“I'll say,” he growled.
“Naughty boy,” Tilda barked. “Don't look too closely. Think about something unsexy.” The lights flashed a few more times.
After a moment, Tilda sighed. “Let's take a break for ten minutes. I need more coffee. Perhaps you can do something to get yourself under control.”
She grabbed a jacket from a hook by the door of the studio and left them.
Katie looked down. “Oh, Lee,” she said. “Save it for Marco. Maybe he can make a mold from it.”
“I'm a professional,” Lee said, sounding annoyed. “I did this on purpose so she would give us a few minutes alone in her studio.”
“A likely story,” she said with an eye roll.
He grabbed his robe and pulled it on. Then, rather than excuse himself to the washroom, he went straight to Tilda's computer and sat in her chair.
“You're quite the evil genius,” she said with admiration.
“Look out the window,” he said. “Is Tilda really gone, or is she just outside the door smoking?”
She looked out through the bars that had stymied them the previous evening. The redheaded artist was far down the path on her way to the ranch house. She appeared to be talking to herself animatedly, her hands waving through the air.
“She's gone to the main house. I don't know if I should stand here keeping watch or help you look for those photos.”
“Help me look,” Lee said. “Check around for filing cabinets or boxes.”
* * *
They'd been searching for eight minutes when Lee called for Katie frantically.
“Come here, I found something!”
She closed the filing cabinet. The drawers had contained a wealth of interesting things—from old auction catalogs to sketchbooks filled with Tilda's doodles and pre-painting sketches. But there hadn't been any photos.
“You found her new series?” Katie stood behind Lee, looking over his head at the large Mac monitor. Her robe had come undone but she hadn't bothered to tie it back up.
“I found something,” he said. “What's the name of your roommate who disappeared?”
“Darlene.”
“Was her last name Silva?”
“Yes.” Her whole body began trembling. It wasn't a very common last name. Was she about to discover something about her missing roommate?
“Silva,” he said. “See, there's a folder here with her name on it.”
The studio suddenly felt cold. Katie whipped her head to see if the door had swung open. It hadn't. But Tilda would be returning any minute.
“Stop messing around,” Katie said. “Open the folder or don't. We've got to get off Tilda's computer before she comes back.”
“I'm not messing around. This folder is full of photos, and I already looked before I called you over.” He swiveled around in the chair and gave her a serious look. “You need to prepare yourself, Katie.”
She lunged over his shoulder and pressed the mouse button herself.
An image filled the screen.
Katie grabbed Lee's shoulder to steady herself. She felt the chill permeate her, straight to her core. Her insides were fluttering, and the room felt like it was twirling around them.
The photo that filled the computer screen was Darlene Silva, and she wasn't alone.
The other person in the first series of images was Clive Kingfisher.
Katie thought she might throw up, but she swallowed the nausea down.
“That's my roommate,” she said. “That's Darlene Silva.”
“Well, she looks pretty familiar with ol' Clive,” Lee said. “Which kinda goes against what he said about barely saying hello to her.”
“She was alive,” Katie whispered. “So full of life.”
“She was an attractive girl,” Lee said. “What a shame.”
“They haven't found a body,” Katie said. “She could still be alive.”
He pressed his finger against the bright monitor, right over Darlene's throat. “A girl that hot? With those come-and-get-some eyes? Someone killed her. A man. A man who couldn't have her and wanted to.” He pointed now at Clive's face on the screen. “Someone like this.”
Lee got up from the swivel chair, went to his pile of clothes, and whipped out a set of keys that included a thumb-sized USB drive. He returned to Tilda's computer, plugged the drive into the computer, and began copying the files from the folder.
There was a stamping of boots just outside the studio's front door. Tilda was coming back.
Both Lee and Katie made strangled noises.
“I'll block the door,” Katie said. She got to the door and twisted the lock. “Hurry up,” she hissed at Lee.
