“Oh, I see. Well, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Raymond,” Denise replied, with every sign of enthusiasm. Dana could feel her sharpening interest in the man before her, and she felt almost hysterically amused at that. If her mother knew what she’d done already to this man! One thing was certain: he was not entertaining the kind of thoughts that Denise suspected. He most definitely didn’t like her. She couldn’t blame the man. For all he knew, she was a prying gossip. “Would you like a cup of coffee, or perhaps some iced tea?”
Dana moved over quietly to the table and finished stacking her drawings together, fully aware of the quick, questioning glance her mother had thrown to her. They were always careful as to whom they invited into their house because of Dana’s sensitivity. Denise was asking her silently if everything was all right.
It was too late for that. The invitation had already been issued. Dana made a quick decision. She couldn’t explain her behaviour to David, and so they really had nothing to discuss. She waited to hear what he would say to her mother, hoping uselessly that he would refuse.
But of course he didn’t. He thanked her mother very courteously, accepting a glass of iced tea, and drinking the liquid with pleasure.
Dana said briefly, “If you would please excuse me. I have many things to do.” She gathered her papers together, nodded pleasantly but distantly to David, avoided her mother’s eyes and headed to the door.
She wasn’t to get away so easily. David asked her quietly, “May I have just a moment of your time? I won’t take long, I promise. I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”
She turned and stared into his eyes, and she saw that they weren’t quite as dark as they first appeared. The chocolate tone to his irises was highlighted by a lighter shade of honey towards the middle. She had to give him credit for tactfulness, she thought, nodding reluctantly. He’d managed to convey to Denise, very nicely, that he wanted a private talk. She was quick to take the hint, leaving after another quick, questioning glance to Dana.
When her mother’s footsteps had died down, Dana went jerkily to the coffee maker and went about the motions of starting the machine. She whisked down a cup, and when the brew was finished, she poured it quickly into her cup, all in a totally unnerving silence. Some spilled over on to the counter and she wiped it up, moving as jerkily as she’d poured. She couldn’t stay still under that steady gaze.
“I talked to Grace quite a bit after you’d left on Thursday,” David said suddenly, and she jumped so violently at the sound of his voice that she spilled her coffee, again, and made a small choking sound as she burned her hand. Her lower lip trembled and she sucked a throbbing knuckle as she heard him move, setting down his glass sharply and coming over to her. Her cup was taken and set down also on the table—he didn’t spill it—and the towel she’d used to mop up the mess was thrown on the floor to the spilled liquid there. Then he grabbed her hand and pushed it under the faucet, holding it there with his hand on her wrist. It was warm, encircling the thinness of her forearm completely, and a contrast to the cold wetness splashing on her hand.
She kept her face down, turned away from him as she started to shake. He had to feel it, she knew, because it wasn’t a mere inward trembling that sometimes accompanies nervousness or self-consciousness. It was a violent shaking that came from severe emotional upheaval. His hand tightened briefly on her arm and then left it to come around her shoulders as he muttered, “Oh, no. Don’t shake so. Please don’t shake.” Her hand had cooled under the water flow until it was almost numb, and she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands dry. Then he steered her to the table and pushed her into a chair, seating himself beside her. She took her coffee cup and stared into it, sipping from it and doing her level best to get steadier, but she didn’t seem to do any good. She trembled like a leaf caught in a strong wind, and he saw it.
It was odd that she wasn’t picking up those waves of dislike from him anymore. As she tried again to grope outwards for his mood, he asked her, “What’s wrong, Dana?”
