Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  “Congratulations. In less than two hours you’ve destroyed the rapport it took me three weeks to establish with Eslin. What in hell did you do to her, Gage?”

  Slowly, he turned toward Ethan, who was sitting at the octagonal table, his tense figure visible as a slightly darker shape against the gloom. “I made a pass at her,” he admitted, as he shed his soaked jacket.

  Cursing under his breath, Ethan stood up and slapped the wall switch above the credenza. Tall amber lamps lit up the room and Ethan’s angry face.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he said disgustedly. “Besides making an ass out of yourself.”

  “No, I don’t.” Gage pulled off his wet boots and placed them on the hearth. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You’ve completely blown our last and only hope of recovering Ganymede. Eslin informed me before she went upstairs— almost in tears, I might add—that she’s leaving first thing in the morning. She’d leave this afternoon, she said, but there’s Mother’s party tonight, and she doesn’t want to be rude.”

  “All right, Ethan, you’ve made your point. I’ll apologize to her. Prostrate myself at her feet and beg her forgiveness.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’ll stay away from her and let me—”

  “Butt out, big brother,” Gage cut him off angrily. “I stopped needing you to clean up my messes for me when I was ten. I stuck my foot in my mouth and I’ll get it out myself or choke on it in the process.”

  “I’ll enjoy watching you do that,” Ethan replied with a slow smile.

  “I’ll bet,” Gage replied sourly as he snatched up his boots. “And by the way, I’m fed up to the teeth with your surprises. The next time you invite somebody I’d better be informed before they get here. A psychic and Blaine Aldridge in the same day is a bit much—”

  “What do mean, Blaine Aldridge?” Ethan interrupted. “I didn’t invite him.”

  “Then Mother must have. He said he talked to her on the phone last night.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In my office waiting to talk to me.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Ethan said, frowning, as he hurried across the room to the sliding glass door. “The last thing we need is Blaine baring his soul to Eslin.”

  Gage watched his brother step outside, push the door shut, and flip up the collar of his tweed jacket as he cut across the courtyard. Once he’d disappeared through the gate, Gage carried his boots and his sodden jacket upstairs.

  At the top of the steps he made a right turn toward his room, then stopped and glanced over his left shoulder. Inside his head he heard Ethan’s pointed interjection, Almost in tears, I might add, and he frowned as he backtracked down the corridor. This would probably be his only opportunity to speak to Eslin privately before his mother’s guests arrived, yet he hesitated outside her door.

  He wouldn’t blame her if she refused to talk to him, but the thought that she might knotted his stomach. Please, just give me a chance, he prayed, as he knocked quietly. There was no answer. She could be in the bathroom, he reasoned … or she could’ve changed her mind and left already.

  Pressing his ear to the door, Gage listened for several long seconds, but heard no sounds of movement. Hesitantly, he opened the door and walked in. The bedside lamp was on, and he saw her lying on the bed, fully dressed. The photo and the reports from the Byrne file were scattered around her.

  “Miss Hillary?” he called softly, but she didn’t answer. “Eslin?”

  Beyond the grilled French windows water cascaded off the roof onto the balcony, causing an hellacious racket. Gage wondered how she could sleep through the storm howling outside.

  He knew there were people who could sleep through anything, but there was something unnatural about the position of Eslin’s body. While her head and shoulders lay against the pillow, her knees were bent to the left, resting on the edge of the mattress. Her hands lay palms up on each side of her head, and her face, half in light, half in shadow, was pale. Her lips were slightly parted, and there was no perceptible movement of her chest. She looked as if she’d suddenly collapsed, or perhaps fainted.

  “Eslin.” He spoke her name loudly, but still she didn’t stir.

  Dropping his boots, Gage darted across the room to the bed and bent over her, bracing himself by placing his hands on either side of her body. Not even the sudden dip in the mattress roused her. He raised an unsteady hand to her throat, touched the pulse point below her jaw, and felt a steady, rhythmic beat.

  As his shoulders sagged with relief, a single droplet of water from his wet hair fell on her forehead. Her eyebrows puckered slightly, and as he lifted his hand to wipe it away, she drew a deep, shuddery breath and rolled her head on the pillow.

