You examine the provenance that Lucy faxed over. The list of the de Wit’s owners goes back centuries. Once you have glanced through it and examined his notes, you take a deep breath and pull out your tape recorder. You insert a fresh tape, make sure it’s rewound to the beginning, and hit RECORD.
“The Morning Room, Diederick de Wit,” you say. You set the recorder down on the table and don a pair of cloth gloves. You pull out a measuring tape.
“Unframed canvas is four feet, two inches wide, six feet, four inches long. Frame is not period. Age unknown. Roughly three inches deep.” The frame looks much newer than the painting—19th century, maybe—but you don’t know. That era was Ben’s territory. You put away the measuring tape and examine a figure at the far left side of the painting—a young woman, no older than fourteen, facing the viewer. The figure is classic late de Wit: she is clad in a grey shift, a black shawl wrapped around her shoulders. One corner threatens to flutter loose, but she clasps it to her ribcage with her left hand, her fingers gripping the fabric. Her dirty brown hair is pulled back severely, as is appropriate for the period, and her face is milk-white and smooth, her lips a sullen, muted bloom. You take particular notice of her eyes, the blue of Bristol glass, more color than appears anywhere else in the painting. The expression on her face is one that you recognize—fresh grief. The edges of her body recess into the gloom. The darkness appears to swallow her. She is looking over her left shoulder, shadows pooling in her clavicles and décolletage and around the tendons of her neck, her right hand stretched past the edge of the canvas. You mutter a curse under your breath. Most likely her hand was visible, once, but a hack framing job like this one probably has buried even more of de Wit’s secrets.
Behind her, sunk in the shadows, an older woman is looking upon the girl, a hand resting comfortingly on her folded arm.
You follow the woman’s gaze. She is staring at a young man in the middle of the canvas. Barely old enough to have facial hair, he is strangely contorted. He looks like an invisible string is yanking him forward. As you follow your eyes away from him, you notice another figure on the floor in a crumpled heap, directly at the feet of the standing boy. He is wearing the same clothes.
You realize with a start that it’s the same person. When you pull your face back a little from the canvas, you realize that the standing boy is… the soul, or essence, of the fallen boy (de Wit’s atheism is a rumor, but a powerful one). Now, as you glance from girl to old woman to the boy and his body, you recognize the tableau. A lover, freshly killed. A survivor, grieved. A family member trying to offer comfort.