Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  Except . . . he hadn’t. Because that was Missy. Not an image that merely resembled her, but her. The big, sad eyes. Long, dark hair. The oval face with its stubborn chin. Even the way she was standing, one foot tucked behind the other ankle, balancing easily, was characteristic.

  And it was painful, how vividly alive she was in his mind.

  “Quentin?”

  He looked at Diana, fully aware that he wasn’t much good at hiding his feelings. “Maybe it’s just my imagination,” he suggested.

  Spacing the words for emphasis, she said, “Do you know who this girl is?”

  “Was,” he said finally. “Who she was. Missy Turner was murdered, Diana, at the age of eight. Here at The Lodge. Twenty-five years ago.”

  She stared at him, drawing a slow, deep breath, then said with what was obviously a tenuous calm, “I see. Then I must have seen a photograph somewhere.”

  “Do you remember seeing one?”

  “No. But my memory isn’t the best. Some of the medications I’ve been on . . . stole time from me.”

  He thought that was one of the most wrenching things he’d ever heard despite her matter-of-fact tone, and had to clear his throat before saying, “We can figure this out, Diana. But not standing here. Why don’t we have lunch—out on the veranda, if you like, in the sunshine—and talk?”

  Again, her wavering was visible, and Quentin spoke quickly to persuade her.

  “You came here for a reason. One more round of self-examination, remember? And in the process of that self-examination, you drew an amazing picture of a little girl who died twenty-five years ago. A little girl whose murder I’ve been trying to solve most of my adult life. There must be an explanation for that, and I think we both need to find it. That’s worth a conversation over lunch, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she replied slowly. “Yes, I think it is.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  Diana looked at the sketch a moment longer, then carefully tore that page from the pad and rolled it up. She slid it inside the oversized tote bag hanging on the side of her easel, then took off the smock she wore and hung it in place of the tote bag.

  Quentin noticed that the tote bag held a smaller version of the sketchpad on the easel, but didn’t comment as she put the strap over one shoulder and indicated with a nod that she was ready to leave.

  It wasn’t until they reached the door that she realized something, asking, “Was I here alone when you came in? Where was Beau?”

  “He left when I got here.” Quentin didn’t elaborate and hoped she wouldn’t question him further on the subject.

  Diana frowned, but shrugged as though to herself. She didn’t say anything else until they were settled at a table on the veranda and the attentive waitress had taken their order and left them with iced tea and a basket of rolls.

  Ignoring both, Diana said, “You said you’d been trying to solve her—her murder most of your adult life. Why? Were you related to her?”

  “No.”

  “Then why? If it was twenty-five years ago, you had to be no more than a child yourself.”

  “I was twelve.”

  “Were you here when it happened?”

  He nodded. “I grew up in Seattle, but that summer my father moved us into one of the cottages here because he was doing some work near Leisure. He’s an engineer, and he was overseeing the construction of a major bridge.”

  “So you spent the summer here. What about Missy? Did she live here?”

  “Her mother was a maid in The Lodge. In those days, some of the employees had small apartments in what eventually became the North Wing. That’s where Missy lived.” He shrugged. “There weren’t many kids around that summer, so those of us who were here tended to do things together. Hiked, fished, rode the horses, swam. Typical summer stuff, mostly designed to keep us out of the way of the grownups.”

  Diana could barely remember being eight, so she was guessing when she said, “Did Missy have a crush on you?”

  He smiled slightly at the word, but nodded. “Looking back—yeah, she probably did. At the time, thinking myself so grown-up, I just saw her as a tag-along kid. She was the only girl in the group, and the youngest of us. But she was shy and sweet, she didn’t mind bugs or jokes or the messes boys got into, and I . . . got used to having her around.”

  Still guessing, Diana said, “You’re an only child.”

  He didn’t seem surprised by the statement. “Yeah. So having other kids around all the time was a novelty for me, one I enjoyed. To me, by the end of the summer Missy had become the little sister I never had.”

  “By the end of the summer?”

  Quentin nodded. “It was when she died. In August. It’ll be twenty-five years this coming August.”

  “What happened?”

  His face tightened, and a bleak chill entered his eyes. Slowly, he said, “There was something weird about that summer, from the very beginning. At the time, I thought it was just that The Lodge was old, and that old places had a creepy feel to them; it was something I’d noticed before then, at other places. And then, being kids, we scared each other senseless with ghost stories around campfires down near the stables, pretty much on a nightly basis. But it was more than tall tales and overly active imaginations. We—all of us—had experiences that summer that we really couldn’t explain.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bad dreams when we’d never had them before. Catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of our eyes, only to turn and find nothing there. Strange sounds we heard in the night. Places in the buildings and on the grounds that felt wrong to us. Places that felt . . . bad.”

  Quentin grimaced slightly. “When you’re a kid, you’re not very good at articulating something you feel, or at least I wasn’t. All I knew was that there was something wrong here. And I should have told someone.”

  Diana, intent, frowned slightly. “You blame yourself for what happened to Missy? Because of that?”

