Finally Joanna blinked, like someone waking from a trance. “Gayla,” she said, her voice breaking for lack of air.
“Gayla?” Caitlin echoed. A tiny pool of frigid water that had collected on her collar dribbled down her neck, tracing her spine like a dagger. “What about her?”
Joanna was gulping her breaths now, and seemed in danger of hyperventilating. “She’s in my room . . . ” With great effort she choked the words out one at a time. She pointed at the second floor.
“Come with me!” Caitlin seized the distraught woman by the hand before she could protest and dragged her into the chateau.
Inside, everything was perfectly still. Robespierre jumped down from his sentry post by the aquarium and was about to rub against their legs in his customary greeting when the splattering of rain from their clothing hit him in the face. He winced and walked away, electing to bestow his favors upon the furniture instead.
“I’ve got to sit down,” said Joanna, moving toward the couch. “I can’t stand.”
“Not, now.” Caitlin took the hand that had gone limp in hers. “Take me to your room. We’re going to find out what in hell’s going on around here.”
It was Caitlin, however, who did the taking, and her volition entirely that propelled them up the stairs and into Joanna’s room where a quick appraisal turned up nothing out of the ordinary. “Where? Show me,” she commanded in a hoarse whisper.
Joanna pulled her hand away and cowered by the door, pointing wordlessly at the closet.
Caitlin, her fear overwhelmed by a rising tide of anger and frustration stepped boldly to the closet door and flung it open.
Joanna gasped.
Hangers of expensive clothes hung with careless disregard. An array of shoes were strewn on the floor. On the back of the door hung a plush purple robe, without which Joanna had fled into the night.
“Where? What did you see?” Caitlin rounded on Joanna just in time to see her faint where she stood. She got to her just as she reached the floor.
“Joanna!” she whispered, her voice a good deal more impatient than she’d intended. There was no response. She got up, went to the bathroom and soaked the corner of a towel in cold water. She dabbed Joanna’s brow.
“Joanna!” she repeated, struggling to keep the anxiety from her voice. “It’s all right. Come on.”
The other woman’s eyes flickered open and shot immediately toward the closet. “She was there.”
“Well, she’s not there now.” Caitlin pulled Joanna to her feet and guided her to the bed. “Let’s get you out of these wet things, and you can tell me all about it.”
Joanna submitted to mothering without complaint, and was soon wrapped warmly in the folds of her robe, while Caitlin shivered.
“How about if I see if I can scare us up a cup of tea?”
“Oh, no. No. Don’t leave me!” Joanna sprang from the bed with panic in her eyes, her arms outstretched in pathetic supplication.
Caitlin was afraid she was going to drop to her knees. She eased her back on the bed. “All right. All right. I’ll stay.” She put her arm around Joanna who seemed to melt, laying her head against Caitlin’s breast. “Now, tell me what you saw.”
“You won’t believe me,” Joanna replied weakly. “I almost don’t believe it myself. It’s . . . it’s like some absurd B movie, a body only one person can see . . . but . . . ”
Caitlin waited.
“But I saw her.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Joanne took a deep breath to compose herself. Nevertheless, when she spoke her voice was shaky and her body convulsed involuntarily from time to time. “I’d taken my bath . . . .”
“How long were you in there?”
“A long time. I always take long baths, it’s my therapy. I put on my headphones and listen to Chopin, or Pavarotti.”
“Go on.”
“I had my pajamas in the bathroom. I put them on, then came out to get my robe.”
“From the closet?”
Joanna nodded against Caitlin’s chest. Another involuntary shudder surged through her body, and she burst into a renewed paroxysm of sobs. She sat up abruptly, grabbed one of the huge down pillows from the bed and clapped it to her face.
