by Rebecca York
While Bree was trying to make sense out of that, Nola spoke again.
“You’ve got to find him!”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?”
“He’s got the run of the estate. But I never see him.”
“Nobody sees him,” Abner snapped. “Except the kid. And two to one, she’s lying.”
They were talking about Troy. And it sounded as if they had the same opinion as Mrs. Martindale.
Bree focused in on the conversation again in time to hear Nola say, “But he does things. Like that music this afternoon in his room.”
“The schoolteacher could be lying. She could have turned it on.”
“Maybe. But I’m sure she wasn’t in our bedroom this morning. I found my calcium pills emptied into the trash can.”
“The bottle could have fallen in.”
“No. The empty bottle was on the sink.”
Abner sighed. “You don’t know it was him. The old lady could have done it by accident and might not want to own up to it. Or maybe it was Graves, trying to spook you. He’s spooky enough even when he’s not up to mischief. It could be him, trying to make us think that London is up to no good—when he’s dead.”
Dead! Bree felt an icy shiver travel down her spine.
“You don’t know if he’s dead. You haven’t found any evidence. There’s more evidence that he’s alive.”
“I say he’s dead, and it’s his ghost haunting us—for revenge. There’s a tradition of ghosts in this damn place.”
Bree pressed a hand to her mouth to keep from making a sound, and Nola said something she couldn’t catch.
“I didn’t think you believed in ghosts,” Abner answered.
“I didn’t. Until I came here. But we’re not going to settle anything by arguing about it,” Nola muttered. “I want to get away from this place. I’m tired of telling lies so nobody will question why we’re staying here.”
“Yeah, me, too. But this is a lot more comfortable than living out of the back of a van.”
Nola sighed.
“Just hang in there for a little while longer until I can work some kind of deal,” Abner said, his voice more gentle.
“You and your deals. That’s how we always get into trouble.”
“This time is different. The money is going to start rolling in. You’ll see.”
“Right.”
Sliding her gaze around the corner of the doorway, Bree watched the couple head toward the office.
Lord, they sounded as though they were in pretty bad shape. Frightened and paranoid. She’d assumed that they were in charge of things here, but it sounded as if they were captives of circumstances.
And what about Troy? Mrs. Martindale said he was on the loose, hiding out around the estate. Abner thought he was dead.
But he wasn’t dead. She’d talked to him and felt his touch. He’d felt warm and alive. Yet the encounters had all been so strange. And although Dinah had talked to him, she couldn’t remember seeing him.
Her heart blocked her windpipe and she ordered herself to get a grip. From the conversation, it sounded as though the Sterlings had had some frightening experiences since Troy had disappeared. Bree had rationalized her own strange encounters with him by telling herself that Troy had unexplained powers he could use to keep himself hidden and to create special effects.
Apparently the Sterlings were making different assumptions.
Maybe reading that book in the library had gotten Nola started on the ghost theme.
Bree rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to wipe away the cold, clammy feeling that had suddenly enveloped her.
She wanted to sprint back to the relative safety of her room but she couldn’t do it yet. At the moment she was trapped in the kitchen. If she stepped into the hall, the Sterlings might come back this way and spot her.
So she stood where she was, pressing her shoulder to the wall and shifting her weight from one foot to the other, hoping Mrs. Martindale didn’t decide to come down here in the middle of the night.
It seemed like a thousand endless years before she heard a door open, heard footsteps again. This time the Sterlings were silent as they made their way down the hall to the stairs.
Bree waited another five minutes after she’d heard them climb the steps. When she couldn’t stand still another minute, she tiptoed quietly down the hall to the office.
She was prepared to use her lock pick. But that wasn’t necessary.
Inside she switched on the flashlight. But she soon found out that merely getting inside the office had done her little good. There was some kind of night lock on the phone, so she couldn’t lift the receiver. Maybe she could wrench it off but she was pretty sure she couldn’t get it back on.
It entered her mind that maybe she should let them think the ghost had done it. The idea of the prank made her grin, until a more sobering thought struck her. The Sterlings had sounded pretty stressed out. Maybe more ghostly shenanigans would push them over the edge. She didn’t want to find out what would happen in that case.
Since the phone was useless to her, she beamed the flashlight on the computer.
It had been turned off for the night, and she’d have to reboot. Setting the flashlight down on the desk, she flipped the power switch. The machine started through its opening routine—then stopped.
“Enter password.”
Oh, great. Just what she needed. Of course she didn’t know the password. She made several sensible tries. Ravencrest. Helen. Dinah. The child’s birthday. None of them worked.
Another worry began to nag at her. Was there some kind of alarm attached to the machine that would sound after a certain number of wrong guesses?
She stopped, knowing she had to take a different approach. Maybe the password was written down.
She pulled out the middle desk drawer and felt around on the underside, hoping to find a piece of paper taped to the thin wood panel.
There was no paper, but she found something else—a small, flat piece of metal that felt like a key.
