Shadows. Circling. Undulating. She looked up. Vultures. Huge wings. Cold, merciless eyes. Lower. Lower. Down to feast on the delicate face.
Natalie’s heart slammed against her ribs. She sucked in air with such a vengeance, pain stabbed her chest. A weight hit the bed and a shard of fear touched her heart. Then a warm, wet tongue licked her nose.
“Oh, Blaine!” she breathed, clutching the dog. “I had such an awful dream. Did I frighten you?”
The dog nuzzled her neck. She smelled of shampoo. She was also heavy but Natalie didn’t mind the weight pressing against her body. It felt warm and reassuring, a sign of thriving life.
Life. She was alive. Blaine was alive. Tamara was dead. Murdered.
Suddenly Natalie began to hyperventilate. She gently pushed the dog away, trying not to alarm her, and got up. She paced the room, her long nightgown wrapping annoyingly around her legs. Stripping off the nightgown, Natalie noticed how damp it was. Perspiration glistened on her abdomen and dripped from beneath her breasts. She ran her hands through her wet hair.
A panic attack. She’d been having them ever since she was six and her mother left. They’d lessened over the years, but today had been enough of a shock to throw anyone, and this was a bad one. Still, it was only a simple panic attack. She would just ride it out.
Ten minutes later her heart still pounded and sweat still poured. Blaine followed in helpless distress as Natalie paced the room, breathing raggedly. Natalie was touched by how quickly the dog seemed to have bonded to her and her company was a comfort, but Natalie was still unnerved by her condition. Often when she had the attacks, she could calm herself by playing the guitar and singing. That wasn’t an option tonight. She would wake her father and he’d make a scene. He’d harangue about Kenny. He’d lecture about her diet, tell her to eat meat. He might even take her to the emergency room at the hospital. How embarrassing. Rushed to the hospital for a panic attack. People would think she was as flaky as her mother.
No, she had to handle this on her own. It was bad enough that she’d run home to Daddy after coming face to face with Kenny’s infidelity. Now to completely fall apart in front of him would be too much.
She put on her robe and went to the kitchen. A glass of milk? No, it sounded nauseating. Tea? No, tea was a stimulant. Orange juice? Natalie drank a small glass of juice, which hit her stomach like a rock.
A walk. A few times when she’d had panic attacks, walks had been the answer. Walking along the shoreline in front of the house would do the trick. She glanced at the kitchen clock. 11:45. No matter. She needed long strides and deep breaths of fresh air.
She went back to the bedroom and slipped on jeans, a tee shirt, Reeboks, and a windbreaker. Then she glanced at the clock again. 11:52. No matter? Yes, it mattered. Although she planned to stay within sight of the house, just last night Tamara had been murdered not too far away.
Natalie took her suitcase from the closet and unlocked it. Fishing in the side pocket, she withdrew a .38 blue-steel Beretta. Twenty-one-point-eight ounces. Strange she should remember the exact weight. She had not wanted it, but Kenny insisted on buying a gun for her after a string of rapes in Columbus last year. A pocket rocket, he’d called it. She hadn’t intentionally brought it along. She’d just always kept it tucked out of sight in the suitcase.
When she’d first begun lessons, her right hand had held the gun stiffly, reluctantly. Then, to her surprise and her instructor’s, she’d discovered she had a knack. She was an excellent shot, even though she wasn’t actually sure she could shoot someone. “You could in a case of self-defense,” Kenny had assured her. “That is, if you’d ever keep the thing handy. What will you do if someone breaks in? Tell them to wait a minute until you unlock your suitcase and get your gun?”
Well, she had it now. She snapped in the eight-shot magazine and stuffed the gun in her pocket. Then she grabbed a flashlight from her nightstand drawer and attached Blaine’s leash. “Ready for a night stroll with your new mistress?” she asked. The dog pulled toward the door. “Off we go, then, into the wild blue yonder.”
No, the wild black yonder, she thought as she and Blaine strolled down toward the lake. Not a bright night. Not a warm night. A breeze blew off the water. Natalie had brought a large barrette and she pulled back her long hair and caught it in the clip. Cool air touched her warm neck like a caress.
