Sienna’s mouth opened, but she seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“Before each accident, your husband hired a prominent artist to do a portrait of each woman – to memorialize her after death, to have a trophy, to make her beauty permanent. Now it’s your turn.”
“I don’t… How on earth do you know this?”
“Some of it I heard from the other artists,” Malone lied. “The rest of it… We don’t have time for me to explain. There’s a room on the third level. In the middle hallway. About halfway along on the left.”
Sienna concentrated, trying to get over her shock. “Yes, where Derek keeps his business documents.”
“You’ve been in the room? You’ve seen the documents?”
“No, it’s always locked. When I first came here, I asked what was in there, and that’s what he told me.”
“That’s where the portraits of the other wives are.”
“This can’t -”
“There’s one way to prove it.”
3
Trying to hide her fear, Sienna reached the top floor. Her legs in pain, she walked along the middle corridor and almost flinched when the door to Derek’s bedroom opened. But it wasn’t Derek who came out, only a servant. After a cursory nod, Sienna continued toward her own room, entered, left a slight gap when she shut the door, and listened for the servant to go away.
The moment the receding footsteps became so soft that they couldn’t be heard, she eased the door open, peered out, and assured herself that the corridor was deserted. Immediately, she went back down the hall and tried the door Chase had mentioned. As she expected, it was locked, but she had needed to make the attempt on the chance that it might not have been. She went one door farther along, to the one from which the servant had just left, slipped inside, and shut the door.
She had been in Derek’s room only once before, five years earlier. Repressing her memories of that night, she saw that nothing seemed to have changed. The place was still decorated with antiques from the Italian Renaissance, including a canopied bed, its four posts intricately carved. The sight of the bed increased her anxiety. She shifted her attention to a door on the right, which led to the room she was interested in. Although it, too, was probably locked, she allowed herself to hope when she tried it, only to lower her head in discouragement when the door didn’t budge. I need a key, she thought.
Derek was scrupulously thorough. Anything important had to have a backup, sometimes more than one. Didn’t it make sense that he’d want to have a spare key hidden within easy reach?
Allowing herself to hope again, she turned to face the room. Across from her, a five-hundred-year-old Medici bureau brought back more memories of the only other time she had been in this room. Derek had waited to marry her until the bandages had come off her face and her beauty had been re-created, as he phrased it. The wedding had occurred in a rose garden on the property, just the two of them, a minister, and Potter as the witness. She had been so grateful to have been rescued from her former life that she hadn’t regretted not having a bigger celebration. In the dining hall, a string quartet had played waltzes. She and Derek had danced. They had cut the wedding cake and given pieces of it to the staff. Her wedding gift had been a diamond necklace. She remembered how heavy it had felt as Derek had escorted her up to his room.
There, the loneliness of her marriage had begun. Wanting more than anything to make love to the man she had married three hours previously, she had reached for him, then became dismayed when his ardor changed to hesitancy, then to frustration, and then to anger. She had tried everything to arouse him. Her final attempt had made him push her to the floor.
“Derek, it’s okay,” she had tried to assure him. “These things happen. It’s the excitement of the wedding. All we need is a little time.”
“Get out of here.”
She’d been sure she hadn’t heard correctly. “What?”
“Get out. There’s a room at the end of the hall. Take it. Sleep there.”
“But aren’t we going to share -”
“Damn it, I told you to get out!”
He had thrown a robe at her, barely giving her a chance to put it on before he shoved her into the corridor. In her room, she had wept, trying to understand what had happened. She had hoped to sleep, but her turmoil had kept her awake, until finally she had walked down the hall and opened his door, saying, “Derek, if there’s a problem, let’s talk about it. Whatever it is, we can -”
Slamming a drawer shut, he had spun toward her, his face twisted with more fury than she had ever seen. “Don’t ever come in this room again!”
Stunned by the emotion of his outburst, she had retreated into the corridor. He had slammed the door, making her realize that she had exchanged one hell for another. The next morning, wary about what would happen next, she had waited a long time before going downstairs, only to be surprised by the gracious way Derek greeted her, as if the previous night had been a fabulous beginning to their marriage. They never discussed what had come between them. They never again tried to have sex. And she never again went into his room. It was so much wiser not to, so much better when Derek wasn’t displeased.
But she never forgot the abrupt way Derek had slammed the drawer.
As if he had been hiding something.
Now she crossed the room toward the Medici bureau. She opened its hinged panels and pulled out the middle drawer. It revealed cashmere sweaters. Nothing else.
I was wrong.
Disheartened, she turned to leave the room. But he looked like he was hiding something, she insisted to herself. Where?
Maybe it isn’t something in the drawer.
Maybe…
She knocked on the drawer’s bottom. It sounded hollow. She ran her fingers along the inside, did the same thing underneath, and tensed when she felt a catch at the back. When she pushed it, the inside bottom of the drawer came loose. Hand trembling, she tilted it up. A shallow compartment contained passports for various countries, a pistol, and a single key on a gold chain.
Reaching for the key, she frowned at how the trembling in her hand increased. She pressed down on the bottom, shut the drawer, closed the bureau, and whirled toward the sound of someone approaching along the hallway. As the doorknob turned, she hurriedly crouched behind a large upholstered chair. She held her breath. If Derek came in… If he found her…
The door opened. Whoever it was crossed the room and entered the bathroom. A moment later, the person came out, passed the chair, and left, shutting the door.
Sienna exhaled. It was probably a servant putting fresh towels or something in the bathroom, she thought. Her crouched position aggravated the pain from her bruises. Straightening stiffly, she listened for more movement in the hallway. When she heard nothing, she moved quickly toward the door, tried the key, and felt her breathing quicken when it worked. With a harrowing sense that this was the most significant threshold she would ever cross, she eased the door open, stepped inside, closed the door, and found herself staring at what seemed like ghosts.
4
The murkiness of the room enhanced the illusion. Thick draperies filtered most of the outdoor light. Across from her, the faces of several women seemed to float in dense twilight. More disturbing, while Sienna recognized the portrait Chase had done of her, she had the sensation of seeing herself reflected in mirrors, so closely did the other portraits resemble her. But how could that be if she had never sat for them? She flicked an electrical switch on her left, blinked from the assault of light, and stared with growing shock at the wall of portraits.
There were seven – the one devoted to her, and three sets of two, each composed of a face and a full-length nude. Each set had the style of a different artist. But the faces were unnervingly similar, sharing the same shape and proportion. Definitely, the flowing hairstyle was the same; it was one that Derek had always insisted on. From a distance or in shadow, the other women could have been mistaken for Sienna. Sienna could have been mistaken for the other women. My God, she thought. Shivering, she approached the paintings. Some had been done in oil, others in watercolor. The signatures on them confirmed that each of the three sets had been done by a different artist. Their names were in the pantheon of late-twentieth-century artists, so famous that even people unfamiliar with art would recognize them.