It was taped securely in place and she had to work at it with her fingernails. Finally it came free, and she had just picked up the flashlight to look at it when the doorknob turned and the door burst open.
Chapter Eleven
Bree clutched the little key in her palm as she whirled to face the door, pushing the drawer partly closed with her hip.
She thought she’d be confronting Nola or Abner again. Instead Mrs. Martindale stood in the doorway.
“Oh, my,” she said. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“I…” Bree mentally scrambled for something to say. Finally she settled on a version of the truth. Falling back on her ditz-brained persona, she fluttered her hands and said, “Ravencrest makes me so nervous. And I’m so homesick. I was hoping to talk to one of my friends, but the phone is locked up so I thought maybe I could send some e-mail. But I don’t know the password.”
Mrs. Martindale’s face twisted. “Yes, Nola doesn’t want unauthorized phone or computer use. She says it’s an economy measure.”
“Why? Is there a financial problem here?”
The housekeeper sniffed. “You’ll have to ask her about that.”
As the woman spoke Bree casually slipped her hand into her pocket, leaving the key tucked out of sight.
After a silent debate she said, “I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell Mrs. Sterling I was in the office. I don’t want to get on her bad side.”
Mrs. Martindale made a tsking sound. “I understand. She can be quite trying.”
“How did she happen to be in charge here?” Bree asked.
“She’s a relative of the Londons.”
“Oh, yes,” she responded once more.
The conversation had wound down, but the housekeeper remained standing in the doorway and Bree got the definite impression that she wasn’t going to be left alone in the office. Leaning back, she closed the drawer the rest of the way with her hip.
“I see you
borrowed the flashlight again,” Mrs. Martindale said. “If you’re finished with it, I’d like to have it back.”
“Of course. I, uh, didn’t want to bother anyone by turning on the light in here.” She knew the excuse was lame, but it was all she could think of.
“Yes. There was only a little light coming from under the door. But I felt like I should investigate. It could have been a fire,” the housekeeper responded as she crossed the room and turned off the computer.
As Bree moved toward the door Mrs. Martindale backed up. In the hall, Bree handed over the flashlight.
She still felt uncomfortable, but there was nothing she could do about that. And she had the feeling that the less she said about her visit to the office, the better.
Yet questions were still buzzing in her mind.
“I was wondering something about Helen London,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Was it Ms. London who invited the Sterlings to come here?”
“Certainly not! She didn’t know a thing about it.”
“How do you know?”
“I wrote her a letter, telling her what was happening. And she wrote me back.”
“Oh. Yes,” she murmured, wishing that the woman’s answers would match the Sterlings’.
Figuring she was going to arouse suspicion if she kept probing, Bree took her leave of the housekeeper and made her way to the back stairs, feeling the woman watch her progress.
Still, it looked as if she’d gotten off easy, as long as Mrs. Martindale kept her word and didn’t blab to Nola.
Back in her room she shut and locked the door, leaning back against the stout wooden barrier as she exhaled a long breath. It made her feel safer to lock herself in. But she knew it was a false sense of security. Anyone who wanted to get to her could do so by coming down the tunnel, through the far entrance that she hadn’t been able to find.
For that matter, they could spring the lock on the door—or break it down.
Unbidden, the image of a crazed Jack Nicholson in The Shining leaped into her mind. She’d been around eleven years old, sitting in front of the television one evening while Mom was out with her friends when The Shining had come on.
She’d heard about it and she’d decided to watch. Big mistake. Soon she was so frightened by the violent images on the screen that she couldn’t move. It was before the era of the ubiquitous remote control and she’d been too afraid to abandon the safety of Mom’s bed to turn off the set. So she’d sat there, staring at scenes that made the hair on the back of her neck feel like knives stabbing into her flesh. Then Jack Nicholson, intent on killing his wife and child, had battered through the door to their apartment with an ax and stuck his head through the opening, grinning maniacally.
The image still made her shudder. She didn’t really think anyone would come after her with an ax. Probably it would be something more subtle, like Mrs. Martindale slipping poison into her tuna sandwich.
Stop it, she warned herself. Mrs. Martindale wasn’t the enemy. But she wouldn’t bet her life on that.
Knowing the best thing to do now was to take a hot shower and get a good night’s rest, she pulled out a nightgown, took it into the bathroom and closed the door. First she turned on the water in the shower, giving it a chance to run hot. Then she took off her clothes and laid them on the sink. The key she’d found taped to the bottom of the desk drawer was still in her pocket.
Briefly she considered hiding it somewhere in the room. But her room had been searched before and could be again.
After adjusting the water, she stepped into the claw-footed tub and pulled the shower curtain that encircled it.
The hot water was like a balm to her jangled nerves. She let the spray pound on her back for a couple of minutes, then began to wash her body.
It was such an ordinary action, something she did every day. Washing herself. Yet this time her hand stopped in the act of soaping her breast, as she imagined that someone was observing her.
