She rubbed her forehead. What had the dream been about? Something about Grey, and trouble. But not trouble that could still be averted. Trouble that had already happened. But if it’s already too late then why do I have to hurry … ?
What utter nonsense. The thought was sharp and bracing, lending her strength. I suppose that poltergeists have to be real, and maybe even the thing that chased you out of Glastonbury, the brisk internal censor went on. But just because those two things happened you don’t have to embrace every half-baked idea from Spiritualism to UFOs! Prophetic dreams and poltergeists don’t exactly go together. There’s got to be a limit somewhere. You’re upset, you’re worried, you want to find Hunter Greyson—it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this means you’re probably going to dream about him. Like Freud said, sometimes a bad dream is just a bad dream.
Winter drew a deep breath, uncertain of whether the thoughts were good common sense or hysterical denial. A dream is just a dream, she repeated, feeling her body relax. Every bad dream didn’t have to be a message—if she started thinking that way, she’d be wearing crystals and looking for omens in tea-leaves next.
That’s right. Just a dream. Not an omen.
The dream had left her too keyed-up to sleep, however, and she didn’t want to run a bath at this hour for fear of disturbing Mrs. Douglas’s other guests. With a sigh, Winter swung her legs over the edge of the bed and went looking for the pamphlet from Inquire Within. The way things stood, she wasn’t going to get any sleep for a couple of more hours at least. Thank heavens she’d managed to be sensible about the whole thing, or she’d probably be in the middle of hysterics right now. And over a bad dream, no less!
It was not until many days later that she recognized those words of rationality for the trap they were.
9
Every Mile is Two in Winter
It was not in winter
Our loving lot was cast!
—THOMAS HOOD
TO EYES ACCUSTOMED to the Manhattan skyline, Dayton was a small clean city with a scattering of skyscrapers and no smog to speak of. It had taken Winter three days, taking the trip by easy stages, to cross Pennsylvania, and by the time she was done, she was heartily sick of the rolling landscape, the endless fields being planted with nameless springtime crops, and the signs for Stuckey’s. Pulling into the traffic tangle that was Dayton’s outer loop was almost a relief after the endless hours of high-speed highway driving.
There had been no more dreams or peculiar incidents of any sort, and though Winter continued to do the psychic exercises from the pamphlet and drink her Centering Tea, it was more for the help they gave her in falling asleep than for any arcane benefits. Her physical stamina was rapidly returning, her mirror told her she was putting back on the lost weight and softening the sharp edges of her gauntness, and she was beginning to wonder if the “artificial Elemental” that Truth had told her about might be nothing more than an elaborate network of coincidences. The smaller animals she’d found could easily have been a cat’s prey, dragged so far from the place where they were killed to seem like bloodless deaths. The deer could be chalked up to poachers. Even the night at the Institute’s lab probably hadn’t happened the way she remembered it now—and the rest? Coincidence, hysteria, bad luck—It didn’t even really matter if everything had happened as she thought it had, so long as it went away now. Hadn’t Truth said that the poltergeist would just give up and go away at some point? Well, maybe it had. She should be glad the thing wasn’t around to get up to its old tricks with her new car.
Winter felt more optimistic than she had in weeks. The problem hadn’t been nearly as bad as she’d thought it was after all. And besides, it was over now.
Winter took the exit that Ramsey had indicated in his directions, and immediately found herself in the middle of the downtown area, lost in a bewildering tangle of secondary streets. Where was—? Oh, here it was. With a little more verve than prudence, Winter cut a sharp left and found herself on a main street: four lanes plus turn lanes divided by a grassy median, the edges dotted with fast-food restaurants and chain hotels.
This doesn’t look much like a residential district. Or a business one.
She followed Ramsey’s directions until large buildings gave way to small ones and to outlet warehouses, an area where real estate prices were lower. She’d nearly given up hope of finding the address when—
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Why couldn’t he just have said so? she asked herself, even though she knew how much Ramsey Miller liked practical jokes—assuming they were harmless ones.
