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  After a few seconds (but what seems like hours) I hear Molly’s voice begging for me through the trees.

  “ Bec, come on,” she shouts. “There’s a waterfall.”

  Curiosity pulls at my insides. It is stronger than fear.

  A waterfall.

  A waterfall means a severe drop-off in the landscape-a cliff of some kind. Maybe a deep pool at the bottom of it. Is that why my father has forbidden us to enter into these woods alone? I realize then, the prospect of his little girls falling off of that cliff is reason enough.

  Still, who can resist chasing a waterfall?

  I take a few steps forward in the direction of Molly’s voice; toward the sound of rushing water. Ducking my head I slip on through an opening in the trees, make my way into the darkness…

  Chapter 24

  A howling wind woke me from out of my daydream. I felt a cold draft against the right side of my face. Looking over my right shoulder I saw that one of the double-hung windows had been left open. Not wide open, but open enough for me to feel the breeze.

  Shifting myself to the window, I reached out with both hands, closed it. That’s when I noticed that the old lock had been sheered as if someone had tried to force the window open from out on the porch.

  I had no choice but to investigate.

  Outside on the porch I went to the window and discovered that it had, in fact, been tampered with. Jimmied. Kids, teenagers. It was the first thought that entered into my head. Locals looking to do a little partying.

  But then if that had been the case, there would have been beer and liquor bottles tossed all over the living room floor; maybe even the charred remnants of a fire in the fireplace.

  But the place was clean. No sign of foul play, least of all a group of teen partiers.

  I made a mental note to call the carpenter to repair the window. I turned and started for the front door to lock it back up. It was then that I spotted the photograph. A black and white photo with a white border that was lying on the porch floor as if it had slipped out of somebody’s pocket not ten years ago, but just this morning.

  Bending at the knees I picked the picture up.

  I felt the floor beneath me shift. The image was of Molly and me. We couldn’t have been more than twelve years old at the time the picture was taken. In the photo we had our twin faces up so close to the camera lens our lips were practically pressed up against it. We were playing for the camera, laughing, smiling, really hamming it up for the photographer.

  But this is not what robbed me of my breath and my balance.

  The real shock was this: the image in the photo was identical to the one I had seen inside the basement art storage space of Franny’s house. The same one his mother said he’d painted back when he was still in his early twenties.

  Had Franny been in possession of this photograph? How would he have gotten hold of it? Did he plant it here purposely for me to find it? If he did, how did he know that I would be coming here?

  I sat down onto the porch floor, my back pressed up against the clapboard wall. I became convinced that Michael had been right all along. It wasn’t Whalen who had me spooked.

  Franny was also doing a pretty good job of it.

  Autism or no autism, Franny was playing with my head, my emotions. Somehow, I got the distinct feeling he knew all about Molly’s and my secret. Somehow he’d managed to invade my head, grab hold of my memories. Now he was toying with me, dangling me by strings like a puppet.

  Sweet, old brilliant Franny.

  I stood up, shoved the photo in my pocket, and took a three-hundred-sixty degree look around. My fear replaced itself with anger. Was I being followed? Stalked? Did Franny have something to do with it?

  I needed answers and I needed them now.

  First I locked the door. Then making my way down the porch steps, I jogged my way across the lawn to the Cabriolet. But before opening the door, slipping behind the wheel, I took one last look at the field and the thick woods that covered Mount Desolation.

  “Up yours!”

  Chapter 25

  The studio was silent when I arrived. If anyone aside from Franny and Robyn had been there while I spoke with Caroline Scaramuzzi, they were gone now. Setting my knapsack on the coat hook and my jean jacket over that, I felt the deadweight of two sets of wide eyes focused upon me. Breathing deeply I made my way across the paint-stained floor toward Franny’s corner with the same enthusiasm a condemned prisoner might face the electric chair.

  “Let’s see it Fran,” I said in the place of a hello.

  “Bec,” Robyn said, her face a painted mask of awe and wonder. “I don’t know how-”

  “Don’t,” I broke in. “Don’t try and explain it.”

  As I came around to face the canvas, Robyn stepped off to the side, as if the corner wasn’t big enough for the three of us.

  “Don’t, don’t.” Franny mumbled to himself.

  “It’s okay, Franny,” I said, “I think I know what’s happening now.”

  Before entering the art center just minutes before, I’d wanted to scream at Franny. What kind of game are you playing? Why are you playing it? I wanted to know if he was the one who walked to my parents’ house, dropped the photograph to the porch floor. I’d wanted to know if he was the one who tried to break into the house. But looking at the newest painting (the third in three days), I could only feel myself breaking down. I felt my limbs tremble, my throat close up on itself. I felt my heart lodge itself inside my sternum.

  A tear rolled down my cheek.

  “How is it possible to know these things, Fran?”

