Chill of Fear (34 page)

Becca shook her head. "That's not the way things work here. The door won't be in the same place.

The
place
won't be in the same place."

"I'm not in the mood for riddles, Becca."

The little girl heaved a sigh. "It's not a riddle, it's just the way things
are.
You'll remember if you think about it. You made the door, so you carry it with you. Sort of."

"Then I'll be able to find it if I need to leave in a hurry, won't I?"

"I hope so."

Diana tried to pretend to herself that the little chill she felt was entirely due to the usual coldness of the gray time rather than to the child's obvious doubt.

"Where's Missy?" she asked Becca.

Becca cocked her head to one side, as though listening to some distant sound. "You really shouldn't be here, Diana. Killing Ellie was just the start. It knows about you now. And it wants you."

"Why?" Diana asked, as steadily as she could manage.

"Because you're finding the secrets. You found Jeremy's bones. You found the trap door and the caves. You found the picture of you and Missy."

"But those are just—pieces of the puzzle."

"And you have almost all of them now. You'll be able to help us stop it this time." Her certainty wavered. "I think."

That didn't reassure Diana very much. "Look, Becca, I need to talk to Missy."

"Missy isn't here anymore."

Diana felt a deeper chill. "What do you mean?" "I mean she isn't here. When you opened the door the last time, when she held your hand, she left the gray time and returned with you."

"Why?"

"Something she needs to do, I expect."

Slowly, Diana said, "I didn't see her. When I was back with Quentin, I didn't see her."

"Sometimes, we don't want to be seen, even by mediums. Besides, I expect you were upset.

Remembering about your mama and all."

"You know about that?"

Becca nodded. "Uh-huh. Missy told me."

"Do you know—" Diana steadied her voice. "Do you know why our mother was trapped on this side of the door?"

"That's why you crossed over, isn't it? And why you crossed over all the way, in the flesh. You tried too hard. Because it means so much to you. Because you have to know what happened to your mama."

"Answer me, Becca. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know where she is?"

Becca turned and began walking down the long corridor.

Immediately, Diana followed. "Becca—"

"Don't get too far from the door, Diana."

Diana hesitated, glanced back. But the green door was still there. She continued to follow the little girl.

"I've followed you guides most of my life," she said, not without a touch of bitterness. "Always following, always doing whatever it was you needed me to do. Dammit, this time I need something. Why can't one of you help me for a change?"

"We've been helping you all along, Diana."

"Oh, sure. Leaving me up to my waist in a lake, or driving my father's car down a highway—"

"That wasn't us."

"What do you mean, it wasn't you? I blacked out, and—"

"The drugs were too strong. They pulled you back before you were supposed to go."

Diana didn't find that terribly reassuring. "So just because I came out of most blackouts safe at home doesn't mean that's where I was the whole time, I gather?"

"Well, it's very helpful for us to have someone who can cross over in the flesh," Becca said. "Most mediums can barely see or talk to us, much less walk with us."

"Speaking of which," Diana said, "where are we going?" The words were barely out of her mouth when she stopped abruptly, momentarily disoriented, because she and Becca were no longer in the long corridor. Instead, they were standing in the garden outside the conservatory.

They were still in the gray time, which meant the garden was as motionless as a photograph and looked blurred and one-dimensional and colorless, and the landscape's lighting did nothing to change any of that.

Becca, who had also stopped, turned to face her. "Since you're here, we have to take the chance.

There's something you need to see."

"Oh, God, not again." Diana frowned at her. "I told you, I have a question of my own this time."

"Then maybe he can answer it for you."

"He? He, who?"

Becca nodded toward the conservatory. "In there."

Diana would have protested again, but in a blink her child guide was gone, and she found herself alone. "Dammit." With little choice in the matter, she went into the conservatory.

For some reason, she wasn't surprised to see that the artistic workshop had left evidence of its existence on this side of the door.