Winter hit her turn-signal and made a left just under the sign that said Miller’s Used Cars.
SHE’D BARELY BROUGHT the car to a stop before Ramsey was walking out of the prefab office in her direction. She was pleased that she recognized him, even with the new mustache. He was of average height, with brown hair and eyes, and the years had been kind to him; he still had the same hairline he’d had in college, and had also escaped the swinging, pendulous beer-gut that so many men his age didn’t seem to be able to avoid.
Winter got out of her car and stood beside it, waiting for him to reach her.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked, his tone professionally polite. He was wearing the loudest sport coat Winter had ever seen—a polyester horror of green and yellow and orange plaid, with a few red and blue stripes thrown in for good measure.
“You can throw away that jacket for starters; it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” Winter said, smiling.
Ramsey’s face lost its expression of formal politeness and broke into a genuine grin of recognition.
“Winter! I told you to call me the day before you got here!” he said, enveloping her in a hug.
“I forgot,” she said meekly, hugging him back, “and Dayton was closer than I thought it was. But just look at you.”
“I’d rather look at you,” Ramsey leered, in the style of a borscht-belt comic. “You look terrific! What have you been doing? What brings you to my humble city?”
“I’m looking up old college friends—you know, the group?” The Blackburn group, Winter meant, but Ramsey didn’t take her up on that.
“Well, when you find Grey, give him my best—and tell him I haven’t forgotten about the twenty bucks he owes me. But come on inside—oh, don’t worry about moving the car; Mike can keep an eye on it. Lends a touch of class to the place. And if I sell it, I’ll make sure you get top price.”
“Gee, thanks,” Winter said mockingly. “And it isn’t even mine.”
“You’re stealing cars these days?” Ramsey shot back, never missing a beat.
RAMSEY’S OFFICE bore a faint kinship with the place in Poughkeepsie that Winter had leased her car from: automotive calendars on the walls and clusters of tagged keys everywhere. Ramsey gestured, indicating she should sit where she liked, and Winter passed up the couch beneath the window in favor of one of the verging-on-antique chairs opposite the battered metal desk.
“Soda?” Ramsey said. Winter nodded, and he went over to a small refrigerator. “Coke all right?”
“Great.” She’d never been one for sweets before—let alone soft drinks—but ever since these things had started happening, she couldn’t keep away from the stuff. She’d developed a particular fondness for Classic Coke.
Carbonated glucose in a can. I don’t even want to know what’s in it, but knowing that plumbers soak fittings in it to get the rust off is enough for me. Despite her flip and mordant thoughts, Winter popped the top on the deposit can and poured the paper cup full. She drank, and let the sugar rush flush the weariness from her body for a while.
While Ramsey was getting his own drink, Winter took a surreptitious look around. The bright spring sunlight beat down on the cars outside in the lot, making the place look about as good as it ever would. Turning across four lanes of traffic she hadn’t had much of a chance to look over Ramsey’s place of business as she came in, but now Winter co
uld see that none of the cars parked out there—with the exception of her leased Saturn—was less than five or six years old; almost obsolete by the standards of the market, and certainly not prime-quality preowned automotive goods.
It was true that the lot was clean and well kept—as were the cars—and the fluttering pennants and the gaudy sign lent a certain liveliness to the place, but with her finely honed predator’s instincts, Winter was willing to bet that business at Miller’s Used Cars was not so hot.
A used-car lot. Who would have thought it?
“So,” Ramsey said, sitting down on the side of the desk, club soda in hand. “How’ve you been? As for me, I am as you see me.”
“Pretty good, all things considered,” Winter said, fencing cautiously. She might be willing to tell him about her inconvenient lapses of memory later, but at the moment, she wanted to feel her way into the conversation—and find out what had made Ramsey so cagey when she spoke to him on the phone.