Like when Kenny had dipped his fingers in a cold vodka tonic and stroked her neck as she lay sunbathing on his balcony just two weeks ago. Tears stung her eyes. No, she would not think of that lovely, sensuous afternoon. Or of another afternoon a week later when a big-breasted redhead flailed around in desperate search of a sheet with a naked Kenny beside her.
“Stop it!” she said aloud. Blaine looked up at her. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she soothed. She stroked the dog’s head. “Such a good girl.”
Fog rolled in from the lake, coiling around her denimclad legs. Minute by minute the fog wafted higher, first to her calves, then to her knees. Slowly the outside lights at the house became dimmer as she strolled in one direction, then turned and went in the other, covering only about fifty yards in either direction.
How many times had she walked this stretch of shoreline with Lily in the old days? Hundreds. And what had they talked of on those cool, secret, night-softened jaunts away from the prying eyes and ears of parents? Boyfriends, of course. Lily always had plenty. Natalie had only one, a gawky boy with acne who was president of the chess club and the math club. He was nice in a stuttering, awkward, perpetually embarrassed way, and she felt sorry for him because she was sure he would never amount to anything. Recently she heard he’d become a top executive with Microsoft.
She stopped as she realized that in her reverie, she’d walked farther than she’d intended. She’d completely lost sight of the house. “Time to go home,” she said to the dog. But Blaine wasn’t listening. The dog tensed, her hackles rising, then suddenly tugged at the leash so hard Natalie lost her grip. “Blaine!” she called as the dog bolted down the beach. “Blaine!” she yelled again, although the dog hadn’t had time to learn her new name. She disappeared into the fog, barking.
Natalie stood still for a moment. She should head for home. The dog would return. Or would she? The St. John house wasn’t home to her yet. She might get lost in the night, wander around, get hit by a car in the fog . . .
Thoughts of what she should do vanished to be replaced by the blind impulse to help the dog before it suffered a worse fate than being dumped in the woods. Natalie took a deep breath and ran in the direction Blaine had disappeared.
She ran for about a hundred feet, then paused. Lake water, still cold at this time of year, licked the shore. She held her breath for a moment, listening. No sound of paws splashing into the water of Lake Erie. Then barking, fast and furious. Natalie started running again.
Up ahead loomed the remains of The Blue Lady Resort. The son of a railroad entrepreneur had bought two acres of prime lakefront land in 1921 on which to build a lavish hotel and dance pavilion. He’d named it The Blue Lady because of a local legend. Sailors claimed they saw a lady bathed in blue light standing on a rise—the rise where Ariel Saunders’s house sat. They swore it was Ariel and the image meant good luck. After all, Ariel had saved two sailors and the captain the night the Mercy sank.
Local businessmen had predicted failure for The Blue Lady Resort, but the young entrepreneur laughed with the confidence of youth and money and lifelong privilege. And he was right. Season after season The Blue Lady flourished. Five years after it was built, it had been visited by countless movie stars, six governors, ten state senators, and the notorious dancer Isadora Duncan. After a riotous evening of drinking in the dance pavilion, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda waded into Lake Erie in evening clothes and nearly drowned before hotel staff rescued them. A president’s niece married there. Houdini spent a week. Later years saw Lana Turner, Princess Grace of Monaco, and Thomas Wolfe.
By the late sixties, The Blu
e Lady no longer drew the rich and famous. It had become a tourist hotel of old-fashioned, shabby grandeur. Then in the summer of 1970 three murders took place in and around the resort. “The Blue Lady Murders” enjoyed short-lived notoriety and although police caught the killer, business abruptly ceased. The hotel closed and shortly afterward a fire completely destroyed it. Miraculously the dance pavilion survived. For over twenty years it had sat empty, a crumbling monument to long-dead nights of glamour and good times.
Natalie stopped a few yards from the pavilion, gasping for breath. She looked up at the clouds turned slightly yellow by the crescent moon. The slanted roof of the pavilion bore a film of dark mold. From photos she knew hundreds of tiny white lights had once decorated trees in front of the pavilion. But that had been long before she and Lily, as teenagers, occasionally broke into the pavilion to smoke forbidden cigarettes and collaborate on atrocious musical creations they hoped one day to play for adoring fans.