  His hand poised above her, Gage recalled her answer to his question at lunch, “And from there?” With her violet blue eyes fixed on his, she’d replied matter-of-factly, “I prefer to sleep on it, if possible.” He remembered, then, the dreamy, faraway expression that had stolen over her features as she’d sat at his desk looking at the picture of Marco Byrne and Ganymede. Twice he’d spoken her name, but she’d continued to stare at the photograph. He’d thought she was in some sort of trance, but he realized now, as he brushed the drop of water off her forehead, that she’d been sleeping with her eyes open.

  Sleeping Beauty and the Frog Prince, he mused, and smiled as he softly traced her eyebrow with his thumb. He knew he was mixing his fairy tales, but he also knew—just as he knew Ganymede was alive—that if she really was what she claimed to be and if his suspicions about his own extrasensitivity were true, then she had the power to make him whole.

  Lightly, he kissed her temple. Still she didn’t stir.

  Reluctantly, he turned away from the bed. As he bent to pick up his boots, the forgotten tarot card slipped out of his shirt pocket and skittered the floor. He picked it up and glanced back at her with a smile. Returning to the bed, he leaned over her and propped it against the pink satin pillow.

  “Think about that when you wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” he murmured softly as he left the room.

  Chapter 5

  In her dream Eslin was drowning. She wasn’t frightened, just surprised, because the lily-dotted pool hadn’t looked this deep when she’d stepped into it to take a closer look at the face wavering near the algae-caked bottom. Above her reared the distorted, undulating shape of the marble stallion, and she cupped her hands over her ears against the roar of the water gushing from his open mouth as she peered through the murky depths for a glimpse of the face. She saw it just beyond her reach and tried to swim toward it, but the vortex gripping her legs only pulled harder. As she sank lower, the face began to shimmer, then broke and dissipated as she stretched her hand toward it … and as she opened her eyes, she could’ve sworn the half-formed lips murmured her name in a voice that sounded uncannily like Gage Roundtree’s.

  Blinking in the glare of the lamp, Eslin shielded her face with her right forearm and yawned sleepily. Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, she opened them wider and yawned again. I’d like to hear what Granny Rose would say about that dream, she thought, and smiled as she remembered how as a frightened little girl she’d run to her Granny’s narrow bed in the middle of the night after one of the dreams had wakened her.

  “ ‘Tis naught but the Sight, wee one,” her grandmother had soothed. “Don’t be afraid, ‘tis a precious gift given ‘ee with yer name. Don’t puzzle over the dreams, just trust ‘em.”

  By then her sobs would’ve wakened her mother, who would appear in the doorway of Granny’s little room, the hall light shining behind her like a halo.

  “Mother, please don’t fill her head with those old country tales,” she’d say. “Did something bad happen at school today, Eslin? That’s what the dreams mean, honey, that something’s troubling you. Come with Mommy now and tell me.”

  And so she’d slip out of Granny’s hard, narrow cot and into the soft, warm double bed. Her mother would stay awake a
nd listen as long as Eslin talked, which naturally led to elaborate lies and innumerable questions that her mother would patiently answer between puffs on unfiltered cigarettes. For the longest time after her mother had died, Eslin had cried herself to sleep thinking that if only she hadn’t wakened her so often…

  It had taken Doc Fitz months to root that source of guilt out of her subconscious. Not for the first time she wondered how different her life would have been if Gerald Fitzsimmons, head of psychiatry at the Harwood-Fitzsimmons Research Hospital, hadn’t happened down that corridor in the cardiopulmonary wing on that bleak, rainy March Sunday ten years ago and found her sobbing her heart out because her mother was going to die and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to save her.

  He’d stopped, sat down beside her on the yellow vinyl-covered bench, and asked her why she was so certain her mother would die. She’d dreamed it, she’d told him, and then added that her dreams always came true. By this time Tuesday she’ll be dead, Eslin had said in a dull, flat voice, and remembered now how he’d frowned when he’d bent his left wrist to look at his watch. She, too, had glanced down and noted the time—three-fifteen p.m. He’d patted her hand, murmured that the doctors would do everything possible to save her mother, and then he’d left. But he’d returned when Patricia Hillary had died at three-thirteen p.m. Tuesday afternoon.

