“I didn’t—I wasn’t ….” Her voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry for that,” he said. His eyes slid over her, as sure and heavy as if he touched her with his hands. “I’m not.”
“Ethan,” she said, struggling to keep her composure. “I didn’t mean—I mean, this doesn’t mean anything. Jonathan is still—” She crossed her arms over her middle as a shield against him. “Everything was innocent until … you ….” Her voice trailed off. Her lips were still throbbing, and there were other areas of her body that were pulsing as well. “I think you’d better go.”
He gave her one last steady look, then a curt nod. “All right. Good night, Diana.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Diana glanced at the shiny black phone as she stirred the pasta she was making for dinner. It had been silent all day—the first time, she realized, since she’d come to Damariscotta just over a week ago.
No, she hadn’t expected Ethan to call. He wouldn’t. He’d just come over, and walk right into the house.
Not that he had any reason to do so. She reached up to touch her lips more than once, remembering that long, hot kiss. No, he didn’t have any reason to come here. Not while she was still tied up with Jonathan. And even if she wasn’t.
It was a kiss. One, simple, hot, crazy kiss.
Jonathan hadn’t called since Ethan answered the phone late last night … and she wasn’t certain how she felt about that. She wasn’t certain how she felt about anything regarding Jonathan anymore. Hard to believe that a month ago, she was deliriously happy that she’d found a man to marry her—something her mother had despaired of ever happening, something that Diana herself had wondered about. Which was why she’d thrown herself so firmly into building her practice.
But now, she realized, she was rather enjoying her life without Jonathan in it. She hadn’t missed him at all.
After working on the Desai case in the morning, Diana tackled more of the den in the afternoon as a way to distract herself from … things. She found a stack of Aunt Belinda’s private journals during her bout of cleaning—as well as some curious information.
She’d been going through the bills to find the most pressing ones and found several statements for medical services. The odd thing was that none of them were for visits to Marc Reardon—they were all with a general practice physician fifty miles away, in Portland.
Diana recognized the procedure codes as ones for office visits and some general testing—blood work, a stress test, cholesterol screening and a hearing exam. Upon closer examination, she saw that they were dated over the last six months. Then, she found two more statements for recent physician visits with Marc Reardon. It seemed as if Belinda was being treated by two different physicians, making the drive to one fifty miles away for the same tests and consults she was having with Reardon. Second opinions were normal, but generally those were with specialists, not a general practitioner like Reardon.
As she made dinner later that evening, Diana mulled over those medical statements as well as her time frame for returning to Boston. Despite what she’d told Jonathan last night, she hadn’t made a decision about when she’d return.
She’d been telling herself she was preparing the house to be sold, but in the back of her mind, something bothered her about that plan. If she sold, she’d feel a little like she was betraying Aunt Belinda. But what in the world would she do with an old house in the middle of Maine?
A house on the lake and you wonder what to do with it? Her own thoughts surprised Diana and she stopped dead in the kitchen, holding her plate of pasta in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She would never have thought it of herself, but the time away from the crazy stresses of her professional and social life back home was a welcome change. Despite the odd things that had been happening, she was actually enjoying the opportunity to relax and be carefree.
The thought struck her suddenly: The Fool.
Hadn’t that been the first card she’d seen from the Tarot deck? And hadn’t her first thought been that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt as carefree as the Fool seemed?
A shiver ran across the back of her shoulders and the hair on the nape of her neck prickled. She placed her dinner on the table and contemplated the absurd, ludicrous, impossible thought that the card—which had fallen randomly from the deck—had a pointed meaning in her life.
The second, and most insistent “random” card had been The High Priestess.
“Look beyond the obvious,” Ethan had said it meant. “Open your mind ….” And that card, Diana reminded herself as the queer feeling rumbling in her stomach became more insistent, had turned up five times.
Five times. For that to be mere coincidence stretched even the boundaries of Diana’s pragmatic mind.
Don’t sell the house, she thought suddenly. It would make a nice retreat. It’s not that far from Boston—only a few hours, and it would be nice to have a place to take the kids—
Whoa! She tried to stop the thought, but it roared in from nowhere and would not be ignored.
She slid into her chair at the table and looked unseeingly at her plate of food. Two children, she thought—maybe three … and suddenly, a picture, as clear and tangible as a photograph, flashed into her mind: two small dark-haired boys and toddling little girl chasing a big, dark dog, and Diana herself laughing at them, joining the chase over an expanse of green grass….
She shook her head with violence, dismantling the vision and refocusing on her dinner … but the pain had already started to throb behind her eyes.
“No,” she moaned, concentrating, concentrating so hard on wrapping fettuccine around her fork. But it was too late. Though she forced herself to eat some of her dinner, the migraine had settled in her head with a vengeance.
~*~
When Diana opened her eyes after the storm of pain, she found herself lying on the settee. Blinking, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them again, she struggled to sit up.
