“Rachel has every reason to be furious,” she told him. “I don’t suppose you thought to ask Ethan how Gage is?”
“No, I didn’t, and I think I’ve taken enough abuse from you for one day.” Doc shot her a frown over his shoulder. “I’m going home now to lick my wounds.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Eslin agreed, “before you end up with some more to lick.”
“I was just trying to help,” he grumbled, as he walked out of the kitchen.
“Keep telling yourself that,” she suggested, following him into the living room. “Who knows? With any luck you’ll start believing it.”
“I can do without the cheap shots, young lady.” He snatched his horribly ruined dinner jacket off the deacon’s bench near the front door and flung it over his left shoulder.
“That wasn’t a cheap shot, it was an impartial observation.” Eslin folded her arms in front of her. “That ugly little scene I witnessed under the tree last night was just a continuation of the argument you two were having in the study, and don’t”— she held up her right hand as he opened his mouth to reply— “try to tell me that you weren’t at each other’s throats when I opened that door. The animosity between you two wasn’t quite as thick as it usually is between Gage and Ethan, but it was there, and if I could see it, you can bet your BMW Rachel could too.”
“All right, all right,” he grumbled, “so we had a disagreement. That doesn’t mean I knew he was hurt and that I left him there deliberately.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked quietly.
He opened his mouth again, then shut it and flung open the front door. He slammed it behind him with such force that the brass hall tree standing beside the deacon’s bench tottered on its three legs. It didn’t fall, and Eslin winced and cursed her ankle again as she walked over to the window and watched Doc’s BMW pull out of her driveway and speed down the block.
Sighing heavily, she sank down on the sofa and felt her rapidly beating heart begin to slow down. She hated to fight with Doc. They hadn’t come this close to a donnybrook since the awful screaming match they’d had after Mimi’s cremation when Eslin told him she was moving out and buying a house. That had been two weeks after Edward Roundtree’s death. A frown creased her forehead as she remembered what Doc had said about Gage smiling his way through his father’s funeral.
She didn’t like thinking about that, or the snatches of the fire last night that kept trying to jerk through her brain like slides fed through an out-of-focus projector, so she sat there with her legs half curled beneath her thinking instead about things that she hadn’t thought about in years.
Which one of them, she wondered—Doc or Mimi—had been having the affair? Since Mimi wouldn’t allow her within ten miles of Roundtree Stables, she’d always thought that it was Mimi who was being unfaithful with Edward Roundtree. But now, as Eslin thought about it, she acknowledged that it was equally possible that Doc and Rachel had been the lovers. She’d known from her first day at Acacia Farms that one of the Fitzsimmonses was in love with someone else, but because it was none of her business, really, she’d turned a deaf ear to the murmurs from someone else’s mind that had sometimes crept into hers. Now she wished she’d listened.
She wished, too, that Mimi had taken her to Roundtree to meet her famous friends when she’d wanted to go, when she’d been a horse-crazy seventeen-year-old. Eslin wished she’d gone then, when she could’ve been starry eyed and awed by the larger-than-life Roundtrees, when she might’ve actually gotten to stroke Ganymede’s muzzle, when Gage had still been a human being.
Ten years ago. He would’ve been twenty-two, and he probably wouldn’t have looked at her twice. Eslin smiled at the thought. But he would’ve been whole then, he would’ve smiled easily, he would’ve laughed. Eslin knew it the same way she knew Marco Byrne was watching, the same way she knew that she would return to Roundtree Stables. What she didn’t know was when or why—or what had happened to change Gage.
If Mimi had taken her when she’d begged to go—Eslin frowned as she counted backward in her head—then she most likely would’ve visited Roundtree sometime between the horse-doping scandal and Johnny Byrne’s suicide. Suppose Mimi had taken her … the possibilities of what she might have seen and heard sent gooseflesh prickling up her arms.
Groaning a little and wincing as her sore, stiff muscles creaked, Eslin limped her way into her bedroom. Her whole body ached, but she couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of physical shape Gage was in. His psychological state she was pretty sure of, and she marveled again at the shiver of wonder she’d felt as she’d clung to him, cold and shaking, and realized midway through his hoarse plea for help that he was psychic.