  He and his wife had befriended her. Mimi had been a tall, thickset woman with shoulders as broad as Doc’s and hair and teeth the same color as the palomino Arabians she’d bred. Her silver-streaked hair came out of a bottle and the stains on her dentures from tobacco. She’d given Meringue to Eslin on her eighteenth birthday, two weeks after they’d buried Granny Rose beside her mother and she’d come to live with Doc and Mimi at Acacia Farms because she’d had nowhere else to go.

  After Doc had helped her work through the layers of her grief and guilt, he had slowly and patiently convinced Eslin that she wasn’t crazy just because she dreamed things before they happened. Now as she sat up on the side of the four-poster bed, she remembered the relief and wonder that realization had brought her.

  It had been her idea to enter Doc’s semiofficial research program on paranormal phenomena at the Harwood. During the summer between high school and her first semester at Stanford, Eslin had eaten, slept, and taken innumerable tests designed to gauge her psychical abilities. Through a series of experiments designed by Doc Fitz—situations based on actual plane crashes, train wrecks, even the sinking of the Lusitania—she’d learned that she was certifiably clairvoyant. He’d given her only sketchy outlines of physical facts to work with. For example, a commercial airliner took off from Los Angeles International Airport on June 12, 1957, bound for Phoenix. It never arrived. What was the airline, the flight number, and what happened to the plane? In each case after a night’s sleep she’d been able to answer not only the test questions but to pinpoint the crash site (usually within fifty miles), list the number of fatalities and/or casualties, and sometimes even include some of the names of the crew or passengers.

  Only rarely without that intervening night’s sleep could she come up with the answers. She didn’t go into a trance like most clairvoyants, and that, according to Doc Fitz, was the most intriguing aspect of her gift. Because she’d learned, or rather been taught by her mother, to suppress her psychic powers, he’d explained, only in sleep could her subconscious override the barriers she’d erected in her conscious mind. Even though she’d trained herself to some degree to function consciously, she still worked best after she’d slept.

  Raising her arms over her head, Eslin slid off the bed and stretched. The room was chilly and she shivered as she walked to the French doors. Folding her arms, she rubbed them absently as she looked through the rain running off the roof at the thick fog blurring the long straight white fences that surrounded the barns.

  Vague bits and pieces of the dream wandered through her mind. With a few minutes’ meditation she could’ve brought them into sharper focus, and she would have if she’d thought they had anything to do with Marco Byrne or Ganymede. But they didn’t.

  What they did have to do with was her refusal to listen to her little voice when it had urged her that morning to run as far and as fast as she could from Roundtree Stables. She’d ignored the warning, so her mind had conjured the dream. Eslin wasn’t sure about the face she’d seen in the pool, but she was sure about the voice. It was Gage’s. And she’d been drowning. She couldn’t ask for a clearer warning.

  She was pretty sure now, too, what Doc’s secondary purpose had been in sending her to Roundtree. He’d done it before, taken her places and introduced her to people just to see if she could pick up on their psychic tendencies. The basic principle was rather like a nail and a magnet or two dreadfully bored people at a cocktail party; eventually they’d find each other. The only thing she didn’t know for sure was which one of the Roundtrees she’d found.

  Another backwash of the dream welled like an undertow out of her subconscious and her heart began to pound. She had to get out of here, she just had to. There were things going on here that unnerved her. She’d seen Gage Roundtree’s aura as clearly as if it had been cut out of cardboard and suspended around him by wires, read the grief and the anger in him as easily as she read a book. And the neck chain. It had called to her, and every time Gage lifted his hand to the gold-plated horseshoe nail, she felt as if he were touching her soul.

  Whatever Doc had gotten her into, she was going to get herself out of—just as soon as this dinner party was behind her. That much, at least, she would do for Doc’s “dear, dear Rachel,” Eslin decided, as she turned away from the window, and her gaze caught on the Lovers card propped against the corner of her pillow.

