Chill of Fear (15 page)

She sighed. "I'll check with the owners, but under the circumstances, I'm sure they'll okay it."

"Thank you." He got to his feet and was on the point of leaving her small office when he found himself hesitating. "Stephanie, I know this is not what you signed on for, and I'm sorry it's happening on your watch."

She smiled slightly. "Don't worry about me, Nate. I'm an army brat. We learn early to cope with the unexpected."

Nate was tempted, but in the end decided not to ask her if the unexpected included the paranormal.

He'd find out the answer to that soon enough. They both would.

"You don't understand." Diana's voice was rock-steady in a way that only those holding on to control with teeth and fingernails could manage. "I talked to him. I took his hand and—and it was warm and solid. Flesh and blood. He wasn't cold, or wispy, or any of the things a ghost is supposed to be."

Quentin stirred an extra spoonful of sugar into the tea and then put the cup into her hands. "Drink this."

She stared at the cup for a moment, then looked around her, frowning. The sitting room was surprisingly large and comfortable, occupying part of an open space that also included the kitchenette and a small dining table.

Both the big sofa and the oversized chair in which she sat were plushly comfortable, and were grouped along with a large, square coffee table around a gas fireplace with a plasma TV placed above the mantel.

"We're in my cottage."

"Yes. It was closest. Drink the tea, Diana."

"How long have we been here? Oh, Christ, I didn't black out, did I?"

Which, Quentin thought, answered at least one of Bishop's questions.

"Not as far as I could see," he said matter-of-factly. "But you're in shock, and no wonder. I'm told it takes quite a while for a medium to adjust."

"I'm not a medium." But for the first time, her protest was more defiant than certain.

Again keeping his tone prosaic even though what he was saying certainly wasn't, Quentin said, "You met and talked to Jeremy Grant, and he's been dead for ten years. Either you're a medium, or else you imagined the whole thing. I know damned well you didn't imagine it, at least partly because there's no way you could have known whose grave you had found."

"A hallucination—"

"Probably wouldn't have given you his name, don't you think? Not the correct name, at any rate."

She stared at him.

"Drink the tea, Diana."

After a moment, she took a sip of the steaming liquid and grimaced, either because it was so hot or because it was so sweet. "I... don't remember coming here," she said finally.

"Shock, like I said. After you told me you'd talked to Jeremy, you didn't say anything else. It seemed to me the best idea would be to get you inside and give you a little time to come to terms with all this."

"I'm sure that cop had questions."

"Oh, he has plenty."

"Then—?"

"He'll talk to you tomorrow. He and his people will be talking to everybody tomorrow. Or at least everybody who was here or might know something about what happened to Jeremy Grant ten years ago."

"I don't know anything about that."

"He didn't happen to mention how he died, huh?"

She stared at him wonderingly. "No."

"Yeah, they never do. My boss says it's the universe reminding us that nothing is ever easy." He took a sip of the coffee he had ordered for himself, and added, "I think it sucks, though, frankly. I mean, you have this cool—and scary—ability to communicate with the dead, and they seldom tell you anything you couldn't figure out for yourself."

Diana cleared her throat. "It doesn't seem...quite fair," she agreed.

"No. It's like most psychic abilities. They come along with limitations, just as the other five senses do.

Mine, for instance, never work when I need them to. I can't look into the future and see who's going to win the World Series this year, or if it's going to rain tomorrow, or even whether I'll be able to solve whatever case I'm working on at any given time. Hell, I can't even reliably predict the turn of a card. In fact, using tests developed years ago to measure psychic ability, I score below average."

Intent now, she said, "And yet you're psychic."

"And yet," he agreed. "Sometimes I just know things. They don't appear in my mind in neon, and I don't get visions. Sometimes I hear a faint whisper, as though someone is telling me something. Other times I just... know."

"And you really believe that?"

Quentin smiled at her. "Of course. I've seen and experienced too much in the last twenty-five years not to."

"Twenty-five years. Since Missy died?"

He nodded.

"You weren't psychic before then?"

"I wasn't born an active psychic, no." He shrugged, keeping it as matter-of-fact as he could. "One theory is that most if not all humans have latent psychic abilities, unawakened senses, maybe left over from more primitive times when we needed that edge just to survive. It could be something we're evolving away from, since our survival as a species doesn't seem to depend on it."

"Is that what you think?"

"Not really. I think it's more likely that we're evolving toward the ability to more effectively use our brains. Maybe because of the increased levels of electromagnetic energy in the modern world. That's a viable theory."

Diana nodded slowly. "Sounds like it."

"Sure, it makes sense. Anyway, for most people, whatever extra latent senses they possess remain dormant, inactive. But for some of us, there's a trigger, usually early in life. An event of some kind that creates just the right electromagnetic spark in our brains to activate what lies dormant."

"What sort of event?" she asked.

"Traumatic, usually. Physically, a severe injury or blow to the head. An actual electrical jolt. Or some kind of emotional or psychological shock."

"Which was it for you?"

"The latter."

"Missy's murder?"

"Only partly." He drew a breath, still finding it difficult to talk about even after all these years. "The real shock came when I was the one to find her body."

Diana leaned forward and carefully set her cup on the coffee table. "You... never told me just how she died." "She was strangled." Quentin paused, then forced himself to go on, holding his voice steady. "I found her in what's now the Zen Garden, ironically. The little stream there was natural to the area, and we played there quite a bit." "Were you looking for her?"

