Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  “Well, the universe never makes things easy.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” She shook her head. “Maybe there’s nothing else here, and all I was meant to find was the one picture.”

  It lay alone on the coffee table within easy reach of Diana, and she glanced at it often. That picture of two little girls and a dog, a moment frozen in time.

  “Could be,” Quentin agreed. “Signs and portents.”

  “Is that what we’re looking for?”

  “God knows. Bishop calls them signposts, and says too many of us walk right by them without noticing. That’s probably true. I mean, most people are too busy just getting through the day to pay much attention to hints from the universe.”

  “So what do these signposts look like, according to Bishop?”

  Since Diana had asked him to talk about the Special Crimes Unit while they went through the stuff from the attic, Quentin had obliged. She hadn’t wanted to talk any more about the experience the storm had triggered, obviously needing time to come to terms with it, and he was reluctant to push her even though questions and thoughts were still swirling in his mind.

  Instead, he had talked about the SCU as the storm had gradually faded away outside and they had worked their way through most of the stuff brought down from the attic, offering thumbnail sketches of some of his fellow team members as well as a few of the more interesting war stories involving the unit.

  He wasn’t at all sure she had even listened to him, and half suspected she’d only wanted the sound of another voice in the room, the sense of another person, while her own thoughts were miles away. But he had jumped at the chance to talk about the unit, feeling it was important for her to hear about things that would make her own paranormal experiences at least sound fairly ordinary by comparison.

  She had, it seemed, heard at least some of what he’d told her.

  “Signs and portents. They can look like anything, that’s the hell of it,” he answered her. “The more ordinary, the more likely they are to be anything but. For instance—” He reached for the last box he had to go through, and from the jumble of its contents produced a very old cigar box. “—this. This is, what, the third lost-and-found box we’ve come across?”

  “At least.”

  “And the same sort of stuff inside.” He opened the box and inspected its contents. “Bits of jewelry, a cigarette lighter, assorted keys, hair combs and clips, a fountain pen, a rabbit’s foot, nail clippers, coins—junk, mostly. Stuff the original owners have long, long since forgotten about. But who knows if there’s a signpost in here? A sign or portent just lying in this ordinary little box for somebody paying attention? There could be.”

  “In a cigar box filled with junk?”

  “You know what they say. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” Quentin shrugged. “Though it’s not intrinsic value that matters, of course. Like I said—any sign tends to be something ordinary. At least at first glance. Or even at second glance.”

  Diana held out her hand and, when Quentin gave her the box, began going through the contents almost idly. “I’d say this stuff was pretty ordinary, all right. How are we supposed to recognize signs and . . . portents . . . if they’re just average, everyday things? What does your Bishop say about that?”

  “Well, to me he said something typically cryptic. He said to pay attention to everything, and the important bits would make themselves conspicuous at some point along the way.”

  “I guess the universe doesn’t like to be obvious.”

  “Apparently not.” Quentin hesitated, then said carefully, “If you’re right about your father coming here, he should be able to give us at least some of the answers.”

  Diana was frowning slightly as she continued to gaze into the box on her lap. “But will he? That’s the question. And even if he does, will his answers be the truth?”

  “You think he’d try to keep a lie going even in the face of this?”

  “That depends on why he started the lie in the first place, doesn’t it? And we don’t have so much, after all. A photograph of two little girls. As far as you’ve known all these years, Missy lived here with her mother. We can’t prove otherwise, can we?”

  “No,” Quentin admitted. “At least not with any information I’ve found to date. There was never a hint, from Missy or from anything I’ve found since her death, to indicate that Laura Turner wasn’t her natural mother. In fact, in the police files of the original investigation is a photocopy of Missy’s birth certificate. Supposedly, anyway. Born Missy Turner, daughter of Laura, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Father unknown.”

  “You never thought that could have been a fake?”

  “About ten years ago I went as far as checking original hospital records, and there was a child named Missy Turner born to a Laura Turner on that date, just as the certificate noted. I had no reason to dig any deeper.”

  Diana nodded, but said, “The way Missy spoke when I was with her, when she said ‘we visited Mommy,’ was so natural that I’m positive she meant exactly what she said. That the two of us went to visit our mother.”

  “I believe you,” Quentin said. “And I can’t think of any reason why she would lie to you. But proving that you and Missy had the same father and mother won’t be easy if your father has, for whatever reasons, covered up that fact. That is what you suspect, isn’t it? That he did it deliberately?”

  Choosing her words carefully, Diana said, “My father is a very powerful man. It’s not just money, although he has plenty of that. It’s real power. Political connections, even internationally; both his father and grandfather were ambassadors. And his company, the family company, has interests in everything from cutting-edge technology to diamond mines. And offices all over the world.”

  Quentin nodded. “So . . . if he wanted to hide a secret . . .”

  “He could pretty much move heaven and earth to hide it. And it would stay hidden.”

  “Realistically, we wouldn’t have much of a shot of digging up that secret, if he buried it deep enough.”

