Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that? Diana—”

  “Could you just please look around in here?”

  Quentin didn’t move. “Does this have something to do with the murders? The disappearances?”

  She drew a breath. “You tell me. A . . . guide . . . brought me down here. A little girl, maybe twelve years old. Said her name was Becca.”

  Barely hesitating, Quentin said, “Rebecca Morse disappeared from The Lodge nine years ago. No trace of her has ever been found.”

  “Then I guess this does have something to do with the—the murders. Because she led me here. In the gray time.”

  “And told you what?”

  “That this place held a secret.” Diana looked around the neat, silent tack room. “Becca told me that there were secrets everywhere. She told me to tell you to look for the one hidden in here.”

  “Me? By name?”

  “No. She said ‘him.’ But she was talking about you.” Diana shivered and drew the jacket even tighter around her. She should have felt lost in all the material, except that it was warm and smelled very pleasantly of him, and that gave her an odd and very unfamiliar feeling of security. She wished she could luxuriate in it. “There’s something hidden here, Quentin, and we need to find it.”

  Still without moving, he said, “In that case, we need to call Nate and then talk to the manager of The Lodge. Before we do anything else. This is private property, Diana, and we’re in here after hours and without permission.”

  “You sure as hell are,” a grim voice agreed from the doorway.

  Cullen Ruppe was a dark man in his fifties, powerfully built through the shoulders and arms, and with a longtime rider’s slim hips and strong legs. He was also, Nate had informed Quentin under his breath, apt to view himself as a badass, possibly why he was apparently hell-bent on giving everybody a hard time.

  Nobody was searching his tack room, not without permission from Management or, failing that, a warrant.

  “I can’t get a warrant,” Nate told Quentin in a low voice as he joined the other man near the entrance end of the long barn, leaving Ruppe scowling just outside the tack room door. “Not on the word of a maybe-psychic who could have been walking in her sleep for all we know.”

  Quentin kept his voice low as well when he said, “I believe her, Nate. I believe we need to search that tack room.”

  “Yeah, I know you believe her. The question is, what do I tell Steph—Ms. Boyd—to convince her?”

  “You said she was agreeable when you talked to her last night.”

  “Yeah, but she wasn’t happy about the situation. Now I’m supposed to get her up at dawn to okay this? Look, what do you really expect to find in there?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Something to help us figure out who murdered Missy and Jeremy Grant—and who knows how many of the others.”

  “You’re expecting a lot of a lousy tack room, Quentin. People in and out all day, every day. What could be hidden in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Quentin repeated. “But I think we need to find out.”

  Nate pursed his lips and blew out a slightly impatient breath. He looked tired, which wasn’t surprising; he might have gotten five or six hours’ sleep before Quentin’s call pulled him out of his own bed, but it was more likely he’d been working in his office until well after midnight.

  “You’re asking me to go out on a pretty goddamned long limb here,” he said finally. “We both know a thorough search of that room is going to mean checking under floorboards and behind walls. If we don’t find anything after all that, the owners of this place are going to raise hell.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t ask it, Nate, if I wasn’t convinced we’ll find something worthwhile in there.”

  The cop studied him for a long, silent moment, then sighed again. “Ah, shit. Okay, I’ll go roust Ms. Boyd, see if I can think of a reasonable explanation to give her. You got any suggestions?”

  Quentin was more or less accustomed to coming up with reasonable explanations for psychic “hunches” or leads, since the SCU members often found themselves in that position, but this time he was stumped. Absolutely nothing he knew of in the information he had on the missing and dead kids connected them in any unusual way with these stables. Nothing.

  No connection, no warrant.

  “I wish I did, but . . . sorry.”

  “And I don’t suppose Ms. Brisco is ready to go public with this psychic stuff?”

  “I doubt it. She’s only beginning to believe it herself.”

  “She believes enough to insist there’s something hidden in that tack room. Because another ghost told her so?”

  Diana had already returned to her cottage to get dressed—at Quentin’s insistence—by the time Nate had arrived, so the cop hadn’t yet spoken to her. About any of her . . . encounters, including the one the previous afternoon. Which was probably why he sounded frustrated.

  Probably.

  “The ghost of another one of the missing kids told her so, Nate. Rebecca Morse. That’s one missing kid you should definitely remember; you worked on her case.”

  Nate was frowning now. “Yeah. Yeah, I worked on it. She went out to play in the gardens one morning, and nobody admitted to seeing her once she stepped off the back veranda. We never found a trace of her. My boss at the time decided her father had snatched her; there’d been an ugly divorce. But we couldn’t trace him.”

  “Trust me, the father didn’t snatch her. Or, at any rate, she never left The Lodge.” Quentin glanced toward Ruppe, and added, “I’ll wait here while you talk to Ms. Boyd, if you don’t mind.”

  “You suspect Ruppe?”

  “He was here twenty-five years ago. He’s here now. That’s all I know.” Quentin was also wary of the fact that Ruppe had turned up here when, if Quentin hadn’t followed her, Diana would have been alone and vulnerable. Maybe the stable manager would have posed no threat to her even so, but Quentin wasn’t prepared to accept that as a given.

