by B. J Daniels
“Yes, I am. My name is Agatha Wells,” the woman said. “I used to work as an insurance investigator….”
The sheriff turned to the doctor. “This is not the prisoner I sent you for a mental evaluation. This woman has obviously been coached. Where is Aggie Wells?”
Even as she asked it, McCall was reaching for her cell phone. If Aggie Wells was on the loose, then she had to warn the Chisholms—especially Emma.
HER MOTHER WAS ON HER MIND as Alexa got ready for bed. Since Tallulah Cross had died a year ago, Alexa’s greatest fear had been that her mother would try to contact her from the beyond. To her relief, she hadn’t. But in this house she felt vulnerable so it was no wonder she was thinking of her mother, she told herself. She hadn’t been able to talk to her brother again. According to Sierra, there was some sort of water leak in the basement and he and the other men had gone down to fix it.
Sierra had said that the “girls” were going to build a fire and have a few drinks before bed. Alexa had excused herself, feigning exhaustion from her long drive. She was exhausted but not from the drive. She told herself it was from being in this house with all these people and worrying about her brother.
The truth, she finally admitted when she reached her room, was that her brother was right. This house had a dark history that had been coming at her like a battering ram. While she couldn’t say what it was exactly, she could feel the unrest of a house that had known its share of tragedy.
As Alexa turned on a light, chasing the dark shadows back into the far corners of the room, she fought the urge to pack and get away from here as fast as possible. She didn’t want to know what was going on in this house. She wanted to go back to her life in Spokane, where no one knew that her mother had been Tallulah Cross, the fortune-teller and infamous psychic.
But she knew she couldn’t go anywhere tonight. Tomorrow, she would try to talk her brother into leaving here. If she could get him away from the house…
Her head ached as she stepped through the open French doors to the balcony and looked out on the peaceful landscape. She breathed in the sweet, summer’s night air and tried to calm herself. Landon would never leave his wife without reason. Which meant Alexa couldn’t leave until she knew that reason or was sure that her brother was safe.
These accidents he’d been having—wasn’t it possible that’s all they were?
Of course it was. Her brother could be overreacting because of their mother’s profession and his DNA. While he apparently hadn’t inherited what he and their mother called the “gift,” he still had the same genes.
Alexa started to move away from the window when she saw a light in the distance. Another house. Was that where the cowboy lived whom she’d seen earlier?
At a sound outside, she quickly extinguished the lamp. Two figures moved through the deep shadows of the trees out to what appeared to be a pond. She could see the faint moonlight shimmering on a portion of the water’s surface through the thick-leafed branches of the trees.
She could make out the shapes of the figures. A man and a woman walked side by side, not touching and staying in the shadow of the trees. Was it only her imagination that they avoided the moonlight because they didn’t want to be seen together?
Standing in a dark corner of the balcony, Alexa watched the two stop under a tree. They were talking, facing each other. She couldn’t hear their words—only read their body language.
They were arguing. She wondered if it was Archer and his wife. Carolina hadn’t seemed happy with all the wine he’d consumed at supper.
But as she watched, she realized the man was taller than Archer and slimmer. Jayden. The argument was growing louder and more violent. Alexa caught snatches of the conversation.
“Stop worrying…no reason to panic.”
“You smug bastard.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Don’t tell me what… I don’t know why I ever…”
She heard what sounded like a slap, then another, followed by a small cry. The woman started to leave, but Jayden pulled her back. The two dark figures melted together and the night grew silent again.
Who had the woman been? Alexa hadn’t been able to recognize her voice from the distance and hearing only snatches of the conversation. Gigi? Carolina?
With a start, Alexa reminded herself there were three women in this house—all of them about the same size—and all blond.
The woman she’d just seen in Jayden’s arms could have been Sierra—her brother’s wife.
MARSHALL HAD A HELL OF A time getting to sleep after he got the call from his father about Aggie Wells being on the loose again.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come spend the night at the main house?” he’d asked after hearing that no one knew where Aggie was. The woman was believed to be a killer. She’d abducted his stepmother and done her best to frame his father for murder. Marshall couldn’t believe that she’d somehow not just gotten away, but paid some woman to pretend to be her at the mental hospital.
“Don’t worry,” his father had said. “The doors are locked and the shotgun is beside my bed. Emma and I are fine. The sheriff has a deputy parked outside tonight.”
Still, Marshall had felt restless after the conversation with his father. Aggie Wells was crazy. Who knew what a crazy woman would do next?
He’d stood for a long time just looking toward the east and the faint glow of golden light from Wellington Manor.
“Speaking of crazy,” he’d said to his dog, Angus, remembering his earlier impressions. He’d assured himself that the woman he’d seen was real and what he’d seen standing behind the woman at the window had been a trick of the light, no more than a shadow, and that tomorrow morning he was going to ride over there and introduce himself. Emma had insisted on baking a batch of her gingersnap cookies to take before he’d left the house earlier.