He yanked out the USB drive and started clicking the mouse. “Come on, come on,” he said to the computer.
The door rattled. Tilda banged on it and yelled, “Finish what you're doing and let me in right now. I've got a key!”
“One minute!” Katie yelled back. “We're just practicing our poses!”
The key scraped in the lock. Tilda wasn't waiting.
Katie was numb as she ran over to stand under the lights.
Lee was nowhere to be seen.
Tilda entered the studio and gave Katie a suspicious look. “You're up to something,” Tilda said.
Katie wiped the corner of her mouth. “Yeah,” she said. “You caught us.” A toilet flushed in the studio's bathroom.
Tilda walked over to her computer and sniffed the air above the swivel chair. “Were you on my computer?”
Lee emerged from the washroom, looking relaxed and carefree.
“I was checking the weather,” he said.
“The weather?” She leaned forward and turned on the monitor.
And there it was, on the screen. Tomorrow's forecast for more snow.
She snapped her fingers at him. “Stay off,” she barked. “I don't like other people touching my computer. The only person allowed on here is Marco, and only when Peggy needs an upgrade.” She patted the top of the monitor.
“Please forgive me,” Lee said. “I was just thinking that the air tasted like snow was coming again, and I wanted to see if I was right.” He began undoing his robe. “Now, should we get back to work?”
Tilda stared at both of them for a long time.
“Sure,” she said. “Let's get to work. We're all professionals here.”
They returned to the earlier poses and worked through a few positions. Tilda moved the lights around and then the camera. Lee helped her bring in a small sofa to use as a prop.
Katie did her best to listen to posing instructions and be a professional, but her eyes kept going to Lee's pile of clothes on the floor. He'd dropped his keys right on top, with the uncapped USB drive visible for anyone to see. Unless Tilda happened to plug the thumb drive into her computer to check, she had no way of knowing Lee had copied her photos. She couldn't possibly know, and yet Tilda kept looking at the keys atop the pile of clothes. She kept eating antacids and looking at her computer and then the keys. Did the woman know what Lee had found? Katie looked around to see if there were security cameras inside the studio. She couldn't see any, but that didn't mean they weren't there.
Chapter 25
The door to Katie's room squeaked open.
Katie sat on her bed where she'd been sitting for the past hour, using her phone and thinking. She'd gone straight to her room after the photo session with Tilda, while Lee had stayed behind, volunteering to help Tilda move furniture and lights around.
Katie rubbed her eyes and took a break from staring at her phone. She couldn't move up the date of her flight out of New Mexico to tonight, and the small airport in Albuquerque wasn't the sort of large international airport where she could camp out overnight. She was stuck at the ranch, even though it was now the last place she wanted to be. The discovery of Darlene's photos had given her a sense of dread that was threatening to blow up into a full anxiety attack. Even now, she was having to concentrate on breathing slowly and steadily.
On Tilda's computer were photographs of two people who'd recently disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances. It had to be more than a coincidence.
Katie rubbed her forehead and thought about the photos taken today. Now she and Lee were captured for eternity, on Tilda's hard drive. Katie was too numb and agitated to feel regret. A person needed more time and distance to feel regret, but surely one day she would regret posing nude for the artist, no matter how artistic and beautiful the images would be.
Was that how Darlene had felt? Unlike Katie, Darlene had never volunteered to pose nude for a life drawing class. She preferred her nudity to be with one person at a time. One recent morning in September, she'd laughingly told Katie she preferred “parties of two, maybe three. Four, tops!” Katie had been annoyed over the sleepless night she'd spent listening to the activities in Darlene's bed. She told her roommate all her parties thus far had three people present, if she included the unwilling roommate witness. Darlene had responded by leaving a fresh package of foam earplugs on Katie's bed that afternoon.
Katie looked up at the adobe ceiling and stuck her fingers in her ears. She liked the first minute of wearing earplugs, the comforting feedback loop of hearing only her own pulse.
