Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  “I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but, yeah, I think I know what you mean.” She sighed. “So far, everything we’ve found or think we’ve found suggests a killer of some kind operating in the past.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So is there any reason I should warn my guests? Any reason to believe there’s a danger in the present?”

  Nate hesitated. “Honestly, I don’t know. My training and experience say no.”

  “But?”

  “But . . . a lot of old crimes seem to be coming to light, and my experience also tells me that means something has changed. Maybe it’s a simple matter of Quentin being here again, pushing for answers, just when Diana shows up with the ability to somehow uncover what’s been hidden all these years. Maybe it’s just . . . perfect timing.”

  “But?” Stephanie repeated.

  Nate remembered the bone-deep cold he had felt down in the caves, and shook his head. “It’s nothing I can put my finger on. Certainly nothing concrete enough to make me offer a warning to your guests, or even to suggest that you warn them.”

  Stephanie worried her bottom lip with her teeth, frowning a little. “And I don’t want to cause a panic—or an exodus. But I think I’ll increase our security on the grounds. Can’t hurt.”

  “No,” Nate agreed. “It can’t hurt.”

  Quentin stood in the doorway to Diana’s bedroom and watched her a moment, reassuring himself that she was still sleeping deeply. He had removed only her shoes and covered her with a light afghan, and she lay on her bed just as he had left her more than two hours before.

  He reminded himself that it wasn’t unusual, after an extreme or prolonged use of any psychic ability, for the psychic to need sleep and lots of it, and common sense told him that channeling the spirit of a little girl murdered twenty-five years before certainly qualified.

  Still, it was difficult for Quentin to make himself move away from the door. He didn’t want to leave her, even to step into the next room. She was certainly getting a baptism by fire when it came to her abilities, and he wanted to make it easier for her; knowing he couldn’t was frustrating and curiously painful.

  Finally, he returned to the living room area of her cottage, where he had set up his laptop. The Lodge being a highly service-oriented place, it provided high-speed Internet access—and an obliging staff more than willing to fetch his computer from his own suite and deliver it to him here.

  Nate had also been obliging enough to grant him the authority he needed to search various databases, and for the first time Quentin was going back much farther than twenty-five years.

  “They created The Lodge.”

  What Diana had said down in the caves gave him a starting point he’d never had before, and Quentin intended to take advantage of the information. He needed to find all the information available on the men who built The Lodge, and the murderer they may have brought to their own version of implacable justice.

  For Diana as much as for himself, he had to find the truth.

  He had to understand.

  “So there really was a killer?” Diana set her cup on the coffee table, frowning. After a hot shower, a hot meal, and plenty of hot coffee, she was finally feeling herself again.

  Or, rather, she was feeling stronger and oddly focused, which wasn’t like her usual self but was certainly better.

  Quentin gestured toward the legal pad he’d filled with notes, and said, “From the info Nate’s people provided and what I was able to find in newspaper morgues and other historical databases available, the disappearances began in this area in the late 1880s. Maybe three or four a year, on average. Considering how rough the terrain was—and is—and the sheer difficulty of travel in those days, it wasn’t perceived as anything out of the ordinary. People got lost in these mountains. Got hurt and died before anybody could find them. It happened.”

  Diana nodded.

  “The town of Leisure was barely in existence, and didn’t have a police force to speak of,” Quentin continued. “They didn’t think they needed one; the people who settled around here tended to be hardy and self-sufficient, and handled their problems without, usually, involving anyone else. It’s a mind-set that doesn’t lend itself to calling the cops, but rather picking up the family shotgun and . . .”

  “Taking care of the problem themselves,” Diana finished. “Which is what the men who built The Lodge did?”

  Quentin nodded. “It’s not entirely clear from what little I was able to find, but I gather that during construction a couple more people vanished—but this time bodies were found. Obviously murdered. The common belief was that robbery was the motive, especially since what we later called stranger killings and then serial killings were virtually unheard-of at the time. Then a child disappeared.”

  “And who would steal a child?” Diana said slowly.

  “Exactly. There was enough fear and outrage that the men who were heavily invested in this land and in The Lodge decided to hire a Pinkerton detective to try to get to the bottom of things before their workers began walking off the job.”

  “I didn’t know Pinkertons looked for killers.”

  “It was generally outside their area of expertise, but apparently the man assigned was what they called a good tracker. Now, the public record on all this is virtually nil, but I did find a couple of letters in the state historical databases written by people who were here when all this was going down. One of the construction workers, especially, wrote about the hunt for this killer in detail in a letter to his sister. It’s pretty clear his conscience was troubled.”

  “Because there was no trial?” Diana guessed.

  “No trial, no arrest, nothing official at all. The Pinkerton found enough evidence to trace the killer, he believed, to a shack up in the mountains.” Quentin paused, frowning. “It’s still there, I think, an old stone building; I saw it five years ago.”

  Diana didn’t question him on that point. “So the Pinkerton found the killer there. And—”

  “And he, along with a small group of trusted workers that included the project manager, went up there and grabbed the guy. Whose name, by the way, was Samuel Barton. They’d already decided that hanging him would draw too much attention, and the consensus was that shooting was too good for him.”

