Without waiting for an answer from her, the driver pulled his truck up to the front of her car and set his brake. He got out.
“What happened?” He was wearing a gray mechanic’s coverall that said “Dave” on it, and he looked open and friendly.
“My car exploded.” She was ready to weep with sheer exhaustion, but if she could not manage to cope, she would have failed, and Winter Musgrave hated failure as theologians hated death and Hell.
Dave looked at her car. “A BMW?” he said in faint disbelief. “I don’t even know if there’s a dealership this side of the river … . Oh, I’m Dave Kelly; I own the garage.” He held out his hand.
Winter stared at it blankly for a moment before reaching out and shaking it. “Winter Musgrave. I live outside of town; all my groceries are in the trunk … .”
“That’s right; you’re up at Greyangels, aren’t you? Why don’t you come on back to the garage—your car might not be in as bad shape as she looks, and if she is, I’ll give Timmy Sullivan a ring; he and his sister run the car service.”
“Yes. All right. Anything,” Winter said.
Dave helped her up into the high passenger seat of the wrecker. She sank into the seat and lay back, eyes closed, while he hooked her car up to the winch and raised the front end up off the ground. She wanted to retreat to the safety of the farmhouse, to shut out the world, to return to the uncaring oblivion she’d had before.
But she couldn’t. It was a seductive trap. There is no time … . It would leave her defenseless against whatever was killing the animals.
Whether it was Winter or something else. She closed her eyes.
“—never seen anything like that before,” Dave said, climbing into the cab. “It’s almost like the thing was struck by lightning—spark plugs are melted into place; don’t know how I’m going to get them out … .”
He looked toward Winter. “Are you all right, miss?”
Winter’s eyes flew open and she straightened up hastily. “Fine. I’m fine.”
I’m not fine at all … .
DAVE KELLY’S garage was at the edge of town; a square white building that seemed to combine a service station and a junkyard all in one. There was a large blacktopped area beside the building filled with cars—some new, some old, some missing tires or hoods or windows. Deftly, Dave Kelly maneuvered the wrecker until the car in tow was where he wanted it, then he released the winch and shut off the ignition.
“Why don’t we see about getting your stuff out of the trunk and I’ll give Tim a ring? It’s going to be a day or two before I have an estimate for you on fixing your Beamer. I can tell you right now you’d better call your insurance—although what you’re going to tell them, I don’t know.”
WINTER AWOKE in her own bed several hours later, ravenous and light-headed. The house was dark; through the open window came the high sweet song of night peepers. Groaning, Winter rolled over and flicked on the light. The warm, oak-paneled walls of the bedroom shone with a reassuring solidity. Wincing at the stiffness of her muscles, Winter tottered to her feet and closed the window. The demanding rumble of her stomach made it plain that simply going back to sleep was not an option.
I have to have something to eat.
The thought triggered another one. My groceries. What happened to them? She remembered reaching the garage, and her overriding determination not to go to the hospital, but everything beyond was a jumbled blur. She must have gotten home somehow—but had her shopping?
Cautiously Winter explored the midnight house, shivering in the cold. The electric heat would take forever to warm the place; she wondered if she could summon the energy to light the stove or build a fire.
Part of the reason for the cold was explained when she got to the parlor. In the hallway beyond, she could see the front door hanging gently open, admitting moonlight and a skirl of last year’s leaves. Winter pushed it shut and threw the dead bolt. She was only lucky not to have had visitors—if not burglars, then their even more destructive cousins, raccoons.
In the parlor, the bags of groceries she’d bought an eternity ago stood like battered sentinels in their tattered paper sacks. Unwarily, Winter lifted one, only to have its contents shower from its damp, torn bottom to bounce and roll in every direction. How did they … ? She didn’t remember loading them into the taxi. To be honest, she didn’t remember the taxi.
She pawed through the bags until she found a jar of jam. Twisting off the lid, she scooped a dollop out with her fingers and sucked it into her mouth. The fruity sweetness sent a tingle of craving through her entire body. Still carrying the jar, she hurried into the kitchen for a spoon, and had eaten half the jar’s contents before she began to feel satisfied. Rinsing her sticky fingers beneath the tap, Winter returned to the parlor to see what else she could salvage.
Most of what she’d bought had been canned or boxed, and only the frozen foods were ruined. She bundled the soggy melted mass up in a plastic garbage bag for later disposal and carried the remainder into the kitchen to put it away. Once she’d done that, Winter opened a can of stew to heat on the kitchen stove.
The bread would have been good with this. And the wine. She winced inwardly at the memory of her expedition to Glastonbury. She only hoped that the consequences didn’t extend beyond a few ruined sacks of groceries and a burnt-out car. Visions of people coming to her house, demanding that she leave with them and go back to Fall River or to some worse place, haunted her until she angrily banished them. She would not go—she wouldn’t! She’d done nothing wrong … .
But what had she done? What had happened, exactly? It had been only a few hours ago, but she wasn’t sure. She’d gotten lost, and—
I panicked, Winter told herself brutally. That’s all.
And the car … ?
A coincidence, Winter told herself.
But it wasn’t.