“Nothing, I burnt my hand,” she replied expressionlessly. She wouldn’t look at him. She was so vulnerable, too vulnerable. Anyone could come along and rip her apart inside, a kind of mental rape, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She was wide open to any hurt David might inflict, all unknowingly. She was so full of her own emotional uncertainties that she didn’t even notice how strange it was that he would start an intimate conversation with a near stranger.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, still being gentle. “But I won’t push it. You’re all right, though?” She nodded, and wondered why he would care to ask. Then she wondered if she had lied or not. He continued, “I wanted to give you a bit of breathing space, so I put off coming over for a few days. I’ve wanted to come over and ask you a few questions, though. Grace told me quite a few things on Thursday.” He paused, seemingly to pick his words, and she felt the careful, hard control he exercised over his feelings. He was clamping down hard on them, keeping them firmly in rein. She caught the edge of something like a whiplash, though, and flinched away from him violently. The man had an incredible amount of strong emotion just waiting to burst from him like a geyser. He was the bomb she felt ticking away in her brain, and he was going to blow sky-high.
“What is wrong with you?” she whispered, and covered her mouth with trembling fingers, aghast at how she’d let herself slip in front of him, again. She pushed back her chair, abruptly, and it would have fallen except for his lightning swift grab. He righted it as she backed away, muttering, “Excuse me, I’m not feeling well…” And she would have turned to run but for another of his lightning swift movements. Suddenly he was right in front of her and he had a hold on her arms.
“You’re perfectly well,” he said in a quick, low voice. “You’re just upset. Why are you so upset, Dana?” The question had a hard urgency to it that she felt even in the midst of her turmoil, and she stared at him in surprise. “What are you feeling right now? What kind of thoughts are going through your mind?”
Her eyes widened on him as she felt thunderstruck. He knew! ripped through her mind, followed by an agonised, How? “Why do you want to know?” she asked, hopelessly dissimulating. “Who am I to you? Why should you care what in the world I’m feeling?”
He sighed, the movements heaving his chest, and she had a brief instant of wonder at the new sensation of being so close to a powerful male body. It felt warm and different, not at all like she remembered feeling when she was held or hugged by her father. It felt…strange, but then everything about this man was strange. She put it down to that and then shrugged it away. It was just another strange emotion, coming from him. It was certainly nothing she’d ever felt before.
“Dana, I don’t know how to say this,” he said deeply. “But when Grace and I talked, what we discussed was how you’d known when she was hurt without having any way of knowing it. We talked about your sensitivity to other people and what they were feeling. We talked about how you’d known just when your father was killed, without anyone ever telling you.”
She wasn’t sure what shocked her the most, the fact that Mrs. Cessler had known for years the secret she’d tried so hard to keep, or that she had told this man, of all people. She broke away from him, crying out in agitation, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I didn’t know anything of the sort!” Even as she spoke the lie, she knew it was hopeless. And her lie was so pathetic.
“You do know what I’m talking about,” he replied quietly, and the contrast between his quietness and her agitation was revealing in itself. She backed up and jolted into the wall behind her. “And it does have to be talked about, so it won’t do any good to prevaricate. Look, are you all right?” This was as she turned so completely white, she looked as though she might faint.
“I think you’d better go, Mr. Raymond,” she said, and all her efforts to sound hard merely sounded quavering. She swallowed. “I don’t want to talk about this any longer. I don’t know what you’re talki
ng about. I’ve never heard of anything like that before—I think you’d better go—” She sidled along the wall until she came to the doorway, backing through the open space and nearly screaming as she came up against someone there. She’d been so intent on watching the man in front of her, she hadn’t even felt her mother’s presence.
Denise’s eyes were trained on David also, not her daughter. “So you talked to Grace,” she said quietly. “Why did you do that, Mr. Raymond? What had Dana done?”
“Mother!” Dana hissed, and it was all too late anyway, but she was still hopelessly trying to make him disbelieve, to make him go away, like a grief stricken mother trying to make her dead child live by holding him tight. “I—I think this conversation has gone far enough! Mr. Raymond, will you please leave now?” Hardly aware of what she did, she backed away from her mother also, and she found herself in a corner, leaning against the counter and the wall.
