Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  “Twenty-five years. Since Missy died?”

  He nodded.

  “You weren’t psychic before then?”

  “I wasn’t born an active psychic, no.” He shrugged, keeping it as matter-of-fact as he could. “One theory is that most if not all humans have latent psychic abilities, unawakened senses, maybe left over from more primitive times when we needed that edge just to survive. It could be something we’re evolving away from, since our survival as a species doesn’t seem to depend on it.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Not really. I think it’s more likely that we’re evolving toward the ability to more effectively use our brains. Maybe because of the increased levels of electromagnetic energy in the modern world. That’s a viable theory.”

  Diana nodded slowly. “Sounds like it.”

  “Sure, it makes sense. Anyway, for most people, whatever extra latent senses they possess remain dormant, inactive. But for some of us, there’s a trigger, usually early in life. An event of some kind that creates just the right electromagnetic spark in our brains to activate what lies dormant.”

  “What sort of event?” she asked.

  “Traumatic, usually. Physically, a severe injury or blow to the head. An actual electrical jolt. Or some kind of emotional or psychological shock.”

  “Which was it for you?”

  “The latter.”

  “Missy’s murder?”

  “Only partly.” He drew a breath, still finding it difficult to talk about even after all these years. “The real shock came when I was the one to find her body.”

  Diana leaned forward and carefully set her cup on the coffee table. “You . . . never told me just how she died.”

  “She was strangled.” Quentin paused, then forced himself to go on, holding his voice steady. “I found her in what’s now the Zen Garden, ironically. The little stream there was natural to the area, and we played there quite a bit.”

  “Were you looking for her?”

  “Yeah. It was past suppertime, and she hadn’t met the rest of us on the veranda as usual so we could eat together. It wasn’t like her to just not show up, and it worried me. I kept thinking about how afraid she’d seemed earlier that day, for at least a couple of days, about how she’d tried to tell me what scared her.”

  “What had she said?”

  “Nothing that made any sense to me. She said that she heard things, especially at night. And that . . . there was something else inside her sometimes.”

  “Something else?”

  “That’s the way she put it, something else. There was something inside her sometimes, and it made a sound like her own heartbeat.”

  Diana frowned slightly. “Does that make sense to you now?”

  “Have you ever heard in your mind something that sounded like your own heart beating, Diana?”

  Instead of answering that directly, she said, “You think Missy might have been psychic? A medium?”

  “Have you?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’ve . . . heard a lot of things inside my own mind, but never anything that sounded like a heartbeat. At least, not that I remember.”

  It was Quentin’s turn to frown. “Still, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t psychic. It would explain why she was hearing things that frightened her.”

  Diana hesitated, then said, “Somebody killed her, Quentin. Somebody real. It’s pretty obvious she had good reason to be afraid.”

  “You don’t have to remind me of that.”

  “What I mean is . . . if you’ve been looking for a paranormal explanation all this time—”

  “That’s why I was never able to solve her murder?” He shook his head. “I’m a cop, Diana. Psychic or not, the first thing we’re taught to look for is the reasonable, rational, likely explanation. Because, more often than not, that’s what we’re going to find.”

  “It wasn’t there, in this case?”

  “The cops who investigated the case twenty-five years ago never even had a decent suspect. I’ve gone over all the reports on their investigation, and conducted my own investigation for years, however unofficially. Even interviewed dozens of people who were here or in the area at the time. And I have nothing new to show for it.”

  He drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Missy was strangled with a piece of twine from a bale of hay that had come from a field just yards away from where her body was found. A field filled with freshly baled hay. All that tells me as a cop, all it would tell any cop, is that the murder weapon was near to hand and convenient, which most likely means the murder itself was impulsive or opportunistic rather than planned. Something triggered his rage or his need, and he used the first weapon he could reach to kill her.”

  “He?”

  “Odds are, the killer was—is—male. Women virtually never kill children unrelated to them, and Missy’s only relation here, her mother, was helping in the kitchen for hours that day, reportedly under observation by a dozen other people the whole time. Beyond that, nothing at the scene offered any indication of who killed Missy or why.”

  Diana frowned and, not even sure where the question came from, asked, “Why did he even need the twine? I mean . . . she was just a little girl. Wouldn’t it have made more sense if he had used his hands?”

  Quentin nodded slightly. “An educated guess is that she was probably strangled from behind with that twine because he didn’t want her to see him, or else didn’t want to look into her face as she died.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because watching her die would have meant he’d have to admit to himself that he was a killer.”

  “How could he delude himself that he wasn’t?”

  “Easily. People do it all the time, you know that. Delude ourselves. Mostly in minor things. We delude ourselves into believing that we won’t be one of the ones let go when our company starts layoffs. That our favorite sports team has a shot at a championship. That we really can afford that shiny new car calling out to us from the lot.”

  “All of which is a long way from denying you’re a killer when you’re choking the life out of someone,” Diana pointed out.

