Ovenshine

32.

Gravel pops and crumbles beneath Percy's tires as he pulls the truck up into his circular drive. He pulls the keys from the engine, hesitates a second, his eyes on the criss-cross, black slats of the front door. He hadn't expected to be back here so soon. Neither had he wanted to.

"Percy?" Jude asks.

"I'm fine," he replies before Jude can finish that thought. "Jude, you come with me so I know what I'm looking for. Sylvia, Gatz, you keep trying to get Indy on the phone."

Gatz nods. "Hurry up, Percy."

"I know."

It appears Tina's already preparing for the holiday season, as Percy and Jude greet two gardeners hanging wreaths on their way in. The door bangs shut behind them as they enter the foyer, and Jude lets out a low whistle. "So this is how a senator lives, huh?"

"Shut up," Percy says. He turns a corner, down the hall where he knows his parents keep most of their art collection. "Describe this painting to me again."

"But you just told me to—"

Percy shoots him a look, and immediately Jude gets the message. "You're right. Sorry," he says. "It's...there was a field, I think. And there were two people standing in it, a woman and a man."

He's not sure he remembers a painting like that, or if the scene is even distinct enough that he'll know it when he sees it. Fighting fierce tides of fear rolling in and out of his stomach, Percy paces the Mitchell art collection two times, and then again, and again. He still doesn't see it.

He paces back to Jude, grabbing him by the shirt collar. "Are you fucking with me right now? Is this all a joke to you? If you really brought me here for some stupid painting that's not even here and then Indy...if Indy—"

"I'm not making it up, dude. These visions nearly kill me every time I have them. You think I would play around with shit like that?" Jude says, wrenching away from him. "Besides. You're not the only one who doesn't want Indy to get hurt, okay?"

Percy exhales, though his chest is so tight it's getting harder to get any air into it at all. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter, though no less tense: "Can you remember anything else?"

Jude pushes his hands up into his hair, closes his eyes, paces in an anxious circle. Finally, he looks up. "The woman's in all black. The man's in all white. And there's tulips. Yeah. A shit ton of tulips."

"Life After Fear."

"What?"

Percy pivots and barrels back towards the foyer, his body moving much faster than his mind can, as if propelling himself towards the edge of a cliff. "That's the painting. I remember it. My—my nanny used to like it. It was called Life After Fear."

Jude's voice comes from behind him now, echoing off the high ceilings of the foyer: "Where is it now?"

"Here," Percy says.

He has to stoop, to shove a side table out of the way, but there it is: the outline of a door beneath the stairs. It should be nothing but a storage closet, a place to drop the many once-used, now useless items his parents have gathered over the course of their life of excess. It should be nothing but a closet. It shouldn't fill Percy with a deep, unsettling dread, a weight he can't shake off.

I'll always be there for you, Percy. Whatever you need.

He is still waiting for the day his brain no longer conjures her voice.

"Percy?" Jude says.

"You open it," Percy gasps. "I can't."

"Percy—"