The Missing Page (Page & Sommers #2)

by Cat Sebastian

what about the oil paintings?” he asked, nodding at a different series of canvases. “I don’t usually sell those.” Leo could see why. These paintings weren’t pretty in the least. Some were beautiful—there was a painting of what looked like Dartmoor, and another of an empty airfield. But they weren’t the sort of thing you’d hang over the sofa in the front parlor. There was also a painting of Blackthorn, its absurd Victorian dollhouse aesthetic twisted around so that it seemed to erupt from the ground like a mushroom. It was not a flattering view of the house, there was no question. But it was also somehow…friendly, perhaps? It was not painted by a person who hated the place. It was painted by a person who saw Blackthorn for what it was—tacky and overwrought but on a domestic scale. It was a home. This was the first time Leo had really thought of the place in that way. People had lived and died there; children had grown up there. Cold and barren as it now was, it might once have been something else. For a moment, he thought that maybe it was also painted by a person who knew Blackthorn’s secrets. “That’s Miriam’s haunted house,” said Carrow. Leo raised an eyebrow. “Does Blackthorn have a ghost?” “No, it’s not nearly old enough for that. But Miriam made it look flat spooky.” “You have an overactive imagination,” Mrs. Carrow said fondly. Tacked up on the wall above the painting of Blackthorn was a charcoal sketch, the only portrait Leo had seen in the studio. It was of Carrow i...