“Dana, sweetheart, it’s too late. He knows too much already—look, even I can see it in his eyes. And for some reason he needs to ask the questions. We can only hope that he’s a good enough man to keep quiet about this, for our sakes.”
Dana wrung out both hands, twisting and turning them, clasping them so tightly together that the knuckles turned white and red from the pressure. Both of them were looking at her and they both looked so concerned and worried that she nearly couldn’t stand it. Their feelings were hammering insistently at her now, for David was too emotionally aroused and involved to be able to hold on to his emotions well anymore, and Denise’s worry rose to the fore like a weary spectre. The thoughts and the doubts and the worries and the fears were all too much for one person to take. She couldn’t tell anymore what was her own and what was not. “I—I’m not prepared for this,” she managed to stammer out, crossing her arms in front of herself in the age-old defensive gesture to cover nakedness. She glanced at her mother and felt the pity and the love from her so strongly that she nearly moaned aloud. Was she then such a freak, to be pitied thus? “You haven’t prepared me for this,” she whispered “Sure, I was naked before, but nobody knew and now—now—” And at that incoherent, stammered statement, Dana did the only action left to her.
She turned and fled.
As she ran from the house, Denise sagged against the kitchen table with a gesture speaking of great tiredness, and her gaze travelled to the quiet man in front of her. There was no expression on his face, and she asked him, “And what are you thinking now, Mr. Raymond?”
Pale himself, he looked at the door that Dana had slipped out of, and he said softly, “I’m thinking that I wish I hadn’t had to force the situation.” He turned his head and looked at her, and though his face was devoid of feeling she caught her breath at the depth of emotion in his eyes, feeling for a fleeting second a hint of what her daughter had felt her entire life. “I’m thinking that I’d better follow her, to make sure she’s all right.”
But Denise shook her head. “No, I think you’d better give her a moment or two to calm down a bit, please. Give yourself time to calm down, too. If you get near her in a state that is anything but calm, you’ll do her more harm than good. She needs time to breathe—may I call you David? Good. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me just why you are so involved in this, are you?” She smiled, unsurprised as he shook his head wryly. “I didn’t think so. I’ll just have to trust Grace’s judgment, then. Oh, yes, I’d known that she had figured out something near to the truth when my husband died but until now everything has been better left unsaid. I hope you will be careful with Dana, whatever it is that you have to say to her. I hope that you are the kind of person to handle this kind of dangerous knowledge with wisdom and that you won’t exploit her, like so many people would. She’s been very sheltered.”
David just looked at the ground, his dark head bent, and something about his solid, broad shoulders and the look on his face made her relax even before he said, “Mrs. Haslow, I hope you can tell how sincere I am when I say that the last thing in the world I’d want to do is hurt your daughter, or anyone else.” His quick eyes flickered up to hers with a glimmer of smile in their dark chocolate depths, and as invulnerable as she knew herself to be to that sort of thing, Denise couldn’t help an involuntary smile back at him. He was a very attractive man. “And with your permission, I think I’d like to try to find your daughter now. I’m a bit worried about her.”
She found herself nodding. But as he started immediately for the door, she called after him, “I don’t believe you’re going to have any success, though. There’s a lot of wood out there, and Dana knows every inch of it. She won’t be found unless she wants to be found.”
The back door swung shut and if he’d answered, it was lost in the slam of wood against hard wood.
The further that Dana travelled, the easier she was able to breathe. She still found herself trembling with dread and with something else. That tension inside of her was not just a wire pulled tight, but a shakingly delicate state of being. Anything touching that wire would, she thought, make it snap and then where would she be? Falling down into the pit? And what did the pit hold, craziness? Oblivion? An impenetrable depression?
She didn’t want to know.
