Orchid

by Jayne Castle

  Still no answer. To ward off a sense of growing unease, she reminded herself that Morgan was an artist. He kept strange hours. Chances were good he was sound asleep inside.

  She knocked loudly. “Morgan? Are you in there? It’s me, Orchid. I got your message.”

  She had found it waiting for her on her answering machine when she walked through her front door forty-five minutes ago. He had left it earlier in the day while she had been out grocery shopping. After watching Rafe polish off her leftover lasagna last night, it dawned on her that she ought to keep more food in the icerator while he was around.

  Morgan’s message had been short and to the point and it had sent a jolt of alarm through her.

  Orchid, this is Morgan. Listen, something kinda weird just happened. I picked up my mail on the way in a few minutes ago. You aren’t going to believe it, but there’s a letter from Theo. It’s dated the same day that he drove off that cliff but the postmark is from yesterday. It says in the letter that he left it with a neighbor. Told the guy to mail it if he didn’t contact him in a couple of days.

  I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s sort of typical Theo, you know, a little paranoid. Maybe I should turn it over to the police or something. But before I do anything like that I need to talk to you. Maybe I’m overreacting.

  Give me a call when you get in. I don’t care what time it is. Feel free to wake me up.

  But awakening Morgan Lambert was proving difficult. Orchid wondered if any of his neighbors had a key. There was a deserted feel to the small houseboat marina. It was a few minutes past two o’clock in the afternoon. Everyone was either at work or out running errands.

  She rapped sharply one last time.

  “Morgan?”

  Still no response. Tentatively she put her hand on the doorknob. It would be too much to expect that Morgan had forgotten to lock his door.

  The knob turned easily.

  Cautiously, half expecting an alarm to sound, she pushed open the door. “Don’t panic, Morgan. It’s me, Orchid.”

  She put her head around the edge of the door.

  And caught her breath at the sight of the small, cluttered living room.

  It was a shambles. Ripped cushions were scattered on the floor. Books had been pulled willy-nilly from the shelves. They lay in a small heap next to an overturned lamp. The drawers of the desk had been yanked out and emptied on the carpet.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Orchid started to step quickly back out onto the dock. She froze when she noticed a shoe lying in the short hall that connected the living room with the kitchen.

  It was a man’s shoe. There was a foot in it. The leg disappeared around the corner.

  “Morgan.“

  Ignoring all the sound advice she had ever heard about entering a residence that had been recently burglarized, she hurtled through the door.

  It was Morgan who was sprawled on the kitchen floor. A small plastic envelope half-filled with gritty gray crystals lay on the table. Next to the envelope was an empty glass. There was a filthy gray residue at the bottom.

  She knelt beside Morgan and fumbled desperately for a pulse.

  He was still alive. She glanced up, saw the phone on the wall near the icerator, and started to get to her feet.

  Before she could move, something scraped in the hallway behind her. She whirled around and found herself confronting a man in a black ski mask. He held a burn-hag jelly-ice candle. As she watched, he casually tossed aside the ice-match he had just used to light it.

  “So you wanna play with fire, do you, bitch?”

  Orchid opened her mouth to scream, but at that moment, the walls of the hall and kitchen twisted in an impossible manner, curving and bending around her. The floor sank away beneath her feet. Her stomach reeled. She reached out to clutch the table to steady herself, but it was not where her eyes told her it should be. Instead, it was tilted at a wildly improbable angle. She could not reach it.

  It was as though she had stepped into a bizarre carnival funhouse. Or another universe. Voices came out of the spinning void that was the kitchen hall.

  “Shit, Jink, it’s her. The one who was with that guy at the house we were watching. The one who kicked me.”

  “It’s all right. She’s alone today. She won’t give us any trouble. The illusion will keep her occupied while we finish the job.”

  Orchid thought she heard a man’s laughter. She could not be certain. Her world had narrowed down to the small, horribly convulsing kitchen. She felt as if she were on a roller coaster. Every time she tried to orient herself, the place shifted around her.

