The third painting wasn’t hung with the others. It rested at the top of the grand staircase, facing the main landing as if greeting anyone bold enough to climb that far into the house.
The subject was a Golden Retriever — painted in radiant golds and soft umbers, his fur almost aflame under the portrait’s heavy varnish. He sat beside a grand piano, head lifted slightly, ears perked toward something unseen beyond the frame.
The plaque beneath read:
“Harper.”
No title. No dates. Just a name.
Records showed that Harper had belonged to Margaret Whittemore, the youngest of the lineage and the last child to be born in the house. She was said to be a prodigy, a pianist who could mimic any melody after hearing it once. It was Harper who sat beside her during long evenings at the keys — the dog’s tail thumping to each note, his eyes fixed on her hands as though guarding the sound itself.
When Margaret was seventeen, she disappeared. Vanished from the manor overnight. No signs of struggle, no note. Only the echo of her piano, still warm when her parents found the bench empty at dawn. Harper was never seen again either.
The painting appeared three months later. No one knew who commissioned it.
Unlike the other Whittemore portraits, this one carried light. The artist had painted sunlight spilling through the fogged windows behind her golden companion, catching dust motes mid-air like fragments of a song frozen in time. And though Harper’s face held no sorrow, his gaze was directed not at the viewer, but slightly upward — as if looking toward someone standing beside him, unseen.
When new owners of the estate first reopened the staircase decades later, they reported faint piano notes drifting through the halls — a slow nocturne, steady and mournful. The sound always came from the upper floors, always ending abruptly when someone reached the landing.
It wasn’t until a storm in ’72 that the mystery deepened. A bolt of lightning struck the estate’s east wing, scorching the walls near the landing. The fire crew arrived in time to save the portraits, but the plaster behind Harper’s frame cracked under the heat.
When the wall was removed for repairs, workers found a narrow door sealed shut from the inside — a servant’s passage long thought bricked over.
Inside was a small stool, a collapsed piano bench, and a faded ribbon.
The air smelled faintly of lavender and sea salt.