by Rebecca York
“You don’t have to help me with anything.”
The way she said it had his aggressive instincts flaring again. “What are you hiding?”
“What do you think—that I’ve got a drug-distribution operation going on in one of my pastures?”
“Do you?”
“No!”
“Then what? Why are you being evasive?”
She dragged in a shaky breath and let it out slowly. “Because I’m tired of having people think I’ve got a couple of screws loose. You think so. I don’t want to give you any more ammunition.”
It was obvious she wanted to drop the discussion, but he couldn’t give her the luxury. Not when the two of them had to find a way to deal with each other before that reunion committee meeting.
“Such as what?” he asked.
Her chin jerked up. “Okay, you want to know the answer. I’ll give you the damn answer. Sometimes I feel like there’s someone out there watching me. I can feel him out there in the dark. Beyond the range of the lights.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know! The other night I thought—I thought he might have something to do with what happened to Hallie. That’s why I had some reason to believe she might really be here.”
“You’ve seen someone out there?”
“No. I—I just felt him…with my sixth sense, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Has he given you one of your headaches?”
“No. What I feel isn’t that strong.”
“Why not? He could be a danger to you.”
“I told you. I can’t control what comes to me and what doesn’t.”
He heard the exasperation in her voice.
“Okay,” he muttered. Then another thought struck him. “You sense him during the day, too?”
“I get headaches during the day, but the extrasensory experiences are always at night.”
“When I came here, you were having one of those episodes.”
Her face contorted. “Yes!”
He kept his gaze tightly focused on her, watching for any sign of duplicity. “When I got here, it wasn’t at night. That was during the day.”
Her face drained of color as she took in his words. “Oh my God,” she said in a barely audible voice.
BETH STARED AT HIM in numb shock.
She’d known someone was looking at her picture. Felt the awful touch of fingers against private parts of her body. But she hadn’t been thinking about the time. Now he was telling her it had been during the day.
The day!
Cal must have seen the panic on her face, must have seen her lips trembling as she tried to speak. Only a groan came out of her mouth.
He crossed the room and sat down next to her on the sofa. Too stunned to speak, she could only continue to stare at him as he lifted her cold hands and sandwiched them between his warm ones.
“Lord, you’re freezing.”
The words were like a trigger making her teeth start to chatter. He pulled her closer, his arm going around her shoulder, his fingers stroking up and down her arm. The contact felt good. Reassuring. She closed her eyes, allowing herself to lean into his warmth and strength.
But as his hand stroked her arm, she felt her body suddenly stiffen as she realized she was doing it again—letting him comfort her. And the worst thing in the world she could do was let herself need him or depend on him for anything. He was only here for a little while—and he was only pretending that they had a relationship. As soon as the job was over, he was walking away, and she had to make sure he didn’t leave a hole in her life. She’d survived all these years alone on the farm. She could damn well do it now.
Straightening, Beth pushed herself away, stood and smoothed a hand over her hair. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m going to work for a few more hours,” she said, making her tone brusque. “The television reception’s not all that great out here. I don’t have cable, but you’re welcome to watch, if you want.”
“I’m not much for TV. I can amuse myself.”
“There’s a towel in the bathroom for you. The pink one. And you’ve already put your stuff in the guest room?”
“Yes. Thanks. I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
“I appreciate that,” she said in a clipped manner, then turned on her heel and exited the room before he saw her hands were still shaking.
Squaring her shoulders, she marched down the hall, then slowed when she heard her traitorous dog hesitate the way he had earlier in the evening. When he finally followed her down the hall, she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
In her workroom, she sat down at the loom and picked up the shuttle. But it was impossible to focus on the wall hanging when her heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she couldn’t catch her breath.
Daylight. It had happened in broad daylight!
Previously the night had shadowed her weird experiences, and the daylight had been safe.
Now everything was suddenly different. Including her need to flee her own parlor—to flee from the man whose presence filled that room. She turned her head, staring toward the front of the house, picturing his dark hair and those dark eyes that saw too much. She’d left him standing in the middle of the room. Was he sitting on the sofa now, or had he gone upstairs?
What did that matter, she asked herself fiercely. What did he matter? She turned deliberately back to the loom and sent the shuttle sailing through the threads.
CAL STARED DOWN the hall after the woman who had fled his presence. He’d tried to comfort her, but she hadn’t wanted his comfort. Which was good, he told himself. In a remarkably short time, he was getting very wound up with her.
She brought out his protective feelings. And his sexual feelings. The first he could handle, the second was damn inconvenient. It had been easier when he’d been able to simply think of her as a liar or a suspect.
A harsh sound rose in his throat. Now that he was getting to know her better, he was torn by doubts he’d never confronted before.
He’d never believed in phenomena he couldn’t measure, couldn’t experience for himself. And he’d always thought that anybody who relied on information from a crystal ball reader ought to have his head examined. But if psychics were pure frauds, what had been happening to Beth?
