by Kay Hooper
Quentin decided later that he was probably damned lucky she didn’t just get up and walk away. He was pushing too hard, and he knew it; he was demanding that she suddenly question and discount what had been drummed into her for too many years and by too many doctors, and that was something that could never happen in an instant.
Diana didn’t walk away. But she clearly wasn’t willing to continue with the same topic. She was expressionless, but when she uncrossed her arms and reached for her coffee cup, the movements were jerky with strain.
“Look, you said you wanted to talk about this girl and her murder. I’m curious because you say my sketch looks the way she looked before she died.”
“I say?”
“Well, if you don’t have a photograph—that you can show me,” she qualified hastily, remembering he’d said there were crime-scene and autopsy photos, “—you can’t really prove it, can you?” She nodded when he remained silent. “For all I know, you did imagine a similarity. Hell, for all I know, you could be making up the whole damned thing. I met you a few hours ago; how do I know you’re being honest with me?”
“You don’t,” he admitted.
“I don’t even know you’re really with the FBI.”
Sighing, he said, “I left my I.D. in my room, but I’ll make sure to show it to you later. I’m not lying to you, Diana. About anything.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened to Missy?”
“Of course I am. As much as I know, anyway.” He hesitated and then, compelled as he had been earlier in the observation tower, reached across the table and lightly touched her hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to push—”
Whatever else he said, Diana didn’t hear. It was as though a switch had been thrown; one instant she was sitting at a table with this man, on a warm, sunny veranda, conscious of the muted sounds of other people around them, and the next instant everything was different.
She was still on the veranda, but it was a darkened and gray space brightened intermittently as though by flashes of lightning. There was a peculiar smell she couldn’t identify in the air, and it was cold. It was very cold.
Eerily, in the flashes of light she could see Quentin sitting across from her, looking at her with a slight frown, but he vanished in between them.
And when she looked down at the table, she could see in the flashes her hand gripping his strongly, as if she were holding on to a lifeline.
Between the flashes, her hand was holding . . . nothing.
She was completely alone in the grayness of almost-night.
Diana.
She didn’t want to, but Diana found herself turning her head slowly to the right. There were two large potted palms flanking the steps that led down to the lower terrace, lawn, and the garden paths; at first, that’s all she could see.
Then there was a flash, and between the plants stood the little girl.
Long dark hair. Big, sad, dark eyes. Pale oval face.
Missy.
In the gray twilight separating the strobelike flashes, she vanished, only to reappear in the bright white light.
Help us.
She didn’t appear to speak; her lips didn’t move. But with every flash she was moving closer and closer, closing the distance between them, her pallid face beginning to twist in an expression of pain, her eyes dark pools of terror.
Her hands reached out toward Diana, pleading—
“Diana!”
She jerked her head around to stare at Quentin, blinking in the abrupt return to the bright warmth of the veranda. And then in the next moment a loud rumble of thunder made her look up to see dark clouds rolling overhead, swiftly blotting out the sun and bringing a chill to the air.
“We’d better get inside,” Quentin said, over the sounds of chairs scraping against the stone surface of the veranda as other guests came to the same decision. “This storm came out of nowhere.”
“Did it?” she murmured, feeling very . . . peculiar. “Or was it here all along?”
“What?”
Diana realized that she was indeed holding his hand, and it required an enormous effort to force herself to let it go. “Nothing. It’s . . . it doesn’t matter.”
“We should get inside,” he repeated, frowning, as he got to his feet.
Diana rose as well, automatically. She was cold. And she was scared. Her body was tingling oddly, as if an unfamiliar energy coursed through her. And yet . . . there was something familiar about the sensation, like the distant echo of a forgotten memory.
Without meaning to say it aloud, she murmured, “Why do they call it second sight? Because you can see what’s underneath the surface? Because you see what isn’t there? Because you can see . . . through a glass, darkly . . .”
Quentin stepped around the table and grasped her shoulders with both hands. “Diana, listen to me. You are not crazy.”
“You don’t know what I just saw.” Her voice was shaky now.
“Whatever it was, it was real.” He glanced up impatiently as the first drops of rain began to splatter around them, then took her hand and began leading her inside.
Diana went, almost blindly. Maybe, she thought later, because she really didn’t want to be alone just then. Or maybe it was because the answers Quentin offered were less terrifying than the probability of her own deepening insanity.
Madison looked up from the very old doll she had found in the trunk and frowned as thunder rumbled. “Daddy said there’d be storms.”
“It storms a lot here,” her new friend said.
“I like storms. Don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“I also like this room.” Madison looked around at the very pretty, very girlish bedroom, with its old-fashioned furniture and lacy curtains. “But why is it secret?”
“Because they wouldn’t understand.”
“They?” Madison frowned and absently patted Angelo, who was curled up next to her, trembling a bit. He hated storms, poor baby. “You mean my parents?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly wary, Madison said, “It’s your room, right? I mean, it doesn’t belong to somebody else? Because I’m not supposed to go into other people’s rooms, not without being asked.”