There were the paintings propped on easels—except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, a forest of them. Diana picked her way through slowly, looking at each in turn, feeling her scalp crawl and tingle unpleasantly.

These weren't the paintings she remembered from the workshop. There had been violence in those, images from troubled minds, but... not like this.

One after another, these images spoke of abject terror. Faces twisted in hideous grimaces. Bodies contorted into violent poses. Explosions destroying. Weapons tearing flesh. Disease, starvation, torture.

And symbolic as well as literal images of fear. Darkness slashed through with lightning bolts. Spiders.

Snakes. Creepy alleyways. Lonely, deserted country roads. A broken window. A fly caught in a web.

Diana paused at last before the painting of an image that was terrifyingly familiar. A dark, dark space, tiny, airless, perhaps a closet. And in the back corner, her arms wrapped tightly around her up-drawn legs, sat a little girl with long dark hair and a tearstained face.

"Amazing how easy it is to identify her, isn't it? That tiny figure in that small, dark corner. She could be anyone. But she could only be Missy."

Diana stepped quickly to the side so that she could see beyond the painting. "You? What the hell are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you," Beau said.

Nate knew he should go home to bed, get a fresh start in the morning—later in the morning—but he also knew he'd be too restless to sleep. There was paperwork awaiting him back at the station, but that held even less appeal, and he wasn't really surprised to find himself just casually wandering past Stephanie's slightly open office door.

She was sitting at her desk, frowning over what he felt was an uncharacteristically untidy jumble of papers spread out on the blotter.

"You're working late," he said from the doorway.

Stephanie looked up with a start, but then smiled. "Not exactly work. Or at least, not work I'm being paid to do. I wanted to keep looking through the old files, see if I could find something useful."

"I could have been anybody, you know," he told her, pushing the door the rest of the way open.

"Sneaking up on you—" He broke off, rather sheepishly, because the door creaked loudly as it opened wide enough to admit him.

Stephanie grinned and moved a stack of papers to reveal a gleaming .45 automatic. "I'm fast, especially with the adrenaline rush. If I hadn't instantly recognized your voice, you would have been looking down the barrel of this before you could get anywhere near the desk."

Nate sat down in her visitor's chair. "Never mind fast—are you any good with that?"

"Yes. And I have a license for it. A license to carry it, for that matter." Soberly, she added, "I think our nighttime security is pretty good, especially with your people patrolling as well, but with a killer here somewhere, I'm taking no chances. Army brat, remember?"

"I remember. And I feel a bit better about you working late alone down here. But only a bit." He paused. "You do realize this killer is likely to be someone you know? Or at least that he'll wear a familiar face?"

"The thought had occurred. In a place like The Lodge, all dressed in its Victorian grandeur, it'd be easy to imagine that only the odd maniac wandering past could possibly have sullied our good name with something as distasteful as murder."

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

Descending to normality, Stephanie said, "Except that this place never really was unsullied, was it?"

"Not according to Quentin."

"And not according to what records I've gone over so far. Did you know that the first death recorded on these grounds happened while the place was being built?"

"Yeah, one of my people found mention of that in a historical database. Not so uncommon around construction sites, especially over a hundred years ago."

"Yeah. But this guy didn't fall from a scaffold or get crushed by falling stone, or anything like that. The local doctor at the time stated in writing that the victim was frightened to death."

"Frightened? Of what?"

"Nobody could say. They came to work early one morning, and there he was, just lying near the foreman's shack. No cuts, no bruises. Place wasn't far enough along to even have security out here, not that they needed much in those days. Bottom line, nobody saw anything."

"Frightened to death. Heart attack?" Nate guessed.

"The doc stated that his heart stopped—but that it wasn't diseased, wasn't enlarged, wasn't any of the things they believed in those days showed signs of trouble. And, apparently, he looked scared out of his mind. His face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror."

Nate was silent, frowning.

"That's not all," Stephanie continued. "Another half dozen men died during the construction of The Lodge and its stables. And all the deaths were...just a little bit strange. Surefooted men falling. Skilled men having accidents with tools. Healthy men getting very sick very suddenly."

