by Fortune Kent
With a start she realized she had forgotten Charles Randall. Was he in the house? She walked unsteadily to the closed door and edged it open a few inches. A floorboard creaked somewhere below her. Steam hissed in the radiators. Another sound. A car. The roar of the motor muffled by the snow. She ran toward the window but stopped beside the bed, afraid of being seen. She looked out but saw nothing except the falling snow. The motor shut off suddenly and a car door slammed, then another. Someone was coming to the house then, not leaving. Who?
Could it be…? She had not worn her watch and there was no clock in the room. Could it be only nine in the morning and Mrs. McAllister was arriving to clean the debris left by the housewarming? Would she have come in this storm? Lesley had heard two doors slam, not one. Had someone brought her?
She returned to the partly open hall door. Through the crack she saw a wedge of hallway, the top of the stairs, and the door to the attic. As she waited for the chimes to ring she pressed her bare toes against the hardness of the floor, savoring the warmth of the house. Remembering the opal—the gem was still in her coat—she ran back, knelt, and transferred the pendant to her pants pocket. Still she heard no chimes or knocking at the front door. Could they have…? Yes, they must have gone to the back. She probably wouldn’t have heard the knocking on the back door from here.
Opening the door, she ran along the hall to the railing at the head of the stairs. Voices came from below. She descended the stairs, her bare feet making no noise, then paused halfway to the bottom when she heard a door close and footsteps cross the kitchen. Heavy steps, a man’s steps. She ran back to the upper hall where she knelt to one side of the stairs behind the newel post. A car started outside the house. He had sent them away. Charles Randall had sent them away. Quick, she told herself. Go to the front door; stop the car before it’s too late. Escape.
She threw open the door, snow whirling in her face. Down the steps in her bare feet. The car, headlights on, swept by, and she called, saw a face in the car window, a woman’s face, not looking at her, not hearing her. As Lesley watched, the falling snow snuffed out the car’s taillights.
She climbed wearily up the stone steps, entered the house, and pushed the door shut behind her. No sound came from below. How could she get word to the outside? Of course—the telephone. Why hadn’t she thought of the phone in her bedroom before? The room was as she had left it a few hours ago, the bed unmade, her party clothes draped on the back of the rocker. The phone sat on the nightstand.
She put the receiver to her ear. Dead. She jiggled the button once, twice, three times. No sound came from the receiver. The line must be down. Or had the wire been cut? There was another, a separate phone line going into the tower. Could she reach the tower? After looking both ways along the hall, she returned to the top of the stairs. The door on the other side of the hall was still open and she thought she felt a breeze from the broken window.
How can I get downstairs, past Charles Randall, and across the yard to the tower? she wondered. Footsteps! She backed away. Footsteps on the stairs. He was coming to the second floor. Panic gripped her—he would find the open door, the broken window, her coat and shoes on the floor of the bedroom. She could not think. Instinct urged her to get as far away as she could. The attic. Hide in the attic.
She ran down the hall. The attic door opened easily. A last glance over her shoulder told her he had not yet reached the hallway. She hurried up the attic stairs, made a right-angle turn past a colored glass window on the landing. When she reached the top of the stairs she was in the middle of the attic with the bulk of a chimney beside her. She looked around the dark room, unused except as a storage area. Chimneys thrust from floor to roof; gloomy recesses led to gables; light came dimly from large windows at each end, one overlooking the drive, the other the lake; light in the gables hinted at other, smaller windows; discarded furniture had been piled this way and that. A musty, dust-laden odor hung over the room.
Hide, she told herself. As she edged past a chiffonier, cobwebs trailed over her hair and she shivered. A door opened and she started, her head striking the slanted roofline and she winced, stunned, one hand reaching out to clutch the back of a chair for support. Steps sounded on the stairs, paused for the landing, came on into the attic.
Her head spinning, Lesley knelt behind a massive chest of drawers, eyes pressed shut, her fingers massaging the bruise on her head. The dizziness lessened. She peered from around the chest. The shadowed figure of Charles Randall stood at the top of the stairs, his back to the window. She saw a metallic object in his hand.
The beam of his flashlight probed the attic, suddenly swinging toward her. She drew back. Had he seen her? She crouched, unmoving, as his footsteps, slow, inexorable, came toward her. He shoved the chest to one side and she cringed away from the blinding light.
Chapter Twenty
Lesley backed away with one hand on the sloped roof over her head. Charles Randall made no move to stop her. She could not see him in the flashlight’s glare but she heard him keep pace with her, step by step. He was, she knew, between her and the stairs, the only possible route of escape. She stumbled, saved herself from falling by grasping a chair, and then her back struck something solid and she felt behind her with her hands. The attic wall. A few feet to her right she saw the light from the window overlooking the lake.
Charles Randall laughed softly as he came toward her. She pressed against the wall, a nail in the wood siding jabbing into her back. The light wavered as Randall moved the flashlight from one hand to the other and in that moment she swung blindly at him, missed, and again he laughed. He touched her shoulder and a scream rose in her throat.
