Locked Away

Days of searching online and getting nowhere brought Ella right back to the place where the adventure had begun, the attic. Rome was on set, so she was in the house alone, save the security guards and Lenore who was in the kitchen humming as she prepared to drop a stew into the crockpot for dinner. Ella stood at the top of the ladder looking around at all of the paintings, trying to imagine F. Ward here painting. Why had she left these behind?
She decided to do an inventory of the paintings here. Maybe that would give her some clues. Pulling out her cell phone, Ella moved across the room to the stacks of finished paintings and began to photograph them, both front and back. A few had tags on the back, as if they were already meant to be off to a gallery or a new owner. They had the name of the painting, the artist, and the date it was completed. Most were finished in the early 2000s, right before the house was sold and F. Ward stopped painting.
As she moved the paintings, Ella was careful where she touched them and how they were stacked. She was just about done with all of the ones that had been finished and stacked to one side when she moved a large one out of the way and revealed a small trunk.
Ella glanced around the rest of the attic, not sure if she was looking to see if she was still alone or if perhaps there were other items here she’d missed. Of course, she was still alone and she didn’t see any other furniture. Setting the large seascape painting aside, she dropped down to examine the trunk.
It was small enough she could’ve easily carried it down the ladder if she needed to, but she saw no reason to move it from the place where it had resided all these years. Sinking down cross legged before it on the floor, she dusted off a layer of debris and examined the locking mechanism. It was meant to take a key, but when she lifted the two latches on either side of the keyhole, she found that it hadn’t been secured.
Inside, she found stacks of letters and cards, hundreds of them, all organized by whom they’d come from with the earliest on bottom and the most recent on top. One of the stacks was from Fae’s son, Kenneth. Even though she knew she was invading the privacy of at least one person who was still alive, Ella leaned back against the wall beneath one of the attic windows and began to read, hoping the correspondence would give her some insight as to what had transpired between this mother and son.
It didn’t take long before she realized exactly what had happened. Fae had gotten several offers from well-known art gallery owners asking for specific types of paintings, ones she didn’t want to paint. She enjoyed her seascapes and other outdoor paintings, she explained to her son. He’d written her back that the money was enough for a sort of lifestyle he’d only dreamt about and that she should just do the paintings the buyers were requesting.
It was clear that Fae had refused, stating that her husband, Harrison, wasn’t feeling well, and she couldn’t get the large paintings up and down the stairs without him anyway. If Kenneth continued to pressure her, she’d stop painting altogether. Ella could gather that from the one-sided argument Kenneth was making in his letters.
He didn’t stop, though. He continued to hound his mother into painting the requested scenes, saying if she didn’t do it, he’d cut her off. She wouldn’t see her granddaughter anymore. The letters stopped about the same time that Harrison had passed away. Ella also noticed that the last date on the back of one of the finished pieces was dated a few weeks before Fae had lost her husband. Whether or not she had continued to write her son, Ella couldn’t say. But if she had, he hadn’t responded, or at least the letters hadn’t been stored here with the others.
The situation brought tears to Ella’s eyes. How terrible was this son that he’d decided to disown his mother because she refused to paint what others wanted her to? Clearly, Fae wasn’t painting for the money, and the fact that her son wanted her to was sad. “The allure of money,” Ella said aloud, shaking her head. In some ways, her own plight was similar to Fae’s, only it had been her father who had essentially disowned her when he’d attempted to force her to be something she couldn’t be.
Ella decided to look through the rest of the letters and cards while she was there, though she didn’t plan to read all of them as closely as she had the letters from Kenneth. Many of them were from Harrison. Ella glanced through a few but didn’t invade the couple’s privacy by reading them word for word. It was clear that he adored his wife, though, that he would do anything for her.
The other stacks were from friends, cousins, a few from fans, and then Ella found a few from someone else, a woman named Myra Costly. After the first few lines of the letter on top, Ella froze, her mouth dropping open. “I’m so happy we will be living with each other soon. I have missed you these past several years since you and Harrison moved away from town. It will be lovely to see you every day again, once you arrive at Elkwood Manor. You will like it here. I know it will be an adjustment, and I hate the circumstances for you, dear friend. But you’ll see. It’s a lovely place to live.”