  There had to be a reason, after all, why his own abilities had sent him down here after her. Maybe he had just needed to wake her, to pull her from the gray time before she remained there too long. Or maybe the threat to Diana had been of the flesh-and-blood sort.

  Quentin didn’t know. Yet.

  “Considering the precious little we’ve got,” Nate said with another sigh, “I can’t say as I blame you for what’s probably grasping at straws.”

  “I know he was questioned after Missy was murdered. I read the file.” He had memorized it.

  “Then you know the cops at the time couldn’t find a whiff of anything suspicious about Ruppe.”

  “I know. But like I said, he was here then. He’s here now. If nothing else, maybe he knows something he doesn’t know he knows.”

  Nate considered that and nodded. “Yeah, maybe. People do, often enough. But don’t question him, Quentin, not yet. He woke at what he states is his usual time and came down from his apartment to find two guests poking around in his tack room, so he’s got a right to be rattled and pissed. Let’s not make things worse until we’ve got reason to, okay?”

  Quentin nodded. “Understood.”

  “Are you okay? You look a little . . .”

  Thinking he probably looked a lot, Quentin grimaced and said, “Headache. A real bitch of a headache.” Plus his ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton, like his sinuses, and his eyes burned and ached. He was definitely paying the price for his all-night vigil.

  “You should take something for that,” Nate said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I will.” Quentin didn’t bother to explain that painkillers couldn’t touch this sort of thing. Nothing ever had, except time and rest.

  Nate headed off toward The Lodge’s main building, leaving Quentin and Ruppe eyeing one another across nearly half the distance of the barn’s long hall. Quentin knew Ruppe undoubtedly had work to do; managing a stable comprising three separate barns and more than thirty horses was
a full-time job even if others did most of the grunt work. The horses were already restless in anticipation of their morning feed, stamping their hooves and snorting softly; the maintenance crew would be showing up any moment to feed them and begin mucking out the stalls.

  The clipboard hanging by the tack room listed three trail rides scheduled for today, as well as half a dozen classes for those beginning riders who wanted to do more than just hang on for dear life during future trail rides.

  Ruppe clearly didn’t have time to stand around all morning, much less engage in a pissing contest with the cops or Quentin. But it was just as obvious that he was jealous of his authority, and not about to give ground unless forced by Management to do so.

  Quentin knew the type. He’d come up against them often enough in his years as a federal cop. He also knew that Nate was right in saying this wasn’t the time to question the stable manager, badly as Quentin wanted to do that.

  Nate would probably point out, however gently, that there was really no hurry, after all; Missy had been gone twenty-five years, and a few more hours or days or even weeks wasn’t going to change that.

  Probably.

  But the restlessness Quentin had been conscious of last night had shifted abruptly into a deep, cold sense of foreboding this morning when Diana had opened her eyes so suddenly to make an eerily familiar statement.

  “It’s coming.”

  And it had required all his willpower to allow her to leave his sight. To walk away from him, back up the well-lit paths to her cottage in order to change. Because that was exactly what Missy had said to him twenty-five years before.

  The last time he had seen her alive.

  Ellie Weeks ate a piece of plain toast and sipped hot tea, longing for the black coffee that was her usual morning pick-me-up. But pregnancy and black coffee didn’t appear to go together, at least where she was concerned; drinking the tea was infinitely preferable to puking her guts out. Besides which, The Lodge’s head housekeeper, Mrs. Kincaid, had been watching her very closely the last few days, and Ellie couldn’t afford to do anything even remotely suspicious.

  Not again, at any rate.

  Hitching her chair closer to Ellie’s in the staff dining room, Alison Macon whispered, “Did you hear? About last night?”

  Ellie looked at her fellow maid blankly for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. They found some old bones in one of the gardens.”

  Alison was clearly disappointed that she couldn’t be the bearer of dramatic news, but nevertheless managed to make her whisper theatrical.

  “It was a kid. A little boy, I heard. They found his watch buried with him.”

  Wrapped up in her own worries and problems, Ellie said, “Bad luck for him.”

  “But, Ellie, they’re saying he was murdered.”

  “They’re also saying it was years ago,” Ellie pointed out.

  “But aren’t you afraid?”

  “Why should I be?”

  Alison appeared at a loss, but only for a moment. “There could be a murderer here at The Lodge.”

  “Yeah, and he could be long gone. Probably is. Why stick around and let himself get caught?”

  With a visible shiver, Alison said, “Well, I’m scared.”

  “Be careful, then. Stay inside The Lodge. If you have to go out alone, don’t wander off the paths.”

  “You’re really not afraid, are you?”

  “I’m really not.” Not about that, at any rate. Some faceless killer that was maybe still hanging around years after his crime couldn’t hold a candle to the very real worries gnawing at Ellie.

  A baby.

  I can’t raise a baby. Not all by myself. I can’t have an abortion. What else is there?

  “You’re so brave,” Alison said admiringly.

  “If you say so.” Ellie drained her cup, hoping it would settle her jumpy stomach, and pushed back her chair. “Fifteen minutes before we’re supposed to start work. I’m going out to get some air first. I’ll meet you in the supply room.”