“Stop!” A man’s voice echoed in the attic. Randall whirled, his light sweeping from the roof to the chimney before focusing on a figure at the top of the stairs. Lesley screamed.
Jon stood as though transfixed by the light. His hair and jacket were wet and a jagged cut scarred his unshaved cheek. The blood seemed to have drained from his face. He’s returned from the dead, Lesley thought.
Charles Randall, she saw, now held a gun in his free hand. Jon came toward him, legs stiff, his hands extended as he groped like a blind man in an unfamiliar room. He lurched to one side as the gun flashed, the sound deafening. Jon came on, seemingly unharmed by the shot and, with a quick intake of breath, Charles Randall retreated. Lesley saw the uncertainty on his taut face.
She swung at him, the chain wrapped around her wrist, and heard the click of the pendant striking his glasses. They spun from his face, the lenses glinting in the light, and at the same time his gun roared again. Jon crouched, then lunged forward, his shoulder driving into Randall, the force of his charge hurling the gunman back against the window. The glass burst outward and Randall flung up his arms, gun and flashlight clattering, to the floor. His hand clutched at the frame and for an instant she saw the surprise on his face before he disappeared into the darkness.
She ran to the window but could not see the ground through the falling snow. From far below waves slapped on the shore. Jon. She spun about. He faced her with blood oozing from the slash on his cheek. His lips moved and she thought he spoke her name.
“What? What?” she cried, reaching to him, the cloth of his coat damp under her fingers. He fell to one side and she caught at his arm, too late, his body thudding to lie unmoving on the floor. She bent over him, brushed the hair from his forehead, and her hands cradled his face to hers.
On the following day the sun rose in a cloudless December sky. The snowfall had ended during the night and the weather had changed, a cold front moving across Canada from the Arctic and into the northern states. Ice glittered along the shore and the top of the wet snow had frozen to form a crust strong enough to support a boy or girl.
The storm had transformed Iron Ridge into an old-fashioned Christmas card. The roofs were white, icicles hung from the eaves, plumes of smoke rose from the chimneys into the bl
ue sky, and birds swooped down to peck at crumbs scattered on the crust outside the kitchen window.
Lesley waited for the bread to rise in the toaster. She had squeezed two oranges, made coffee, and poured milk on the hot oatmeal. The toaster clicked, then popped the toast up. After spreading butter and sprinkling cinnamon on the toast, she cut the slices from corner to corner and then carried the breakfast tray to the hallway and up the stairs.
When she reached the second floor corridor she rested the tray on the stair railing, her head spinning from the climb. Last night she had been sick in bed but now Dr. Norton’s penicillin prescription had begun to work. And her feet, though slightly frostbitten, were almost back to normal.
She pushed open the bedroom door and stood just inside the room. Jon, a bandage on his cheek, lay in the middle of the bed with his head and shoulders propped up on two white pillows. When, sensing her presence, he glanced toward the door, Lesley hurried across the room with the tray.
“Your breakfast,” she said. This was the first time she had seen him awake since he had collapsed in the attic the day before. She was ill at ease.
He drank the juice and began to eat. “How did you know I liked oatmeal?” he asked.
“I thought it might be good for you.”
“Ahhh.” She expected him to say something about her being a registered nurse but instead he looked back to the tray and continued eating. Still unsteady on her feet, she sank down into the rocker.
“Are you all right?”
He sounds concerned, she thought. Lesley nodded, her fingers gripping the knobs at the end of the rocker arms. Jon didn’t speak again until he finished the breakfast and slid the tray onto the nightstand.
“You saved my life,” he said. “I don’t mean just in the attic, though you did there, too. But before the landslide started I remembered your vision, your dream, and I was half expecting what happened. I still fell but got a handhold on a ledge partway down the cliff and kept myself from going all the way to the beach.”
“But I saw you on the rocks.”
“When I was on the bluff I saw Randall come up the hill behind you. I knew he had a gun, yet I thought I was the only one he was after, not you. He claimed I wasn’t living up to our bargain. If I could make you think I was dead you’d convince him and that way I’d protect us both. And it worked, up to a point.”
“I ran away from him,” Lesley said. I won’t tell Jon, she decided, that I know Charles Randall was the man in my apartment in San Diego. “Then I lost my way in the storm and finally stumbled onto the driveway and followed the road back to the house.”
“I’m not sure what happened to me after I fell,” Jon said. “I must have been more shaken up than I realized because I passed out on the beach and the next thing I knew I woke up in the garage. When I came into the house looking for you I was still groggy. I don’t know how I made it to the attic. He’s dead, isn’t he? Charles Randall?”
She nodded. “The police said there’d have to be an inquest but no charges will be filed.”
“After I’d known him a while I found that Randall had quite an arrest record. I don’t know how I became involved with him or why I stayed involved. Nothing I did seemed to matter to me then.”
“After Mary died?”
