Chapter 12

The Girl in the Drawing

Ladina 

"Gabriel. Gabriel, please wake up," I called out, panicking in the dark.

Before his eyes even opened, his  hand reached out and grabbed my wrist. He held it very hard. He was ready to protect me. Then, he blinked and saw my face in the dim light. His tight grip immediately went soft. "What is it?" he asked quickly. "What happened?"

"It is the study," I said. I was shaking so much that I could barely get the words out of my mouth. "The wooden door is wide open. The small stove is lit and burning. Somebody was just in there."

He did not even pause to think. He was up on his feet before I could finish my sentence. He leaned over and woke his brother. Suddenly, all three of us were running down the hallway. 

Gabriel ran first, holding the iron poker in his hand. Oliver ran right behind him, carrying the bright lantern to light our way. I followed behind both of them, running only in my socks. The wooden floor was freezing against my feet.

When we reached the door, the study was completely empty. There was nobody hiding in the corners. But the room felt alive. The metal stove made a quiet ticking sound as the fresh fire burned inside it. The old wooden clock sat on the shelf, and it was ticking, too. Tick, tick, tick. To me, those steady sounds felt like a cruel joke. They sounded like the stranger was laughing at us from the shadows.

I wrapped my arms tightly around my body to stop myself from shaking. The air inside the room felt warm, but it also felt wrong. But worse than that, it smelled like someone else had just been breathing inside it. The stranger had been right here.

Gabriel did not accept that the room was empty. He was too angry. He tore through the entire house, searching everywhere. He checked every single door. He checked every single window. He stomped through the back mudroom and marched down the cold stairs into the basement. He looked for any sign of a break-in.

But there was nothing to find. Everything was still locked tightly from the inside. The locks were exactly the way we had left them earlier that night. Outside the thick glass windows, the heavy snow was still falling fast. If a visitor had walked up to the house, the snow had already buried their footprints. It looked like no one had come inside, and no one had left.

And yet, we all knew that someone had been here.

Oliver did not run around the house. He stayed in the study. He walked over to the wooden shelf and looked at the clock. He picked it up very carefully with both of his hands, holding it like it might burn his fingers. He slowly turned the clock over to look at the back.

"Every tiny metal screw have been put back in," Oliver said quietly. "Every small gear is put back in the exact right place. I took this clock apart yesterday.

" He looked up at us. "Putting this clock back together should take a long time. At least an hour."

"A whole hour," Gabriel repeated, his voice full of anger and disbelief. "They were here for that long while we slept just down the hallway." Gabriel lifted his hand and opened his fist. The brass key to the study rested in his palm. He held it up to show us, like a police officer showing evidence. "This key never left my hand. I held it the entire night."

"There is always a second key," Oliver said softly.

Oliver turned and walked out of the study. He led Gabriel and me down the hall to the front closet. Inside the closet, a small wooden cabinet hung on the wall right next to the winter coats. I remembered seeing this cabinet on our very first day in the house. Inside the cabinet, there were rows of small brass hooks. Each hook had a label under it. The words on the labels were written in neat, square letters. It was the handwriting of their father, James. The labels read: Kitchen. Mudroom. Basement. Study.

We all looked at the hook labeled Study. It was completely empty.

"Our father keeps a spare key for every single door in this house," Oliver explained. "Anyone who has ever spent a weekend visiting this cabin could know exactly where he keeps them."

"Then it is him," Gabriel said. His voice was completely flat and cold. "It has always been him playing this sick game with us."

"Or, it could be anyone else who has ever walked through that front door," Oliver argued. "We just do not know the truth yet."

"Stop making excuses for him, Oliver," Gabriel snapped.

"I am not making excuses for anyone," Oliver replied calmly. "I am simply telling you that we do not know for sure."

Gabriel grabbed a pot and went to the front door. He scooped up a pot full of freezing snow and came inside. He dumped it directly onto the hot stove. The fire hissed loudly, and a cloud of white steam filled the room. The fire was completely gone.

Then, Gabriel grabbed an armchair. He dragged it out of the study and placed it right in the middle of the hallway. He sat down in the chair, facing the closed study door. He laid the iron poker across his knees and looked at Oliver and me.

"Go back to sleep, I will stay guard," Gabriel ordered us.

"I cannot sleep," I said. "I am too scared."

"Then just lie down anyway," Oliver told me gently. "I will stay right here with you."

I walked back to my spot on the floor in the living room and laid down. Oliver followed. He pulled the thick wool blanket up over my body and tucked the edges of the blanket carefully around my feet. Exactly the way a parent would tuck in a small child to keep them warm. I let him do it. It felt nice to be cared for.

My body did not ask for my permission to rest. The heavy exhaustion pulled me down into the darkness, like a giant hand pulling me under the water. I fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up, the living room was no longer dark. The windows had turned to a pale, dusty gray color. It was morning, but it was the kind of winter morning light that creates no shadows on the walls. It was quiet and still.

Somewhere very close to my head, I heard a soft scratching sound. It was the sound of a pencil moving across thick paper. I did not open my eyes all the way. I kept them almost closed and watched secretly through my eyelashes.

Oliver was sitting quietly on the wooden floor right beside the couch. His sketchbook rested on his knee. He was drawing. I noticed that his face looked very different when he was drawing. Usually, Oliver kept his face very calm and careful, like he was always hiding his true feelings. But now, that careful mask is completely gone. The look underneath was much softer and kinder.

He looked over at my sleeping face. Then, he looked down at his paper and drew a line. Then, he looked back at my face again. Every single time he looked at me, he seemed to breathe out a long, slow breath. He looked like a tired man who was finally setting down a very heavy box.