For a long time Caitlin, her own heart thumping furiously, gently stroked Joanna’s head until, finally, she stopped crying and removed the mascara-stained pillow from her eyes. “It was dark . . . ” she began, even now only forcing the words through the supreme effort of her will. She detached herself from Caitlin’s embrace and sat up. “When I opened the door – it felt strange. Heavy. It swung open by itself.” Another deep breath, and the threat of more tears. “I reached for my robe and, it was her . . . ”
“Gayla?” Caitlin said, realizing she been holding her breath. Joanna nodded furiously. “Her eyes were open – rolled back in her head. Her face was blue and her tongue was swollen.” She rushed the words in an effort to get them out before being overtaken by emotion. “Her clothes were wet . . . the same clothes she’d drowned in.”
For the moment, it was all she could manage.
Caitlin automatically looked at the stone floor. It was dry. She stood up, went to the closet door and ran her finger over the hook. Also dry, as was the back of the door. “What did you do? Did you scream?”
“No. I thought I was going to be sick. I ran out into the hallway; I had my hands over my mouth. I wanted to wake Amber, but when I opened the her door and saw her lying there, I realized after all she’d been through it wouldn’t be fair to . . . She doesn’t need another shock. I knocked on your door. When you didn’t answer, I went in . . . I’m sorry.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” Caitlin said consolingly .
“I didn’t want to disturb the other guests. But I didn’t know what to do. I came down the stairs. I suppose I’d’ve waken Jill if I hadn’t seen the van headlights. That’s all.”
Chapter Seventeen–Feast of Ashes
The long silence that followed absorbed their thoughts. “The mind is a frightening thing,” Joanna said at last. Her eyes were on her hands, which troubled one another rhythmically. The panicky edge was gone from her voice.
“How do you mean ?” Caitlin prompted.
“It was so real . . . Gayla in the moat. In the closet . . . but it couldn’t have been her, could it? She’s dead. But it was so real. Why would my mind create such . . . such terrible things?”
Caitlin was relieved to hear her making such sense. One of the shadowy, half-formed thoughts that had been clamoring for attention in her brain was that Joanna’s mind had snapped; that remorse – or guilt – had severely undermined her reason.
The other thought, which she fought back whenever it bobbed, unbidden, to the surface, was that Amber had been impersonating her sister in an attempt to drive her stepmother insane. The notion was tooMovie of the Week to merit serious consideration, besides which Amber had been the first person to respond to Joanna’s cry after the first incident and this time, according to Joanna’s own testimony, was asleep in bed even as her dead sister’s body hung from the closet door.
“There are only three possibilities that I see,” said Caitlin, after a thought-filled silence. Joanna looked at her uncertainly. “Either someone’s trying to drive you mad, or you’re imagining things. Or . . . ”
“Or?”
“Frankly . . . you’ve made it all up.”
“But I wouldn’t!” Joanna cried, rising, her eyes betraying shock rather than offense.
Caitlin, calmed her with a gesture.
“You have to look at it from my perspective, Joanna. There’s virtually no evidence to support anything you’ve said.” She thought of Mrs. Griffeth’s fairy, but elected to keep that to herself. Meanwhile, she hoped that if she could keep the woman talking, she might uncover some clue, however unconscious, to these inexplicable events. “Look, there’s no water on the floor. Or on the hook. Yet you said the body – her clothes – were wet. Where is the water?�
��
Joanna looked at the floor, palpably fearful that her senses had betrayed her.
“You said something woke you yesterday. Made you go to your window, and that when you got there, you saw a body in the moat. You thought it was Gayla.”
Joanna nodded.
“It’s hard to see from up here . . . ”
“It wasn’t hard to see when she was hanging from the closet door.”
“Then, do you imagine someone found the poor girl’s body – I’m sorry to say this – and is dragging it around the place trying to scare you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then who is the only one who could possibly impersonate Gayla in such a situation?”
Joanna hung her head and studied her fingers. “Amber,” she whispered.
“Right.” Caitlin was talking things out for her own clarification as much as to comfort Joanna. “But it couldn’t have been her in either of those circumstances, could it?”