“Elkwood Manor?” Ella repeated. Realizing she might finally know how to find Fae, she reached into her pocket for her phone. It wasn’t there. Where had she set it down when she’d found the trunk?
Ella scoured the floor and finally found her phone setting on the window sill above her. By the time she got it unlocked, her hands were shaking slightly with anticipation. She searched for Elkwood Manor and found out it was a retirement home in LA, just as she’d expected.
With a deep breath, Ella decided to call them. The phone was ringing before she realized she had no idea what she should even say. Would they be able to tell her whether or not Mrs. Ward lived there?
A woman’s friendly voice said, “Elkwood Manor. Carol speaking. How may I help you?”
“Uh… hi. I was wondering…. I’m looking for someone I believe may be a resident there. Fae Ward?”
“I’m sorry. We’re not allowed to give out information like that to just anyone. May I ask your name?”
Ella hadn’t told anyone her real name for so long, the lie came easily enough. “Of course. My name is Miranda Ward Bowles. Mrs. Ward is my grandmother, though I haven’t spoken to her for years. There was a bit of a falling out.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Carol said, her tone implying she meant it. “While I can’t confirm or deny whether or not Mrs. Ward is a resident here, I can take down your number and pass it along, should that be the case.”
Thinking it sounded as if Carol were trying to say that Mrs. Ward did actually live there, Ella gave her the number. If Mrs. Ward actually called, she’d have to continue to lie to the old woman and let her think she was her granddaughter, which was terrible, at least until she was able to meet with her in person and tell her the truth--the truth as it had become, anyway. She wasn’t planning to tell her who she really was.
Carol repeated the phone number back to her, and Ella thanked her before disconnecting the call. Then, she put the letters away and closed the trunk before deciding she needed to go ahead and finish inventorying the paintings. If she was able to meet with Fae, she wanted to be able to show her the paintings she’d found so that the artist could tell her precisely what to do with each of them.
By the time she was finished, she’d determined that there were 34 finished paintings, mostly of landscapes, though there were a few she assumed were self-portraits, some of beach homes, and a couple of inanimate objects. There were two that were not finished. The large one, still on the easel and another smaller one that she’d found sitting by itself on the other side of the attic from the stacked, finished paintings. It was a much smaller seascape where the focal point was a seagull in flight. From what Ella could tell, it was almost finished, but the ocean wasn’t quite complete, and there was no sandy beach yet as there was on the finished seascapes.
Ella studied it for quite some time before she set it back down. Could she finish it and the larger one? Was she talented enough to bring Mrs. Ward’s vision to fruition? While she had painted some back in France, she hadn’t had access to paints while she lived in the attic, and she hadn’t bothered to buy any while she was on the run or since. She hadn’t even been spending as much time with her sketch pad since she’d met Rome.
She wouldn’t do anything until after she spoke to Mrs. Ward, assuming she was able to speak to the artist at all. What if she wanted to finish the paintings herself?
With nothing more to be done in the attic, Ella took one more look around and headed back downstairs. The scent of the stew roasting in the crockpot made her stomach growl, and even though dinner wouldn’t be ready for hours, she decided to head into the kitchen for some lunch. Perhaps Lenore would be up for a chat. Ella could use the conversation. She felt bad about lying to the nice woman on the phone, and if she had to continue to lie to people to get what she wanted, a meeting with Mrs. Ward, she’d feel even worse. But she was doing all of this for the woman’s own good, wasn’t she? Or perhaps Ella felt as if the paintings locked in the attic were her kindred spirits, locked away with no means of escape. Maybe freeing them had more to do with her own history than she was willing to admit. Either way, she needed to speak to Fae, and once she had the opportunity to do so, she’d tell her the truth—or most of it anyway. She just hoped it wouldn't damage the old woman to think she was about to speak to her granddaughter when the woman who wanted to talk to her was of no relation whatsoever, no matter how close to the artist and the paintings she’d become.