  Alison nodded, but absently, her gaze already directed across the room to another maid who might not have heard about last night’s discovery.

  Ellie got up, making a show of looking at her watch for the benefit of Mrs. Kincaid. A show of pausing, considering, deciding she had time. Then she left the dining room, moving briskly, someone with a specific place to go.

  The staff dining room was in the lower levels of the South Wing, along with the kitchens and other maintenance areas. Also in that wing were the very few small suites reserved for those comparatively few employees on the housekeeping staff who lived as well as worked in The Lodge.

  Ellie occupied one of those, at least for now. But not once everybody knew about the baby. When that happened, she’d be out on her ass. Mrs. Kincaid was hard-nosed about that sort of thing. An unmarried maid turning up pregnant? No, she wouldn’t have it. Not at The Lodge. So Ellie would be lucky to get a week’s pay and half an hour to pack her stuff and get out. No job, no home. And no one who gave a shit what happened to her.

  She didn’t go to her suite. Instead, she stepped out one of the service entrances to stand on the small concrete porch. A metal pail half filled with cigarette-littered sand stood more or less behind the door, mute testimony to the usual reason employees lingered in the area.

  But there was no one here now, and when Ellie glanced around warily, she didn’t see a sign of anyone in the area. She reached into the skirt pocket of her uniform and pulled out her cell phone. And a slip of paper with a phone number printed in shaky handwriting.

  It hadn’t been easy to get, this number. Contact information on the guests—the special guests—was kept in a locked file drawer in the manager’s desk. Everybody knew that. Well, everybody as curious as Ellie and who had reason to wonder about those secretive VIPs. Good reason.

  Ever since that first pregnancy test had been positive, Ellie had spent way too much free time lurking outside the manager’s office. It was one reason Mrs. Kincaid was watching her so closely now, because there was no good reason for her to have been in the administrative section of the hotel except in passing.

  She had passed through a lot. Luckily, she’d gotten her chance before Mrs. Kincaid became too suspicious. And her luck had held when Ms. Boyd had left her office door closed but not locked.

  The file drawer had been locked, but desperation and panic had apparently lent Ellie magic fingers, because the metal nail file she tried had actually unlocked the thing.

  And without telltale damage. She hoped.

  Ellie wasted another precious minute wondering if that miracle heralded a change in her luck, then drew a deep breath and carefully placed the call.

  She got his voice mail, which she’d been counting on, and left the careful message she had rehearsed half the night.

  “Hey, it’s Ellie. From The Lodge? I’m sorry to call you like this—I know I promised not to get in touch. But something’s happened and I really need to talk to you. I don’t want to make trouble, honest. But this is something you should know. So if you could call me back? Please?”

  She didn’t bother to recite her cell number, since she knew his would record it automatically along with her message. Instead, she merely added, “It’s important. Thanks.” And ended the call.

  There. The ball was in his court.

  All she could do now was wait.

  “I don’t blame them for not believing me,” Diana said as she and Quentin stood watching Nate McDaniel, Cullen Ruppe, and Stephanie Boyd form a clearly tense huddle in front of the tack room. Ruppe was arguing angrily against the invasion of his domain, Nate was arguing for a search he couldn’t legally justify or present any rational reasoning behind, and the manager of The Lodge was clearly annoyed and frustrated by the entire situation.

  With a sigh, Diana added, “In the sane light of day, I don’t really believe it myself.”

  Quentin was hardly surprised by that. As dramatic as her ghostly encounters had been thus far, he knew ver
y well that she was struggling to overcome a lifetime of conditioning. Such radical shifts in thinking were seldom quick or easy turns.

  “There’s a difference, though,” he said to her. “This time, you remember what happened. Right?”

  “If it happened. It all seems like a dream now. And maybe it was. Maybe I was just walking in my sleep.”

  Instead of arguing with her, Quentin asked, “Did it feel like that? Like a dream? Or did it feel like you were someplace you’d visited before?”

  She was silent.

  “Diana?”

  “Dreams feel that way sometimes, we both know that. Familiar even when they seem . . . different from most dreams.”

  “Were there shadows?”

  That surprised Diana, and she looked up at him. “What?”

  “Were there shadows?” His tone was steady, his gaze holding hers. “If there’s any light at all in this world, there are also shadows. Even in the darkness, there are shadows, areas of deeper black. There’s depth, dimension. It’s one of the qualities we associate with our world. With its substance, its reality. Did you feel and see that last night? Were there shadows?”

  Diana dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her light windbreaker, wondering if she would ever feel warm again. The sun was up now, the air warming. That should have made a difference, she thought. She wondered why it didn’t.

  And she wondered how he could possibly know about the lack of shadows in the gray time. Had she told him? She didn’t remember that.

  He was waiting patiently, and finally she heard herself answer him. “No. No shadows. No dimension. No darkness, no light. Just gray.”

  “Where you were alone with Rebecca.”

  “It could have been a dream.”

  “It was real, Diana. A real place, apart from this one. Even if you don’t want to admit it, somewhere deep inside yourself you have to know that.” Without waiting for her to respond, he added thoughtfully, “You’ve obviously been there many times before. I wonder why you’ve remembered this time?”