  Painted on the canvas, an oil portrait of two blonde-haired girls, down on their knees at the edge of a stream. They were surrounded by deep woods. To their left was the even deeper forest. To their right, a waterfall bound on both sides by an open cliff face. Beyond that, an open valley that led further into the country. You saw only the backs of the girls, their long blonde hair draped down their narrow backs like silk veils. The girl to the left-Molly-had her hand dipped in the rushing stream water as though about to take a drink. The girl to the right-me-was looking down at the hand, curious but at the same time, afraid to drink. At least, that’s the way it had happened in real life.

  That’s the way I remembered it.

  I stood back, pressed my spine up against the wall, my eyes glued to the painting. I took a more focused look at the woods, the girls and the stream. Inside the water I made out the faintest of words: ‘Taste’.

  I shifted my eyes to Robyn.

  She appeared even more shocked now that she could see that I was crying, her normally happy-go-lucky tan face having turned pale, her expression tight-lipped and bug-eyed.

  “Is that you and Molly back when you were kids?” she softly posed.

  I nodded, swallowed.

  She raised her right hand, pointed to the stream in the painting.

  “T-a-s-t-e,” she spelled out. “I see the word this time, Bec. I see the word.”

  My eyes focused on her.

  “Do you have a date tonight?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes still focused on the painting.

  “There’re no more classes today,” I said, wiping the tears from my face with the backs of my hands, composing myself. “I’m going to close up shop for the rest of the day. Franny and I need some privacy to talk alone.”

  “Alone,” Franny softly spoke in rhythm with his rocking. “Alone.”

  Robyn shot me a pensive glance. Then, without a word, she grabbed her jacket and her bag. Silently she walked the length of the studio toward the exit. She turned, looked not at me, but into me.

  “Bec, what’s going here? Why is Franny making these paintings for you?”

  “I can’t tell you that now. But soon I’ll tell you everything.”

  With that worried expression still masking her face, my partner turned and disappeared out the door.

  Drying my eyes once more, I swallowed a breath, tried my best t
o regain my equilibrium and my sanity.

  “Franny,” I said. “It’s time you and I talked the truth.”

  Chapter 26

  As I stood before Francis inside a studio filled with easels, unfinished paintings, clay sculptures and sketches, and not a soul around to work on them, I found myself alone not with a man but a different creature altogether. But then I also knew that this creature had to know something about me; about my past; about Molly’s past. Even more frightening, he might also know something about my future. In either case, I was determined to get the whole story out of him.

  A metal work table was set only a few feet away from Franny’s stool. I sat down on top of it, letting my legs dangle off the side.

  “I need to ask you a few questions, Fran.”

  He rolled his eyes. I recognized the reaction. It meant he was receiving me loud and crystal clear.

  “Questions,” he mumbled. “Questions, answers, questions…”

  I inhaled.

  “Why did you paint Molly and me, Franny? Why did you paint the woods in back of my mom and dad’s home? Why are you putting words in the paintings?”

  His eyes, still rolling in their sockets, never stopping to focus on anything, let alone me, for more than a couple of second at a time.

  “Molly and Rebecca,” he said after a long beat. “Molly and Rebecca go into the woods. Molly and Rebecca go into the woods where they don’t belong.”

  My stomach dropped. Pulse picked up inside my chest and temples.

  “What do you know about Molly and me and those woods?”

  Eyes rolling rapidly inside their sockets, Franny rocked back and forth on his stool. Chubby face grew redder and redder, like a red balloon about to burst. I recalled what Caroline had said about his heart. But it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter enough.

  “Molly and Rebecca,” he chanted, voice growing louder. “Molly and Rebecca go into the woods where they don’t belong. Monster man is in the woods. Monster man does bad things to Molly and Rebecca.”

  Body trembling, my blood shot through the veins.

  “Franny how do you know this?” I screamed. “How can you possibly know?”

  I was standing now, in the middle of the studio floor. I stood over him, where he was seated on the stool, left hand clutching his red T-shirt. I pulled the black and white photograph from my jeans pocket, held it only inches from his nose. I screamed in his face. “Did you put this on my parents’ porch? How did you know I was going there? How did you know?”

  But that’s when something stopped me. Something invisible reached out for me, pulled me back. I let go of him, collapsed onto my knees. Franny had been right here at the art center studio while I made my stop-over at Caroline’s. Franny could not have known that I would be visiting my childhood home. That is, unless somehow he was able to intuit it.

  What have I done?

  I looked up at Franny, looked at him rocking. I stood up and wrapped my arms around his barrel chest. When I released him, I saw that his eyes were no longer rolling but focused up at the ceiling. He was crying.

  I whispered, “Franny were you there when it happened all those years ago? Did you see Joseph Whalen attack Molly and me?”

  Chapter 27

  He was crying hard now, rocking so violently on that stool I thought he might fly off. He was mumbling something. But the words were impossible to understand. I hated to see him like this, hated myself for causing him pain. I inhaled and exhaled until I felt some calm enter back into my bloodstream.

  I shoved the photo back in my pocket, went to Franny, once more wrapped my arms around his bulk. I held him so tightly I thought I might break my arms. He stopped rocking, but he was shivering. I dried his eyes with my hands, brushed back his thick hair, whispered, ‘shush’ the same way a mother might calm a little boy.