SHE’D REFILLED the rick on the mud-porch, and now she carried logs into the parlor and laid a fire in the fireplace. While it was kindling, Winter filled the stove in her bedroom and lit it, ate the canned stew she’d opened, and even found a little brandy to go in her instant coffee—a forgotten bottle pushed far to the back of the pantry. She sat in front of the fire, sipping the warming drink, and sleepily watched the flames dance over the burning wood—the way the signs had danced over the buildings, the glassware in the windows—
No! A bright jolt of fear galvanized her to wakefulness; she couldn’t sleep, not when she might find anything at all here in the farmhouse when she awoke. The memory of the squirrel made her shudder. If she slept again, who knew what she’d find in the morning?
Because she was the one responsible. She had to find the strength to admit that now. There was no one else to blame. No human agency could have followed her from Manhattan, to Massachusetts, to Glastonbury, killing animals and placing their ravaged corpses outside her door. It was her. She was the one doing it.
A wave of depression mixed with relief settled over her. Accept the blame, a cold inner voice whispered. It’s your fault, all your fault. Don’t try to find an explanation. Just accept the blame … .
Winter drew a long, shuddering breath of grief. All right. She’d accept the blame—that was supposed to be the first step on the road to recovery, wasn’t it? Mea fucking culpa? But if she was the cause, she could also make it stop.
Couldn’t she?
IN THE SEARCH that had uncovered the brandy, Winter had also seen what she needed now, and although she could not imagine the necessity that had stored 250 feet of cotton clothesline in the farmhouse pantry, she blessed it now. With the clothesline in one hand and the kitchen shears in the other, Winter retired to her bedroom.
She’d built a fire in the woodstove at the same time she’d built the fire in the fireplace, and the room was pleasantly warm now. She took the time to change her slept-in clothes for heavy flannel pajamas and turn back the patchwork quilt and Hudson Bay blanket that covered the white iron bedstead.
Then she turned to t
he clothesline.
It’s not me. It’s not. But it was, it had to be—there was no one else here to blame. She cut a long hank of line, and knotted one end around the bedpost, tying and retying knot over knot until there was no way to undo it. She set the rest of the coil aside on the rocking chair and slipped the shears carefully beneath the mattress. Then she climbed into bed.
At least it won’t happen tonight.
Winter felt her cheeks go hot with embarrassment—although there was no one to see—as she took the free end of clothesline and wrapped it around her wrist, knotting and tying it until it was as secure as the other. She tugged at it, relieved at its strength. There was no way she could break the rope, and no way to untie it. In fact, she’d set herself up for a certain amount of strenuous gymnastics in the morning, since in order to get out of bed she was going to have to get the shears out from under the mattress and cut the clothesline one-handed, something she knew she couldn’t possibly manage to do in her sleep.
If she did walk in her sleep—and she had to believe that she did—she would not do it tonight. Satisfied, Winter turned out the light and settled herself again for sleep.
2
A Rose in Winter
It was the winter wild.
—JOHN MILTON
TAGHKANIC COLLEGE was founded in 1714 in the colony of New York to provide education to the residents of what would later become Amsterdam County. The college was first housed in a building that had once been a cider mill, and the mill was still there on the campus, though its classroom days were long past. Taghkanic College survived into the twentieth century almost unchanged from its Federalist heyday; the newest building on the campus was the “new wing” of the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory, and the “new wing” was completed in 1941.
Margaret Beresford Bidney graduated Taghkanic College in the late 1860s, and upon her death, her fortune went to fund what came to be known as the Bidney Institute. From the moment of the Institute’s inception, the trustees of the college were on the verge of claiming the entire Bidney Bequest on behalf of Taghkanic College, when Professor Colin MacLaren accepted an appointment as director of the Institute. Under his guidance, the moribund Institute revived, taking the lead in the investigation both of psychic phenomena and its wicked stepsister, occult phenomena. In the waning years of the twentieth century, Taghkanic College, in association with the Bidney Institute, stood as one of the few schools to offer a doctoral program in parapsychology.
But the Institute’s primary function began as, and remained, research—into parapsychology as well as “Science’s dark twin,” the occult sciences that Professor MacLaren so firmly believed must be studied alongside the psychic sciences in order to understand them fully.
On this particular spring morning, researcher Truth Jourdemayne, who had become expert in the glamorless field of statistical parapsychology long before she realized her allegiance was to an older stranger craft, was not thinking of science—parapsychological or occult—at all.
“An entire summer in an Appalachian ghetto—you sure know how to spoil a girl,” Truth teased. Her willing victim was Dr. Dylan Palmer, both a teacher at the college and a researcher at the Institute.
Dylan simply grinned, his mild blue eyes and shaggy blond hair giving him the deceptively placid air of a penitent sheepdog.
“There hasn’t been an in-depth case study ever done on Morton’s Fork—oh, Nicholas Taverner did a little something in the twenties, but he was more of a folklorist, gathering material about English folk-survivals.”
“When what you want is ghosts,” Truth said.
