Finding Laura (18 page)

“Thanks, but I still say we’re lucky that everybody so far has made a note about what happened to the mirror. I mean, Faith left a will and left the mirror very specifically to her sister. And the sister was a prominent society widow, childless, so there was public note of what happened to her estate.” Dena looked reflective. “But it’s the earlier stuff that got me. Finding that mirror way back in 1800, and then being able to get information on it and the people who’ve owned it was more than lucky. Funny. It’s almost as if …”

“As if?”

“Well, as if you were meant to find out about the mirror.” Then she grinned. “Of course, I’ll deny I said that if the trail ends at this New York auction house.”

Laura smiled. “I have absolute faith in your ability to trace the mirror all the way to 1997 and the Kilbournes’ attic.”

Dena got to her feet with a chuckle. “I’ll do my best. In the meantime, I’ve got to get home and get ready for a
test tomorrow. I’ll be back in touch by the end of the week, I hope.”

“Thanks, Dena.”

“Don’t mention it.”

When she was alone in her apartment, Laura opened the folder and read Dena’s brief report. Again, it was a dry recitation of facts and dates, this time about a young couple with far fewer years together than the first, and with more than their share of bad luck. Then Laura continued through the file to find photocopies of a journal’s pages, and instantly the spidery handwriting leaped out at her.

Then on another page, on another day:

Then, finally:

That last entry was dated 1859, during their first winter together, and someone—apparently the helpful librarian—had noted that it was the final entry of the journal. Either her life had become too busy for the daily discipline of noting the day’s events, or else Faith had simply said all she needed to with that last happy entry. Five years later, almost to the day, she would be dead.

Laura closed the folder and leaned forward to place it on her coffee table. Another couple through whose hands the mirror had passed. Another couple whose love for each other seemed unusually powerful. And so … what? What, if anything, did it mean?

She brooded over it for the rest of the evening while she took care of the usual chores daily living demanded. She stripped her bed and remade it, took a trip down to the laundry room, halfheartedly dusted the living room. She fixed supper for herself and watched a newsmagazine on television, then took what was meant to be a relaxing bath and got ready for bed.

She couldn’t sleep. Her mind was too full of Anne’s bitter anger and Madeline’s overwhelming grief. Too full of questions. Every time she closed her eyes, it was to see those two meetings replayed in her memory, every flicker of expression and nuance of voice incredibly vivid, as if her subconscious had recorded all the details for a reason.

But try as she might, considering those details left Laura no closer to understanding. She had met, today, an angry and bitter woman just past thirty whose sulky manner and discontented expression made her seem far less mature than her years. And she had met a dazed and grieving mother who had clearly worshiped her dead younger son and who seemed oddly apathetic about her older son.

Each woman had said something Laura couldn’t stop
thinking about Anne’s comments about Peter’s “plans” and her contention that he had died because of the way the family did business; and Madeline’s statement that Peter had told her all his secrets. The question was, did either woman know something that might help explain Peter Kilbourne’s murder?

Or was Laura merely looking for complications in what was in essence a very simple, straightforward crime of passion?

W
EDNESDAY WAS
A grim, overcast day, though the rain held off all morning. They were into October now, a month the forecasters were promising would be unusually stormy and unsettled. Laura didn’t know if the weather added to her tension, but by the time she and Amelia had as usual spent the morning alone together and then had joined Josie for lunch, she was more than ready to get out of the house for a while.

Before Amelia could hand her off to Josie, as she had done on both previous days, Laura forestalled her by saying she wanted to spend Amelia’s rest time just walking over the estate by herself. If Amelia didn’t mind, of course.

After an almost imperceptible hesitation, Amelia said, “Why, no, child, of course I don’t mind. But it’s due to start raining any minute now, so don’t get too far from shelter.”

Laura agreed to that and, when Amelia had left the dining room, said to Josie, “I’ve been itching to try the maze.”

Josie smiled quickly, the preoccupation she’d shown during the meal not so obvious now. “I thought you might be. Just remember, there’s no shelter in there until you reach the gazebo. Why don’t you grab an umbrella from the stand at the end of the hall, just in case?”

“Thanks, I will “

“Okay. See you later.”

Laura elected not to take her sketchpad with her, leaving it on a chaise in the conservatory as she passed through on her way outside. The house was very quiet as she left it, and she wondered where everyone was. There hadn’t been a sign of any of the family except Amelia and Josie, and no one else had been mentioned.

The rain was still holding off, so Laura carried her umbrella closed, but the air was damp and the temperature cool enough that she felt a bit chilled even in her lightweight jacket. It was going to rain, she was certain; her left arm was aching dully, something it always did when rain was present or on the way, though she had no idea why. Her mother had called her the family weather forecaster, always far more reliable than those paid to do the job, and had ascribed Laura’s ability to a grandfather who had also been able to predict the weather from the aches in his bones. Laura didn’t really care from whom she had inherited the ability; she just knew it was going to rain, and soon.

She walked quickly along the path to the maze, knowing she’d have only a couple of hours before Amelia would be back downstairs and ready to sit for another sketch; she could no doubt get good and lost in the maze in that length of time.

She encountered no one in the garden, and it was so quiet along the way that she caught herself glancing around a bit uneasily. Not that she was afraid, of course—but it was very quiet. Even the birds seemed subdued. She paused on the hill overlooking the maze and looked down on it for a few moments, not trying to find the key but simply getting the pattern in her mind. Then she continued along the path down the hill to the opening of the maze.

She hadn’t expected it to … loom as it did. The hedges forming the maze were easily eight feet high and
neatly squared off. The graveled path ended at the opening; the roughly three-foot space between the hedges where one walked was grass, so that anyone entering the maze was surrounded by green.