Part of her was a bit miffed that she hadn’t realized it on her own; the rest of her marveled at how well he’d hidden it—even from himself. While she filled the blue porcelain tub in the bath adjoining her room and stripped off her pajamas, Eslin wondered if it was the constant denial and rejection of his psychic ability that had changed him, or if it had been something else. The scandal perhaps, or something that he’d seen the same way he’d seen the barn and the lightning?
Clairvoyance sometimes made people think they were losing their minds. Because she’d had Granny Rose to tell her it was “naught but the Sight, wee one,” Eslin had never thought she was crazy—she’d only feared that because she saw things before they actually happened that she’d somehow made them happen. Did Gage fear the same thing? Did he think he was going insane?
Please, Eslin, help me, I saw the lightning and the barn—
The desperate, ragged edge in his voice echoed in her head as Eslin slid shivering into the tub. She splashed water on her shins but couldn’t rinse away the chill creeping through her. What had he seen? The same thing she had—the single bolt of lightning snaking toward the tree and the barn? Had the image leapt into his mind with the same frightening clarity? Had he been aware, as she had been, of the brush of another consciousness in that same split-second?
Which one of them had seen it first and fed it subconsciously to the other? Though she sometimes experienced simultaneous flashes, Eslin was pretty sure that last night she’d been the receiver and Gage had been the transmitter. How Doc would classify him, as clairvoyant, precognitive, or what have you, she didn’t know—but she was willing to bet a month’s salary that Gage was, if nothing else, telepathic.
That would explain why she, too, had seen the barn, how she’d so easily been able to find his neck chain buried in the straw in Ganymede’s stall. It did not, however, account for the feeling she had that he touched her soul whenever he lifted his hand to the horseshoe nail, or for what had happened to her on the gallery last night.
Of all the things that had occurred yesterday, that baffled and frightened Eslin most of all. She’d never fainted, she’d never even come close to being in a trance, and she’d most definitely never experienced an honest-to-goodness-knock-you-on-your-can vision. First time for everything, Doc had said, and she was pretty sure that last night had been her night for firsts.
And despite his denial Eslin knew that Doc had deliberately left Gage lying there on his back under the tree. The only reason that made sense to her was that he’d been trying to get back at Gage, get even with him, to hurt him—but why? What in the world could Gage have done to him?
And better yet, what had Gage done to her? As Eslin soaped a washcloth and scrubbed the back of her neck, her hand began to slow and tremble a little as she murmured his name again in her mind and remembered the agony she’d seen on his bloody, filthy face as he’d staggered away from Ganylad with the gun in his hand. She’d barely noticed the gore and the mud, but the pain she’d read in his eyes and the heartbroken sobs that had shaken his whole body when he’d flung himself against the oak tree slowly filled her eyes with tears as she remembered. He’d been crying for Ganylad, for Ganymede and himself, and for something else that Eslin had been unable to read through the searing onslaught of his grief.
<
br /> Help me—hold me.
Why had she done it? Why had she touched him?
Because she’d wanted to, almost more than she’d wanted to draw her next breath. Not just to comfort him, either, but to feel his arms around her and his body pressed against her. She wanted to still, had wanted to, she realized suddenly, from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, when she’d whirled around in Ganymede’s stall and seen him glowering at her.
But I thought— he’d said to her when she’d rebuffed the pass he’d made at her in his office.
The jolt the recollection gave Eslin launched her, slipping and sliding, to her feet. A spill of water followed her over the side of the tub as she grabbed a towel off the rack and huddled, shivering, into it. She’d said absolutely nothing coy or flirtatious to him, and hadn’t yet consciously acknowledged her attraction to him—so why had he thought that? How had he thought that? Unless he’d read her mind?
Perhaps she was interpreting his words the wrong way, but Eslin didn’t think so. Gage was too direct, too blunt—no, he’d meant precisely what he’d said—he’d thought it. He’d reached into her subconscious mind and seen it there. The depth and power of his ability that that implied astounded her.