  “So they dropped him down that shaft?”

  “Pretty much. The shaft had been discovered when excavation was going on for the stables, and the ladder put in place because somebody had the notion they might be able to use the caves for storage. But the tunnel was so long and narrow that transporting anything down there turned out to be too much trouble. It made a dandy prison cell, though.”

  Diana frowned. “Did they intend for him to die down there?”

  “I don’t know what they intended, but they must have known he would die. The men were so angry that in catching him they had pretty much beaten him to a pulp. Dropped him down the shaft and bolted that trap door shut. He must have known nobody within hearing distance was going to help him. Maybe he just followed the tunnel hoping there’d be another way out.”

  “But there wasn’t one.”

  “Moot point. According to the man who wrote the letter, Barton only got as far as that big cavern we found. The man felt guilty enough that he went down there himself a week or so later, secretly, at night. Found the body in the cavern. And left it there.”

  Diana drew a breath and finished the likely story. “The Pinkerton and the project manager reassured the others that the . . . problem . . . had been taken care of. The killings stopped. And The Lodge was completed.”

  Quentin nodded. “That’s pretty much it. Except that the killings didn’t really stop, except for a while. At least that’s what I think. Because people kept disappearing in these mountains. Not many, a few every year. Travelers, people passing through. Transient workers. People who wouldn’t be missed, for the most part. The difference was, they didn’t find any more bodies.”

  “Until Missy?”

 
He nodded again.

  “Quentin . . . you’re not saying it’s been the same killer all these years. Are you?”

  “You said it,” he reminded her. “Down in the caves.”

  She remembered. Scary though it was, she remembered it all. But . . . “Whatever Missy knows, I only know what I said. I mean, I don’t understand how it could be the same killer. How a dead man could still be killing more than a hundred years after his own death. And I don’t understand why, if it is somehow true, his—its—behavior changed with Missy. Anything hunting and killing that long, successfully, wouldn’t change. Would it?”

  “Not likely.” Quentin was too good a profiler not to have thought of that, and offered a possibility. “Unless something external forced the change.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Diana, spiritual energy has its own plane of existence. It can only exist in our world temporarily, and only then if a doorway is provided, or if the energy itself is strong enough to force its way through.”

  “So you’re saying the spirit of this killer was strong enough to cross over, strong enough to kill?” She was dimly surprised that she didn’t sound more incredulous.

  “My guess is that it killed by—for want of a better term—possessing a person. Most likely someone who was vulnerable to that kind of attack. Mentally or emotionally unstable, or physically weakened in some way. The killer took them over and . . . used their bodies for a while. Enjoyed their terror and confusion. Maybe even forced them to kill someone else.”

  “Quentin—”

  “That would help explain the time between these disappearances and deaths. There would have to be an interlude of rest after expending so much of its strength, but the interludes wouldn’t be consistent because the amount of energy necessary would depend on whether it was merely possessing someone or using them to physically kill.”

  “Merely?” was all she could manage.

  “It’s possible, Diana. It’s possible that the spiritual energy left behind when Samuel Barton was virtually buried alive held enough rage, enough evil, to go on killing, and hiding his crimes, all these years. At least until he killed Missy. Until he killed someone capable of somehow preventing him from hiding her body the way he’d hidden or buried all the others.”

  How?” Diana asked. “How could a little girl have done that? What could she have done if he’d killed her?”

  “I don’t know. Yet. But I know that something changed when Missy died. I feel it.”

  Diana didn’t know how to challenge his certainty. She didn’t even know if she should. So all she said was, “We have a lot more questions than answers.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we won’t know anything new from Jeremy’s remains, or the bones down in the cavern, for a while yet.”

  “Maybe quite a while. Forensics takes time, especially when it comes to skeletal remains.”

  She hesitated, then said, “I have the sense that something is going to happen here, and soon. Something bad. I—I haven’t told you, but I’ve seen other ghosts. People who very obviously lived in another age. Two women, a man, two little boys. Not in the gray time, but here, looking flesh-and-blood real. Like Jeremy. Asking me to help them. And at least one said something about it being time. There was an intentness about them, an urgency I could feel.”

  Quentin didn’t bother to ask why she hadn’t told him until now. “I gather they didn’t tell you how you could help them.”

  “No.” Diana got to her feet. “But Becca told me there was something in the tack room, and she was right about that. She also told me there was something in the attic I needed to see. That it would help me understand.”

  Quentin smiled, wondering if she had any idea of how much stronger she was since waking up. He didn’t know how, but it seemed that providing a voice for Missy down in those caves had somehow enabled Diana to turn a corner. She had stopped protesting the reality of her abilities; she wanted answers.

  “I wondered why you asked Stephanie so pointedly about the attic,” he said.

  “Now you know. Shall we?”

  Quentin took only a few moments to lock his laptop and notes away in his computer case, habit making him cautious. Then he walked with Diana back to the main building.