“Yes. The better I came to know Mary after we were married the more heartsick I became. The exact opposite of the change in my feelings for you. She was morbid, became depressed easily. Some days she was as cheerful as when I first knew her and then other times she would sit for hours staring out over the lake, brooding.”
And he felt the opposite about me? she thought. How did he feel?
“Charles Randall heard of your predictions from an employee at the computer center and wanted to use your second sight. I needed money and he sold me on the idea. We weren’t sure how you’d help us, perhaps as a performer, a mind reader. Or we’d put you into situations where foreknowledge would be valuable. His job was to frighten you; mine was to find out more about your abilities so we’d be able to decide how to use them.” His eyes refused to meet hers.
“I guessed something of the sort.”
“Then the unexpected happened.” When he paused, she glanced quickly at him. He was staring down at the backs of his hands.
“I fell in love with you,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth? About Mary. About Charles Randall. Why didn’t you, ever trust me enough to tell me?”
“I was confused, on the brink of a nervous breakdown, I suppose, feeling guilty about Mary’s death, for one thing.” He grimaced. “There had been JoAnn Larsen, after all, and Mary found out about her. And after Mary killed herself, if that’s what she did, I felt I was at least partly to blame and then we came back here, you and I, to Iron Ridge where I had lived with Mary, and the lake was a constant reminder of what had happened. I almost did tell you a couple of times, yet you seemed to hold me at arm’s length when I needed you most. First you wrote to the institute and then Craig Ritter came here to see you. In fact, toward the end, I thought you were beginning to hate me.”
I’ll never tell him I did, she thought. Yet she knew, despite everything, she had always loved him. Was that possible? To hate and love someone at the same time? Now the hate was gone; the love remained, a tested love, she thought, stronger than before. But how did Jon feel toward her?
“I’ll have to sell,” he was saying.
“Iron Ridge?” She was startled, remembering her dream that had come the day before when she stood in the falling snow in front of the house. She had been sure the room in the dream was this room, their room.
“Not all of the property, not the house, but a lot of the land.”
“I’d hate to see the forest destroyed for the timber or to make room for hotels.”
“You don’t have to worry. I think the state is interested. The Conservation Department wants to buy the old mine and the quarry to preserve them as historical sites.”
“Your book. Were you really writing a history of the mines and the Upper Peninsula?”
“I really was and I mean to finish it. Writing’s a lot harder work than I thought, particularly rewriting, and especially when you’re worried about money. If the state buys the land we won’t have the money problem for years. They don’t intend to buy just the mine; they want the bluff over the lake, too, and some of the highway frontage.”
“I wouldn’t mind giving up the bluff; I don’t think I want to see it again for a long time. If ever. Did you know that what actually happened to me was different than in my dream? The snow. I hadn’t dreamed of snow. There were other differences, some small, some large. In one dream I knew you were dead.”
“You ought to find out more about your foreseeing and the influence of the opal. Couldn’t the university test you here in Michigan?”
“They could, but you always said you thought the whole idea was foolish.”
“I wouldn’t mind now,” he told her. He’s reaching out to me, she realized, building a bridge. She remembered what her grandmother had told her—October’s child must love and be loved in return before she can find happiness.
Jon said, “I have a gift for you.”
“A gift? How could you have had time to buy something?”
He leaned over the side of the bed; his face tightening with pain, and when he sat up he held a package wrapped in newspapers. She unfolded the wrapping and held his present in front of her. Tears came to her eyes. “It’s just what I wanted,” she said, running her fingers over the carving of the little Mexican girl.
“Remember when I bought you that in Tijuana? I wish with all my heart we could wipe away what’s happened since. Can we, Lesley? Can we start again?” His voice softened. “I love you, you know.”
“Yes, oh yes,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. She took one of his hands in hers and he reached up with the
other to tousle her hair.
“Such beautiful blonde hair,” he said.
“Will you still love me when it’s gray?”
“What a strange question. Of course I will. But your hair isn’t going to get gray, ever. Wait and see.”
Lesley smiled to herself, remembering her dream. Jon pulled her down beside him and kissed her. Secure in his arms, she raised her head to look at him.
“We’ll wait and see,” she told him.
About the Author
Fortune Kent, aka Jane Toombs, was the author of around a hundred books in all categories except men’s action and erotica. She passed away in early 2014.
Look for these titles by Fortune Kent
Now Available:
Isle of the Seventh Sentry
The House at Canterbury
House of Masques
Writing as Jane Toombs:
Tule Witch
Point of Lost Souls
The Fog Maiden
A Topaz for My Lady Fair
Coming Soon:
Writing as Jane Toombs:
The Star-Fire Prophecy
A dark secret hangs over her quest for justice…
House of Masques
© 2014 Fortune Kent
Kathleen Donley steps off the train in Poughkeepsie, New York, with everything she has left in the world contained in a lone carpetbag, and one desire burning in her heart. To find Captain Charles Worthington, the man acquitted of murdering her brother during a pitched battle in Indian territory—and put him in a coffin.