"Yeah. It was past suppertime, and she hadn't met the rest of us on the veranda as usual so we could eat together. It wasn't like her to just not show up, and it worried me. I kept thinking about how afraid she'd seemed earlier that day, for at least a couple of days, about how she'd tried to tell me what scared her." "What had she said?" "Nothing that made any sense to me. She said that she heard things, especially at night. And that... there was something else inside her sometimes."

"Something else?"

"That's the way she put it, something else. There was something inside her sometimes, and it made a sound like her own heartbeat."

Diana frowned slightly. "Does that make sense to you now?"

"Have you ever heard in your mind something that sounded like your own heart beating, Diana?"

Instead of answering that directly, she said, "You think Missy might have been psychic? A medium?"

"Have you?"

She shook her head. "No. I've... heard a lot of things inside my own mind, but never anything that sounded like a heartbeat. At least, not that I remember."

It was Quentin's turn to frown. "Still, that doesn't mean she wasn't psychic. It would explain why she was hearing things that frightened her."

Diana hesitated, then said, "Somebody killed her, Quentin. Somebody real. It's pretty obvious she had good reason to be afraid."

"You don't have to remind me of that."

"What I mean is... if you've been looking for a paranormal explanation all this time—"

"That's why I was never able to solve her murder?" He shook his head. "I'm a cop, Diana. Psychic or not, the first thing we're taught to look for is the reasonable, rational, likely explanation. Because, more often than not, that's what we're going to find."

"It wasn't there, in this case?"

"The cops who investigated the case twenty-five years ago never even had a decent suspect. I've gone over all the reports on their investigation, and conducted my own investigation for years, however unofficially. Even interviewed dozens of people who were here or in the area at the time. And I have nothing new to show for it."

He drew a breath and let it out slowly. "Missy was strangled with a piece of twine from a bale of hay that had come from a field just yards away from where her body was found. A field filled with freshly baled hay. All that tells me as a cop, all it would tell any cop, is that the murder weapon was near to hand and convenient, which most likely means the murder itself was impulsive or opportunistic rather than planned. Something triggered his rage or his need, and he used the first weapon he could reach to kill her."

"He?"

"Odds are, the killer was—is—male. Women virtually never kill children unrelated to them, and Missy's only relation here, her mother, was helping in the kitchen for hours that day, reportedly under observation by a dozen other people the whole time. Beyond that, nothing at the scene offered any indication of who killed Missy or why."

Diana frowned and, not even sure where the question came from, asked, "Why did he even need the twine? I mean... she was just a little girl. Wouldn't it have made more sense if he had used his hands?"

Quentin nodded slightly. "An educated guess is that she was probably strangled from behind with that twine because he didn't want her to see him, or else didn't want to look into her face as she died."

"Why?"

"Maybe because watching her die would have meant he'd have to admit to himself that he was a killer."

"How could he delude himself that he wasn't?"

"Easily. People do it all the time, you know that. Delude ourselves. Mostly in minor things. We delude ourselves into believing that we won't be one of the ones let go when our company starts layoffs. That our favorite sports team has a shot at a championship. That we really can afford that shiny new car calling out to us from the lot."

"All of which is a long way from denying you're a killer when you're choking the life out of someone,"

Diana pointed out.

"Yeah, it's a leap. But I believe by the time he picked up that twine and wrapped it around her neck, this killer had gradually reached that point. It may have taken him years to get there, but he had. Possibly for the first time. By then, by that day, he could kill, but didn't view himself as a killer."

Quentin had seemingly been cool and clinical up to that point, but the detachment left when he continued, his voice going quiet and a little rough. "Whatever happened out there, whatever triggered it, he killed Missy. She was left in that stream, her body wedged in among the rocks, the twine still wrapped around her neck."

He paused, then added softly, "Her eyes were open. When I first saw her, she seemed to be looking right at me. Pleading with me. As if I could help her. As if I should have."

"Quentin—"

"By then, she'd become the little sister I'd never had. Someone I couldn't imagine my life without. And I stood there, frozen, staring into her eyes, knowing that I had failed her. As a brother. As a friend. I hadn't listened to her. I hadn't protected her. I hadn't helped her. I hadn't saved her. It was... it felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. Everything around me faded, grew dark, until all I could see was her.

Her eyes. That pale, pale face. And the twine wrapped around her neck, cutting into her skin. Such a strangely small, ordinary thing to have snuffed out a life. To have stopped a smile and silenced a laugh forever. Just twine. Just twine from a bale of hay."

Diana wasn't entirely sure she wanted to hear any of this, yet at the same time she couldn't remember ever feeling so focused, so clear-minded. There were no scattered thoughts, no random flashes of information, no whispers in her head. There wasn't even the earlier shock and fear at the certain knowledge that she had on this day spoken casually with a ghost.

There was only this man and his low, hurting voice, painting for her a horrific, tragic image she could see so clearly it was as though she had stood there herself and seen that murdered little girl.

Her long, dark hair moving in the water as though it and she were still alive, big dark eyes open, staring up...

"It wasn't a...sexual crime," Quentin continued, obviously with difficulty. "At least, that was the official conclusion, and I haven't found any evidence to believe otherwise. She was fully dressed, and no bodily fluids were found on or near her, though being submerged in water means we can't be certain there wasn't something on her clothing or body that was washed away. There were no bruises, no signs of trauma other than what had killed her. No defensive injuries. They scraped under her fingernails, took clippings. But there was nothing, no evidence to help identify her killer.