He’d finally gone to bed and felt as if he’d only just drifted off when he was awakened with a jolt. Lying in bed listening, he wasn’t sure what had brought him out of his sleep so suddenly. He glanced at the clock, surprised it was only an hour or so before daybreak, then glanced toward the open window and darkness beyond—and saw his dog standing there, looking out, the hair on the dog’s back sticking straight up. Angus let out a low growl.
“What is it, boy?” Marshall whispered as he slipped out of the bed and padded quietly over to the window. A sliver of moon hung on the edge of the horizon, golden among the canopy of stars. The breeze was scented with the smells of August, golden grasses heavy and ripe with grain.
He loved this time of year because he knew how fleeting it was. Montana was a place of seasons that changed with little notice. One day could be hot and beautiful, the next the temperature would drop and that season would be over. Or after an unusually long winter, the snow would suddenly melt and the air would smell of spring.
His thoughts surprised him because there was almost regret in them. Another summer almost gone. He could feel his life slipping away. Part of the problem, he knew, was that three of his brothers had fallen in love and were talking marriage. He hadn’t been aware of a time when all six of them weren’t sowing their oats, the wild sons of Hoyt Chisholm.
“I don’t see anything,” he told the dog and started to head back to bed, no longer concerned about what had awakened him.
The scream made him spin around to the window again. He realized it was what must have awakened him and had Angus on alert.
His gaze went to the Wellington mansion, but all he saw was darkness at first. Then a flash of white caught his eye. A woman was running across the pasture toward his house.
Marshall felt a chill wrap around his neck and tighten at the sight of the same ghostlike woman he’d seen earlier in the second-story window of the mansion.
Unable to move at first, he stood watching her approach. She ran as if the devil himself were at her heels and yet he could see no one, nothing, chasing her.
Hell, he wasn’t even sure she wa
s real. Maybe he was just dreaming her.
But Angus thought she was real. He let out a bark and tore downstairs as the woman turned to look behind her, stumbled and almost fell and another terrified scream burst from her throat.
Pulling on his jeans, Marshall raced downstairs and out onto the porch as she emerged from the field and into his yard. He bolted down the porch steps as she stumbled and fell on the patch of grass in front of his house.
She was breathing hard, huge gasps and sobs emitting from her, her body quaking from exertion and whatever had her so terrified. Angus had stopped part-way out into the yard and stood as if frozen in midstep, a low growl coming from his throat.
“Stay!” Marshall ordered the dog as the woman staggered to her feet. She wore a thin, white nightgown, her lush body silhouetted against the moon and starlight and more beautiful than he thought possible.
As he rushed to her, she looked up, but her eyes had a strange emptiness to them, as if whatever she was seeing wasn’t really there.
Marshall wasn’t even sure she was real until she fell into his arms and he felt the weight and warmth of the flesh-and-blood woman.
THE NIGHTMARES HAD ALWAYS been waiting for her the moment Alexa closed her eyes. They had terrified her when she was a child. As she got older, she’d come to accept them, telling herself they weren’t real.
But of course they were. Her mother knew, that’s why Alexa had often found Tallulah standing over her at night as if gazing at the nightmares like a horror film on television.
“I’m always watching over you,” her mother used to say, the words giving her no comfort.
“Why don’t you wake me up and hold me like my father used to?” she’d wanted to know. When her father had touched her, she had always awakened from the horrors of her dream.
“They’re your nightmares, Alexa. You must learn to control them. You have the power—if you choose to use it.” Her mother would give her that look that said she suspected Alexa had lied about not having the gift.
Just as the nightmare would end the moment her father awakened her, this one ended the moment the cowboy took her in his arms.
Alexa looked up into his face, felt the lingering effects of her nightmare, the exertion of her run across the pasture toward the only light she’d seen, the shock of finding herself in the cowboy’s arms and fainted.
When she came to, she was lying on the cowboy’s couch with a cool, damp washcloth on her forehead. His dog, the one she’d seen with him earlier that day, was sitting in front of her, staring at her.
She sat up abruptly, making her head swim, the blanket he’d covered her with falling to her lap.
The dog growled.
She quickly pulled the blanket back up over her thin cotton nightgown, aware of how naked she was beneath it and how big his dog was.
“Don’t let Angus scare you,” the cowboy said as he came into the room. “I told him to watch you while I got you something to drink.” He had a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He must have realized her fear wasn’t just of the dog because he stopped midway into the room.
“I thought you might like some water,” he said and stepped forward to offer her the glass. He’d put on a shirt and boots since she’d last seen him. She recalled the feel of his broad, warm, bare chest before she fainted. Just as he must remember the sheerness of her nightgown.
She felt her face heat with embarrassment. She wasn’t overly modest but she did hate anyone knowing about her nightmares, and she wasn’t in the habit of visiting neighbors half-naked.
“Or you’re welcome to the beer,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink.”
She couldn’t help but smile at his gentle manner and kind, almost embarrassed, expression. She accepted the glass of water with a “Thank you,” and took a sip as he sat down in a chair across from her.