Her free hand clenched. She’d been thinking how easy it would be for someone to come into the room. Now her gaze shot to the shower curtain. It was translucent, and she saw a hazy image of the bathroom fixtures.
But that was all. There was no one standing in the room. Still, just to make sure, she stuck her head around the curtain and peered out, the cold air from the room chilling her skin and making her nipples tighten.
The scene hadn’t changed. Nobody was there.
With a sigh, she withdrew behind the curtain again. Then, defying her attack of nerves, she poured shampoo into her hand. Closing her eyes, she worked a lather in her hair. She was finger combing the shampoo into her scalp when she felt it again—the sensation of eyes on her.
Stop it! she ordered herself.
Water and shampoo were running down her face, and she knew she’d be making a painful mistake if she opened her eyes. As quickly as possible, she rinsed the suds out of her hair, then grabbed the plastic bottle of shampoo. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was the best she could do. Turning her head slowly, she looked toward the shower curtain again. Once more, to her vast relief, she found no one standing beyond the flimsy barrier.
Was there a hidden camera in the bathroom? She hadn’t thought to look for one in here. Maybe that had been another mistake.
In the Baltimore Sun, she’d read about a dirty old man who rented apartments to young women and videotaped their most intimate moments in the bedroom and bathroom. Could Graves the handyman be up to something like that?
Her enthusiasm for the shower had evaporated. With a grimace, she turned off the water, then pulled the curtain partially aside and stared at the light fixture, the window frame, the mirror on the medicine cabinet. They all looked utterly ordinary. But they would, wouldn’t they?
Ready to step out of the tub, she switched her gaze downward, making sure she didn’t slip as she climbed over the high side. As she focused on the bath mat, she froze, and a wave of cold swept over her, peppering her skin with goose bumps.
In the white pile of the small rug she saw the impression of two footprints.
They weren’t her small ones, but two much larger prints of tennis shoes. A man’s shoes, unless one of the women here wore size fourteen or fifteen—and she didn’t remember Nola or Mrs. Martindale clumping around in rowboats.
She stopped in midstride, her hand clamping on the edge of the tub as she peered downward, telling herself she must be mistaken. That she had imagined the imprints.
But they remained firmly in her line of vision.
She’d been right the first time. She wasn’t being watched on a video camera. Someone had been here! Someone had been out in the bedroom, then come into the bathroom, in the few minutes when she’d had her eyes closed.
Quickly her arm shot out and she grabbed the towel from the rack, wrapping it around herself like a security blanket and hiding her nakedness. For all the good that did her now.
She didn’t want to leave the bathroom. But if someone had been standing right beside the shower, she wasn’t safe anyway. Gingerly, she stepped around the bath mat, the cold floor hitting the soles of her feet and seeping into her bones.
After drying off in record time, she looked at the nightgown she’d laid out. It would make her feel too exposed. Instead of pulling it on, she got fresh underwear out of the suitcase she’d set on the stool in the corner and then redressed in the shirt and pants she’d been wearing.
As she dressed, she tried to talk herself out of her previous conclusion. Maybe the footprints were not what she thought. Maybe something about the steamy atmosphere in the room had brought out previous impressions on the rug.
It was a reasonable theory, she told herself. And she added more details. While she’d been in the shower, she hadn’t felt the wave of cold air she should have felt if the door had been opened.
Stepping back into the bedroom, she crossed to the door and checked the lock. It was secure. So was the closet door. But so what? After the episode in t
he shower, the idea of staying in this room gave her the creeps. And she knew that she wasn’t going to get a moment’s sleep if she stayed here.
Returning to the bathroom, she did a quick job of blow drying her hair. Then she looked around the bedroom, wishing that her gun hadn’t disappeared. Finally she unplugged the cut-glass lamp on the bedside table and removed the silk shade. Clutching the cylindrical base in her hand, she tiptoed to the door and listened. When she heard nothing, she cautiously turned the lock and looked out into the hall.
Torn between feeling foolish and needing to feel safe, she left the bedroom, closed the door and stood in the hall, trying to decide where to go.
An image came to her. An image of Troy’s room. Nola had given her a direct order to stay away from there. Which meant getting caught disobeying instructions would put her in jeopardy.
Yet once the idea took hold, she simply couldn’t dislodge it from her mind. It was almost as if Troy was talking to her inside her head, compelling her to come to him. Telling her she’d be safe in his bed.
Returning briefly to the room she’d just left, she grabbed the lock-picking kit. Then she tiptoed quietly along the hallway to the back stairs. On the landing at the top she waited for several minutes, making sure that no one else was up here walking around.
Then she hurried down the hall to Troy’s room. When she tried the knob, she found the door was unlocked.
The only explanation that made sense was that Troy had opened the door for her. Because he wanted her to come here. Because he wanted to keep her safe.
She kept that idea centered in her mind as she stepped inside and locked the door behind her before dragging over a straight chair. Tipping it up, she wedged the top rung under the knob. If someone wanted to come in, she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
She could be locking Troy out, of course. But somehow she didn’t think that was going to be the case.