He’d doubted her original story about Bradshaw. But that left him with no explanation for how she’d known about the woman’s disappearance or the blood.
Then he’d come here this afternoon and found her in the throes of some kind of attack that he couldn’t dismiss. Now he was almost a hundred percent positive that she wasn’t faking.
He cursed under his breath.
It was clear that something had happened to her. Something she explained in terms that left him baffled and uneasy.
But he wasn’t going to mentally take a flying leap off a cliff because he didn’t understand her.
For damn sure he wasn’t going that far!
He sighed and pushed himself off the couch. Part of the problem was that he had nothing else to occupy his thoughts. He was used to being busy. But Ken Patterson had taken away his active caseload because Cal couldn’t risk being seen going into the Warfield Building when he was supposed to be spending his time peddling financial investments.
He walked into the hall, opened the front door and stepped onto the porch, staring into the brightly lighted yard and the darkness beyond.
In the past, when he’d been on an undercover assignment, it hadn’t been that difficult to play the role of a drug buyer or a dealer or the owner of a fencing operation. But the rules had been different. He’d been working to arrest the scum of society. There had been no moral ambiguity about his role.
He hadn’t liked this charade from the first. Now he was finding out just how difficult it was going to be playing Beth Wagner’s husband.
He wasn’t sure how to cope with the shaft of guilt that stabbed through him. Raising his ri
ght hand, he pounded his fist against his left palm in frustration. In the middle of the blow, he was struck with a feeling of self-consciousness. Beth had said she’d sensed someone out there, someone watching her.
Watching him, now, too. Because, with the lights turned up, he was about as visible as a character on a movie screen out here.
The thought of being spied on made him edgy. And angry. If some bozo was coming out here harassing Beth, he wanted to know who it was and why.
Could it have something to do with the missing class members? Was the guy who had abducted the others and presumably murdered them going after Beth?
It didn’t seem likely. All the victims had been movers and shakers during their high-school years. Football players, cheerleaders, members of the homecoming court. Beth had been nothing like them. According to her own account, she’d been an outsider.
Of course, she could be lying to him. But he didn’t think so, not from the look on her face and the emotion in her voice when she’d talked about her high-school days.
So who had come sneaking around here? Was the watcher just a figment of her imagination? Or was she lying to him about that?
He clenched his teeth, then deliberately eased up in the pressure. He hated second-guessing everything she told him, hated making a value judgment about every encounter.
And suddenly he remembered the car he’d seen parked at the end of her lane. He still had the license number in his notebook. But he’d forgotten all about it with everything else going on. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that until he got back to his computer.
Resolutely, he climbed down the stairs, then headed toward the large bulky barn. As soon as he stepped around the side of the building, he was shrouded in darkness. Good.
He stood there for several minutes, breathing in the country air, which was perfumed with a generous dollop of sheep manure, he noticed. He stood with his back to the solid bulk of the barn wall, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the dark, thinking that the three-quarters full moon gave him just enough light to see by. As he stepped away from the building, he remembered Brodie’s complaint about his shoes, and gave a low snort. If the shoes got messed up, he could always leave them on the porch and clean them up in the morning. Beth must be used to stuff like that since she lived out here.
BETH’S HANDS WORKED the shuttle, her feet worked the pedal of the big loom, her motions automatic, the familiar rhythm of her work and the low classical music coming from the radio helping to take the edge off her nervous tension.
She had almost managed to forget about her disturbing houseguest, when a stab of pain in her head made her body jerk as though she’d been shot.
“Oh God, no,” she moaned the words aloud. It was happening again. And the last time had been only hours ago.
A sob of mingled protest, fear and frustration welled in her throat as she waited helplessly for some unwanted sound, some terrible vision to invade her mind. Or the feel of hands on her body.
At first she felt nothing concrete. Heard nothing, saw nothing. All that came to her was a vague and shadowy impression of darkness. And then a man walking in a darkened field. She could see his legs and his feet, but not his face.
Despair threatened to overwhelm her.
Please, God. Please, not again, she silently begged, pressing her palm to her forehead, willing the image to go away.
Was it the man who had been watching her?
She should try to see his face. Rationally she knew that. Instead, she fought the mental invasion with everything she had.
Her hands trembled, sweat broke out on her forehead and her whole body went rigid.
She had tried in the past to make the terrifying experience stop. Always before, her will had been weaker than the invisible energy waves bombarding her, and the unwanted experience had taken over her mind with a death grip she was helpless to control. But this time her determination was stronger than it had ever been in her life.
Cal had come in once and found her hysterical with fright. The thought uppermost in her mind now was that she couldn’t bear his seeing her like that again.
Every muscle in her body clenched as she fought the invasion with more determination than she’d thought she possessed. Slowly, slowly, the picture in her mind grew dimmer, wavered, defused. And for the first time in her life she felt as if she had some control over the forces invading her mind. For long seconds, she sat there, breathing in and out, marveling at her victory.