“I went into Wall Street,” Winter admitted, expanding on her story. “I did a whole Bonfire of the Vanities thing. I survived the eighties. Now I’m … taking some time out,” she finished lamely.
“Don’t worry about it; you’ll get another job,” Ramsey said with dismaying instinct. “Especially with your looks. You don’t look a day older, you know.”
“Neither do you.” If it was stretching the truth, the truth wasn’t being stretched too far. And she liked Ramsey. She always had. Even if he did automatically assume she’d been fired. “So, what are you doing these days?” she asked. It was a pallid conversational gambit, but at the moment Winter was more interested in normalcy than drama.
Ramsey nattered on about trivia, and Winter let the sound of his voice, his look, his gestures, carry her back to their shared days at Taghkanic. The tissue of evoked memory was too fragile to bear much weight, but even without being able to recall specific details, Winter could sense the time they’d spent together; the emotions they’d all felt for each other—all five of them.
But if that’s true, why didn’t the others stay together, even if I left? What happened to all of them?
More mysteries.
“—so after Ellie left, I got this place, and, I don’t know, I think it’s worked out pretty well,” Ramsey was saying. “Who can ever be sure how their life is going to turn out at eighteen or twenty?”
“Ellie?” Winter was roused to a sense of her social responsibilities. “I never even asked—is there a Mrs. Miller? I don’t want to come barging into your life like an old girlfriend.” Which she’d never been—she and Ramsey had been that rarest of all male/female pairings: friends and nothing more.
Ramsey laughed ruefully. “Mrs. Millers? Several, but none of them wants to know me any more. I’m divorced, Winter—I just took it for granted that you knew, but of course there’s no way you could. Number Three just left about a month ago—that was Laura. Ellie was Number Two, and Marina was the first one, back in ’eighty-three.”
“Just out of college,” Winter said. They’d all been Class of ’82; Ramsey had graduated even if she hadn’t. What had he gone on to do? She could almost remember … .
“I was working at the Chicago Daily Sentinel then, back in the good old days when I was going to have matched Pulitzers for my mantelpiece. But you don’t want to hear about that.” His tone was definite, and now Winter remembered clearly. Ramsey had been a journalism major; he’d been the one who was going to find the truth and change the world. “How long are you staying?” he added.
“What?” The question startled Winter out of her reverie; for a moment the world around her became hyperreal; from the slanting bars of sunlight across the dusty goldenrod rug to the dents and scratches in the old metal desk. Ramsey’s office. The office of a used-car salesman, a stage-set in some horrible alternate reality to the future he should have had.
“Staying,” Ramsey repeated patiently, “in Dayton. I admit it’s not the garden spot of the universe, but its a nice little town; a person could do worse. Look, it’s pretty dead here on the lot; I usually stick around until nine or so, but people don’t buy used cars in the spring, and if anyone decides to buck the statistics, Mike can have the commission. Why don’t you come on back to the house? You can have your pick of the bedrooms, although I admit they don’t all still have beds in them.”
WHEN WINTER REACHED Ramsey’s house, carefully tailing his blue Subaru out into the Dayton suburbs, she found out he’d said nothing more than the truth.
Ramsey Miller lived in a development of the sort that realtors liked to call “better homes.” The houses were good-sized, and some care had been taken by the architect and the landscaper to give each one a little individuality. Ramsey signaled and turned into the driveway, the automatic garage-door opener in his car raising the door of his attached two-car garage as he did. He pulled in on the left side with the ease of long practice. Winter pulled her car up beside his.
“All the comforts of darkest suburbia,” Ramsey said with slightly forced cheer. There had been a blue-and-white realtor’s For Sale sign stuck into the lawn, and the sense of failure, of abandonment, was strong.
“Ramsey, if this isn’t a good time …” Winter said doubtfully.