“I see you’ve met Angus,” the cowboy said. “He seems pretty taken with you. I apologize for his manners. But he only stares at people he likes.”
She could tell he was trying to make her feel at ease. It was working.
He held his bottle of beer as he looked at her, then as if remembering it in his hand, he took a long drink.
“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand self-consciously and she realized she was smiling at him again. There was just something about him. She loved the dark sheen of his longish straight, black hair, the deep, rich hues of his equally dark eyes. His skin was a warmer mocha than her own—hers descending from Gypsies, his, she guessed, from a Native American mother or father.
It surprised her that she wasn’t the one feeling self-conscious, since she had on less clothing then he had and had obviously awakened him in the middle of the night, dragging him into one of her nightmares. And yet she didn’t. She felt strangely safe here with him. Even the house felt inviting. Is that why she’d run to him in her nightmare?
She’d never been able to remember anything about her nightmares when she’d awakened and had always been glad of that.
“You need to try to remember your dreams,” her mother had said many times. “They signify something important either from your past or your future. Stop being afraid of them.”
That only had made Alexa more terrified of the nightmares, since she didn’t want to see into the future. It also had made her all the more determined to keep them from her conscious mind. She’d become very good at it. Like tonight. She had no memory of what had sent her out into the night.
“I’m sorry. I must have frightened you,” she said as he took another drink of his beer and she realized that he was shaken by what had happened. “I must have been screaming?”
He nodded.
Alexa had often awakened in the middle of a bloodcurdling scream. The horror and pain in the sound had made her all the more terrified. What in her subconscious could frighten her so much? She could only imagine, given the kinds of things her mother used to tell her about the people she read fortunes for.
“Bad dream?”
She nodded, took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she felt her strength coming back into her. The nightmares took something out of her. When she was younger, she sleepwalked a lot, waking up in strange, frightening places.
It had been years, though, since she’d taken off in her sleep. She didn’t need to think hard to figure out what had caused the relapse as she glanced out the window and saw Wellington Manor in the distance. The sun was starting to come up, the horizon a fiery red, shafts of light streaking up into the big, dark sky above it.
She turned to look at the cowboy again. “You don’t happen to have another one of those beers, do you? I think I could use something stronger myself.”
He chuckled as he got to his feet and took her water glass, returning with a bottle of beer and a clean glass. She shook her head when he offered her the glass and noticed his large, callused hands as he twisted off the cap and handed her the cold bottle.
Alexa took a swallow. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a beer. Especially just before daybreak. It tasted better than anything she could remember ever drinking. “It’s wonderful.”
He smiled at that as he sat down again. She could see that he wanted to ask her about the nightmare, but was either too polite or too shy. Or maybe too afraid of the answer.
“I suppose we should introduce ourselves,” she said, thinking this had to be the strangest way she’d ever met a man. “Alexa Cross.”
“Marshall Chisholm,” he said, leaning forward to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you.” His rough hand felt surprisingly warm even though it was the one he’d been holding his beer bottle in. His dark eyes held that same warmth.
She took another sip of her beer and said into the silence, “I’m a reporter from Spokane visiting my brother, Landon. His wife, Sierra, inherited the Wellington house. He and some of their friends are helping her remodel it.”
It was th
e reporter in her that had her sizing up the situation in as few words as possible, known in journalism as the “nut graph.”
Taking her example, he said, “My family runs the Chisholm Cattle Company. I saw you over at the house when I went for a horseback ride yesterday. You were standing on one of the upstairs balconies. I thought you were a ghost.”
Alexa laughed. “Then I can well imagine what you thought when you heard me screaming and saw me running across your field.”
SHE HAD A GREAT LAUGH AND Marshall found himself relaxing as the sun came up behind her through the window and they drank their beers.
He waited, thinking she might tell him about what had sent her out into the night like that, but she didn’t. There was something almost exotic about her, the wild, curly dark hair, those amazing violet eyes that pulled him in like a well-thrown lasso, that heart-shaped face. He couldn’t help but remember the body he’d seen in the moonlight and starlight.
She was beautiful and she’d ended up on his doorstep. He felt privileged and smiled to himself when he saw that Angus seemed just as smitten with her.
He could have warned the dog though. There was something inaccessible about Alexa Cross. He recognized it because he was like that himself. He was no stranger to the walls that people built to protect themselves. But last night he’d felt as if a part of those walls had come crashing down when she’d stumbled into his arms.
“I should get back before I’m missed,” she said as she finished her beer.
He got up to take her empty bottle. “I’ll drive you.” He could tell she didn’t want to put him to any trouble but also didn’t want to make the trek back across the pasture. “I’ve also got some clothes that might fit you….”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that.”
He left her on the couch with Angus watching over her and went upstairs to rummage in his bureau, returning to find her still wrapped in the blanket he’d put over her earlier. As he handed her a flannel shirt, a pair of his jeans, a belt and some knitted slippers someone had given him for Christmas, he pointed to the bathroom off the kitchen.