“You can always come into this room.”
Madison had the suspicion that her questions hadn’t really been answered, and asked another, more pointed one. “What’s your name? You haven’t told me.”
“Becca.”
“That’s pretty.”
“Thank you. So is Madison.”
“So this is your room, Becca?”
“It was.”
“But not anymore?”
Becca smiled sweetly. “I still come here sometimes. Especially when it storms.”
“Do you? I like my room at home when it storms. I feel safe there.”
“You’ll be safe here too. Remember that, Madison. You’ll be safe here.”
Madison eyed her uncertainly. “From the storm?”
“No.” Becca leaned toward her and, still smiling sweetly, whispered, “It’s coming.”
Diana sipped the hot, sweet tea Quentin had ordered, looking at him over the rim of the cup. When she set it down in its saucer on the small table between their chairs, she said dryly, “The traditional remedy for shock.”
He shrugged. “We didn’t get to finish our coffee.”
They were sitting in a fairly secluded area of the big lounge off the main lobby, where quite a few guests had also taken refuge from the storm. The space was arranged so that numerous chairs and tables in scattered groupings separated from each other by large potted plants, screens, and other decorative dividers provided for privacy and quiet conversations, yet there was still the sense of not being too isolated, too alone.
The storm continued to rumble outside, more thunder, lightning, and wind than rain. Which was usual for this valley, Quentin had said.
Diana hadn’t really recovered from her experience on the veranda. In fact, she wasn’t sure she
ever would. And now that she’d had a few minutes to think about it, she was feeling wary, defensive, and more uncertain than she could ever remember feeling.
It was not a comfortable sensation.
“We also didn’t get to finish our conversation,” Quentin added. “What did you see out there, Diana?”
“Nothing.” She had, at least, regained enough of her wits to know better than to describe what she thought she had seen. What she couldn’t possibly have seen. No matter what he said he believed, in Diana’s experience people found the inexplicable unsettling at the very least.
And she really didn’t want to see that too-familiar look in his eyes, that don’t-let-her-know-I-think-she’s-nuts careful lack of shock or disbelief.
“Diana—”
“This morning, you said something about this not being a safe place for kids. Something about tragedies? I assume you meant other than Missy. So what’s that all about?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Accidents, illnesses, unexplained deaths, kids gone missing.”
“That happens everywhere, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. But it happens here a lot more often than can be accounted for by random chance.”
“And you believe that ties into Missy’s death somehow?”
“I’ve found that for the most part, there’s no such thing as coincidence,” Quentin said.
Diana felt herself frowning. “No?”
“No. There are patterns everywhere, if we only knew how to recognize them. Mostly we don’t, at least until after the fact. Some of them, on the other hand, are so clear they’re practically in neon. You and me, for instance.”
Warily, she said, “What about us?”
“The fact that we’re both here, now, isn’t a coincidence. The fact that you drew a very accurate sketch of Missy, someone whose murder I’m trying to solve, and that I happened to be here to see it, isn’t a coincidence. Even the fact that you climbed the stairs to the observation tower at the crack of dawn this morning and found me there wasn’t a coincidence.”
“All part of the master plan, huh?”
“All part of the pattern. It all connects, somehow, some way. And I’m guessing Missy is the connection.”
Diana, thinking of the other sketch in her tote bag, the one of this man drawn before she’d ever set eyes on him, found it difficult to argue with at least some of what he was saying. But she tried.
“How could that be? I told you, I never knew anybody named Missy. I’ve never been here before. I’ve never even been in Tennessee before. There was probably a newspaper article about her death or something, with a picture, and I saw it at some point years ago. Something like that.”
“No.” Quentin’s voice was flat. “The article about her death was little more than a paragraph, and there was no picture. Plus, it never even made the big regional papers, let alone any national news media. I’ve studied the case for years, Diana. I’ve seen every scrap of information I could find—and the Bureau teaches us how to search, believe me.”
Diana was silent, bothered but a long way from convinced.
“You saw her, didn’t you? Out on the veranda.”
She half shook her head, still silent.
Patiently, he said, “Whatever you saw, it was very sudden and very vivid—and it was triggered by the storm.”
That surprised her. “What?”
“Remember what I said about energy? Storms are full of it; they charge the very air with electrical and magnetic currents. Currents our brains are hardwired to react to. Psychics are almost always very strongly affected by storms. Sometimes they block our abilities, but more often what we experience is far more intense than is usual for us, especially in the minutes just before a storm breaks.”
More to herself than to him, she murmured, “I usually know when one is coming. But, out there . . .”
“Out there,” he finished, “we were both concentrating on the conversation and got caught off guard by the storm. I can usually feel them coming myself.” He paused, watching her. “And most of my senses tend to be heightened during storms. Just like yours are heightened right now.”