  “Watch this,” someone said out of the void in the hall.

  She saw the flame of the jelly-ice candle grow larger. It was the only thing in her field of vision that did not waver. She stared at it with desperate concentration. For an instant, she thought the world steadied. Her hand finally made contact with the edge of the table.

  Then the flame exploded into a great conflagration. Fire filled the void. Waves of brilliant orange flames lapped at the kitchen.

  Panic seared her senses. She had to get out. Now. Fire blocked the hall. That left only the window.

  She groped for and finally found Morgan’s ankle. She tried to tug his unconscious body across the undulating kitchen toward the window. It was impossible to make any progress. The walls flowed into new configurations every time she took a step.

  She thought she heard more laughter. It was followed by a woman’s scream. She thought it was her own but in that wild, chaotic kitchen-universe, she could no longer be certain of anything.

  Chapter 11

  She could not smell the smoke.

  The realization struck her with blinding clarity. Flames billowed toward her, consuming the hallway, but she could not smell any smoke. It was thick in the air around her, but if she concentrated, she had no trouble filling her lungs with clear air.

  Orchid released Morgan’s ankle and forced herself to think. An old adage reverberated again and again in her brain. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

  But what if there was no smoke? At least, none that you could smell?

  Orchid closed her eyes. Instantly the room stilled. She could feel the kitchen floor beneath her knees, right where it should have been.

  She was right. There was no smoke in the kitchen. Nor could she hear the roar of the flames in the hallway.

  Illusion.

  She kept her eyes closed, cutting off the vision of an inferno in the hall. Gradually her jangled nerves stabilized. In the absence of visual input, her other senses began to convey logical information once more.

  She became aware of the sound of rain pounding on the roof. The storm had struck. Voices came from the front room. The same voices she had heard last night when she and Rafe had encountered the two men in the unnatural fog outside Theo Willis’s house.

  “It has to be here somewhere.”

  “We’ve turned the place upside down, Jink. Come on, we gotta get out of here.”

  “Keep looking. He won’t like it if we don’t find it. Let’s check the bedroom.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Forget her. She won’t give us any trouble. She’s too busy having a nervous breakdown out there in the kitchen.”

  Orchid listened to the footsteps of the two men as they receded in the direction of Morgan’s bedroom. Very cautiously, she opened one eye.

  The flames still consumed the hall. The kitchen writhed.

  Orchid quickly closed her eye. The illusion-talent was strong. So was his prism. Together they were powerful enough to maintain the vision here in the kitchen while they searched the bedroom.

  There was no way she could get down the hall and across the living room without the two men noticing. Her only option was the wall phone.

  Unable to trust her visual sense, she kept her eyes firmly closed and tried to recall the exact location of the icerator. Directly behind her and a little to the right.

  She turned,
crouched, and began to crawl blindly across the floor. Thuds echoed from the bedroom. It sounded as if the intruders were pulling drawers out of a dresser.

  Orchid knew she had found the icerator when she banged her head against it. Damn, damn, damn. But she managed not to cry out.

  She used her sense of touch to guide her to her feet.

  The icerator handle was reassuringly firm in her grasp. She clung to it with one hand and groped for the wall phone with the other.

  A jolt of unwarranted relief raced through her when her fingers touched the receiver. Then she realized she would have to punch out the numbers without opening her eyes.

  Where were the numbers on the phone?

  Think. The number one was at the top on the left. The nine had to be last. No, that wasn’t right. There were all those other little buttons. The pound key. The star button.

  She risked opening her eyes long enough to squint at the number pad. A mistake. The keys swam before her, each digit moving in meaningless circles.

  Hastily she closed her eye and stabbed at the key she thought might be the nine. Then she fumbled for the number one key. She punched it twice. Nothing happened. How hard could it be to dial 911 without sight? she wondered.