  The last time she’d seen it, the tarot card had been tucked in Gage’s shirt pocket during lunch, which meant she hadn’t dreamed his voice—he’d actually come into the room while she was asleep. The realization weakened her knees, and before they could fold up on her, Eslin sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the card, which felt damp, and ran her index finger across the watermarks rippling its gaudy face. Inexplicable tears burned the corners of her eyes, but she willed them away with a deeply drawn, shuddery breath, and laid the card aside.

  The initial shock of finding it had passed, but her knees began to quake again as she imagined Gage leaning over her—as he must have done in order to prop it against the corner of her pillow. She’d seen herself on videotape enough times to know what she looked like when she was in one of her deathlike sleeps—small, helpless, fragile. A knot of anger tightened her throat as she remembered the pass he’d made at her, his arrogant assumption that she’d simply been waiting to swoon at his feet. Easy pickin’s she was not, and she determined to make that crystal clear to him as she rose from the bed and dressed for dinner.

  Her outrage carried Eslin through a record-setting shower and makeup application in the bathroom, then back to the four-poster where the Lovers still lay on the rumpled pink sheets. She picked up the card and slid it into the pocket of her silky, midnight-blue dress, then exited the room. When she reached the steps that led to the gallery, the gurgling, grating voice of the fountain filled her ears. She steeled herself against the nauseating shiver the sound of the splashing water sent through her, and proceeded to the gallery.

  That damn marble stallion was another thing she’d be glad never to see again. Gritting her teeth as she stepped between a black iron settee and a potted lavender hibiscus, Eslin held on to two delicately curved filigrees in the Spanish grill, and looked down at the pool she’d nearly drowned in.

  Just as in her dream, the water gushing from the mouth of the rearing stallion cascaded wildly at his hooves and green algae caked the base of the marble pedestal from which he rose. Concentric rings radiated outward, rippling the smooth green surface of the pool and gently bobbing the flat, waxy leaves of the lilies. From beneath the gallery she could hear voices, one in particular that was louder than the others, one that she knew she�
�d heard before but couldn’t quite place.

  “I understand how he feels, Ethan. Now, for God’s sake, try to understand how I feel.”

  It was a man’s voice, thin and plaintive, and Eslin remembered then when she’d heard it before: that afternoon in Gage’s office. There’d been that same pleading tone in Blaine Aldridge’s voice when he’d told Gage he needed to talk to him.

  Someone—Ethan, she thought—was answering him now, the deep-timbred reply sounding closer, as if Ethan were moving toward the door. Eslin turned her head to listen, but the voice faded abruptly at the sudden, sharp jerk she felt in the back of her mind.

  Her fingers slackened on the grill, then clenched like talons around the iron filigrees as the voice swirled away in a kaleidoscopic blur. She moaned softly, a bewildered, helpless little moan, as violent reds and purples gushed up from deep inside her with a roar like surf crashing on a beach at high tide. In their cyclonic center a spinning face slowly began to take shape—a face with shiny, ebony-hard eyes.

  Chapter 6

  When Gage heard the pathetic little whimper, he forgot all about being late for his mother’s dinner party and came to a halt on the stairs above the gallery. Puzzled, he looked around him for the source of the sound. For a moment he thought he’d imagined it, and then he saw Eslin, half screened from view by the settee and the plants, swaying unsteadily on her feet, her fingers clasped around the grill.

  “Eslin?” he called.

  She heard her name reverberate in her ears like the clanging of a gong. She wanted to reply but couldn’t. Consciousness was slipping away from her like sand through a sieve, and all she could do was stare into the bottomless black eyes swirling toward her from the whorling maelstrom inside her mind.

  “Es-lin!” Gage repeated, his voice loud and firm.

  Still there was no response from her, and his heart began to pound and he frowned as he remembered the open-eyed nap she’d taken in his office and the deep sleep he’d been unable to waken her from when he’d entered her room earlier. She’s nodded off again, he thought, and quickly downed the remaining steps to the gallery. Her back was to him, and as he came up behind her, her head drooped, her fingers lost their grip on the grill, and her body swooped toward the floor.