“No,” Joanna replied softly. She sniffed back a tear that hung on the end of her nose. “Perhaps I am going mad.” She raised her eyes. “Is this what mad people see? Can these things seem so real, but not be there all? When I hear of people seeing things I imagine – I don’t know – ghosts or shadows. But these . . . these images . . . whatever they are . . . I swear you could reach out and touch them.” Her voice trailed off.
It was a rhetorical question. Caitlin didn’t know what mad people see. The notion flashed through her mind that maybe everyone is mad. Maybe nothing exists in a fixed reality at all, but everyone is born, lives, and dies in a separate cocoon of their own perception. What if all of life is nothing more than a projection on the three-dimensional screen of the mind, a random firing of the synapses, making things up as it goes along? The suggestion was both absurd and troubling. She shook it off in favor of a line of reasoning that had occurred to her earlier. “What if someone’s trying to make itseem that you’re losing your mind?”
“What do you mean?”
A single thread of reason twisted through Caitlin’s thoughts, and she struggled to lay hold of it. “Let’s suppose someone is behind this – that it’s all an elaborate hoax. But the point isn’t necessarily to drive you mad, but simply to make itseem as though you’re mentally incapacitated.” The thread veered through an unexplored corridor in Caitlin’s brain. “Who would benefit if it could be proven, in a court of law, that you are incompetent?”
The brief glare of incomprehension in Joanna’s eye was slowly replaced by the light of understanding. “Amber, and the company, I suppose.”
“Company?”
“My husband’s company . . . ” Joanna was transformed by the chain of thought that was assembling itself in her mind. “MediStream.”
“What about it?”
“I’m the majority shareholder, according to his will. I have twenty percent. So does Amber. Twenty percent is controlled by Avril Cummings, Philip’s personal secretary – she’d been with him forever, and Philip had given her shares in lieu of salary. She’s not on the board, so she doesn’t have a vote. The rest is held by various members of the directors.”
“What happened to Gayla’s share?”
Joanna shifted in her seat. “Philip . . . Philip had doubts about Gayla. He never said, in so many words, what or why. Not to me, anyway. But from what he did say, I gather he didn’t think she was competent to be involved in the company. He surely was against the idea of investing her with too much wealth. So his will stipulated only that she would receive an allowance sufficient to assure she never wanted for anything, but reasonable enough so that she couldn’t become profligate.”
“Did she know that?”
“Oh, yes. It was common knowledge. He used it as a parenting tool, I think. Telling her that once she had demonstrated maturity, he could make changes . . . that type of thing.”
“Go on.”
“MediStream is very successful. Philip was under incredible pressure to take it public when . . . he died.”
Caitlin’s grasp of the world of business and high finance was tenuous, at best. But even she knew of the vast paper fortunes to be made by shareholders when a company with a proven track record offered its stock for the first time.
“He didn’t want that?”
Joanna shook her head emphatically. “No. He was afraid he’d lose the autonomy he needed to take the company where he wanted it to go.”
“What kind of business is it?”
“Medical research and equipment,” said Joanna. “Originally, Philip designed computer software.”
“Video games?” Caitlin asked tentatively, afraid she might be revealing more ignorance than she wished.
“No. No. He invented software that made it possible to track outbreaks of disease – AIDS, ebola, avian flu – and project their spread. He developed a very complex algorithm incorporating economics, geography, climatology, demographics, psychographics, population density, religion . . . ”
“Religion?”
“Yes. Inasmuch as religion often dictates the behavior of its adherents . . . their diet, lifestyles, their willingness to accept life’s calamities as acts of God rather than phenomena over which they can exercise control.
“Eventually he got into medical research. He was involved in HGP, the Human Genome Project,” she looked up to see the mention registered with Caitlin.
“I’ve read about it.”
“He acquired a patent on the seventh genome as a result of some of his work. The potential – particularly relating to diseases of senility, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, he thought – was enormous. Part of the company was working with pharmaceutical manufacturers to develop medicines based on the patent.