It was dark outside and she could hear the chirping crickets and the faint cry of a loon. The house was in darkness, and there wasn’t enough moon to shine through the windows.
Nervousness clutched her middle as she swung her feet off the couch and fumbled for the switch of the lamp on the piecrust table. It took a moment, but she found the chain and yanked, and a soft glow broke the darkness.
“Motto?” she called, suddenly wanting to know that she wasn’t completely alone. “Arty? Here kitty!” This time, her falsetto wavered and cracked.
Silence hung over the house like a pall, and Diana stood, wondering why her mouth was so dry. She’d taken two steps toward the kitchen when the phone rang.
Her heart jumped into her throat at the sudden noise, and she hurried to answer the ugly black phone, just to hear another human’s voice. “Hello?” She picked it up, interrupting the second shrill ring.
Silence.
“Hello?” she said again, hating that her voice sounded desperate.
More silence.
“Is anyone there?” she tried again.
Suddenly, the dial tone blared rudely into her ear.
Her fingers were shaking when she let the receiver drop onto its cradle, and Diana had to swallow back a moan of fear. She ran to the front door and checked the lock, which was bolted firmly. All the windows were locked, upstairs and down, and the back door as well.
Diana turned on lights as she went, wanting the house to be a bright talisman against the night and against the ugliness of the voice out there. The remains of her uneaten dinner sat innocently in the kitchen, but all vestiges of hunger had disappeared.
Looking at the phone, she debated calling Joe Cap to report the incident, but decided it could wait until morning when she took the cats to the vet. It’s just a prank call. Some kids fooling around.
But someone broke into your house.
But they can’t get in. I’m locked up tightly. And I have Uncle Tracer’s gun.
Speaking of whi
ch … she went back to the den to get the rifle and turn off the lights. The sight of the settee reminded her of her earlier migraine. It had been the strongest one she could ever remember having, and it had obviously put her out of commission for hours.
A shiver jolted through her and queasiness started in her stomach. The image that flashed through her mind just before the onset of the headache—the vision of herself chasing three children and a big dog—flashed back. A big dog? She didn’t even like dogs. And she was afraid of the big ones.
She reached to pull the chain and turn off the light, but her attention was caught by the mahogany box and the small collection of books she’d placed next to it: Aunt Belinda’s journals.
Almost before she realized it, Diana had picked up one of the books and began to leaf through the pages from twenty years earlier. From when she’d been much younger, and so had Aunt Bee.
And she began to read.
Much later, Diana set the battered, leather-bound book down, her heart lodged painfully in her throat. She felt light-headed and queasy. The hair on her nape prickled, and blood hummed in her head. It can’t be, she thought frantically. This is too weird!
For once, Motto seemed to have found her presence acceptable, and he was curled up into a corner of the settee. Diana reached blindly for the cat, picking up ten pounds of dead weight and burying her chin in the fur. She stared across the room, seeing but not really seeing the stacks of papers and books, ignoring Motto’s low, throat-growls.
When the snobbish feline decided her presence was no longer necessary, she struggled out of Diana’s arms. The warmth that had been the bundle of cat left Diana, and she felt chilly, and lonely. She picked up the journal again, forcing herself to read the entry that had stopped her world.
“July 23, 1989. Diana has the Gift! Praise God, it is true without a shadow of a doubt! Little James Bettinger and his mama Rose were over, and the two children were playing with blowing soap bubbles.
Diana scampered up to me, cute as could be, and said, “Aunt Belinda, I know when Uncle Tracer is going to die. I saw it in a bubble.” I looked at her, surprised, and asked, “What did you see?” “I saw his gravestone and it said January 16, 1992.”
Before I could say another word, she ran off to blow more bubbles! My heart did not stop pounding for hours after—to have such a Gift! It seemed effortless for her. And my poor Tracer… I cannot hope but that she is wrong, but for her to see it with such clarity… .
Well, I cannot write of my grief for his loss before it should happen, but I thank God that I have had this moment of foresight. At least I will have the chance to make our next two and half years together as wonderful as they may be… and should Diana be wrong, well, then I’ll be a relieved and happy woman on January 17, 1992. I shall write more on this later.”
Diana closed the journal, keeping her forefinger as a bookmark. Tears welled in her eyes. Thanks to Victoria, she’d learned long after the fact that Uncle Tracer had succumbed to cancer’s death grip on that date in 1992. But more importantly, she didn’t remember telling her aunt what she had seen in a bubble years earlier, at the age of ten.
“I couldn’t have known that,” she said aloud to Arty, who was just poking his salmon-colored nose around the corner of the desk. “Could she have been mistaken? Could she have misunderstood me?” The cat shot across the room, pouncing on Motto, ignoring Diana’s question.
