Chapter 2 - The Whispering Curtains
By six o’clock the following morning, the fog hung low over Bell Creek, draping the valley in white cotton.
Carol sat at her scratched laminate kitchen table, cradling an enamel mug of black coffee. The radiator clanked in the corner, a familiar, comforting rhythm against the cold morning wind that rattled the thin windowpanes of her four-room clapboard house.
In the small bedroom down the hall, eight-year-old Sophie was already awake. The girl padded out into the kitchen in flannel pajamas, her bare feet pattering against the worn linoleum. Her dark eyes, so remarkably like Samuel’s, were wide and glued to the cracked screen of an old tablet Carol had bought second-hand for her schoolwork.
"Grandma?" Sophie’s voice was small, edged with wonder.
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"Why are there five million people watching you on the internet?"
Carol stopped mid-sip. Sophie turned the screen.
There, on a viral video clip uploaded by an attendee at Belmont, was Carol Bennett, standing in her navy utility smock under the dazzling gallery lights, pointing toward the $12 million canvas. The caption below read: *Maid Stops $12M Masterpiece Auction: Claims Dead Husband Painted It.*
Beneath the video, hundreds of comments scrolled by in real-time. Skeptics called it a publicity stunt; art enthusiasts debated the brushwork; others demanded to know who Samuel Bennett was.
"Grandma, were they mean to you?" Sophie asked, stepping close to press her head against Carol’s ribs.
"No, darling," Carol murmured, stroking Sophie’s dark curls. "They were just surprised. People don't expect the person who scrubs their floors to know anything about truth."
Carol looked toward the front window. Across the gravel lane, parked beneath the bare branches of a black walnut tree, sat a sleek, dark sedan. Its engine was idling, thin trails of white exhaust curling into the morning mist. The windows were tinted jet-black. It had been there since four in the morning.
Carol reached out and pulled the faded calico curtain shut.
A sudden, sharp knock at the front door made both of them jump.
Carol placed Sophie behind her, walked to the door, and checked the peep hole. It was not a private security guard. It was Tessa Morgan.
The young appraiser looked disheveled. Her camel-hair coat was buttoned crookedly, her blonde hair whipped by the morning damp, and her leather briefcase was clutched tightly under her arm.
Carol opened the door an inch. "Miss Morgan?"
"Mrs. Bennett. Please," Tessa said, shivering in the doorway, casting a wary glance back at the dark sedan down the lane. "I haven't slept all night. I need to talk to you. Alone."
Carol studied the woman’s pale face for three seconds before opening the door and stepping aside. "Come inside. It's warm by the stove."
Tessa entered, her heels clicking softly on the floor. She took off her leather gloves and laid them on the table, her gaze sweeping over the modest house—the faded patchwork quilts, the shelf of library books, the small framed charcoal sketch of a sleeping infant on the mantle.
"Mr. Mercer spent the entire night threatening my firm," Tessa said, her voice taut. "He called our board members in Zurich. He threatened lawsuits that would bankrupt the house by noon. But when I went down to the vault at three in the morning with an ultraviolet lamp... I saw the strokes. The signature of Arthur Fontaine was painted over a scraped base. The varnish was chemically aged using amber shellac to fake fifty years of patina."
Tessa locked eyes with Carol. "Who was your husband, Mrs. Bennett? Really?"
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Carol didn't answer immediately. Instead, she knelt beside her bed in the adjoining room and reached deep beneath the box spring. Her fingers found the iron handle of an old cedar trunk. With a low grunt, she dragged it out across the floorboards.
***