“He talked about it all the time. I wish I’d listened more carefully.” Joanna smiled unexpectedly. “I’d nod a lot, try to act interested. But, between the two of us, it was all Greek to me. Of course, having been a nurse, I understood some of the medical aspects, but the technology was like another language entirely.”
She lowered her head slightly. “I’m afraid I’m more the Florence Nightingale type.”
Caitlin could appreciate that. Calling herself a purist she had, at first, resisted the idea of digital photography. When it became clear that her lack of knowledge was costing her cold hard cash – many of her students had nothing but digital equipment – she abandoned artistic purity, bought her first digital camera a couple of years earlier. It had sat in its box for several months – as if the brightly colored cardboard container it came in was Pandora’s box which, when opened, would demand that she enter a new, artistically suspect world of the unfamiliar in which she would be more a spectator than a participant. Finally, she took it out and, over a couple of months, worked her way through the daunting tome of instructions. Her argument was that she wished to remain a ‘purist’. Actually, she was intimidated.
“How do things stand now?”
Joanna stared blankly at the wall. “As far as I know, the IPO . . . the Initial Public Offering . . . is supposed to happen November first.”
“Week after next,” said Caitlin, after a quick computation. “How can they do that, if you and Amber are against it. Did this secretary . . . Cummings?”
“Avril Cummings.”
“Avril,” Caitlin echoed. “Did she vote to go public?”
Joanna shook her head slowly. “No.”
“Then, between you, Amber, and Cummings, you control sixty percent of the vote, don’t you? I’m not much of a mathematician, but that seems like more than enough.”
“It’s Amber,” said Joanna, raising her eyes. “She voted for it with the rest of the board.”
“Amber? Why? It’s against her father’s wishes.”
“That’s what I told her, but she says those wishes are superseded by her need to take care of me. That my health comes first – that’s the way Philip would want it, if he knew . . . ” Her hand went to her head and she massaged her brow. “Perhaps she’s right. I’m sure i
f he . . . We’ve argued about it, but she’s determined and, frankly, I just haven’t had the strength or the presence of mind to fight. I’m ready to just give in and get it over with. Do what the Board tells me to do.”
“So, there’s already a board in place, even though the company’s not public yet?”
“A board of directors, yes. Friends, family, and business associates. Lawyers. Advisors.”
“Do you have a lawyer to advise you? Some kind of independent advisor to tell you what you should do? . . . or shouldn’t do?”
Joanna answered timorously. “The company’s law firm handles everything. I guess I figured that since Philip hired them, he must have trusted them, so . . . ” As the irresponsibility of her actions bore in on her, the light left her eyes. “I don’t know what he’d want me to do. I feel like I’m betraying him.”
“Don’t think like that,” said Caitlin comfortingly. “It’s not your fault.” She didn’t know to a certainty that Joanna was blameless, but a powerful intuition told her that the woman’s emotional and mental vulnerability, compounded by physical exhaustion, were being taken advantage of by someone. What better time to cripple her resolve than when she’s at the end of her tether?
“How much money are we talking about?”
Joanna hung her head. “Hundreds of millions. Maybe billions.”
Caitlin drew a sharp breath. Greed. Here at last was more than the glimmer of a motive to give credence to the haunting of Joanna Capshaw.
“Do you know any lawyers?”
“Personally? No. I mean . . . only the firm that’s been handling the business all along. Yance, Harrow, Sabien & Metz.”
Caitlin nearly choked on the in-drawing of her breath. “My . . .” She was going to say fiancé, but edited on the fly – it would prompt too many questions; questions she didn’t wish to address, “Michael Sabien is a close friend. He’s one of their senior partners!” Thoughts of Michael came flooding back with gut-wrenching clarity and with them, as always, vivid, visceral images of the accident that had rendered him comatose.
Dead and Breakfast (Caitlyn Craft Mysteries Book 1) Page 14