  The answer was very hard. It took her two more tries before she got it right.

  “New Seattle Emergency Center .”

  “Fire,” Orchid whispered. She hoped that the driving rain would keep the men in the other room from overhearing her. “Shelter Cove Marina .”

  “Please speak up, ma’am. I can barely hear you.”

  Orchid raised her voice slightly, listening all the while for sounds from the bedroom. “There’s a fire. At Shelter Cove Marina . Houseboat number four. Hurry, please.”

  “I’m dispatching help right now. Can you stay on the line?”

  “No.” Orchid fumbled the phone back into the wall cradle.

  “Sonovabitch, Jink, she got to the phone. Probably called the cops. We gotta get outa here.“

  “Don’t worry about it. We got what we came for. Let’s go.”

  “Shit. I thought you said the illusion would hold her.”

  “Don’t worry, she can’t tell the cops a damn thing. She never saw our faces. Come on. Move it, man. I can hear a siren.”

  Orchid crouched on the kitchen floor and listened to the two men run from the apartment. When she heard their footsteps outside on the dock, she opened her eyes very carefully.

  The kitchen was back in the right universe. The hallway was no longer filled with fire. She drew a deep breath, trying to quell the tide of adrenaline that was sending chill after chill down her spine.

  She straightened slowly and picked up the phone a second time to dial the emergency number.

  “New Seattle Emergency Center .”

  “This is number four, Shelter Cove Marina again. We need an ambulance, too.”

  Then she called the one person she wanted to call most of all.

  Rafe.

  Fifteen minutes later, Rafe stood on the dock in front of Morgan Lambert’s houseboat. He had one arm locked so tightly around Orchid that it was a wonder she could breathe. He was certain that he had set a record for the short trip from his hillside house to Curtain Lake .

  Her phone call had come as both a relief and a terrible confirmation of the increasing unease he had been experiencing for the past hour. He had called her home phone every five minutes after the first trickle of restlessness had hit.

  At first, he had felt foolish. He knew as well as everyone else that there was no such thing as telepathy. But after the night he had felt the consuming need to phone Orchid and had awakened her from one of her psychic vampire nightmares, he had not been so quick to shrug off his intuition when it concerned her.

  He watched the grim scene unfolding on the street above the marina. The rain had stopped a few minutes ago, leaving a damp sheen on the pavement. The medics were in the process of trundling the still unconscious Morgan into an ambulance. Two police cruisers were parked at odd angles. The uniformed officers were inside Lambert’s apartment, taking notes.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?” Rafe asked Orchid for the third, possibly the fourth time. He had lost count.

  “No, I’m all right, really. Just a little shaken. Rafe, the cops are going to want to talk to us after they finish inside the houseboat. You heard the officers. They’re working on the assumption that Morgan overdosed himself on dirty-ice and got ripped off by some drug-dealing friends. What are we going to say?”

  “There’s not much we can tell them. As far as we know, that may have been exactly what happened.”

  She turned in the circle of his arm. Her eyes were steely green. “Morgan did not do hard drugs. He would never touch something as dangerous as dirty-ice.”

  “You want to tell that to the medics who just pumped out his stomach? One of them said it’s a wonder he’s still alive.”

  Her mouth tightened mutinously. “Those two intruders must have forced him to swallow the stuff. Maybe the illusion-talent made the drug look like milk or wine or something.” She shivered. “It had to be the same talent-prism team we ran into the other night at Theo’s house. I’m sure of it.”

  The bastards would pay for scaring her, he thought. But he had a hunch she would not want to hear about his plans for retribution just now. She was too busy worrying about her friend, Morgan.

  “You said you think that the two men were after a letter Theo Willis sent to Lambert?”

  “I heard enough to know that they were searching for something. It had to be the letter Morgan mentioned In the phone message he left on my answering machine. Unfortunately, I think they found it. We won’t know what was in it until Morgan wakes up.”