  “Not just because of that,” he said. “Because Missy was afraid. Because she tried to tell me what she was afraid of—and I didn’t listen. Not then, and not two days later when she tried to tell me again. That was the last time I saw her alive.”

  By late morning, Madison had explored most of the gardens, or at least those that interested her. Which was a good thing. She had returned obediently to the main building and inside to have an early lunch with her parents, and reluctantly promised afterward to stay inside because storms were forecast for the afternoon.

  Since she was an independent child and not the sort to be destructive or get herself into trouble, her parents didn’t object when she announced her intention of exploring inside as she had the gardens.

  “But remember the rule, Madison,” her mother said. “Stay out of other people’s rooms. Why don’t you go to the library or the game room?”

  “I probably will, Mama. Come on, Angelo.” She left her parents in their two-bedroom suite—the Orchid Room, officially—and set off with her canine companion to explore.

  She did check out the game room, finding one other child in there: a boy of perhaps ten who was utterly absorbed in the video game he was playing. There were a few adults in the room as well, several grouped around a pool table and others talking quietly over games of chess or cards, also engrossed in what they were doing.

  Madison shrugged and went to study stacks of board games and puzzles on shelves by several handy tables. She responded politely to one elderly lady’s greeting, helpfully picking up a playing card that had fallen to the floor near her chair.

  “Well! No wonder it wouldn’t come out right,” the lady said, staring at the half-finished game of solitaire spread out before her. “Thank you, dear.”

  “You’re welcome.” Madison’s experience with elderly ladies told her that this one would talk to her as long as she stood there, so she wasted no time in moving away. It wasn’t that she didn’t like elderly ladies, it was just that she wanted to see what else the hotel had to offer
.

  They were supposed to stay here for a whole week, and Madison was determined to explore her options.

  She left the game room and continued on, saying to Angelo, “I think you’re the only dog here.”

  Angelo hesitated, whining, when she turned down the long hallway leading to the North Wing, and she said impatiently, “You didn’t want to go into the Zen Garden, either, but we had fun in there, didn’t we?”

  The little dog whined again, but when his favorite person in the whole world continued without pausing, he hurried to catch up, ears and tail lowered in unhappiness.

  “You’re a baby,” Madison informed him. “I told you that you don’t have to be afraid of them. They’ve never hurt us before, have they?”

  Whatever Angelo thought about that declaration he kept to himself, sticking close to Madison as she explored two sitting areas and a couple of short hallways before going up the stairs to the next floor.

  “Madison!”

  She smiled at the little girl beckoning from the other end of the hall, and hurried toward her. “Hey! I was beginning to think I’d never find you.”

  “I said I’d be here, didn’t I?” her new friend replied.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t say where.” Madison joined her at the T-junction of the hallway, looking to the left and the right to find two more shorter corridors. “What’s up here? Be quiet, Angelo,” she added in an aside to her whining dog.

  “There’s a secret place. Want to see?”

  “Like a secret room or something?” Madison liked that idea. “Where?”

  “Follow me.” Her new friend led the way toward a dark green door at the end of the hallway.

  Whining louder, Angelo followed them.

  Diana pushed her plate away and said, “It’s no use. I can’t just eat and pretend I’m not waiting for the rest of your story.”

  Since he didn’t have much appetite himself, Quentin didn’t protest except to say, “Murder isn’t the best thing to talk about over lunch.”

  “You should have thought of that before you suggested it.”

  “I did.” He smiled wryly. “But I also thought you’d be more willing to sit and talk if the setting was . . . unthreatening. Lunch on a sunny veranda, other people near, no reason to feel crowded or cornered.”

  “Why would I feel that way in any case?”

  “It was an impression I got this morning. That the observation tower was too small, even open as it is, that you felt uneasy there. Then again, maybe it was just me.” He gazed at her steadily.

  Somewhat evasively, she said, “You seem to get a lot of feelings about . . . places. About this place.”

  Quentin allowed the shift in subject, still cautiously feeling his way with her. “Some people, to varying degrees, of course, are sensitive to their surroundings,” he said matter-of-factly, pushing his own mostly untouched plate away. “Our brains are apparently hardwired to pick up electrical and magnetic impulses that most people aren’t aware of.”

  “How is that possible?” She was toying with her glass, frowning a bit.

  “How could it not be? It’s the way the human brain works, Diana, by transmitting electrical impulses. Energy. And energy is all around us. It only makes sense that some people possess a stronger-than-average sensitivity to that energy. I mean, as a species we throw out an occasional genius or inexplicably gifted person, a Mozart or an Einstein or a Hawking. Their brains seem to work differently from the norm, but it doesn’t make them less human.” He shrugged. “I think we’re just beginning to understand how the mind really works. Who knows what we’ll define as ‘normal’ in the years and generations to come?”

  Slowly, she said, “So you really do feel things about places? About people?”

  “A bit, though it’s not my strong suit,” he replied easily. “But a place like The Lodge has such a long history it’s not all that surprising that its energy would be unusually strong. Strong enough so that even I can pick up on it sometimes. A clairvoyant or a medium would probably sense a lot more.”

