Chapter 67: Reflections

As Flora rolled the cleaning cart in front of her, she got near one of the portraits that were hung on the walls. She made another gasp when she found an old portrait of a man wearing the traditional formal clothes worn in Cardena about a century ago. The man had thick black hair combed neatly over his head and the black and white suit he had on was expertly painted that the brush strokes easily converted into the folds of his clothes. It was not his clothes, however, that made Flora gasp, but the intense look from his eyes that seemed to look directly at her even as she walked in front of it. Flora noticed that the other paintings were also portraits of old men and women who might have been real persons, possibly relatives of the master. If they were portraits of real people, Flora wondered if the south wing really was reserved for the master and his guests and she wondered if the guests that Pablo mentioned were staying in the house were in fact relatives of the master. She would lik