  I told him I was sorry; that everything was going to be okay.

  “Okay,” he whispered in a quaking voice. “Franny’s okay.”

  When finally he calmed down, I stepped outside the room, called Caroline to come pick him up; that Franny needed to go home. She was about to hang up when I stopped her.

  “The painting Franny brought for me today. Did you see it?”

  Dead air oozed over the line.

  “Francis didn’t show me the piece. Sometimes he makes a point of showing the paintings to me. Other times he can be very secretive. He’s a grown man and I must respect his decisions, within reason of course.”

  It struck me as strange: Caroline referring to Franny as a “man.” Not the boy she spoke of earlier.

  We hung up.

  When I went back into the studio, Franny was bundled in his old navy blue pea coat, sticker-covered portfolio bag slung over the shoulder. He faced the door at the opposite end of the room the same way a scolded child would stand in a corner. He was awaiting his mother, even though it would be some fifteen minutes before her arrival.

  The new painting was laid out on my table. Like rubbernecking at a bad car wreck, it hurt to look at it. Still, I had to pose the one crucial question about its title. But before I could open my mouth, he blurted out the answer to the unanswered question.

  “Taste,” he said not to me, but to the door only inches from his face.

  Chapter 28

  I raced home as soon as Franny and his mother took off in their old truck. Michael immediately stopped what he was doing when I came through the apartment’s front door. He looked up at me, closed the laptop, as if my timing had been perfect.

  “Don’t tell me,” he smiled warmly. “Franny painting number three.”

  “Sure.”

  He got up and stared at the painting. After a silent time he turned to me.

  “You and Moll,” he said. “You and Moll at the stream on the day it all happened.”

  I nodded.

  Like Robyn before him, he traced the letters to the word ‘Taste’ which had been painted in blue-white letters inside the stream water.

  “I really see the word this time.”

  Then I told him everything else. About my morning get together with Caroline; about the basement art room; about the painting Franny did of Molly and me many years ago-the one that matched precisely a black and white snapshot I just happened to discover on the porch floor of my parents’ home as if somebody had purposely set it there for me; somebody able to anticipate my every move.

  “This photo,” I told him, pulling the tattered snapshot from out of my jeans pocket, setting it on top of the closed laptop.

  While he turned his attention from the ‘Taste’ painting to the photograph, I told him about the jimmied window; how someone had definitely tried to break into the house. I told him about my confrontation with Franny; about how I didn’t get a word out of him other than confirming my own suspicions. That, number one, he’d somehow witnessed Whalen assaulting Molly and me thirty years ago. Maybe witnessed it through a basement window. And number two: he was trying to warn me of something. I also told him that it was time I went to the police.

  Michael looked at me with squinty eyes.

  “So long as they believe you,” he said, handing the snapshot back to me. “It’s the right thing to do. But they’ve got to believe you.”

  My portfolio bag was stored in the narrow space between the couch-back and the far wall. I pulled it out, unzipped it, reached inside and took out two of my own blank canvases, setting them against the bookshelf. Then I slipped Franny’s paintings inside. I zipped up the bag, slung it over my shoulder and checked my pockets for my cell phone and car keys.

  “I really want you to come with me,” I said. “But if you’d rather keep out of it.”

  He pursed his lips and shot me a wink of his right eye.

  “Let’s go make believers out of the cops,” he said.

  Chapter 29

  Our decision to drive downtown to the South Pearl Street Precinct had not been indiscriminate. According to the info we’d found online, this was the very place in which Whalen had b
een jailed after his arrest for the abduction and attempted rape of an eighteen year old college freshman thirty years ago. That single assault led to the discovery of at least a half-dozen prior rapes when, after a photo of Whalen was posted on every local TV station and newspaper, a small flood of brave, young women started coming forward and pointing the finger-women with more courage than Molly and me. Or maybe less to lose by telling the truth.

  Being that my father had been a state trooper, I wasn’t entirely a stranger to police stations. But that didn’t make them anymore comfortable to be around. My cumbersome portfolio bag slung over my shoulder, I followed Michael up the granite steps, through the glass doors, across the vestibule waiting area to the large bench. Seated on the bench was a heavyset, gray-haired officer. Set before him was a desktop computer, a phone and a small plaque with the words ‘Watch Commander’ embossed in it.

  “Help you?” he grumbled, eyes focused not on us but his computer screen.

  “We need to speak with a detective,” Michael announced.

  Behind the watch commander’s shoulder, I could make out the not too unfamiliar inner workings of the wide open station-the many uniformed and plain-clothed policemen and women, the identical metal desks set out equidistant from one another, each of them topped with a computer where typewriters might have been back when Whalen was first arrested. Back when my dad was ‘Trooper Dan’. There were the bright overhead ceiling-mounted lamps, the ringing phones, the chiming cells, the buzzing fax machines and at least a dozen voices competing with one another.

  “And why is it you need to see a detective?” the watch commander smirked.