Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  And he thought this might be one of them, for him. What he did or didn’t do now could determine his path from this point onward, perhaps even his ultimate fate.

  “The universe puts you where you need to be,” he reminded himself, repeating something Bishop and his wife, Miranda, often told their team of investigators. “Take advantage of it.”

  The question was . . . how?

  Ellie Weeks knew she was going to get fired. She knew it. And the reasons why she would get fired made up a long list, at the top of which was the secret, passionate affair she’d had with one of the guests a few weeks back.

  Number two on the list was getting pregnant.

  There had been a cold knot of terror in her belly ever since she’d used the early pregnancy test that morning—for the third time this week. Positive. All positive.

  Three faulty tests in a row were hardly likely, she knew that all too well. So they hadn’t been faulty. And she could no longer ignore or pretend to ignore the awful truth.

  She was unmarried, going to have a baby, and the father of her child was—he had told her, by way of ending their affair—already married. Happily.

  Happily married. Christ.

  Men were bastards, every last one of them. Her father had been a bastard, and every man she’d been involved with in her twenty-seven years had been a bastard.

  “You’re just not lucky with men,” her friend and fellow maid at The Lodge, Alison, had offered sympathetically when Ellie had confessed to a heartbreaking “fling” without going into details as to who the man was and where the affair had taken place. “My Charles is a fine man. He has a brother, you know.”

  Ellie, queasy with morning sickness and a gnawing bitterness, had informed her friend that she never wanted to hear from another man as long as she lived, no matter how fine their brothers were.

  Now, as she pushed the noisy vacuum over the carpet of the Ginger Room in the North Wing, Ellie wondered miserably what was going to happen to her. She figured she had, maybe, three or four months before her pregnancy became obvious to everyone. And then she’d be fired, out on her ass with no savings and nobody to turn to for help. With a baby on the way.

  If she had the nerve, she’d contact the baby’s father. But he was not only wealthy and famous, he was a politician, and Ellie had the uneasy suspicion that he’d know plenty of people who could and would take care of a little problem like a pregnant ex-lover turning up. And it wouldn’t be by paying her off, either.

  Ellie wasn’t that lucky.

  The vacuum began making an unholy racket then, and she hastily turned it off. She hadn’t noticed anything in the deep pile carpet, but obviously somebody had dropped a coin or something else metallic. She knelt and turned the vacuum on its side, peering at the rotating brush head.

  It turned easily under her probing touch, so she shook the vacuum a few times, until what had been rattling around inside dropped to the carpet.

  It was a little silver locket, heart-shaped and engraved on the front with a name. Ellie picked it up and studied it. The sort of thing a child might wear, she thought. She used a thumbnail to try prying it open, but it stubbornly resisted her attempts, and she finally gave up.

  She knew better than to merely leave it on the nightstand or dresser. Climbing to her feet, she went to her cart in the hall and got one of the envelopes provided for just this sort of thing. She wrote the date, the time, and the room name on the outside, then gave the locket a last look before dropping it into the envelope and sealing it. Then she put the envelope in one of the cart’s lower compartments.

  “Okay, Missy,” she murmured, “your locket will be at the Lost and Found in Housekeeping. Safe and sound.”

  Then she went back into the Ginger Room and continued her work, the roar of the vacuum drowning the sound of her voice when she murmured aloud, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do. . . .”

  Diana was glad there was a workshop class scheduled later that morning. Meeting Quentin had shaken her more than she wanted to admit; left with nothing to do but brood over the question of how she had been able to draw a very fair likeness of him before ever setting eyes on him, she might well have bolted.

  Instead, she found herself standing in her usual corner of the conservatory, the easel with her large working sketchpad open to a fresh page before her, frowning as she half listened to the pleasant murmur of Beau Rafferty’s voice. He was instructing his students to use their charcoal sticks to sketch whatever was uppermost in their minds this morning, whether it be an idea, an emotion, a problem, or whatever else bothered or preoccupied them.

  “Don’t think about what you’re doing,” he told them, repeating what he had told Diana privately the day before. “Let your thoughts wander. Just draw.”

  Diana resisted the impulse to once again sketch Quentin’s face. Instead, she thought about her predawn experience and the maybe-dream of the plea for help traced on a windowpane.

  Help us.

  Us? Who was “us”? No. Never mind. It was a dream. Only a dream.

  Just another strange dream, another symptom, another sign she was getting worse instead of better.

  It scared her. This illness of hers had disrupted her life from the time she was eight years old, and twenty-five years was a long time to deal with anything like that. But at least in those early years she had been able to function normally most of the time. There had been some dreams, scattered instances of thinking she had heard someone speaking to her when there had been no one nearby, even eerie glimpses of people or things, like a flicker of motion caught from the corner of her eye but gone when she tried to look straight at them.

  Unsettling, to be sure, and it had worried her father when she had mentioned this or that occurrence. But it was only when Diana hit adolescence that the symptoms had begun to seriously interfere with her life.

