said aloud
to Emma. “No matter how he would try to expunge the face of the girl who died bearing his child, she
still greeted him anew every morning.”
Emma sniffed. “I would say he got no more than what he deserved.”
“Oh, undoubtedly,” Rayley said, “but it has always struck me that insanity is an especially cruel fate,
far more terrifying than death.” He paused and gave a rueful chuckle. “Dorinda very nearly took
Trevor and I down the road to madness along with them. If you could have seen her running about the
countryside in the moonlight, wearing her sister’s white cape…Quite effective, I assure you, and that
final night, when she descended from the turret using that same rope pulley she told me she had
created for the water…my knees all but buckled in terror. She was a true actress, that one, capable of
creating any effect she chose, and if the girl frightened two Scotland Yard detectives out of their wits,
it was no trouble at all to dupe a man whose mind was already corrupted by lead and alcohol.
Sometimes it is easy to imagine the presence of the supernatural, even though it seems a silly thing to
confess in the light of day.”