  “In other words, we don’t have any hard facts to give to the cops.”

  “No. But we have to protect Morgan. Those two men wanted him dead. What if they try to get at him while he’s in the hospital?”

  Rafe considered the matter briefly. “I doubt that they’ll risk attempted murder in a hospital. After all, Lambert can’t identify them. But just in case, I know someone who will keep an eye on him. For a price.”

  “Who?”

  “Whistler.”

  “Your street source? Is he also a bodyguard?”

  “If the price is right.”

  Orchid brightened immediately. “Good idea. But that still leaves us with the problem of what to tell the cops. I know Dr. Brizo asked us to keep the stolen relic a secret, but how can we do that after what’s happened?”

  Easy, Rafe thought. He’d had years of experience keeping secrets. He did business under a long-established policy of protecting his clients’ privacy. Furthermore, he knew only too well that if news of the missing relic hit the press, his small handful of leads would vanish. People who might know things would panic and drop out of sight. Time would be lost dealing with questions for which he did not yet have any answers.

  “We’ve got nothing concrete to give the cops at this point,” he said. “If we tell them what’s going on, they’ll probably assume that your friend, Lambert, is involved.”

  “But Morgan doesn’t have anything to do with this. He’s just an innocent bystander.”

  “Maybe, but how do you prove that? Given the few facts we have, it would be very easy to come up with a scenario in which Lambert plays a major role.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was a relatively close acquaintance of Theo Willis’s. One of the few friends Willis had, apparently. It would be reasonable to assume that Lambert helped Willis stage the theft of the relic.”

  “No. Absolutely impossible.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Rafe warmed to his own logic. “Maybe they had a buyer for it. Maybe Lambert got greedy and decided he no longer needed Willis. Maybe he killed Willis and then tried to do the deal on his own. Hell, maybe he tried to raise the price and the buyer got pissed and sent that talent-prism team to get the relic.”
/>   “That’s ridiculous. If Morgan was involved in something shady regarding the relic, why would he call me to tell me he had a letter from Theo?”

  “Maybe he was trying to draw you into a trap. He may have suspected that you knew too much.”

  “Rafe, that’s just plain crazy.”

  “The bottom line is, there’s no hard evidence that Willis’s letter even exists.”

  Orchid groaned and reached up to massage her temples. “Good lord, I never thought of that. You’re right If I tell them what I know, the cops might leap to the conclusion that Morgan is mixed up in this.”

  “He is mixed up in it.” Rafe watched a medic close the ambulance door. “We just don’t know how, yet.”

  “I refuse to believe that Morgan had anything to do with--” She broke off as one of the medics walked toward them.

  He was a young man with earnest eyes and a crisp, clean-cut appearance. The name stitched on the pocket of his uniform was Paulsen. He gave Orchid a reassuring smile.

  “I think your friend will be all right, ma’am. Lucky you found him when you did, though. Judging by that half-empty packet of dirty-ice, he took a major overdose. Another hour or two and he’d have been gone.”

  “Dead,” Orchid whispered.

  “Yeah.” The medic nodded. “As it is, he won’t wake up for at least twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours and he’ll be pretty groggy for a while after that. But with luck, he’ll make it. Hope he has the sense to get himself into syn-psych drug rehab. Next time he may not be fortunate enough to have you around to save him.”

  The medic turned and walked back to the ambulance. Orchid stared at his retreating figure. Then she looked at Rafe.

  “They really did mean to kill him,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Rafe agreed quietly. He did not share her conviction that Morgan Lambert did not do hard drugs.

  Orchid clenched her hands at her sides. “I’ll bet they’re the same ones who murdered Theo.”

  “Willis’s death is still an open question. Don’t forget, the police have ruled it an accident.”

  “It was murder. I’m sure of that now.” She clenched her hands at her sides. “Rafe, I don’t like the fact that two of my old crowd from the ice-prism research group got tangled up with this missing relic thing.”