Diana couldn’t help thinking that he had guessed more about her and her various moods and peculiarities in a few short hours than all the doctors had in years of knowing her.
If he was guessing.
It was unsettling, and yet it had to make her wonder if there could conceivably be any truth to the other things he was telling her. The possibilities. Could there be? After all the years, all the tests and therapies and medications . . . could the answer to what was wrong with her really be that simple? And that incredibly complex?
“Diana, what did you see?”
“Her. I saw her. Missy.” Diana hadn’t realized she was going to answer until she did, and when she did, she braced herself unconsciously for his reaction.
Except that Quentin didn’t react at all, at least overtly. Still watching her with focused intensity, he said, “Describe what you saw. Exactly.”
Diana was suddenly reminded of one of her many doctors, expressionless, determined to be nonjudgmental no matter what she said, even while mentally cataloging her neuroses, and the memory made her grit her teeth.
Might as well get it over with.
Rapidly, her voice toneless, she said, “There were flashes like lightning or a strobe light, and she was coming toward me, closer in every flash, and I thought she said ‘Help us,’ but her mouth didn’t move, and it was cold and I was alone except for her—” She sucked in a quick breath. “And you, in the flashes but not the gray time in between. You were there, but only because I was touching your hand, keeping you partway—there.”
“We were still on the veranda?”
She searched his face for signs he was humoring her the way some of her doctors had, and didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed that she found none. “Yes.”
“No one else was there? Just the three of us?”
“Yes.”
“During the flashes. Were you completely alone out there between them?”
Diana nodded. “There was—I couldn’t see anybody else in the gray time. None of the guests. Not you. Not her.”
Quentin frowned suddenly. “It almost sounds like you were the one slipping into her world, which I believe is far more rare than the other way around. I’ve always thought mediums provided a doorway, but not that they passed through it themselves. Not that I’ve ever heard, anyway. I wish I knew more.”
“What?” Even before he could answer, Diana was shaking her head. “No. Don’t tell me you believe—”
“Missy is dead, Diana. If you saw her—”
“Obviously, I didn’t. It’s all in my mind.” She heard her own voice rise, and paused a moment to collect herself. Being too excitable or emphatic about things got her into trouble, she’d learned that well enough. “Because it isn’t possible to see the dead. There’s no such thing as an afterlife. When you’re dead, you’re gone. Period.”
“You really believe that?”
“I really do,” Diana said firmly.
Ransom Padgett trudged up the narrow stairs to the attic of the main building, grumbling underneath his breath. Every damned time it stormed, something went wrong with this old place. Either there was a leak, or rain washed leaves and other crap into the gutters, or else the hotel’s backup water supply—designed by a thrifty original owner to be replenished by rainwater carried down from the surrounding mountains—increased pressure on the old pipes so they groaned and rattled and disturbed the guests.
This time, at least three guests on the main building’s topmost occupied floor, the fifth, started complaining about noises almost as soon as the first clouds darkened the skies.
Ransom thought most of ’em had too much imagination and ought to be warned by Management when they checked in that old buildings made noises, there was just no way around that. But handling the guests directly wasn’t his problem, thank God. He just fixed
things.
In this case, however, he doubted there was anything to fix. He’d had trouble with squirrels nesting in the attic over the winter, and since he hadn’t yet discovered how they were getting in, he figured a couple had just come back inside to take shelter from the approaching storm.
So he was mostly up here to check his humane traps—which hadn’t, so far, been successful in catching any of the canny squirrels—and poke around a little so he could tell Management he’d checked it out.
He used his key to unlock the attic door and then opened it, flipping the light switch just inside. The lighting consisted of bare bulbs in metal cages scattered around the vast expanse, and there were a lot of them, but the medium-wattage bulbs didn’t do much to brighten the attic. Nor did the several dormer windows or even the big ones at the north and south ends, partly due to age-darkened stained and leaded glass. And with all the old furniture, trunks, boxes, and various junk stored in the space, the clutter didn’t help.
Ransom had suggested more than once that the hotel’s owners have somebody go through everything and get rid of what was obviously never going to be used again. He just didn’t see the sense of holding on to things like old clothing and ancient linens falling to bits, and old tools and broken furniture, but, again, he hadn’t been listened to.
“I just work here,” he muttered to himself as he picked his way among the refuse of time and people’s lives, trying to remember exactly where he had left those traps.
He found one up under the eaves on the west side of the building, still empty—but with the dried ear of corn he had left as bait gone.
“Little bastards,” he said of the squirrels, baffled as to how they’d managed to get the bait without springing the trap. This thing was designed to trap squirrels, after all. He tested the spring and found it in good working order.
“Now I gotta go all the way down to the garden shed and get more bait. Shit.” He thought longingly of the days when a little poison did the trick, wishing he dared disobey Management and just eliminate the rodents permanently.