"What about after construction?"

"Well, then the records get just a bit murky." She shrugged, frowning a little herself. "I know enough about record-keeping to know that the entries I've found so far concerning illnesses, disappearances, and deaths here were noted with an absolute minimum of detail, almost casually."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that from the get-go, any sort of bad news for The Lodge—especially of the death-on-the-grounds variety—was strongly downplayed."

"Wouldn't that be expected for a hotel?"

"To a certain extent, yeah. But your average hotel, when faced with the disappearance, death, or even murder of one of its guests, would have paperwork up the wazoo. Police reports, security reports, doctors' statements. Every piece of paper that could possibly be required to acquit the hotel and all its employees of any wrongdoing."

"Which The Lodge doesn't have."

"Like I said. If you ask me, somebody very early on made the decision of how bad news was to be handled. And whether it became habit or an ironclad rule, that's how it was done from that point onward."

"No paperwork."

"No paperwork, and only the bare mention of an occurrence. Name, date, not much more. Usually buried in accounts of the day-to-day running of the place."

Nate rested his forearm on her desk, fingers drumming absently. "I know how many deaths and disappearances we're talking about in the last twenty-five years, thanks to Quentin's obsession. What about before that? How many?"

"Oh, jeez, it'll be weeks before I can tell you that. I'm barely up to about 1925."

"Okay. How many up to 1925?"

Stephanie drew a breath. "Counting the deaths during construction, I have reported on the grounds of The Lodge more than a dozen deaths by 1925."

It took a minute, but Nate finally said, "Of those, how many were suspicious?"

"In my opinion? All of them, Nate. All of them."

"Are you dead?" Diana asked incredulously. Beau smiled. "No."

She took a step closer, uncertain. "Are you a medium?" "No." Diana looked around her at the gray easels with their gray canvases daubed and stroked with varying shades of gray paint. She looked at the gray plants here and there in the conservatory, looked down at her own gray self and then up at him.

Gray too. Everything was gray.

"Then I repeat. What the hell are you doing here?"

"I told you. Waiting for you."

"Beau, do you know where we
are?"

"I think you call it the gray time."

"What do you call it?"

He looked around him, as though in mild curiosity, and said, "Your name fits. It's an interesting place.

Or—time."

"Only the dead walk here."

"You walk here."

"I'm a medium." She stopped, startled, and Beau smiled again.

"Is that the first time you've said it?"

"I guess so. First time I meant it, anyway."

"It'll get easier," he told her. "Not so surprising. Even ordinary, after a while."

Diana shook her head. "Never mind that. I don't understand how you're here."

"It's a knack I have. My sister says I'm... very plugged in to the universe."

"Is that supposed to be an explanation?"

"Probably not. Diana, it doesn't really matter how I'm here. All that matters is that you see what I have to show you, and listen to what I have to tell you."

"You sure sound like a guide," she muttered.

"Sorry." He turned, beckoning her to follow, and led the way to the back corner where her easel was set up.

Her easel. Her sketchpad. Her drawing of Missy, there despite the fact that she knew it was in the tote bag in her cottage. But more astonishing, there was a brilliant scarlet slash across the sketch, glistening wetly and, in fact, still dripping onto some rags below the easel.

Scarlet. Not gray.

Like the green door, this was a color she could see.

"Why?" she asked, sure somehow that she wouldn't have to explain her question more fully.

"Signposts," he said. "The gray time has them as well. Things to pay attention to. Things to remember, so you can find your way. Only here they stand out a bit more."

Diana thought about that. "The green door I get; it's the way back. The way out. But this?"

Beau stepped back, gesturing for her to move closer to the easel.

She did so, looking at the sketch that certainly looked like the one she'd drawn. At the scarlet slash across Missy's delicate form. The scarlet that seemed to be... bleeding off the edge of the paper. Almost as if...