She opened the journal again. Perhaps if she read further, she’d find an explanation for this unsettling entry.
The next few days’ entries were mundane, mentioning the things Diana had done with Aunt Belinda during that first summer’s visit—fishing, weeding the garden, swimming—as well as a few readings she had done using her Tarot cards. These last items were interesting enough—especially one entry which read:
“July 30, 1989. I had an odd vision today when I was doing a quick spread of cards. I saw a large explosion in my mind, near a big body of water. I had posed the question ‘What will happen today?’ as an experiment, and kept my mind blank.
After I laid out the cards, and I spent a moment concentrating, the explosion happened as if I were watching it on TV. It was a large building, perhaps a factory or a warehouse, and it was on a shoreline. There were other buildings next to it. I don’t know what it meant, or where it was, or even if it really happened.
And then, the entry for the following day:
“July 31, 1989. I was reading the New York Times today and saw mention of a large warehouse having burned down yesterday. I immediately thought of my vision—could that have been what I saw during that spread? It was near the docks, so the article said. I’ll never know for certain, I suppose, but it may be true.
There was little mention of Diana herself in the ensuing entries—little but passing references to what they had done on a given day—and certainly no further comment about her “Gift”.
As Diana read on, she found that Aunt Belinda learned that when she did a Tarot spread to answer the question “What will happen today?” she would often see a vision or get the impression of something that had actually happened. Aunt Belinda learned to scour the newspaper, looking for reference to her vision—and when she didn’t find an answer in the New York Times or the Boston Globe, she began to increase her subscriptions to periodicals from all over the country. There seemed to be no particular geographic location or type of event that figured in the spread of cards.
That explains the piles of newspapers, and the circled articles, Diana thought, glancing at the papers stacked against the far wall of the den.
She read on, covering several years, where Aunt Belinda’s journal entries had become sparse.
At last, she came to another entry, this written in the angry scrawl of an unhappy person.
“August 14, 1991. Victoria is being ridiculous! After three years, I finally told her about Diana’s Gift and she told me that it was absurd and made me promise not to speak of it to her daughter again! She refused to listen to anything I had to say—she refused to even allow me to tell her about Diana’s prediction of Tracer’s death and about the car accident in Dublin.
‘I want your promise that you won’t show her those cards of yours anymore,’ she said, ‘and don’t even speak of fortune telling in her presence! I don’t want her to grow up like some kind of gypsy who thinks she can make a living reading crystal balls!’ Fortune-telling! I have never been so insulted—and so hurt!—in all my life! Is that what Geoffrey’s wife thinks of me? That I spend my time reading crystal balls in a dingy tent at county fairs? Or that I do séances in my office? I wish there was a way for her to understand that I did not ask for this Gift, nor did I even want it at first… but now I’ve come to respect it and have learned that I should thank the Lord for it.
“Tomorrow, Victoria is taking Diana home, and the last thing she said before she went up to bed was, ‘If you don’t promise not to speak of this again, I’ll not have her visit you again! I’ll find someone else to take her during the summer!’”
So that was the reason Diana hadn’t come back to visit Aunt Belinda the following summer, when she was fourteen. That would have been after Uncle Tracer died, after Diana’s prediction had come true.
Impossible. I couldn’t have known that.
She pulled abruptly to her feet, trying to shake off the unsettling feeling that her aunt was either delusional or that she, Diana, had at one time predicted her great-uncle’s death. A violent shiver overtook her limbs, then coiled around and around to settle, sharp and hard, in her belly in the form of queasiness. She felt light-headed, as though a chill wind was bearing down on the nape of her neck.
It can’t be true, she told herself over and over—repeating the mantra as she made her way from the den and its eeriness to her bedroom. Even if at one time I did predict Uncle Tracer’s death—it could have been a guess, or a coincidence even, but even if I did predict it, I don’t have the ability any longer. I haven’t seen any visions in bubbles, or puddles
of water, or mirrors—or crystal balls, for that matter—since then. It must have been a fluke.
Diana pulled on her nightshirt and walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She went through the motions automatically, in a fog, trying to banish the unsettling thoughts. How could it be?
As she returned to her room, still unable to escape her horrified thoughts, the answer came … and suddenly all of the tension drained out of her.
Aunt Belinda! It was Aunt Belinda who’d had the prediction of Uncle Tracer’s death—and because it was so traumatic for her, she somehow projected it upon Diana.
A relieved smile curved her face as she once more crawled into bed. That explained everything—why Diana had never had a vision or image since then, and why she didn’t remember telling her aunt about the prediction. That was because she’d never had it!
Diana drew in a deep breath and let it out in a welcome, soothing sigh. That explained it all. She wasn’t crazy, there was nothing going on with her mind that she couldn’t control—she wasn’t making predictions about people dying.
The Cards of Life and Death (Modern Gothic Romance 2) Page 14