Once she’d zipped herself into a disreputable-looking pair of jeans and buttoned a loose, peach-colored chambray shirt over a white camisole, Eslin attacked the mess Doc had made of her kitchen. And then, to keep her mind off Gage, she began to clean the house and do the laundry.
She’d just put the first load into the dryer and started a second in the washer when she heard a car pull into her driveway. Hobbling over to the front window, she saw her metallic-blue Celica hatchback. She opened the front door just as Ethan’s gray Lincoln eased up to the curb edging her lawn. As he got out of his car, her eyes darted hopefully to the Toyota, but the slim, brown-haired young man in jeans and a tan work-shirt who climbed out of it wasn’t Gage. One of the hands, Eslin thought, and forced her nagging smile back into place as Ethan met him behind the Toyota and lifted her beige weekender out of the hatch. The farmhand gave him the keys, turned toward the Lincoln, and Ethan smiled at her as he came up the drive.
Haggard was the first word that came into Eslin’s mind as she pushed open the screen door and watched him step off the drive onto the walk. He was meticulously dressed as always, in gray slacks, a pink shirt, and maroon sweater, but his face was nearly the same color as his trousers and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“You look tired, Ethan.”
“I’m bushed.” He handed Eslin her keys and let the door ease shut behind him. “How are you?”
“Sore in places I never knew a person could be,” she admitted, and tucked her key ring into her pocket. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you, I’ve already drunk enough to float a battleship.” He put her suitcase down near the closet door. “I’d like to stay, too, but truthfully, I don’t have time. Things are in such a mess you can’t imagine.”
Eslin thought she could but didn’t say so. “You really didn’t need to bring my car home. I do appreciate it, but Doc could’ve driven me out to get it.”
“That’s one of the things that’s a mess,” Ethan said, one corner of his mouth twisting wryly. “I think Mother intends to shoot him on sight. What the hell was the matter with Gerald last night, Eslin? I know Gage can be difficult, and that’s putting it mildly, but my God—”
“I don’t know, Ethan,” Eslin told him, deciding that was as far as she’d go toward defending Doc. “I honestly don’t.”
“Well, that makes three of us.” He sighed and shook his head. “Mother’s furious with him—and Gage, too, of course. She grilled him in the ambulance on the way to—”
“What?” Eslin gasped.
“Oh, he’s all right,” Ethan assured her. “It’s nothing serious, just a couple cracked ribs and a slight shoulder sprain. We checked him into the Harwood last night for his own good—otherwise he’d be right in the thick of the cleanup. He’s madder than hell at us, but he’ll be released in the morning.” He smiled at her. “By tomorrow things should be back to semi-normal, so how about if I pick you up about seven and take you to dinner? We need to decide on a plan of attack for finding Ganymede, you know.”
“I haven’t said I’d take the case, yet,” she reminded him.
“Something else has surfaced that I think you should know.” Ethan paused and his smile vanished. “The barn wasn’t struck by lightning. The fire was set—it was arson.”
“But, Ethan, I saw—”
“I know.” He held up his right palm to silence her. “The tree was hit, all right, but the tack room in the barn had been doused with kerosene. The fire inspector found the can at about four this morning once the ashes had cooled enough to dig through.”
“Are you telling me it was coincidence?” Eslin couldn’t believe it.
“Apparently.” He nodded grimly. “The only lucky break we had was that you were there.”
I didn’t have anything to do with it, she wanted to tell him, but decided this was hardly the time.
“Was the inspector sure, Ethan? I mean it doesn’t make sense—”
“C’mon, Eslin, think about it,” he cut in shortly. “If we’d lost those colts, we would’ve lost the biggest chunk of our racing stable, not to mention our future breeding stock. The insurance on the colts belonging to other farms, the lawsuits that most certainly would have followed, could very easily have wiped us out. Somebody has a big grudge against Roundtree, and I don’t have to be psychic to figure out who that somebody is.”
Neither did she, really. Still, as Ethan said it, a backwash of her vision from the night before made Eslin tremble and her mind shrink away from the remembrance of the ebony-hard eyes.
“He’s watching,” she murmured, “I know that much.”
