Deadly Visions (Nightmare Hall) (11 page)

They passed it from hand to hand, each of them studying the watercolor carefully, looking for some hint of what the message on the purse had threatened.

No one but her saw anything.

It doesn’t matter, Rachel thought dispiritedly as she retrieved the painting from a bewildered Aidan. The hidden images weren’t meant for any of them, anyway. They were meant for only one person. Me. And
I
see them.

The artist had accomplished what every artist wanted more than anything. He had achieved his goal in painting the watercolor. He had sent a message, and the message had been received.

The message was: Rachel Seaver, you are going to die.

“T
HAT LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING
you’d do, Sam,” Joseph said to Samantha; pointing at the water-color in Rachel’s trembling hands. “It’s got your touch. All those dull, weak pastels. And it
is
a watercolor, your specialty.”

“Who are you kidding, Joseph?” Samantha said, leaning over Rachel to study the small painting. “You’ve never paid enough attention to my work to have any idea where my real talent lies.”

“What talent?” Joseph murmured.

Rachel hurt for Samantha, although Sam herself seemed unperturbed by Joseph’s comment. She never even glanced at him. “Everyone’s a critic,” she said dryly, and then tapped a finger on the watercolor and said to Rachel, “It’s just a painting, Rachel. It can’t hurt you. But I don’t blame you for being upset about the calendar. That’s pretty creepy.”

“And Joseph’s right,” Paloma said, “that page is from the calendar in the lobby of the art building.”

“Which means,” Aidan pointed out, “that any one of hundreds of people who viewed the exhibit could have helped himself to that page. No one would have noticed someone pocketing a calendar page.”

Rachel wasn’t listening. She was staring at the painting. Flowers … so many flowers … like at a funeral.

YOU WILL NEVER SEE ANOTHER MONDAY.

Who had stolen her purse? Kicked those boxes out from under her? Locked that closet door?

Rachel felt as if her brain was rapidly disintegrating. What was left of it remembered that she had put something in her purse before she’d climbed up on those boxes. What was it? What had she confiscated?

Oh. A smock. Aidan’s smock. Because of … because of the paint stains, the colors.

She slid her hand into the purse again, fumbling around, even though she was certain now that she wouldn’t find what she was seeking.

Because it wasn’t there.

Aidan’s smock was gone.

She glanced up at him, her heart denying what her brain was thinking. The truth was, Aidan could have painted this simple water-color with one hand tied behind his back. And only Aidan would have any reason to remove that smock, with its telltale paint blobs, from her purse.

“What’s the matter?” he asked when he noticed that she was staring at him. “Why do I all of a sudden feel like I have two heads?”

Rachel’s silence gave her away.

Aidan’s eyes narrowed. He said quietly, intensely, “You just put me on your list of suspects, didn’t you? You think I sent you that calendar page? Why would you think that, Rachel?”

“I never said I thought that, Aidan.” Then, boldly, “I mean, there isn’t any reason why you
would,
is there?”

Aidan looked as if she’d slapped him.

“Rachel!” Paloma gasped, clearly shocked. “How could you suspect Aidan?”

Samantha, however, said nothing, which Rachel found interesting. If anyone were going to rush to Aidan’s defense, she would have expected it to be Sam. They seemed to be such close friends. Maybe Sam knew something about Aidan that no one else did.

“I would just like to remind you,” Aidan said icily, “that while you were
supposedly
trapped in that supply closet, I was downstairs in the lobby making small talk about art with two professors and a teaching assistant. If you’d like to check with them, I’d be happy to give you their names.”

But Rachel didn’t feel like backing down. Hadn’t she dreamed about someone being suffocated with a death mask? Aidan made those masks. Others did, too, but he was the best at it. Maybe that particular nightmare had been her subconscious, warning her not to trust him. And as far as Aidan’s alibi went, he could have slipped away from the lobby conversation just long enough to take the elevator upstairs, grab her purse, and lock her in the closet. He could have been back downstairs before anyone even noticed he was missing.

Everyone was staring at her.

Rachel didn’t want to think these things about Aidan. If she could be that wrong about someone she was attracted to, that made her too stupid to live. Also, she was
still
attracted to him, and already sorry that she’d hurt his feelings.