  “No. And convincing him to talk now won’t be easy, not after all these years. He’s hardly likely to listen to my . . . experiences . . . let alone believe them. In fact, if I tell him what’s happened to me here, he’s entirely capable of using it against me. The delusional ravings of someone in need of medical care, obviously. He wants me back under the thumbs of his handpicked doctors, medicated until I stop thinking for myself.”

  “Why?”

  She looked up at Quentin, honestly startled. “Why?”

  “Yeah. Why would he want that now? What secret would demand such extreme measures?”

  “The one that kept me from knowing I had a sister, maybe?”

  Quentin chose his words carefully. “Obviously, there’s a lot we don’t know about this. All I’m saying is that we can’t assume anything until we have more information. That Missy’s existence was kept from you and that you were under medical care for so many years may have been due to different situations completely unrelated to each other.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  With a sigh, Quentin said, “No, I don’t. But I still say we can’t assume without more facts.”

  Diana looked back down at the old cigar box in her lap, absently fingering a rather gaudy costume earring. “Quentin . . . my mother died in a mental hospital, and if Missy and my own memories are right, both her illness and her death had something to do with paranormal abilities she couldn’t control.”

  “We’ve always known it was possible,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Abilities my father probably believed were simply . . . manifestations of mental illness.”

  “Also possible. Maybe even likely. Medical science, especially twenty-five or thirty years ago, tended to view anything it couldn’t explain as an illness.”

  “So what am I supposed to tell him when he gets here? That I can . . . walk with the dead, and encountered the spirit of my sister on one of those journeys?
How do you think he’s going to react to that?”

  Madison was glad the storm had finally died away. They seemed to bother her more every time, and as for Angelo, he just shook like a leaf, poor little thing.

  “It’s over now,” she told her dog reassuringly.

  He whined softly as he stood gazing up at her. Storms always bothered him, but his anxiety had been growing steadily for quite a while now.

  “It is over,” she told him. “The storm, anyway. And the rest . . . will be over soon. I promise.”

  Angelo sat down with a peculiarly human sigh, managing to express even more uneasiness along with his frustration.

  Madison looked around the game room, where she and Angelo had waited out the storm and which was, except for them, empty. The whole place was awfully empty, really; it practically echoed.

  “It’s here,” Becca said from the doorway.

  Madison wasn’t really surprised, but she was worried and didn’t try to hide her shiver of fear. “You said Diana wasn’t ready yet.”

  “She’ll have to be, won’t she?”

  “But what if she isn’t?”

  “I expect he’ll help her.”

  Madison bent down to pick up her little dog, and held him, stroking him to soothe his uneasy whining. “Still, if it’s here . . . bad things will happen, won’t they?”

  “Usually do. When it’s here, I mean.”

  “Will they find more bones, Becca?”

  Becca turned her head slightly, as though listening to some distant sound. Softly, she said, “No, it won’t be bones this time. It won’t be bones.”

  “Diana, no one is going to haul you to a mental hospital or put you under medication against your will, no matter how your father reacts. I promise you that.”

  Her mouth twisted. “Are you going to tell him you’re a seer? That the FBI has a whole official unit made up of psychics?”

  “It’s not a secret.” He smiled faintly. “We do our best to avoid undue publicity, but plenty of people in this country know about the SCU. Some very highly respected, powerful people. If he doesn’t want to believe you or me, I can offer your father quite a few unimpeachable references, people who will willingly talk to him about their paranormal experiences. Whether or not he believes what they say, he’ll have to take it seriously.”

  “At least seriously enough not to call the guys with the butterfly nets to catch his daughter?”

  “That is not going to happen.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  “I am sure. Believe me.”

  Diana almost did. But she knew her father, and her anxiety level hardly diminished. Still, she was able to push the question aside for the moment to ask Quentin another one.

  “Anything of interest in that last box?” With nothing else to show for their efforts so far, she had to wonder if the only “signpost” either of them had been intended to see was the photograph of two seemingly ordinary little girls.

  Though heaven knew that signpost was sending Diana in a completely unanticipated direction in her life, one she would have thought unbelievable even a few days ago.

  Quentin reached into the box and produced what looked like an old journal of some kind, and began flipping through the pages. “Well, well. I’d call this of interest.”

  The very matter-of-factness of his tone alerted Diana. “What is it?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, it’s somebody’s account of at least a few of this hotel’s secrets.”

  “What?” Diana left her chair and went around the coffee table to join him on the sofa.

  “Look at this. The dates aren’t in any particular sequence; one page has an entry dated 1976, and the facing page is dated 1998.” He indicated the former page, and read aloud, “‘Senator Ryan brought his mistress this trip. We’re all under orders to call her Mrs. Ryan, but we know better.’ And more of the same. Sounds sort of . . .”

  “Bitchy,” Diana supplied.

  “I was going to say ‘resentful.’ ”

  “That too.” Diana was studying the page dated 1998. “And more of the same on this other page. An actress came here to dry out . . . a senator with a cocaine problem . . . And what looks like an account of an overheard argument between a wife and her cheating husband.”

