In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
First, so far at least, Cecily Rose seems okay. The poison story appears to have been bullshit. After two days in the hospital she was released. Her parents spoke about taking her somewhere peaceful and quiet for a complete rest, but the girl refused. She just wanted to be home, in her own house, with friends, books, clothes, her beloved tortoise shell cat, Mildred, close at hand. Unlike Cecily Rose, who was fairly tranquil, her parents were a wreck. Alicia wanted to leave Austin because of all the bad associations. Emil had shut down, old mannish suddenly, a shadow of his old self. It was decided that Alicia's mother, Roberta, should move in with them for a few weeks. Cecily Rose adored her grandmother, peas in a pod, as I've noted, the two of them staying up late watching TV, gossiping, pigging out on ice cream.
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Cecily Rose
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Roberta
A brief statement had been released to the press. Cecily Rose was in good condition and recuperating well; the identity of the kidnappers remained unknown; her return had been privately negotiated, no information available. What had the press in an uproar was the story of a hidden grave beneath the itty bitty house in which Cecily Rose had been sequestered. That was the story that interested me most, too. The remains of an adult male had been found in the grave. My first thought hearing that news was... yes, you probably guessed it... perhaps it was Victor's body they had discovered. The skeleton was as yet unidentified, but going back to the psychic's vision of a body buried beneath an artist's studio that had gotten me started on this whole saga, some of the details were the same: the tiny house had been used as a painter's studio; it was located in the Austin area; it had a faded old blue door and stood beneath a scraggly grove of trees.
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♪ ♫ Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Jed ♫ ♪, Chuck Coker, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
So there you have it. It would take weeks, maybe even months, for forensic anthropologists to identify the body. In the meanwhile, by coincidence, a problem had occurred with my studio floor. With all the craziness of recent weeks, I'd been in and out of the studio sporadically and hadn't progressed very far with my portrait of Mme X. But I'd noticed the floor beneath my easel had gotten very spongey. I arranged for a contractor to come look at it, and he told me water had collected beneath the floor and it had to be dug up for the problem to be resolved. Dug up! Holy cow. But the timing was good. I was about to leave on my trip to Romania, so the work could be done while I was gone. And finally, we would know for sure if there was a secret grave haunting my beautiful studio.
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