“I’d say he’s doing more than that,” Ethan countered. “For all anybody knows, he set the fire himself. And it’s apparent that snatching Ganymede wasn’t enough. He’s going to make sure—damn sure—that Roundtree is destroyed.”
“I suppose you called the police?” Eslin asked.
“Nothing much they can do, but yes, I did.” Ethan sighed. “Captain Hargrove agrees that there could be a connection between Byrne and the fire, but there’s no evidence to prove it. He advised us to be very cautious. Don’t hire any new help and recheck references on anyone employed in the last year or so. We’ve checked twice but I suppose a third time won’t hurt. I’m also taking bids from several security firms for round-the-clock guards on the stables and the house.”
“The house?” Eslin echoed. “You don’t really think—”
“I don’t know if I do or not.” He stared at her, almost pleadingly. “All I do know is that finding Byrne is more important now than finding Ganymede. With any luck we’ll find the stallion with him, but we’ve got to find Byrne, Eslin—we’ve just got to.”
He’d didn’t add, We’ve got to get him before he gets us, but Eslin read it in his eyes. She read concern for Rachel there, too, and amazingly enough, for Gage as well.
“All right, Ethan,” she told him quietly, “I’ll take the case.”
“I knew—rather, I hoped you would.” He smiled and didn’t look quite so tired. “So I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow night?”
“Thank you, Ethan, but no,” she replied firmly. “Things like this take time and solitude.”
“Then we’ll celebrate when Byrne’s behind bars and Ganymede is safely home.” He opened the screen door. “You’ll call me, then?”
“Yes, as soon as I have something. Did you tell Gage about this?”
“Not yet. I’m not going to until he’s released, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t either.”
“Me?” Eslin tried not to sound startled or to blush. “What makes you think I’d tell him?”
“He’s in room four-oh-three.” Ethan stepped outside and smiled at her through the screen door. “Just remember
that I’m the brother you have the date with.”
He winked at her and crossed the lawn to his car. As Eslin watched him leave, she wondered if telepathy ran in the Roundtree family. When the Lincoln pulled away from the curb, she picked up her suitcase and carried it to her room. She swung it up on the bed, unzipped it, and laid back the lid. On top of her neatly folded clothes lay a manila file and a leather-bound album—the Byrne dossier and Ganymede’s baby book.
Chapter 9
Cursing his brother under his breath, Gage sat on the side of his hospital bed trying to fasten his shirt over his taped rib cage, and the sling immobilizing his right arm against his chest. Leave it to Ethan to bring a man in an arm sling a shirt with buttons.
In the twenty minutes since his brother had gone downstairs to check him out. Gage had managed to insert three buttons into their respective buttonholes—and felt like he’d just run the Kentucky Derby with Ganymede lashed to his back. He gave up on the fourth button and slammed his fist angrily into the mattress. He wouldn’t be able to stand this goddamn sling for ten days. He’d be a raving lunatic by then—if thinking about Marco Byrne torching the two-year-old barn didn’t drive him nuts first.
Oddly enough, despite the flash of lightning he’d seen in his mind on Saturday night, he hadn’t been at all surprised when Ethan had sat down in the chair beside his bed less than an hour ago and told him about the charred kerosene can found in the ashes. He hadn’t any idea what the lightning he’d seen had to do with it, if anything, and he frankly couldn’t have cared less. All he cared about was getting Ganymede back—and hopefully getting his hands around Marco Byrne’s throat in the process.
“Good morning. How are you feeling?”
Until he heard the door hinges squeak a few seconds later, Gage thought he’d dreamed Eslin’s voice. When he realized he hadn’t, that she was really here, he shifted sideways on the bed and tried not to wince as he glanced over his right shoulder at the only other thing he cared about.
She’d pushed the door to his room half-open, and leaned past it smiling as he looked back at her. Shiny and tucked behind her right ear with a tortoiseshell comb, her dark hair swung forward over one pink silk shoulder, erasing the rain and mud-streaked memory of her that had haunted his troubled dreams for the past thirty-six hours. He wanted to tell her he felt about a million percent better all of a sudden, but he couldn’t. All he could do was stare at her, hope that she couldn’t see how badly he was shaking, and wish to hell he didn’t have one arm pinned to his chest.
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