She climbed up a rising slope, having left any discernible path, and clambered up the rising ground until she reached the top of the hill and then she struck south, moving easily. The blue skies of summer hummed serenely above her with the sounds of living things. A jackdaw scolded, a squirrel chattered, and something rustled busily in the nearby bushes. She’d apparently walked too close, for a rabbit’s composure broke, and he bounded from his cover in a silly, mindless panic, big eyes staring and ears twitching madly as great long feet thumped him away from the suspected danger. Stupid, cute little thing, she thought, watching him disappear. She smiled and continued on her way. If either her mother or David came after her, they wouldn’t be able to find her. There was too much ground to cover and this was not one of her haunts that she was known to frequent, which was precisely why she’d picked it. She cleared the trees, having come to a grassy clearing, and she sank to her knees. Only her head and shoulders were above the long, tangled green strands. The sun pulsed down, she could nearly hear its beating, it was so palpable. She let her muscles relax, feeling incredibly weary. Emotional states are so hard to sustain, and when she caught the lash of another’s upheaval, it always would wring her dry inside.
She took a deep, easy breath, as if she was lacking oxygen. All of her life she’d lived in as much of a cocoon as her parents could weave around her. She felt so stifled suddenly she could barely breathe, and she yearned intensely to go out and experience life with gusto. And yet for her it was like a moth’s attraction for deadly, beautiful flames. It could kill her if she succumbed to it. So she stood outside of the magic circle, not knowing the incantation that would get her in, watching achingly while life and her own youth slipped by like water trickling through fingers, wistfully wanting to be near people but unable to be near them. How balanced would she be if she happened to befriend someone with suicidal tendencies? What would happen if she got psychically involved with someone like that and became so empathetic that she would die also? Would she become totally unbalanced and commit suicide in the midst of another person’s depression? It was the rhetorical question of her life, and one she dared not find the answers to.
She huddled into a small bundle. It was so close, like that black pit, so very close…
“May I join you?” David asked, his voice coming from behind her. Her head snapped up. Strange, to feel surprise. She rarely got surprises of that sort.
“How on earth did you know where to find me, for Heaven’s sake?” she asked, unable to keep the astonishment out of her voice. Grass rustle. He dropped easily down beside her.
“So you occasionally miss with that radar of yours?” he asked in return, smiling at her. She mentally sniffed at the air, finding a soothing lack of turbulence. She relaxed.
“It’s by no means
infallible. I can’t control it or direct it very well. Either it happens with a person or it doesn’t and never will. Alack and alas, I can’t even block it.” She drew in a deep breath then, amazed at herself.
“Please don’t be distressed because I know,” he said carefully, and she knew he was trying to be gentle for her sake. “I won’t do anything to hurt you. I know it must be very frightening at times for you, and hard. If you’d rather just take a little time to adjust to me knowing about it, we can just be quiet, or I could leave. I don’t want to upset you. I just came to see if you were all right.”
She smiled at him at that, incredibly touched, and saw him stare with an arrested look. But before she could wonder at what he was feeling, the look was wiped away as carefully and as cleanly as someone clearing a slate. She in turn stared. It seemed he was very good at control, then. “You haven’t told me how you found me,” she reminded him. “Did I do something incredibly obvious, like track mud or white paint?”
A flash of amusement at that, barely shown but swiftly caught by her, like a tossed ball. “No. I don’t know. I just started to randomly search around. Intuition, I suppose.” At her stare, he had to chuckle, a rumbling sound in his chest. “An odd word to someone like you, I’ll bet. No, nothing came down out of the sky like a lightning bolt. I simply wandered around, and hit on you by luck.”
“I—see. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it’s a bit hard for me to believe in a vague thing like luck when it’s more definite for me. I guess I’m continually surprised when other people don’t sense the things that I do.” Her eyes fell away and she reached out to pluck absently at the grass. The harshness of the green strands slit into her skin slightly. “It’s lonely.”
His hand came out quickly at that and took hold of hers, and after the first startled jump, she let her stiff fingers relax in his warm grip. “Would it help to talk about it?” he asked quietly. “All of that input into that small body and hardly anyone to listen to the output…”
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