When Darlene packed her bag and left, she'd not told her roommate where she was going. And she'd dropped and busted her phone the week before, so she didn't even have any way of keeping in touch. Katie hadn't been concerned at all. If anything, she'd been looking forward to some peace and quiet, a full eight hours' sleep each night. It had taken a worried phone call from the Silva family a week later to tip her off that anything was even wrong. She'd been napping peacefully when the call came in, and for a few minutes she'd been hazy, unsure if the hysterical voice on the phone was real or a nightmare.
“Where was Darlene going?” Darlene's mother had kept asking the question, over and over, not taking Katie's answer that she didn't know, that she hadn't even asked. “She must have told you something!” Mrs. Silva was angry and pleading. When her emotions finally cut off her words, she handed the phone to Darlene's stepfather, who was calm and spoke slowly to Katie, going over the facts. It had been eight days since they'd spoken to Darlene, and they hadn't even known about her leaving the campus until now. His resigned sadness was even more terrifying than Mrs. Silva's shrieking. The man had married Darlene's mother when Darlene was thirteen, and he'd tried to make a difference in her life. He adopted her and gave her his last name. But there was something in his voice that betrayed the fact he'd known their relationship would always end like this.
Katie still had her fingers in her ears and her eyes closed. She could be anywhere right now. She could imagine herself away from the ranch.
She heard Darlene's voice in her head. “So, Kitty, if you want to leave, just leave. But tell me something. Why did you come here?”
It was a good question. Katie had told the Silvas there was a chance Darlene would show up there, resurfacing after some wild bender. It would be good for her to find a friendly face. And Katie told her own parents a lie—that she'd won the trip through a scholarship. They'd easily agreed to paying the airfare to New Mexico and back, to give her a break from everything. In January, if her roommate hadn't resurfaced, she'd be assigned a new dorm room.
“Kitty, don't you see the connection?” Darlene's voice was taunting. Everything she said was always meant to provoke a reaction. She could never just relay information or talk. There was always a pleading need for attention, a desire for attention she could never get enough of. Katie hated that need. She fought to suppress her own desire to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed. It was a weakness. It took away from the art, to be thinking too much about the audience.
“Kitty, look around you. Look outside.”
Katie stayed on the bed, eyes closed and fingers in her ears. She felt herself disassociate from her body, lifting up and seeing the room with other eyes. The ceiling disintegrated, and above her was the big, blue New Mexico sky. The walls dissolved. All around her were rocky red mountain ridges. She floated over to a trail, a trail that led up a steep mountain. She climbed the trail, stumbling and complaining that her feet hurt. She wasn't wearing the right shoes for this. She was getting blisters. But she had to keep going. The person she was walking with insisted.
Katie tried to look beside her, to see who it was urging her to keep going despite the bad footwear, but she couldn't turn her head far enough. She sensed anger and frustration, but she couldn't see a face. And she wasn't even Katie in this dream. She was Darlene.
She was Darlene, and she was scared.
She was alone here on this mountain trail, asking for help, and she realized she'd made a terrible mistake. A deadly miscalculation.
Fingers around her throat. Venom falling on her face.
Suffocation.
Grasping, clawing, fingers in the dirt, light closing off. Darkness and quiet. Nothing.
A shovel in the dirt. Scraping.
No pain, no needs, just nothing.
And then she was home again, back in the dorm room, and there was Katie. Her sweet little Kitty, sleeping peacefully.
“Wake up, Kitty. Wake up! You're in danger!”
She screamed as loud as she could, but there was no sound reverberating in the dorm room. Was she mute? Darlene clutched her throat. It was raw, damaged.
She tried to scream, but it was silent. She was locked on the other side, behind glass. She could see her roommate, but she couldn't reach her.
A glowing light appeared beside her. She asked, “Are you an angel?” No sound came from her mouth, but she heard her words resonate with the other being.
