The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [82]
The image of this woman was stylized. She was tall and thin, and she gazed down at her cupped hands. Her auburn hair, piled on top of her head, escaped in tendrils; her dress was deep blue, falling to her ankles, with an empire waist. Her toes were straight, and her hands and face, her arms and feet, were a pearly opalescent white. She was looking down at three pale blue eggs in her palms and her eyes seemed almost closed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The angle is so different, it’s hard to say if she’s the same woman or not.”
“I have to agree,” my mother said. “She seems a little bit generic. Maybe the similarities are in the artist’s style?”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Oliver said, both excited and a bit impatient. “In this one, I’m not looking so much at the face. You’re right, it’s ambiguous, maybe yes, she’s the same one, maybe no. But I think she is the same woman, and this is why: look at the pendant she is wearing. Look at the bracelet on her left wrist. They are the same.”
He was right. The pendant was oval, like the eggs, a nugget of dark blue lapis lazuli resting against her pale chest. The bracelet, too, was a deep vibrant blue, made of oval-shaped beads strung together. I’d been concentrating so much on the face and the flowers in the other windows that I hadn’t really paid attention to the jewelry and couldn’t remember if it had appeared in those or not. But Oliver knew. He clicked to the next slide, which was of the woman in the stairwell. The bracelet was not visible beneath the flowers in her arms, but the lapis lazuli pendant clearly was.
“You see,” he said, and then clicked again to an image of the Joseph window, which Keegan had sent at Oliver’s request. Here, the woman was much smaller, but the resemblance of her stance and facial shape and features to the women in the other two windows was very strong, and Oliver was right—she wore the lapis lazuli pendant, too.
“Now, one more,” Oliver went on, after giving us a minute to absorb the image. “This last one is a very recent acquisition, a couple of months ago. I found it at an auction, actually, an estate sale right here in Rochester, just a few miles away. The proximity of course makes me think that the owners must have known Frank Westrum, at least professionally, but the executrix of the estate didn’t seem to have any information. She’s the niece or grandniece of the owner of the house, quite elderly herself. I asked her to check, but she phoned a few days later to say she had nothing that connected the window to Westrum—or to anyone, for that matter. So, we are going on style.”
He clicked to the final image.
This window was large and, like the window in the stairwell, featured the now familiar image of the woman. Here, she stood on steps, one sandaled foot pointing down to the next stair. She wore a tunic, caught tightly at the waist, fastened at one shoulder and leaving the other one bare. She was looking at something out of the frame, smiling, her hands lifted as if to catch something falling from the sky—raindrops, or snow, or the rays of the sun. She wore no pendant, but the dark blue bracelet hung from her wrist. A tangle of vines and flowers climbed the side of the window, scattering dark red petals and blossoms on the stairs around her feet.
“Roses,” I said. “She’s walking on roses.”
“I suppose it could be,” Oliver said. “They might be climbing roses, or maybe they’re clematis. Still, I concede roses as a possibility. The trouble, though, is that there’s no concrete evidence that Frank Westrum knew Rose Jarrett personally. None whatsoever.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” my mother suggested. “Maybe she just modeled for him.”
“Unlikely. He didn’t typically work with hired models. He liked to work with people he already knew.”
I looked back at Oliver, who was studying the image on the screen.
“You said you talked to the