Forever Family (Forever #5) by Deanna Roy Page A

had seen him, his wild gray curls, his friendly expression. And the adoration for Tina always on his face, as if she might have somehow been his lost daughter.
    “The studio is this way. It has its own exterior door, but it’s been blocked for years, apparently. I’ll get it opened up again so that when we start accepting artist fellows they don’t have to tromp through the evil mansion.”
    “Probably a good idea,” I said.
    We took one of the hallways leading from the red room. This one had ordinary muted gold wallpaper and was a relief from the intensity of the first rooms. Framed paintings lined the walls, a completely random assortment of everything from still-life works of fruit to landscapes to classical portraits. A few abstract pieces with blocks of color were mixed in.
    “This is his hall of contemporaries,” Tina said. “He bought a lot of art to support people he had met or gone to school with. Some were former students. He had a lot of friends in the early days, before the bad stuff happened.”
    “And after?”
    “He built this place and closed himself up. There are rooms for every mood, none of them happy.”
    “Art wasn’t an escape for him, then?” We paused by a set of double doors at the end of the hall, and Tina sorted through the keys again.
    “He tried to make it one, but he just couldn’t get the pain out of his soul,” she said. “The evil clowns came easily to him, so he just kept doing them, over and over, sort of like a child who might rock back and forth when distressed.”
    I thought about my old habit of holding my breath to pass out when life got too hard. Maybe it was the same thing. The stuff we did to make it through.
    Tina opened the door. The studio was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was a wing off the main house, and the top was all skylight. The far wall was also all windows.
    “Wow,” I said.
    “Yeah, a lot of light for someone who was obsessed with one dark subject. He could have painted so many amazing things.”
    Several easels stood around, most empty. Cabinets and drawers covered one entire wall. Parts of the room were tidy with blank canvases and clean paint palettes. The rest was chaos, with drops piled up and brushes stuck to dried spatters of paint. Discarded canvases were stacked haphazardly, some of the stacks falling over.
    “I started the process of picking up, but I might hire a service in the end,” Tina said. “Long way to go before we can make this a working space.”
    “What happened to the assistant who found him?”
    “She got spooked after she realized he wasn’t dead and she’d started a bad rumor. Nobody’s heard from her. She abandoned her Facebook pages.” Tina shrugged. “I had the locks rekeyed and the security changed.”
    I walked around the room, dodging jars of oils and tin cans of turpentine. I paused by a table with a half-finished sculpture of a woman. “Was this Albert’s?”
    “I don’t think so,” Tina said, coming up on it. “He really only did the clowns once he lived here. I’d guess it was the assistant’s or maybe some art student who was around. A few were still coming to work here occasionally.” She touched the base. “I don’t want to move anything that is unidentified, though, for the estate. Albert was big. Big enough that his last incomplete works are very valuable.”
    She walked to a corner where a desk with a computer felt out of place, black and modern among all the easels and paints that could have come from almost any era.
    I looked at the sculpture again. The woman wore a dress, and the bottom hem looked odd, like it wasn’t hanging down. Like maybe it was floating. I peered at her head. There was no hair yet, just an unformed block. “You think she’s underwater?” I asked Tina. I remembered my coat floating around me in the ocean from that terrible day I walked into the water.
    Tina walked back over, holding an envelope. She bent to stare at the statue. “You might be right.” She