He met her gaze directly, with the honesty that had always made him a good friend. “It’s just as good a time as any other, Winter. Believe me. It wasn’t a noisy divorce, and it’s over. Laura has the kids and the bank accounts and she’s moved back in with her family in Cleveland for a while. I’ve got the house—at least until it sells—and it’s probably not going to sell in the next week, alas. You’re welcome to stay here.”
He pointed the control wand at the garage door and the door descended, shutting them into darkness once more. Moving through the dark with the ease of long habit, Ramsey made his way over to the wall and flipped a switch. The overhead light went on, throwing the walls and accumulated domestic debris into sharp relief. Winter could see the pale shadows on the walls where bicycles had hung.
Ramsey opened the kitchen door. “Come on. I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour of Chez Miller.”
THE GARAGE ENTRANCE led into a spacious yellow-and-white kitchen several steps up the social scale from Janelle’s. It seemed oddly empty, and after a moment Winter realized why: The normal kitchen-counter clutter, from canisters on the counter to microwave, was absent.
“This,” said Ramsey unnecessarily, “is the kitchen. I’ll show you over the rest of the house and then we can decide what to do about dinner.”
When Laura Miller had taken the kids and gone to Cleveland, Winter discovered a few minutes later, she’d also taken practically everything that wasn’t nailed down. The four-bedroom ranch house was nearly empty—the dining room was bare, the living room held only a few pieces of furniture, and what—judging from the wallpaper—had been the kids’ bedrooms were empty to the walls. Winter was only surprised that the woman hadn’t taken the wallpaper, too.
“She seems to have been very thorough,” Winter commented in what she hoped were neutral tones.
“Laura always was efficient,” Ramsey said with a trace of pride. “I came home and the place was like this; she got the movers in while I was at work. Called me from Cleveland and let me know she was leaving me.”
“Didn’t you mind?” Winter asked disbelievingly. If anyone had done something equivalent to her, she would have hunted them down with a scalping knife, not recounted their exploits with this sort of fond proprietary delight.
“I guess I wasn’t surprised; she put up with a lot before she called it quits. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve been left. She played fair, though—left me the bedroom set and some of the living room furniture, and there’s a fold-out couch in the guest room you can use. It was her office—Laura was a CPA; she kept up her business after we got married.”
The former office was a small room about ten by twelve with a window that overlooked the house next door. It contained no furniture except the couch, and Winter wonder
ed why that item had been spared. There was a couch in the living room, too. Perhaps the former Mrs. Miller didn’t like couches?
But it would be a place to stay, at least for the night. And she wanted the chance to spend more time with Ramsey than she could over a piece of pie in some very public diner.
“It looks fine. If you’re sure I’m not putting you out …” Winter said in a last token protest.
“How could you ever do that?” Ramsey said fondly. “One for all and all for one, remember?”
“Whoever is my brother or sister in the Art, let them be my brother or sister in all things.” Winter shook her head, trying to dislodge the intrusive voice. “Were you Sealed to the Circle?” she remembered Truth saying. She and Ramsey had shared stronger bonds than blood or love once, so she was told.
“Okay,” Winter said, capitulating gracefully. “You’ve sold me. Now, what about dinner?”
EITHER LAURA MILLER had taken all of the food with her, too—an idea Winter was not prepared to rule out—or Ramsey was no different than any other bachelor. Both the cupboards and the refrigerator were nearly bare. Ramsey volunteered that there was a supermarket not far from the house, and Winter proposed an expedition to it. Like most busy professionals—male or female, single or married—she wasn’t much of a cook, but she could make an omelette and a salad providing she had the ingredients.
The grocery store seemed immense by East Coast standards—vast and gleaming and containing every item known to modern man, from potted plants to motor oil. In Ohio something called a “package store”—a liquor store—was attached to the supermarket, and Winter picked out several bottles of wine. White for tonight, red for some future meal. Maybe spaghetti; that was supposed to be easy, and maybe Ramsey was a better cook than she was. Winter filled the cart with whatever caught her fancy as she and Ramsey chatted, but some part of her knew the real talking would come later.
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