  “Yeah, it’s a leap. But I believe by the time he picked up that twine and wrapped it around her neck, this killer had gradually reached that point. It may have taken him years to get there, but he had. Possibly for the first time. By then, by that day, he could kill, but didn’t view himself as a killer.”

  Quentin had seemingly been cool and clinical up to that point, but the detachment left when he continued, his voice going quiet and a little rough. “Whatever happened out there, whatever triggered it, he killed Missy. She was left in that stream, her body wedged in among the rocks, the twine still wrapped around her neck.”

  He paused, then added softly, “Her eyes were open. When I first saw her, she seemed to be looking right at me. Pleading with me. As if I could help her. As if I should have.”

  “Quentin—”

  “By then, she’d become the little sister I’d never had. Someone I couldn’t imagine my life without. And I stood there, frozen, staring into her eyes, knowing that I had failed her. As a brother. As a friend. I hadn’t listened to her. I hadn’t protected her. I hadn’t helped her. I hadn’t saved her. It was . . . it felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Everything around me faded, grew dark, until all I could see was her. Her eyes. That pale, pale face. And the twine wrapped around her neck, cutting into her skin. Such a strangely small, ordinary thing to have snuffed out a life. To have stopped a smile and silenced a laugh forever. Just twine. Just twine from a bale of hay.”

  Diana wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear any of this, yet at the same time she couldn’t remember ever feeling so focused, so clear-minded. There were no scattered thoughts, no random flashes of information, no whispers in her head. There wasn’t even the earlier shock and fear at the certain knowledge that she had on this day spoken casually with a ghost.

  There was only this man and his low, hurting voic
e, painting for her a horrific, tragic image she could see so clearly it was as though she had stood there herself and seen that murdered little girl.

  Her long, dark hair moving in the water as though it and she were still alive, big dark eyes open, staring up . . .

  “It wasn’t a . . . sexual crime,” Quentin continued, obviously with difficulty. “At least, that was the official conclusion, and I haven’t found any evidence to believe otherwise. She was fully dressed, and no bodily fluids were found on or near her, though being submerged in water means we can’t be certain there wasn’t something on her clothing or body that was washed away. There were no bruises, no signs of trauma other than what had killed her. No defensive injuries. They scraped under her fingernails, took clippings. But there was nothing, no evidence to help identify her killer.

  “She probably died there in the stream or nearby; there was nothing to indicate it might have happened somewhere else. Nothing to indicate that she fought her attacker, or even that she struggled at all. The last person to see her alive, as far as they could determine, was me.”

  That surprised Diana. “You?”

  “Yeah. Late that afternoon. I was coming back up from the stables, and met her near what’s now the entrance to the Zen Garden. That’s when she tried one more time to tell me that she was afraid, that there was something . . . wrong here. But I was hot and tired and just wanted to go to our cottage and take a shower. I thought she’d had a nightmare, or maybe was just making up a story, for whatever reason.”

  “Could there have been a reason?”

  He shrugged. “Because the other kids and I had been spending more time riding the horses, and she never went along since she was afraid of them. Because the summer was winding down and we were all getting a little bored, a little tired of one another’s company. Whatever. So I brushed her off.” He paused, then added steadily, “They fixed the time of death as just under two hours later.”

  “And nobody saw her in all that time?”

  “Nobody admitted to it. In all fairness, they probably wouldn’t have noticed her. She was—she had the knack of slipping past people without really being seen.”

  “Like a ghost?”

  “Like a ghost.”

  In the privacy of her office, Stephanie Boyd grimaced as she held the phone to her ear. She was pretty good at keeping her thoughts and feelings to herself, but it was a relief now to relax physically as she couldn’t allow herself to verbally. With this man, at any rate.

  Her boss had, not surprisingly, reacted badly to the news of the remains of a child being found on the grounds of The Lodge. His reaction was even worse once he grasped the probable ramifications of the police investigation already under way.

  “You couldn’t stop them, Stephanie?”

  “How?” she asked, repressing the urge toward sarcasm. “The police are bound by law to investigate something like this, and I have no authority to stop them. Offhand, I can’t imagine any local judge or politician trying it, either, not when it concerns the death of a child.”

  She drew a breath. “Setting aside, of course, the fact that it could only further damage the reputation of The Lodge if we seemed in any way reluctant to find the truth of this tragedy, we are morally compelled to do whatever we can.”

  “Of course. Oh, of course.” Doug Wallace tried hard to sound as if he cared about the long-ago murder of a little boy. And he almost pulled it off. Almost.

  Stephanie kept her own tone brisk and businesslike. “Under the circumstances, I believe our best course is to cooperate fully with the authorities. The police captain in charge of the investigation has assured me that he will do his utmost to conduct all relevant inquiries as discreetly as possible.” She decided not to mention the FBI agent who was, after all, here very much unofficially.

  Wallace sighed. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

  Pressing, Stephanie said, “And I have your permission to extend our cooperation to the police, to make our records available to them?”

  “Christ. Is that really necessary?”