How blithely they had walked up the steps and in the darkness picked the padlock on the front door. She didn’t remember ever worrying about getting caught.
A sharp bark came from the portico in front of the pavilion. Natalie strained her eyes and made out a dark shape. “Blaine!” she called again. Another bark. “Come here!” The dog sat firm. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Natalie muttered, stalking toward the portico.
As she neared the dog, Blaine began to make an anxious chuffing sound. Natalie paused. “What is it, girl?” she asked as if the dog could answer. Blaine stood and turned in a circle, then scratched at the pavilion door.
Natalie slowly approached the dog. Blaine looked at her, then at the door. Her leash trailed out to the side and Natalie picked up the loop. Then she glanced at the door. A new padlock hung open.
Natalie stood still and listened. Nothing but the sound of distant wind chimes tinkling in the breeze. With the lock open, silence was not a good sign. Maybe someone was hiding inside, trying to be quiet.
Or maybe someone was hurt. Blaine scratched at the door again and this time it opened slightly. Someone had closed it so lightly the latch hadn’t caught. Blaine pulled forward. Then Natalie heard a tiny, high-pitched cry.
Good lord, she thought. Could someone have crept into The Blue Lady just as she and Lily used to do and gotten hurt? After all, the place was a wreck.
Natalie started inside, then hesitated. There had been a murder last night. Maybe she should go home.
But if she simply walked away, deserting someone who might be hurt, she would never forgive herself. And she wasn’t defenseless—she had her gun. She had to at least give the pavilion a cursory scan.
Inside, the dance room looked cavernous. “Is anyone here?” Natalie called. Not a sound. She flicked the beam of her flashlight around. Only a few tables sat on a dusty floor. “Do you need help?”
She stood still, barely breathing. Silence. Maybe she’d only heard a bird that had flown in when the door was open and been trapped. Time to go, she told herself, but she couldn’t leave just yet. She hadn’t seen this place for years.
She and the dog walked across the floor, Blaine’s nails clicking on the wood. Beautiful wood, once highly varnished to facilitate the smooth moves of dancing feet. Grandmother St. John had told her all about The Blue Lady where she and Grandfather had spent so many hours of their youth. Natalie closed her eyes and in her mind the room filled with people, the men in formal black, the women in a rainbow of satin with gardenias pinned to their hair. She pictured her grandmother—an elegant woman with dark hair, flashing green eyes, and a taste for fine champagne—dancing to the sounds of big bands.
Natalie opened her eyes and the opulent scene vanished. Once again she stood in a big, empty room filled with dust and ghosts and the sound of dark, cold water lapping against rotting pilings.
A thud of her heart reminded her she was still winded from running. All the exertion after a raging panic attack had left her drained and she suddenly felt woozy. The room spun. She sat down on one of the chairs near a wall and drew a slow, deep breath. Then another. She frowned. What did she smell? Roses? Impossible. She wore no cologne. Imagination, she told herself. She’d been thinking of Grandmother who wore an expensive rose-based perfume. But no rose perfume lingered in the lonely pavilion. Only the memory of a beautiful woman dead over ten years.
A few more slow, deep breaths and she’d be ready to head for home, she thought, glancing around the room. Windows lined the pavilion, providing a panoramic view of the lake. She knew soft blue lanterns once hung around the structure. The slightest breeze sent them dancing, turning the lake water into a rippling sapphire fairyland. Now only a yellowish glow from the sodium vapor lamps in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store struggled through the filmy, flyblown windows.
She darted the flashlight beam around again. Overhead soared a high cathedral ceiling. In the center hung a huge, mirrored ball.
Natalie started. She’d never seen it except in pictures. In all the years she’d come here, it had been covered in burlap. Now the ball glittered, reflecting the room in a hundred prisms of polished glass. Freshly polished.
“Is anyone here?” she called again, this time her voice not so strong.
“Na-ta-lie?”