  It wasn’t until they were climbing the stairs toward the attic that he said, “I guess Rebecca wasn’t very specific about whatever it is she thinks you need to see in the attic?”

  “No. As you said, they never seem to be specific when it would be helpful.”

  “They?”

  “The guides. Spirits, I guess.”

  “Nice to see you’re coming to terms with their reality,” Quentin said.

  A little laugh escaped Diana. “Reality? I’m not sure I know what’s real anymore. Actually, I’m not sure I ever did.”

  “You know. You just have to trust yourself.”

  “Forgive me, but that sounds a lot like the psychobabble I’ve been listening to for years.”

  “There’s a major difference,” Quentin said, taking her hand as they climbed. “I know damned well you aren’t sick and you aren’t crazy, and I’ll never try to convince you that you are. You can trust me. And you can trust yourself, you know.”

  “Can I? How do you know that?”

  “Diana, what you’ve been through just in the past couple of days would have sent half the psychics I know into shock or into a coma.” He nodded as she glanced up at him. “You’re a hell of a lot stronger than you realize.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she murmured.

  A few minutes later they reached the attic, and looking around the vast, cluttered space, Diana really did hope he was right. Because it was going to take plenty of strength and energy just to go through everything up there, never mind coping with anything unexpected they might find.

  “Damn,” she said with a sigh. “Why can’t things ever be easy?”

  “The universe frowns on that.” Quentin sighed as well. “Want to flip a coin, or should we just start at opposite ends and work our way toward the middle?”

  “You’re the seer,” she said, only slightly mocking. “Why don’t you see where we should start?”

  “It doesn’t really work that way.”

  “Figures.” Diana looked around, absently admiring the beauty of the stained-glass windows illuminated by the afternoon sunlight. There were shafts of colored light shining in, almost beaming in, she thought, so that a stack of old storage trunks in the fairly clear aisle down the north/south axis of the attic seemed to glow in a brilliant spotlight.

  Spotlight.

  “Or maybe,” she murmured, “it can be easy, after all.”

  Quentin followed her gaze. “Well, well. Almost as good as a sign, huh?”

  “You sound a bit doubtful.”

  “I mistrust signs, as a rule. They tend to point me in directions I probably should avoid.”

  Diana lifted her eyebrows and waited.

  “This is your sign,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  As they worked their way toward the stacked trunks, Diana said somewhat ruefully, “I can’t decide if I should blame you for all this or just be glad you’re here to help me steer.”

  “I vote for the latter.”

  “I’ll just bet you do.”

  “Like I said from the beginning, you and I are both here for a reason. We both need answers.”

  Reaching the trunks, Diana eyed them and said a bit tentatively, “Yeah, but what are the questions? You want to know who killed Missy, and I want to know if I’m nuts?”

  “We’ve already established you aren’t nuts.”

  “Then what answer do I need?”

  “Maybe the one Rebecca told you was up here.” Quentin reached for the side handle of the topmost trunk. “Hang on, and let’s see if this is as heavy as it looks.”

  It wasn’t, thankfully, and they were able to line all three trunks up end-to-end along the aisle. None of the
trunks was locked, and when all the lids were raised, Diana and Quentin found themselves contemplating semi-organized chaos.

  “Lovely,” Diana said with another sigh. “The one on this end looks like it has mostly old clothes inside.” She pulled out a feather boa that more or less disintegrated in her fingers, and sneezed. “Mostly.”

  “Bless you. The one on this end and the one in the middle also have old clothes, but—” He knelt at the trunk on his end and pulled out a creased box filled with loose papers. “—we also have what look like letters, invoices, receipts. At least a couple of ledgers and journals. Jesus. It’s going to take hours to go through all this.”

  “No kidding.” Diana knelt at the middle trunk and pulled out a scrapbook that was barely holding together. She checked a couple of pages, and said, “You’ll love this. Lots and lots of photos of The Lodge, some of them from when it was being built.”

  “Great. Set it aside to take downstairs, will you? We’ll get Stephanie’s permission to look over anything interesting somewhere more comfortable. The light up here is very colorful, but not the best for studying this sort of thing.”

  “That’s for sure.” Diana set the scrapbook aside, along with another one she found in the trunk. Then she pulled out an old box with LOST AND FOUND stamped on its lid. She opened the box, discovering bits of costume jewelry, several hair clips and combs, a beaded change purse, other small items, and a number of loose photographs.

  She lifted up the photos to see what lay under them, and one slid out to the side. In the bright, colorful light spilling into the box, the old black-and-white image seemed to glow.

  Diana reached for the picture, allowing the box to tumble back into the trunk. She saw her fingers tremble, and wasn’t surprised.

  “What is it?” Quentin asked. He shifted a bit closer, looking at the photo she held, and sucked in a surprised breath. “That’s Missy.”

  She sat on what looked like the front steps of an unidentifiable house, dressed for summer in shorts, her long dark hair parted in the middle and caught up by ribbons beneath each ear. She was smiling, one hand stretched out to touch the big dog lolling beside her.