It had happened again. But this time she’d gotten some control over the experience.
The only residue was a dull ache in her head. Standing on shaky legs, she steadied herself against the frame of the loom, then walked down the hall to the bathroom.
Opening the medicine cabinet, she found two ibuprofen tablets and downed them with a glass of water.
Had Cal heard her walking down the hall? Would he wonder what she was doing, why she had stopped working? Where was he anyway?
With a grimace, she realized the focus of her thoughts. It didn’t matter what Cal was doing or what he thought about her walking around her own house. Firmly she put him out of her mind and hurried back to the workroom.
But instead of picking up the shuttle, she sat there thinking about what had just happened, trying to evaluate the experience.
It wasn’t like the last time when she’d felt as if questing fingers were assaulting her body. This time had been different. Not like something was happening. But like something was going to happen.
But what?
She stopped herself with a jolt. Why was she trying to bring it back when she’d just worked so hard to make it go away?
CAL TIPPED his head up, looking at the blaze of stars above him. They were so much brighter than he’d ever seen in Baltimore, or even in Ellicott City where he lived now.
It reminded him of Greensboro, and he suddenly realized how much he missed the open space and the solitude of his boyhood home.
He stood for a moment, listening for any sounds around him. There was nothing to hear but the buzz of insects and the distant bleat of a sheep.
The bleat came again, more plaintive, he thought. Then it was joined by another. And another.
Did sheep get stirred up like that all by themselves, or was something—or someone—spooking them?
Turning in the direction of the sound, he reached for the small but powerful flashlight he carried on his key chain. Then he thought better of it.
If someone was out there in the pasture with the animals, he didn’t want to announce his presence with the light.
Instinctively crouching low, he moved as silently as possible through the darkness, heading for the field with the sheep, their fluffy white shapes coming into view as he drew closer.
Weeds tugged against his pants legs, then grew more sparse as he moved under the branches of a giant tree.
It was darker here, the stars and the moon blocked from view and the ground uneven, and he stumbled over a tree root. Moments after he’d righted himself, his lead foot stepped off into empty air. Then, before he could jerk himself back to safety, he was falling through space, an involuntary cry tearing from his lips.
BETH HAD BEEN WORKING for a few minutes when the pain attacked her again—fast and ruthless, like a knife plunging into the soft tissue of her brain.
It was worse than the attack she’d fought off a few minutes ago, and this time she knew it wasn’t a premonition of disaster to come. This time the breath whooshed out of her lungs in a strangled gasp as she felt herself falling, falling through space in a terrifying plunge.
A silent scream clogged her throat. The hand that automatically shot out to keep herself from falling closed around the solid wooden frame of the loom.
The plummeting sensation stopped with a sudden sickening jolt that made her body feel as if it had slammed into a stone wall.
Disoriented, she dragged in a rattling breath, even as Granger stood and moved to her side, pushing his nose against her leg, si
lently asking her what was wrong.
She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t speak. Her head was spinning, the pain almost unbearable. But somewhere in her mind she knew that she wasn’t the one who had fallen. It was Cal.
Something had happened to Cal. And she wasn’t prepared for the surge of panic that swept over her. Wasn’t prepared for the way it gripped her by the throat, cut off her breath.
With a strangled sob, she jumped up and ran toward the front door, the dog at her heels. Heedless of her own safety, she dashed into the night.
There was no hesitation. She made straight for the pasture to her right, her feet eating up the yards as she plunged ahead into the smothering darkness.
IT TOOK SEVERAL SECONDS for Cal to realize that his foot had struck something solid, breaking his fall before slipping off again. But his reflexes had been good enough for him to grab for purchase.
In the pitch blackness, he could see nothing. Cautiously, he shifted his body, and winced when he felt a twinge in the leg that had taken the weight of the fall. Flexing it, he decided it wasn’t broken, thank the Lord.
For long moments all he could do was hover where he was, fighting to catch his breath, clinging to whatever it was that had broken his plunge into oblivion.
Then, being careful not to loosen his hold, he slid his palm over the solid surface under his hand. Rough fibers tore at his bruised skin, and he winced.
Where in the hell was he? he wondered as he cataloged sensory impressions. It felt as if he was clinging to a tree limb. Well, not a limb exactly, a root maybe.
Careful not to dislodge himself, he shifted so that he could crane his neck upward. Above him he could see a patch of star-studded sky, partially blocked by branches. The view was further blocked on all sides by some sort of circle. From below him, the smell of dampness wafted upward. Reaching out the foot that wasn’t throbbing, he touched a wall. A curving wall. When he kicked at it, a small piece of masonry dislodged, falling into the darkness below him and finally splashing into water.
Silently, he considered what he knew. A curved shaft around him, water below him, a tree root sticking into one side of the shaft and continuing through the other. He must have fallen into an old well. Who in the hell was stupid enough to leave a hazard like that around?