Laura didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, and she thought that was a good thing. There was sufficient light despite the overcast day, but … The leafy walls rose on either side of her, still and a bit damp, the short grass was soft beneath her loafers, it was eerily quiet—and it would have been all too easy to feel a panicked sense of being trapped.

Shaking off the first tendrils of that, Laura concentrated on using her sense of direction to pick her way through the maze. She encountered a dead end within minutes, amused to see that a section of the wall of green blocking her way had been clipped artistically to provide a subtle but skillful likeness of an indolent poodle, so that it seemed to peer out at her from a bank of greenery. Backtracking, she chose another green alley and this time made progress.

For a while, Laura was completely intent on working her way through the maze, amused at dead ends to find other topiaries—all animals and most of them comically rendered. But as she moved deeper into the maze, her sense of isolation grew sharper, and the tendrils of that earlier panic slithered around her. She caught herself looking up often just to assure herself that the leaden gray sky still remained above her, that she was not, in fact, boxed completely in by the leafy walls.

It grew dimmer as the clouds darkened threateningly, and Laura checked her watch uneasily to find she had been in the maze for more than an hour. And she had no idea if she was even near the center. She paused when she was presented with a choice of paths, her sense of direction confused now, and jumped as if she’d been stung when
there was a sudden, eerily silent burst of light almost in her face.

After the first moment of surprise, Laura had to laugh, albeit shakily. Not a
burst
of light, she realized—but light. Cannily hidden within the hedges, evenly spaced lights shone upward, providing illumination without in any way diminishing the mystery of the maze. Obviously, the lights must have been wired to an optical sensor; the darkening of an already overcast day had simply tricked them into their night mode.

The explanation was reasonable, and Laura was momentarily cheered by the lights. But she moved on tentatively, almost wishing she’d left a trail of bread crumbs so that she could find her way back out of this living puzzle; clearly, she was not going to find the center, at least not on this first attempt. And despite Josie’s warning that it had taken her nearly a year of trying before she had found the key, Laura had hoped to be luckier. She was usually good with puzzles.

So now what do I do? Swallow my pride and yell, or just keep wandering around out here until Josie comes to find me?

She wandered a little farther and came upon an intersection—with three possible paths. “Damn,” she muttered.

“Laura?”

His voice sounded so near that she nearly jumped out of her skin a second time, and for an instant she couldn’t reply. Then, clearing her throat, she said, “Daniel?” even though she knew it was him.

“Stay where you are,” he called to her. “I’ll come to you.”

He had been close, because it was only seconds before he appeared around a bend in the right-hand path and approached her. He was wearing dark slacks and a black leather jacket over his open-necked white shirt, his hard face unreadable, and for a moment Laura felt a sudden
urge to run, to get away from him. How long had they both been in the maze, moving in silence as he trod familiar paths and she tried to learn her way? Had he known she was here? Had he followed her?

“He’s a dangerous man, Laura. He’s a very dangerous man.”

Was that it? Did she believe Amelia? Or was it simply that this was too eerie and isolated a place in which to encounter a man who unnerved her? She heard a rumble of thunder as he neared, and it seemed to her that it was abruptly hard to breathe.

His pale eyes narrowed slightly as Daniel reached her, but his low voice was mild and matter-of-fact. “I saw your sketchpad in the conservatory and thought you might have come out here.”

She nodded hesitantly. “I wanted to try my hand at the maze.”

“You’re close to the center. Did you know?”

“No. I was more or less lost,” she confessed.

“It’s a tough maze if you don’t know the key.” He glanced upward at the brooding clouds, and as another rumble of thunder rolled toward them, said, “The sky’s about to open up, I think. The closest shelter is the gazebo. I’ll take you to the center.” He held out his hand to her.

Laura hesitated, but when she met his steady gaze, she realized that he was as conscious of reaching out to her as she was. And that he had done it very deliberately. There was something infinitely patient in the way he waited for her to take his hand, as if he would have stood there all day if that were necessary.

Still holding her umbrella in one hand, she finally lifted her free hand and placed it in his. She thought she was braced for it, but the shock of his flesh touching hers was so powerful it was as if she had touched a live wire. And her involuntary response was the same as if an actual electrical
current had formed its unbreakable connection between them—she couldn’t have pulled away from him even to save her own life.

His long fingers closed around hers in a strong but painless grip, and he smiled very slightly. But all he said was, “This way,” and guided her to turn onto the left-hand path.

Laura didn’t say a word as she walked beside him. The urge to escape him was still very much with her, yet at the same time she felt an odd sense of fatalism, a powerful inner certainty that some things were simply inevitable—and that this meeting was one of them.

I’m losing my mind
, she thought with a touch of desperation.
It’s all that stuff Faith wrote in her journal about her meeting with Stuart, that’s what it is. I’ve let it all go to my head
.

But she hadn’t read Faith’s journal excerpts when she had first met Daniel, and yet she had felt this same aching awareness, this sense of familiarity and the unnerved sensation of being nakedly vulnerable to him. So how could she blame Faith and her journal?

Daniel didn’t speak either, guiding her along the path and through three more turns without a word. It wasn’t until they came abruptly to the heart of the maze that he spoke again. “The jewel at the center of the puzzle,” he said.

It was, Laura thought, an apt description. The heart of the maze was an opening at least sixty feet square, landscaped with numerous low-growing shrubs, planters containing late-season flowers, and even a lovely fountain splashing quietly. Stepping stones formed a path that meandered around, stopping here and there at delicate white wrought-iron benches where the reward at the center of the puzzle could be enjoyed.