The light glowed brighter, and it asked her if she'd like to come with the light, to the place without pain, or if she wanted to stay there. Staying would mean pain for Katie. So much pain. But through her suffering, there would be justice. There would be payment for what happened to Darlene, and to the baby.
Would she make that choice? Would she cause her best friend, her only true friend, to suffer, if it meant justice?
The angel urged her to choose.
Just then, Katie's eyes fluttered open. They locked onto Darlene's eyes. Katie saw her. They were making a connection across the divided realms, looping a thread between life and death.
Choose, the angel urged, and she did.
Darlene chose suffering, and justice.
Chapter 26
A knocking sound at her door awoke Katie from her strange dream.
“There you are,” Marco said. He'd opened the door and now stood in the doorway, filling it with his body.
“Here I am,” she said, still blinking away the image of a blue sky going black.
Marco adjusted his rolled-up shirtsleeves, pushing them further up his lightly freckled arms. “So, how did the photo session go?”
“Fine.” She sat up, head spinning, and tugged at the neckline of her shirt. She'd changed into a turtleneck since leaving Tilda's studio. Anything to get more covered up. But now her neck was itchy, and the dream had made her sweaty.
“I guess I should let you keep napping,” Marco said.
“I'm awake,” she said, sliding to the edge of her bed.
He looked at her suitcase, which was open on the floor.
“Don't tell me you're leaving,” he said. “You're paid up for a few more days.”
She tugged at the turtleneck again. The soft fabric felt like it was strangling her.
Without waiting for an answer, Marco continued talking. “Listen, I know things haven't exactly been ideal around here, and my lizard lesson today wasn't my premium material, but you guys are welcome to stay to the end of your week.”
“I'm not sure I want to stay,” she said.
He looked dow
n at his feet. “You must think less of me now that you know how I earn a living. You've lost respect for me.”
“No,” she said.
He looked up with a crooked grin and one eyebrow raised.
His expression was so goofy, Katie giggled. “Okay, maybe I see you differently now.”
“My bestseller is called The Unicorn,” he said. “It's not really a horn, but it's not really the other thing, either.”
She put her hand over her mouth and giggled some more.
“You have a nice giggle,” Marco said. “I wish I'd told you about my sculpture specialty before now.”
She sighed. “It's been an action-packed week. Thanks for the laugh.”
They both looked at her open suitcase on the floor.
“You can't go yet,” Marco said. “Once you leave, it'll just be me and Mom and the ghosts.”
“And Holly,” she said.
He stared at the suitcase. “Take me with you,” he said flatly. “I know I'm a big boy, but I pack up small. I'll just fold myself up, climb into your suitcase, and nobody needs to know.”
“I'll think about it,” she said.
He backed away from the door frame, back into the hallway. “I should show you some of my pieces,” he said, swinging his arms.
“Not The Unicorn.”
He blushed. “No, I mean my art pieces. Don't leave yet, okay? Give me fifteen minutes to get tidied up, then come down the family wing and find me.”
“Okay.”
“Promise you won't leave without seeing some of my work,” he said.
She held up her hand, pinkie finger extended. “I swear I won't leave until I've seen your work.”
* * *
Katie finished packing everything into her suitcase, but she couldn't get it zipped. She hadn't acquired anything new during her stay at Spirit Ranch, yet her stuff had expanded somehow.
She pulled out the bulkiest item—a polar fleece zip-up jacket—and pulled it on over top of her turtleneck sweater. At last, the suitcase zipped.
She would go see Marco's sculptures, break the news to him that she was leaving early, and then call for a taxi. If Lee Elliot wanted to leave as well, they could split the cost. Once they got into the city, she would get a motel room or get on a bus. She should have left when they found Clive's body. She should have never come in the first place. But she didn't have a time machine, so she'd do what she could now to correct her course.
Dancing with a Ghost (Restless Spirits Cozy Ghost Mysteries Book 3) Page 15