  She blinked. “You’re talking about . . . ESP?”

  “I guess some people still call it that. Or the paranormal.” He shrugged again, keeping his tone casual. “The very idea of psychic ability is still denied by many in the mainstream, but as more and more research is being done, we’re learning that very few things are impossible when it comes to the human mind.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” she said slowly.

  Quentin followed his instincts. “The unit I belong to was designed around the idea that psychic abilities could be channeled constructively and used as investigative tools. So we’ve done plenty of research and have several years of experiences now to study and draw on. Empirical evidence, the scientists call it. Not absolute scientific proof, but we’re getting there.”

  “You believe you’re psychic?”

  He could hear the tension in her voice and answered carefully. “I have the ability to use my five senses with more control and precision than most people, given the belief that it was possible and years of practice. And, yes, I believe I possess an extra ability most others don’t have or can’t tap in to.”

  “What ability?” The tension was growing.

  “Sometimes I know things before they happen.”

  Diana sat back abruptly and crossed her arms before her. “So you can see the future? Tell me my fortune?”

  “I don’t see anything,” Quentin said. “I don’t read tarot cards or gaze into a crystal ball or study the lines on someone’s palm.” His voice was dry now. “I just know things sometimes before they happen.”

  “Just,” she muttered.

  “It’s a perfectly human ability, Diana, even if it is a rare one.”

  “How can you possibly know something is going to happen before it does? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s one ability we really can’t explain scientifically,” he admitted. “Using today’s science, that is. If time is linear, as we believe it is, then it certainly doesn’t seem possible that the human mind could, as you say, perceive something that hasn’t yet happened. Then again, maybe we don’t understand time any better than we understand our own minds.”

  She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I have enough trouble with reality as it is, thank you. Even if I believed what you say is possible, I—”

  “Explain your drawing,” Quentin invited.

  “Like I said, I must have seen a photograph.”

  “As far as I’ve been able to find out, Diana, Missy and her mother had no family. They had lived here from the time Missy was three or four. And less than a year after she was murdered, the North Wing was left nothing more than a hollow shell after a fire gutted most of it, destroying all of her and her mother’s possessions. So how did you see a photograph of her? In fifteen years of searching, aside from crime-scene and autopsy photos, I’ve never been able to find one.”

  Diana was silent, clearly uneasy.

  “Your sketch shows her the way she was that summer,” he continued. “The heart-shaped locket around her neck? I gave her that. In late July, at her birthday party. It disappeared when she was murdered, and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “You can’t possibly know it’s the same locket, not from a simple—and badly drawn—charcoal sketch. I’m not an artist, Quentin—” She broke off as their waitress appeared to take their plates and inquire about dessert and coffee, finally leaving them alone again with the latter.

  “I’m not an artist,” Diana repeated steadily. “And nothing in that sketch can be taken seriously. I don’t even know where that—that image came from, but there has to be a perfectly rational explanation for it.”

  “I agree. But my idea of rational and yours might just be light-years apart.”

  “If you believe in the paranormal, probably so.” She shook her head. “It’s just . . . mysticism and junk science. It isn’t real. There are valid medical explanations for why people see things that ar
en’t there, or hear voices, or—or whatever. It’s not their fault, it’s just that they’re sick. They have an illness.”

  “And what if they don’t?”

  She stared at him.

  “What if they don’t, Diana? What if all those valid medical explanations are wrong? It wasn’t all that long ago that medical science used leeches and didn’t have a clue that a chemical imbalance in the brain could cause all sorts of problems then mistaken for insanity.”

  “Quentin—”

  “You read the newspapers, right? How often are we told that scientific or medical facts have been proven wrong? Technology advances, new discoveries are made, and suddenly today we know more than we knew yesterday. So we rethink. We come up with better tests, or we look at the evidence in a new light of understanding. The impossible becomes possible, even likely and predictable.”

  “Even so, some things are just too far-out to be believable.”

  “And psychic ability is too far-out for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” He hesitated when she remained silent, then said slowly, “Why is it so much easier for you to believe that you’re sick?”

  “We weren’t talking about me,” she said, visibly tense.

  “Weren’t we? Diana, there’s nothing wrong with you. That’s why all the medications and the therapies haven’t made a difference. You’re trying to fix something that was never broken.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you’re psychic. And knowing that, I can guess a few other things. Either you were born with the abilities, or else they were triggered when you were very young, by some sort of physical or emotional trauma. You tried to tell people—probably your parents first—about your experiences. About seeing things that didn’t seem to be real. About hearing voices. About unusually vivid dreams. Maybe there were blackouts, missing time. And that’s when the whole useless round of doctors and medications and therapies began.”

  Still tense, she said, “And where did you get your medical degree, Quentin?”

  “How many doctors with medical degrees have been unable to help you?” he countered. “When is it time to consider perfectly viable alternate explanations for a so-called disease no expert has been able to treat? Next month? Next year? When you’ve done a roll call of the AMA? When most of your life is behind you and it’s not even worth trying one more time?”