  The blackouts had been the most frightening. “Waking up” to find herself in a strange place or doing something she never would have done consciously. Dangerous things, sometimes. Once, she had opened her eyes to realize, to her terror, that she was up to her waist in the lake near her home.

  Fully clothed. In the middle of the night. Just wading out toward the middle of the lake. And at the time, she hadn’t been able to swim.

  After that, she learned.

  What had been called “disturbances” by school officials had led to special private tutors who struggled to complete her education while doctors struggled to find the right combination of medication and therapy to enable her to function.

  There were times she was so heavily medicated she’d been little more than a zombie, resulting in whole stretches of her life she could barely remember. Times when new medications caused “adverse” reactions far worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat. And many times when yet another doctor with yet another theory offered hope of a cure only to ultimately admit defeat.

  Through it all, through twenty-five years of doctors and clinics and therapies and medications, Diana had, at least, learned to play their games. She had learned, through painful trial and error, which responses and answers would lead to more drugs and which signaled “improvement” to the doctors.

  She had learned to fake it.

  Not that she didn’t sincerely try to get better. Try to listen to what they told her. Try to be as honest as she could, if only silently, to herself, in weighing what she thought and felt.

  Because even with all the unsettling, frightening occurrences in her life, with all the confusion in her mind and her troubled emotional state, deep inside herself Diana truly believed she was sane.

  Which, sometimes, frightened her most of all.

  Beau moved among his students, offering a quiet word or smile here and there, gradually working his way back to the far corner where Diana had set up her easel on the first day. He wondered if she was even aware of what signal that sent, that she cornered herself deliberately, looking out on those around her with wary defensiveness, her back to
the wall.

  Probably. She didn’t lack self-awareness, despite the concerted efforts of mainstream doctors to convince her that she only had to understand herself to be able to heal herself.

  Which, of course, was bullshit, at least in the strictest sense. Diana didn’t need to understand herself, she needed to understand her abilities and accept them as natural and normal for her.

  She needed to stop believing she was crazy.

  As he neared her corner, Beau was conscious of a surge of satisfaction, not unmixed with concern. Her gaze was fixed on the open workbook on her easel, but at the same time it was a distant, unfocused look. She was expressionless, yet her hand moved rapidly, the scratching of charcoal on paper not at all tentative.

  Without saying a word, Beau stepped to where he could see what she was drawing. He studied it for a moment, looked at Diana long enough to note her dilated pupils, then moved away as silently as he had approached.

  Within a minute or so, he began releasing the other students, one at a time. It was something he had done before, so no one was surprised. He spoke to each briefly, commenting on their work or their mood, listened if they wished to talk to him, and then sent them from the conservatory to get some fresh air or exercise or meditate in one of the gardens, whatever was appropriate for the individual.

  He didn’t release Diana, or even approach her again.

  Instead, Beau took up a position by the open doorway, so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by anyone entering the quiet building. He leaned against the casing and looked out toward the gardens, listening to the steady scratching of charcoal on paper and patiently waiting.

  If Quentin had learned anything in his years with the SCU, it was that there really was no such thing as coincidence. No matter how random something appeared to be, there was always a connection. Always.

  Diana Brisco was here at The Lodge in a troubled search for answers; Quentin was also here searching. The possibility that he could help her with her search told him it was also possible that she could help him with his.

  He had no idea how. It seemed bizarre to suppose that she could have any connection with what had happened here twenty-five years before, especially when she had told him this was her first visit to The Lodge. But all his instincts as well as the quiet voice in his mind insisted there was a connection.

  All he had to do was find it.

  Another man might well have been daunted, but after too many years of sifting through the same information again and again and finding no answers at all, Quentin felt energized at the mere possibility that there was a new avenue to explore. But he had to be cautious, he knew that. Whatever else she was, Diana was emotionally vulnerable; if he pushed too hard or too fast . . .

  So, hard as it was for him to cultivate patience, he forced himself to let a few hours go by before he sought her out. He had breakfast, and then went down to the stables hoping to talk to Cullen Ruppe, the man who had been here at The Lodge twenty-five years before.

  It was Ruppe’s day off.

  Malevolent fate again.

  Quentin was left to prowl restlessly around the stables and gardens for a while, before he finally gave in and found out—with some difficulty, given the hotel staff’s famous discretion—where the painting workshop was being held.

  As he approached the conservatory, he was silently debating how to handle this meeting when he was thrown off balance by a completely unexpected development.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Beau Rafferty smiled. “Teaching a workshop.”

  Quentin eyed him suspiciously. “Uh-huh. And I suppose Bishop had nothing to do with it?”

  “This series of therapeutic artistic workshops,” Beau replied pleasantly, “was established years ago. They’ve been so successful that at least two are held each year. In different parts of the country. Taught by different artists. We’re all volunteers and sign up well in advance, supplying information such as the time of year or area of the country in which we’d prefer to teach. Then each of us goes through training so we’re better equipped to deal with our troubled students.”

  “And when did you sign up?” Quentin inquired, his tone just as affable.