All my life, people have always looked at me because they wanted to check on something. They looked at me to see if I was behaving properly. They looked at me to see if my hair looked pretty enough. They looked at me to see if I was going to cause any trouble. My mother always looked at me the exact same way she looked in a mirror before leaving the house: she just wanted to make sure everything looked perfect on the outside. Recently, Gabriel had started looking at me like he was a starving man and I was food.

But Oliver was looking at me in a completely different way. He was looking at me like he simply wanted to understand me. He wanted to get my picture exactly right.

I thought about what he had whispered to me yesterday. He had said I looked at Gabriel like he was a door. Being with Oliver did not feel like opening a door to escape. Instead, it felt like someone had opened a small window to let clean, fresh air into a stuffy room.

"I know you are awake," Oliver said softly. He did not even lift his eyes from his paper.

"How do you know?" I asked, opening my eyes completely.

"You stopped snoring," he replied.

"I do not snore," I said quickly.

"You snore a little bit," he teased gently. "It is a very polite snore."

I laughed out loud. The happy sound actually surprised me. I had not heard myself laugh in days. It felt strange but very good.

I sat up slowly and stretched my arms. "Can I see the drawing?" I asked.

He stopped moving. He hesitated for a moment, he looked almost shy. "It is not completely finished yet," he warned me. "It might be a bad drawing."

"I want to see it anyway," I said. I reached out and took the sketchbook from his hands.

I looked down at the page. There I was, drawn in dark pencil lines. I was asleep on the couch. The thick blanket was pulled all the way up to my chin. One of my hands was tucked sweetly underneath my cheek. My long hair spilled softly across the couch cushion. He had drawn every single wave of my hair, one careful line at a time.

But it was my face that made me stop breathing.

Since the very first day we arrived at this terrible cabin, I had a deep worry crease right between my eyebrows. I was always frowning because I was always scared. But in Oliver's drawing, that tight crease was completely gone. My forehead was smooth. In the picture, I looked like a normal girl who had never heard of a scary stranger on a tablet. I looked completely peaceful. I looked perfectly safe.

Looking at the girl in the drawing made me want to cry for her. I wanted to actually be her.

I looked closer. Oliver had even drawn a tiny, faint scar on my chin. I got that small scar from falling off my bicycle when I was only nine years old. I had completely forgotten that the scar was even there. I did not know that anyone else had ever noticed it. But Oliver had noticed it.

"Is this really what I look like?" I asked. My voice wobbled and shook with emotion.

"That is what you look like when nobody is asking you for anything," Oliver said quietly. "Yes."

My eyes started to sting with fresh tears. My hand automatically reached out toward the front of his warm sweater. I moved out of habit. I moved out of a deep hunger to feel safe. I wanted to pull him down to the floor with me. I wanted to hide in his arms and find that quiet feeling again.

But then I realized something very strange. I already had a quiet feeling. The loud, scary circle of thoughts in my head had completely stopped spinning, and nobody was even touching me yet. A few simple pencil lines on a piece of paper had done what physical touch could never fully do. The quiet feeling stayed inside me, even without holding him.

Oliver saw my hand reaching for him. He reached out and closed his warm hand gently over mine. He did not pull me closer. Instead, he eased my hand softly away from his chest.

"Not for that reason," he said softly. "Not this morning, Dina. I did not draw this to make you hold me. I only wanted you to see yourself the way that I see you."

I nodded slowly, because my throat was too tight to speak. A single, warm tear slid down my cheek and settled into the corner of my mouth.

"Good morning."

I jumped slightly. Gabriel was standing right in the doorway to the kitchen. He was holding two warm mugs of coffee. I had absolutely no idea how long he had been standing there watching us. His face was perfectly blank, giving away no emotion at all. He walked across the room and handed one of the warm mugs to me. I wrapped my cold hands around the hot ceramic. Then, he stood behind me and looked down over my shoulder at the open sketchbook in my lap. He stared at the drawing for a very long time.

"It really looks exactly like her," Gabriel finally said. His voice was a little bit rough. "Except for the part where she is snoring."

"I told you both, I do not snore," I argued playfully.

"You absolutely do," Gabriel and Oliver said at the exact same time.

Gabriel almost smiled. His lips twitched upwards. It was the very first time I had ever seen him look almost happy, and it completely changed his entire face. He looked younger and less angry. For a few seconds, sitting there with the warm coffee, it actually felt like a perfectly normal morning in a normal, safe house.

I smiled back at him. Then, I looked down at the drawing one more time to admire it.

That was when I saw it.

In the background of the drawing, Oliver had drawn the tall ceiling above the couch. He drew the exact spot where the wooden ceiling beam met the gray stone wall. And right there, sitting in the corner, Oliver had drawn a tiny, dark circle. It was very small, no bigger than a little lentil.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to the tiny dark circle on the paper.

Oliver leaned in to look. Then, he suddenly reached out and snatched the sketchbook right out of my hands. All the warm color completely drained out of his face, leaving him looking sick and pale.

"I did not draw that dark circle on purpose," Oliver whispered.

"Oliver, what do you mean?" Gabriel asked, his voice suddenly sharp.

"I draw exactly what I see, Dina," Oliver explained, his eyes wide with fear. "I draw even the things that I do not know I am looking at." His voice dropped so low it was almost impossible to hear. "My eyes saw that tiny black spot on the wood. My hand drew that spot on the paper. And I never even realized what I was looking at."

Nobody moved a single muscle. The room went dead silent. Gabriel slowly placed his hot coffee mug down on the wooden table without making a single sound.

My heart started to pound hard against my ribs. I was terrified to look, but I knew I had to. Slowly, very slowly, I tilted my head backward. I looked past the stone wall. I looked up high, right along the dark wood of the thick ceiling beam above us.

Right there in the corner, a tiny, black camera lens looked right back down at us