“Look,” she said, laying the purse aside, “I’m sorry, Aidan. I didn’t mean that. But you don’t know what it was like, any of you. You don’t even seem to believe that it all happened the way I said it did. Being trapped in that awful place, thinking I’d never get out, and then that horrible ride down in the dumbwaiter. I’ve never been so scared in my life. And now
this,
” holding up the calendar page. “So don’t expect me to act rationally, because I don’t think I can, okay? I’m shaking inside.”

“Well, I believe you,” Bibi said, taking the watercolor and the calendar page from Rachel. “We need to take these to the security office. But for now, you need to go out and do something to take your mind off all this. I’ll put these things in your top drawer.”

“We have to take some stuff from the show to the mall,” Sam said. “Rachel, come with us. You can’t stay here alone.”

“And I won’t be here.” Bibi picked up her own purse. “I promised Rudy I’d help him take a load of paintings to the mall.”

Rachel didn’t want to go to the mall. She didn’t want to go anywhere. But if Bibi wasn’t going to be here, neither was Rachel. The purse had been delivered to her room. Maybe the mystery artist was lurking outside in the hall at that very moment, chuckling gleefully over her imagined reaction to his “gift.”

Bibi turned to the others, asking, “How about it? A trip to the mall will do Rachel good. Help her forget about all this stuff. You know what they say: When the going gets tough …”

“The tough go shopping,” Sam finished, laughing. Just as quickly, she sobered. “This is more than tough going, what’s happening to Rachel. This is very scary stuff. But,” she went on more cheerfully, “it’s probably just a joke, anyway, Rachel. Someone playing games.”

Rachel didn’t know if anyone else in the room believed that, but she certainly didn’t. Not for a second.

But she got up and grabbed a jacket from the closet.

Aidan shrugged and nodded.

“We’ll have to be back by six to clean up after the exhibit,” Joseph reminded all of them. “But I guess a quick trip to the mall isn’t such a bad idea. And if we take a few of the paintings now, we won’t have so much to take later. I’ll miss seeing new viewers
ooh
and
aah
over my work, but I’ve had so much of that already. I wouldn’t want to get a swelled head.”

“Too late,” Samantha quipped. “Rachel, you ready?”

“Yes,” Rachel said, pulling on her jacket and following the others out of her room.

T
HERE WERE STILL SPECTATORS
viewing the exhibit when Rachel and her friends arrived, but Paloma suggested they take the first group of jewelry she had had on display, and half a dozen paintings that the artists had replaced with new ones for the last and most important day of the showing.

Joseph drove to the mall. Samantha shared the front seat with him, a group of canvases at her feet, while Rachel found herself sandwiched into the backseat between Paloma and Aidan. Bibi had decided to stay behind to help Rudy begin the cleanup.

Paloma carried her jewelry in a white shoe-box on her knees. “Mr. Stein at the jewelry store in the mall wants to see my best pieces,” she said happily. “I figure, if those sell, and I start getting a name for myself, then I won’t have any trouble selling the pieces that aren’t quite as good.”

“You don’t
have
any pieces that aren’t quite as good,” Joseph said generously. “Everything I’ve ever seen of yours has been perfect.

“You’ve never once messed up, the way I did in my pathetic attempts at creating life masks.”

“How unlike you, Joseph,” Samantha said drily. “That is the first and only time I have ever heard you pay another artist a compliment.”

“Well, if you’d paint something besides those watercolors that look like they were left out in the rain,” Joseph replied, “I’d compliment you, too.”

“They’re
supposed
to look like they were left out in the rain,” Samantha countered.

“Sam, you haven’t really discovered the power of painting until you’ve worked in oils,” Joseph insisted.

Rachel stopped listening. Being in the car with people who were talking casually about art seemed surreal to her. Her life had been threatened, and yet here they were, talking about Samantha’s watercolors and Paloma’s jewelry. How could they? Why weren’t they all discussing how she might protect herself, how she might escape from this horrible nightmare that was holding her in its grip, how she might live to see Monday?

Maybe they thought she didn’t want to talk about it. She certainly hadn’t been all that talkative back in the room. But that had been because she hadn’t been sure they’d take her seriously. They didn’t seem to be grasping the truth. One person had died, another had been seriously injured and was still unconscious, and more important, someone had connected those events to
her.