“Well,” Dylan admitted, “you have to agree that the director of the Institute is more likely to be interested in ghosts than folk songs—and from what I can tell, Morton’s Fork is the center of unexplained activity for a fifty-mile radius. I’ve marked this survey map—”
Dylan spread the map over the piles of paper that covered his desk. Truth bent over it to see it more clearly, and Dylan tugged at her arm so she overbalanced and fell into his lap.
There was a time not so long before when Truth would have lashed out against a gesture of this sort; fighting against it and the feelings it provoked. But that time had passed, and an emerald-and-pearl ring glinted on the third finger of her left hand in token of her emotional renewal.
“But maybe you’re right,” Dylan said wistfully as Truth put her arms around him. “It won’t be much of a holiday, and I did promise … .”
“I think it will be the perfect vacation,” Truth said, snuggling into a more comfortable position. “Just you, and me, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of temperamental recording equipment, three grad students, and some ghosts.” Or whatever genius loci infest the place, she finished, with a pang of premonition.
“Sounds crowded,” Dylan murmured. “But, as none of them are here right now …”
There was a knock at the door.
Dylan swore, and tipped Truth to her feet an instant before the door opened. Meg Winslow, the Institute’s secretary, looked in.
“Sorry to bother you, Dylan, but—oh. Truth, I didn’t see you there. Boy, am I glad to see both of you—we’ve got a real live one this time.”
As a public focus for society’s interest—and sometimes obsession—with the occult and paranormal and allied New Age pursuits, the Bidney Institute had become accustomed to attracting a certain amount of public inquiries, by phone, by letter, and sometimes in person. They ranged from pleas for help from those genuinely troubled by psychic phenomena, to attempts by con men and charlatans to bilk the Institute of its endowment through one fraud or another, to outcries—no less sincere and desperate for all of that—from individuals whose problems lay entirely within the scope of their confused minds and troubled emotions.
“What’s his problem?” Truth asked, getting to her feet.
“Her,” Meg corrected. “I tried to get rid of her, but she just keeps saying she needs to talk to one of the researchers. She’s really out there, Truth; I put her in the Interview Lab—she was scaring the students.”
“As if anything could,” Truth muttered.
“Did she tell you what the problem was?” Dylan asked.
Meg shrugged. “All she’d tell me was that she was being haunted—she’s got that right, if you ask me.”
WINTER MUSGRAVE rocked restlessly back and forth, too keyed up even to pace. She wrung her hands, as if some private devil were clasped between them, until she noticed what she was doing and stopped—only to start again as soon as her attention wandered. Her jaws ached with the tension of gritted teeth, but she nearly didn’t dare open her mouth for fear that the sounds that issued from it would be the keening of a madwoman.
I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. What happened—I could not have done that. No matter what.
She clung to that thought, even though she could not understand how it could be true. Perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe she was crazy. That would be better. Because if she wasn’t crazy, she didn’t need a shrink.
She needed an exorcist.
Winter hadn’t meant to come here at all, but when she’d called Sullivan’s Taxi she hadn’t been thinking clearly, and when the driver had come, he’d misunderstood her frantic demand to be taken “to the Institute” and brought her here. She hadn’t really been thinking of going back to Fall River when she gave him the order; only of getting away from the house that had now twice betrayed her.
But the driver had brought her here instead—to the Bidney Institute.
He’d had to tell her where she was three times before she’d get out—by then, hazy memories of the local college’s pet ghostbreakers had begun to surface and Winter realized that her destination was sanctuary of a sort. She didn’t remember where she’d heard about the Bidney Institute—It wasn’t the sort of laboratory that was traded on Wall Street, after all—but once she’d arrived she knew it was her last hope. Her only hope.
Winter stared aroun
d the room she’d been told to wait in without really seeing it. The long window at the far end looked out over the old cider mill, with the river behind it like a bright foil ribbon. On the oak table in front of her were various things to fiddle with—blocks, a silver tuning fork, a deck of cards, and a brown paper bag, looking out of place among the executive time-wasters that Winter recognized from happier days. The back wall was lined with books and cased runs of magazines.
I am not crazy. Winter clenched her hands tighter. On the table the tuning fork began, ever so faintly, to hum.
Oh, please, I don’t want to be crazy.
She’d been waiting for over ten minutes, and was beginning to be afraid that the receptionist—who had so clearly wished she’d go away and stop being a problem!—had simply shut Winter in here to get rid of her. She couldn’t let them do that. They had to see her, had to, had to, had to—
Because I am not mad. I’m not.
When the door opened Winter had her back to it. She was so keyed up that the slight sound of its opening made her jerk and yelp. She tripped backward into the table; the deck of cards spilled onto the floor and one of the Rubik’s Cubes clattered after it. Winter stared wild-eyed at the figure in the doorway, heart pounding.
SHE LOOKS as if she’s going to have a seizure any minute, was Truth Jourdemayne’s first thought, and the second was that the petite chestnut-haired woman ought to be in bed—maybe even a hospital bed. Her gauntness had the emaciation of hysteria rather than fashion, and even while staring at Truth and Dylan as though they were fresh out of her nightmares, she could not keep her hands still.
Another crazy, Truth thought resignedly, though some instinct kept her from being satisfied with the facile judgment.
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