Here again, there were a few personal items that included a hairbrush—the sort Brodie used—along with a bottle of hair tonic, and a straight-edged razor. All of which a man would usually take with him for time away.
There was a peculiar musty smell, no doubt due to the towel that lay on the floor where it had obviously been tossed aside.Men, it seemed, according to mentions from my sister when she was previously married or my great-aunt with one of her side comments, were not particularly concerned with such things as hanging up their clothes or a towel after bathing.
Except Brodie, I had discovered. He was quite orderly when it came to his long coat or the few other clothes that he had, no doubt from having few possessions as a boy on the street, nor a roof over his head, as I had learned from Munro.
Brodie was not one to go on about such things. Learning anything about him in the beginning had been like attempting to pry a bone from the hound and frequently had ended with him—Brodie not the hound—simply waving off my question.
“It’s not somethin’ to concern yerself with,”he had told me several times, but it did concern me.
Perhaps now more than ever. With this distance between us I needed to understand. His history, the things that had mattered to him, the good and bad.
I supposed that it was the writer in me, or possibly my own history that drove this need. The past, as I knew only too well, made us who we were.
It became obvious, early in my association with him, that I realized the man he became—honest, true, someone I could trust—was in spite of the horrible years of his youth...Almostin spite of them, I thought as I searched the bathroom.
Other than those few personal items and that discarded towel, I found nothing more in the bathroom that might tell me anything and continued through to that adjoining room.
This room had obviously been the artist’s private studio where he worked on his own projects when not teaching young students.
Monsieur Dornay obviously preferred to work with oils. There was a shelf on the near wall with tubes of paints, a variety of brushes set on end in a chipped porcelain vase to dry. Andthe ever-present jar of pungent-smelling liquid—turpentine for cleaning those brushes, as I knew so well from my sister’s artistic efforts.
There was a table, hardly in better shape than the one in the dining room below. A vase of withered flowers that might possibly have been a subject for a painting stood on the wooden surface, along with other tools for the artist’s work that included several well-used cloths, a square-tipped blade, and a knife. Possibly for creating an effect from particularly thick paint a brush could not achieve, as I had seen my sister do on one of her pieces.
There was also a great deal of trash and rubbish scattered around the room, wadded up artist’s paper for drafting subjects before beginning a piece with oils, along with a shattered wine glass and a decanter, the corner of the table stained with the contents.
My sister knew far more about these things that I did, and had explained that artists could be a temperamental lot. It was not unusual for those she had visited, and one in particular who had provided lessons, to explode in a burst of temper at some trivial matter.
Much like a temperamental Scot?
The thought was there and then immediately gone as a memory of the night before returned.
There had been nothing temperamental or angry when I had wakened and Brodie was there beside the bed, his fingers brushing mine. Then the expression on his face as he stared down at my hand in his. Tears had stung in my eyes as I held on and then felt his weight beside me and his warmth surround me. Protecting me?
I took a deep breath and continued my search of the atelier. Amid the smell of paint and turpentine, that smell I experienced in the bathroom was much stronger.
Across the room were several easels of partial and completed works, some draped with canvas. I pulled the canvas back from the nearest one and uncovered a portrait of a young girl with dark hair and blue eyes made all the brilliant by the flowers she held in her hand.
It was a simple painting with only the girl and the sweet expression on her face. But the beauty of it was in the simplicity.
Someone who lived nearby, the daughter of a friend, or perhaps the artist’s child?
I had seen nothing else in my search to indicate that a child lived there.
Lowering the canvas back into place, I carefully stepped around other piles of rubbish including a small barrel that had toppled over, and almost tripped over the artist’s stool that lay on its side. A body lay alongside it.
I had found the source of that smell, strong, tightening the back of my throat as I clasped a hand to my face.
It’s one thing to prepare oneself for the sight at a morgue or funeral, quite another to come upon one unaware and then very nearly step on it.
I heard a muffled sound and I realized that I was the one who made it—startled at my discovery, unprepared for the pool of dried blood that surrounded it, and the ghastly expression on the man’s face with eyes wide open.
“What is it? Have ye found something?” Brodie called from the adjacent room, and then he was there.
“Mikaela?”
He found me in that room, then stepped past, going down on one knee beside the body as he had undoubtedly done dozens of times when he was with the MET, and obviously in our private work.
The usual sort of question—Is he dead? Obviously, a moot point. The man was very dead.