She had no idea why. She hadn’t known Ted that well, or Milo, either. And no one knew she’d had the dreams.

How could she blame her friends for not grasping what was going on? They hadn’t seen what she’d seen in the paintings, and they hadn’t had the nightmares.

But what
did
they think was going on? Did they really believe that Ted’s death and Milo’s fall had been accidental, that her entrapment in the storage closet had been a fluke of some kind?

Joseph and Samantha were still discussing art when Aidan took a corner too fast. The shoebox on Paloma’s lap slipped off her knees and slid to the floor, the lid flopping off as it landed. Jewelry spilled out across Paloma’s black, high-button shoes.

Rachel bent to help pile the pieces back inside their container.

When she saw the bracelet, she thought at first that she was imagining it. She closed her eyes, shook her head to clear her vision, but when she opened her eyes again, the bracelet was still lying in the palm of her hand, and there was no mistaking its design.

It was a simple gold chain from which dangled half a dozen tiny brass monkeys.

Rachel looked at it more closely. Two of the monkeys had their tiny paws over their mouths. Two were covering their eyes, and two more were shielding their ears from sound. The first one was identical to the monkey she had found lying on her pillow.

“Paloma?” Rachel said softly. “Did you make this bracelet?”

Paloma, busy scooping jewelry off the floor of the car and back into its shoebox, glanced up to see which piece Rachel was asking her about. She nodded. “Yeah, I did. Like it?”

“The ‘see-no-evil’ bracelet?” Samantha asked from the front seat. She turned her head toward Rachel. “I have one. I liked Paloma’s so much, I had her make one for me.”

“I already have the monkeys made,” Paloma said to Rachel. “I made a bunch of them at the same time. So putting a bracelet together for you wouldn’t take any time at all. In fact, I keep them in that storage closet you were stuck in. If you’d snooped around at all, you’d have come across them.”

The expression “stuck in” wasn’t lost on Rachel. Paloma hadn’t said “locked in” or “trapped in,” she’d said “stuck in,” as if the door had accidentally, innocently, jammed. As if being trapped there and having to make a dangerous escape by dumbwaiter could have happened to anyone, anytime.

But Rachel was too preoccupied with the shock of seeing the tiny brass monkeys to focus on Paloma’s choice of expression. Unwilling to release the bracelet, Rachel stared down at it, still in the palm of her hand. Paloma and Samantha both owned bracelets like this one? “Have you made more bracelets like this one?”

“Sure.” Paloma covered the shoebox. “Half a dozen or so. Why?”

In a way, Rachel was relieved. When she had first seen the bracelet, her instant reaction had been to suspect Paloma. But if Samantha and half a dozen other people on campus owned similar bracelets, any one of them could have put that monkey on Rachel’s pillow as a warning.

And Paloma had said she kept more of the tiny monkeys in the storage closet. “Do you keep them locked in something?” Rachel asked. “Like a strong box, something with a key?”

Paloma reached up to adjust her black velvet choker. “Locked up? The monkeys? No. Why would I lock them up? They’re just brass, Rachel. They’re not all that valuable.”

That meant that everyone in the art department had access to the charms. Great. The art department had a lot of people in it.

At the mall, while Paloma talked with the jewelry shop manager, Aidan dragged everyone else into a nearby shop called African Safari. It was filled with exotic clothing and accessories, live plants, books, and photographs. On the wall near the door hung a cluster of masks carved of dark wood, the reason for Aidan’s enthusiasm.

The masks were unlike anything Aidan made. The wood was smooth and shiny, the features painted on in vivid colors. Some had hair, some heavy wooden earrings dangling from lobes.

Aidan stretched up his arm to lift two of the more exotic masks off the wall. Holding one up in front of his own face, he thrust the other toward Rachel. “Here, try it on for size. It’ll give me some idea of the dimensions I’ll need when I make your life mask.”

At the words “life mask,” Rachel went deathly white and backed away from Aidan so fast, she stumbled and nearly fell over a display of baskets behind her on the floor.

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” Samantha asked.

And Aidan, still extending the wooden mask, echoed, “Rachel? These things don’t bite. Go ahead, try it on!”