  “I’m guessing someone from the housekeeping staff wrote this.”

  “Or reported it to whoever wrote this.” Diana reached over and turned a few more pages, pausing long enough for both of them to silently read the few lines on each page. “And these are the sort of secrets the housekeeping staff could easily know about just because maids and maintenance personnel are so often present and so seldom noticed. They’d see what was there, even behind closed doors. Mistresses, alcoholism, lovers’ quarrels, gambling problems. The underage daughter of a politician sent here to secretly give birth. And look at this—a European prince apparently spent the better part of a month here twenty years ago while his parents worked quietly to extricate him from some very messy legal problems.”

  “Those were the days,” Quentin murmured.

  “Yeah, a lot of this sort of thing would hardly cause a ripple now. Except in the tabloids, I guess. But setting aside what’s written here, look at how it’s written. Look how the handwriting changes. What—it was a round robin kind of deal, with one person passing the journal on to another, taking turns to write what they knew? I’m a big fan of conspiracy theories, but what kind of sense does that make?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “No, it doesn’t. And here’s a date of 1960. More than forty years? What would be the point of keeping this journal that long? Has anybody been here that long?”

  “The housekeeper, Mrs. Kincaid, has lived here her whole life,” Quentin answered. “Her mother was housekeeper here before her. In 1960, she wouldn’t have been much more than ten, I’d guess.”

  “None of this was written by a child.”

  Like most of Bishop’s team, Quentin had at least a bit of expertise in numerous diverse fields, and was able to say with some confidence, “I agree. I know enough about handwriting analysis to be pretty sure of that. Not written by a child and not written by a single individual. But at least some of these entries show some fairly clear indications of individuals with a few problems.”

  “You said ‘resentful’ before.”

  He nodded, frowning down at one page in particular. “I’d say so. Envious, resentful, judgmental.”

  After a moment, Diana said quietly, “It’s about judgment. It’s about punishment. Maybe whatever’s left of Samuel Barton set himself up as judge and jury.”

  Yeah, except . . .” Quentin leafed through the pages, his frown deepening. “As far as I know, none of these names connect to any of the missing or dead people.”

  Diana leaned back on the sofa with a sigh. “Dammit, I was hoping we were getting somewhere. Somehow. But it’s just another puzzle piece, isn’t it? A journal filled with secrets, written by God knows how many different people over a span of more than forty years.”

  “If it’s a signpost, it’s a damned enigmatic one,” Quentin agreed.

  “And why was it in the attic?” Diana wondered. “The most recent entry was that one for 1998, and if it was written when it was dated, then the journal must have ended up in the attic only a few years ago.”

  “Unless it was kept in the attic all along,” Quentin suggested. “It was in one of the old steamer trunks that have to be over a hundred years old, so it would have been easy to find up there. Easy to keep track of. From what Stephanie said, the attic is aired and dusted maybe once or twice a year, but otherwise is left undisturbed, so whoever kept it there could be reasonably sure it would remain hidden.”

  “It’s as good a possibility as any,” Diana said with a sigh of agreement. “But I still don’t get how—and why—so many different people would have kept up the entries.”

  “Because,” Stephanie said from the doorway in a rather grim tone, “they were paid money to do it. A lot of mon
ey.”

  Alison Macon would have been the first to cheerfully admit that she wasn’t the best maid in the world. Or even the best one in The Lodge. Work wasn’t her favorite thing, and being a maid was hard work—especially when she was expected to follow Mrs. Kincaid’s exacting standards.

  Being a reasonably bright girl, Alison had developed a number of shortcuts to make her job a bit easier and even more pleasant. Most were harmless, depriving no one of a clean or comfortable room. So what if she didn’t change the unused towels for “fresh” ones as Mrs. Kincaid demanded; the towels were still clean, after all.

  And there was no need to throw out perfectly good flowers when all that was needed to freshen them was a change of water in the vase. And what was the sense of scrubbing a tub that had clearly not been used since she had last cleaned?

  The result of all her little shortcuts was that Alison often had a bit of extra time to herself now and then. Time to slip out and enjoy one of the rare cigarettes she allowed herself. Time for an extra half hour of sleep in the mornings, and perhaps even an occasional very refreshing afternoon nap.

  Most importantly of all, time to sneak out and meet her boyfriend, Eric Beck, whenever he could get half an hour or so away from his own boss down at the stables.

  Like her friend Ellie, Alison carried a forbidden cell phone, making it easier to arrange their meetings.

  On this late Friday afternoon, Alison finished her work in record time, helped along by the fact that nearly every room on her floor was empty and only a few due to have guests to check in over the weekend. So when her silently vibrating phone announced a call, she was able to happily arrange a meeting.

  But she was startled to encounter Eric just outside the side door she always used.

  “Why are you up here? If Mrs. Kincaid sees you—”

  “She won’t. Look, I don’t have much time, because that damned storm earlier postponed one of my classes.” Eric often led the trail rides into the mountains, but also taught the occasional beginning rider classes The Lodge offered.