  Unconsciously, Stephanie tilted her head to one side. “Is there any reason why it would be a problem, Mr. Wallace?”

  He was silent for a beat or two, then said, “Stephanie, you’re aware that most if not all our clients—our guests—value their privacy.”

  “Yes, sir.” She stopped it there, waiting. In her experience, silence quite often produced answers where insistent questions wouldn’t.

  “We have had some Very Important Clients.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He sighed again, impatient. “One of the services we offer is discretion, Stephanie. The very reputation of The Lodge was founded on that. Our specialty, as it were, the lure to get people to such an isolated spot. So if a Very Important Client checks in with a companion not his wife, we respect his privacy. If an actress recovering from cosmetic surgery or the unfortunate repercussions of an ill-judged affair wishes her presence to remain . . . well . . . secret, we oblige. If a group of businesspeople requires a secure and discreet setting in which to discuss the future of their company, we provide that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dammit, Stephanie, we mind our own business. And our paperwork reflects that.”

  Evenly, she said, “Sir, I very much doubt that the records of any of the situations you describe could possibly be relevant to this police investigation and would, therefore, be of no interest to them.”

  Wallace swore, not under his breath. “Stephanie, what I’m trying to tell you is that there have been occasions in the past during which no records were kept. Officially or unofficially.”

  “Sir, I was never told that anything of that nature would be part of my duties,” she said stiffly.

  “No, of course not. We don’t do that sort of thing these days,” Wallace was quick to say. “We keep a private ledger—which I’m sure you were told about since I told you myself—for those more discreet occasions. But there were regrettable instances in the past in which Lodge employees accepted . . . um . . . additional gratuities . . . to keep a guest’s name or the situation entirely off the books.”

  Somewhat grimly, Stephanie wondered what she’d gotten herself into. It had seemed like such a nice little job. “I see, sir.”

  Wallace’s tone was strained but steady. “I don’t know how thoroughly these police officers mean to examine our books and other records, or what they expect to find, but someone familiar with hotel accounting would certainly notice some . . . discrepancies.”

  Stephanie knew. “Such as food and beverages charged to supposedly unoccupied rooms. Such as spa services booked and not charged.”

  “Yes, yes, exactly those sorts of things.” Wallace drew a breath. “I can assure you that all monies were reported and accounted in accordance with the law. We merely protected the anonymity of our clients.”

  And Stephanie believed in the Easter Bunny. She wondered how many secrets this place really held. And which of them would blow up in her face the instant they were exposed.

  “Yes, sir.” There really wasn’t much else she could say, at least as long as she kept this job.

  He cleared his throat. “My point being, of course, that if the police should look closely at our books, they could conceivably find things that could send them off on quite useless and needless tangents in their investigation of this child’s tragic death.”

  Baldly, she demanded, “What do you expect me to do, sir?”

  “You’re on the scene,” Wallace said, his tone persuasive. “You can . . . guide . . . the local police. Keep them focused on details relevant to their investigation.”

  “Guide them, sir?”

  “Don’t be deliberately dense, Stephanie. You can make certain that the police aren’t allowed to paw indiscriminately through our accounts and records. Boundaries. Boundaries must be set.”

  “I’ve already been asked to allow access to employment records and historical documents stored in the basement.”
r />   “I don’t see how those could be relevant.”

  “I’ve been assured it’s simple procedure. The police need to know who was here at the time this child was murdered, and since ten years have passed, they’ll need whatever paperwork they can find.”

  “You need to see those records first, Stephanie.”

  “Sir, are you asking me to interfere with that investigation?”

  “Absolutely not.” He sounded offended now, though also harassed. “I’m not suggesting you keep anything of value from the police, merely that you take a look before they do. Weed out what your common sense tells you cannot possibly be relevant. And notify me should you find anything . . . unusual.”

  “Unusual, sir?”

  “Just anything that might strike you as odd, that’s all. Nothing to do with this murder, obviously.”

  Stephanie had pretty good instincts, and right now they were practically doing handstands to get her attention. Trying to “guide” the police away from discrepancies in the bookkeeping was one thing; actively searching through documents herself in order to report back to Wallace was something else entirely. And suspicious as hell.

  What did he expect her to find?

  “Stephanie, I’m making a perfectly reasonable request that you keep in mind the best interests of your employers, that’s all.”

  Stephanie was tempted, but decided not to try and pin him down to more fully explain his meaning. He was adept at sidestepping, for one thing. For another, she really didn’t want him worried enough about what she might do to hop on a plane out in California and come here himself. Not before she figured out what this was all about, anyway.

  If there was anything army brats learned young, it was that the more information you had in hand, the better your likelihood of making the best decision possible. Nobody could sneak up on you if you knew where they stood.

  In other words, protect your goddamned flank. And your ass, while you were at it.

  Keeping her own tone calm but just faintly impatient, she said, “Very well, sir. I’ll take a look downstairs and report to you anything that seems to me unusual. And I’ll work as closely as possible with the police, to keep fully abreast of the investigation.”