Natalie stiffened. Blaine’s ears lifted and she turned her head to the right.
No one.
But it had been a woman’s voice—young, clear, delicate. A familiar voice. The voice on the phone this afternoon.
No, no that couldn’t be, Natalie told herself sternly. She was deeply shaken by the murder, by her dream, by the phone call, by the eerie atmosphere of this place. The voice existed only in her mind.
But Blaine’s head had turned.
I must have made a sharp movement, Natalie thought. I startled her and she instinctively lifted her ears and turned her head.
“Na-ta-lie. I know you hear me. Can’t you see me?”
Natalie jumped. Blaine lunged, but Natalie clutched the leash. If the dog found the voice, the dog would die. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.
“Who’s there?” Natalie could not get an exact fix on the voice although Blaine pulled toward the end of the room with the dais where the bands had once played “String of Pearls” and “Take the A Train.”
“Aren’t you going to answer, Na-ta-lie?”
Blaine pulled harder. Natalie shot the flashlight beam around the room. Cobwebs. Dust. Mildew.
The highly polished mirrored ball.
“Who are you?” Natalie asked, trying to steady her voice. She wouldn’t run. She sat against a wall. Someone might be trying to lure her into the open.
“I’m Tamara.”
Natalie’s breath came hard and fast. “Stop it!”
“Their throat is an open tomb.”
“You said that earlier on the phone. What are you talking about?”
“Romans, chapter three. It’s about bad people. So many bad people in the Bible!”
Freezing water seemed to run down Natalie’s back. That voice. So like Tamara’s, so lost, so sad. And so frightening. She felt as if she were spiraling down into another world—a world of shadows and voices and bone-chilling cold.
The voice rose. “I want you to be with me, Natalie. And you will. Even if I have to kill you.”
As Natalie’s fear intensified, so did her instinct for self-protection. In one smooth movement she lay the flashlight on her thigh, reached into her windbreaker pocket, and withdrew the gun.
“I’m armed,” she said loudly, although her voice cracked. “Do you hear me? I have a gun and I will use it.”
“You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.”
A whisper of movement. Blaine growled, then barked ferociously. Natalie held tight to the leash as the flashlight dropped to the floor. She couldn’t see, but she could hear something coming closer . . .
She aimed and fired.
6
I
Blaine hit the floor as the noise of the shot rev
erberated around the pavilion. For an instant Natalie feared her grip had wavered and she’d shot the dog. Then she looked at her hand. Level and steady. How many operations had she performed on animals? Steady hands were a necessity. Slowly Blaine stood up.
No answering cry of pain followed the gunshot. Somewhere a fog horn bellowed. Other than that there was only silence except for the loud breathing of Natalie and the dog.
“Are you still there?” Natalie asked with a quaver. “Are you hurt?”
Nothing. Blaine looked around, trembling. Natalie trembled, too, but she tried hard to control herself. “Are you hurt?”
Still no answer. Oh, God, what if there hadn’t really been any danger? What if someone, maybe just a kid, had been playing a joke and she’d killed them? She should never have come in here.
She could not move. She was too frightened, too horrified at actually firing her gun at anything except a paper target. She sat motionless, the gun frozen in her hand as the seconds ticked by, trying to decide what to do. Then—
“Police!”
Her throat tightened, strangling a shriek. An urge to run madly from the pavilion took hold of her, but immediately she quelled it. She wasn’t a criminal. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Except maybe kill someone.
“Drop your weapon! We’re coming in!”
Natalie placed her gun on the table, pushed it an arm’s length away, and sat rigidly in her chair as the front door opened. A man walked in, gun drawn. He shone his large flashlight around the room, then directly into her face. She squinted but didn’t dare raise a hand to shield her eyes. “I put down my gun and I’m holding onto the dog,” she called. “Please don’t shoot.”
A pause. Then: “Dr. St. John?”
She recognized his voice. “Sheriff Meredith.”
“Who was shooting?”
“I was. Only once.”
“You! What’s going on?”
“Please take the light out of my eyes, but don’t lower your gun. Someone is in here. Someone threatened to kill me.
Don’t Close Your Eyes Page 8