  “About six months ago.”

  “Saying you thought April in Tennessee might be nice?”

  “Well, it is, isn’t it? I suggested The Lodge. I was told it would be the perfect setting.”

  Quentin sighed. “So Bishop did have something to do with it.”

  “With putting me here, certainly. But you know as well as I do that what happens next is always up to us. And at the end of the day, I’m just here to teach a therapeutic workshop.”

  “You’re the one who’s here to help Diana?” Quentin didn’t even try to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  Beau smiled. “I’m just teaching a workshop, Quentin. I don’t think either one of us believes that will provide Diana with the answers she’s looking for. It may pose a few more questions for her, though.”

  Frowning, Quentin looked past the other man into the conservatory. He saw Diana in the far corner, standing behind an easel, her face oddly without expression as her right hand moved rapidly. From this angle, he couldn’t see what she was drawing, but something about her posture and that curious absence of emotion on her face . . .

  “Is she doing what I think she’s doing?” he asked.

  “Yeah, she’s on autopilot. Has been for nearly half an hour now. The artistic version of automatic writing, totally from the subconscious and whatever psychic senses are tapped.”

  Quentin looked quickly back at the artist. “Jesus, Beau, you told me yourself that’s dangerous as hell.”

  “It is. It’s also the only way, sometimes, to unlock the door blocking us.”

  “Maybe it’s blocking her for a reason.”

  “There’s always a reason, Quentin. And, always, there’s a moment when it’s time for the door to be unlocked.” He paused, adding, “Bishop said to tell you it’s time.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean all the pieces are finally here. All the pieces you need to solve your puzzle.”

  Quentin stared at him. “Why do all the people around me talk in metaphors?”

  “Probably to see that look on your face.”

  Refusing to laugh, Quentin merely said, “In plain English, did Bishop offer up any sage advice as to how I’m supposed to help Diana?”

  “No.”

  “Free will. Dammit.”

  “We make our own choices and follow our own paths. Not even Bishop can control what happens once a situation begins to unfold. Obviously, this one is unfolding.” Beau glanced back over his shoulder at the absorbed Diana, and added, “She’ll be coming out of it any minute now. I don’t have to tell you that she’ll be . . . upset. Disoriented. And disinclined to put much trust in a stranger. Be careful, Quentin.”

  Quentin watched the other man stroll away, muttering under his breath, “Easy for you to say.”

  He really didn’t have a clue how to handle what he strongly suspected was going to be a very difficult interlude. But that had never stopped him before, so he squared his shoulders, drew a deep breath, and went into the conservatory.

  He barely glanced at sketches on other easels as he passed them, thinking only that Beau was clearly dealing with a number of emotionally disturbed persons if their drawings were any indication.

  When he reached Diana, he studied her face first, noting the dilated pupils and intent but expressionless face. He wasn’t sure whether he should touch her or say her name, but before either option could be put to the test, she blinked suddenly, shook her head a little, and dropped the charcoal stick she held, flexing her fingers as though they ached.

  “Diana?”

  She looked at him, frowning. “What’re you doing here?” She sounded not so much dazed as a little sleepy.

  “I wanted to buy you lunch,” he said, following his instincts.

  “Oh
. Well—” She glanced at her sketch, then looked back at it quickly, her face going pale and an expression of fear tightening her features.

  Quentin reached out to grasp her arm, still following his instincts, and then looked for the first time at what she had drawn. And it was his turn to feel total shock.

  Amazingly detailed, especially for a charcoal sketch, it was a view looking out a window from inside. A window seat with pillows framed the view, and through the panes of glass a garden scene was visible. A spring garden, judging from the smudges that were surprisingly vivid little black-and-white portraits of various flowers.

  Standing in that scene, looking toward the window, was a girl. She was perhaps eight or nine years old, with long hair and sad, sad eyes. She wore a small heart-shaped locket around her neck.

  “My God,” Quentin said. “Missy.”

  Missy?” Diana tore her gaze from the sketch to stare at him. “You know her? You mean—she’s real?” She sounded shaken now, and there was a new tension in her body, as though she were poised to run.

  Quentin got a grip on himself, realizing in the same instant that his grip on her arm had tightened unconsciously. She didn’t seem to notice, but he forced his fingers to relax at least a little, and summoned a smile he hoped was reassuring.

  “You’ve captured her beautifully,” he said, keeping his tone casual. “I could never forget those sad eyes.”

  “But . . . I don’t know who she is. I don’t know anybody named Missy.”

  “Maybe you’ve just forgotten,” he suggested. “It was a long time ago.”

  “What?”

  Quentin swore silently and tried again. “Look, Diana, why don’t we talk about this over lunch?”

  “Why don’t we talk about it here?” Seemingly noticing his grip for the first time, she pulled her arm free. “Who is Missy, Quentin?”

  He forced himself to look at the sketch again, consideringly this time. Asking himself if the resemblance he had first seen really existed. There was, after all, no reason to further upset Diana if he’d imagined the similarity.