Whispers on the Wind (3 page)

She struggled to regain control of her senses. Supernatural be damned! “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said, standing up so fast she sent water slopping everywhere.

Isn’t there? The question seemed to come from way down deep in her mind, but still, she snorted with disgust. She glanced at herself in the mirror. Dammit, she did not believe in ghosts. Nor did she believe in hauntings. There was nothing wrong with the cabin; ergo, the fault lay within herself.

“So leave,” she muttered. “Doctors aren’t infallible. Clearly, mine doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Burnout or no burnout, what she needed was to get back to her own home, her job, her responsibilities. Those, surely, would keep her mind off weird, erotic fantasies.

Though the question remained, would returning home permit the other dreams to recur, the ones in which a small child came to her, seeking companionship and love and...connection? Or the one in which she experienced being the mother of the child, afraid, not so much for herself, but for her daughter, whom she felt was threatened in some way.

She closed her eyes and the same feelings were there as had been each time she awoke from one of the mother dreams. She felt sick, disoriented, head reeling and heart aching. Those were bad feelings, yes, but they were never worse than when the dream was that of the little girl herself, when it seemed she came right into Lenore’s mind, demanding attention. From those dreams—that dream, for it seemed to be the same one, recurring, she awoke feeling bereaved, yearning to go back into it and find the child, to cuddle her close and accept the loving trust that was offered with such joyful expectation of having the feelings returned.

That one, much as she disliked admitting it even to herself, had come when she was sure she was wide awake, sitting at her desk in her office in the Crompton Building in the center of Sector Seattle. It had happened at other times, too, such as when her car was locked onto the glideway across Puget Strait, or when she was walking in the park near her home. The damned little kid with her curious questions, her bright observations and her strange insistence that Lenore come and play.

It was, of course, the child she ached to have and never would. Hence the intense feelings of loss and privation when the vision ended.

Opening her eyes, she shook off the memories of those dreams and figments of her weird imagination. Deliberately, seeking normalcy, she looked at the pale peach bathroom walls, at the electric baseboard heater—another relic of times past—powered by the turbine in the stream above the cabin. The stack of towels on the vanity, her cosmetics placed neatly on a glass shelf under the mirror—all were such prosaic items. The toilet, complete with fuzzy lid and tank covers, remnant of the tenure of Caroline’s long-dead grandmother, had no place in a fantasy, she thought as she stepped from the tub, grabbed a towel and rubbed her skin briskly.

She folded the towels she had used, hung them squarely on the rail over the baseboard heater, slipped into her flannel nightgown, which she covered with a terrycloth robe, and went to the kitchen to check on her bread.

It wasn’t until she had shoved her hands into oven mitts to remove the loaves, beautifully golden-brown, the exact shade of Jon’s hair, that she realized something else was terribly, eerily awry.

She set the last loaf down on the cooling racks she’d laid out, took off the oven mitts and stared at the palms of her hands.

“What the hell?” she said, sinking down onto a hard wooden chair, suppressing the scream that rose up tight in her throat. “What in all the flames of hell is going on?”

Lenore struggled to shake off debilitating terror as she stared at the undeniable but inexplicable. Not so much as a trace of a blister showed on the palm of either hand. She prodded the resilient pads of flesh at the base of her fingers. There was no tenderness, no torn skin where blisters had broken. No angry red flesh beneath. No slow seeping of fluid. Nothing. Her hands were as they had been before she began chopping wood.

Standing again, though her knees felt weak and almost numb, she bent and touched her toes. Her back didn’t hurt, either. Not a twinge. She swung her arms. Her shoulders were fine, feeling strong and limber.

“That,” she said loudly, finding some courage in the sound of her own voice, despite the tremor of apprehension she wished were not present, “is some great bubble bath!” She wanted, very badly, to believe what she said, to find in the bathroom some magic elixir that she might have poured by mistake.

It was, however, the exact same brand she always bought, the exact same bottle she had brought with her. She had not accidentally used something her friend might have left behind on a previous visit, something exotic from one of globe-trotting Caroline’s Asian treks. There were no toiletries in the bathroom besides the ones she, Lenore, had carried up the mountain with her.

She had known that, of course. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it. She sighed and sat down on the fake-fur cover of the toilet lid. “What is going on?” she said again. “What in hell is happening to me?”

Shaking, Lenore pulled her robe tighter around her, feeling an unexpected chill in warm bathroom.

“Food,” she said. “You’re lightheaded from lack of food.”

She was also, she thought, incredibly thirsty. Something, the altitude, maybe, or the dry climate, had made her crave liquids terribly the past few days. The thirst was greatest when she awoke from one of her dreams, she realized, wondering if there could be a connection.

Her stomach growled. Hunger, like thirst, had been her constant companion for the past few days—almost since her arrival. That must indicate the doctor’s prescription of rest and relaxation was working. Ordinarily, when she was depressed or stressed, food was the last thing on her mind. Loss of appetite was simply one more of the symptoms that had driven her to seek professional advice.

Her stomach growled again and a vision of a thick, juicy steak, a mound of mashed potatoes and gravy, floated before her eyes. Lord, if she started to eat like that, she’d weigh a ton before she left. The McQuarries had stocked the cabin for her with a wide variety of
real
meat from their private stock—pork, beef, chicken, ham, none of that bogus stuff made from soy beans and seaweed that was available to the vast majority of the world’s population. If she ate even a quarter of that bounty she might have to take on the entire woodpile, she thought, slamming the bathroom door behind her.

In the kitchen, she ladled herself out a bowl of stew from the pot she’d left simmering all day on the back of the stove. It did contain meat, though not in great quantities. She sliced into a hot, steamy loaf knowing it was much too soon to do so, but craving the new bread despite its turning doughy at the touch of the knife. She slathered on butter, a treat she could not resist, watching it melt, then set the slices on the side of her plate.

She ate hungrily, draining two glasses of milk with her meal, telling herself that ghosts did not exist, therefore, she hadn’t experienced that episode in the tub, where she had actually felt the man’s physical body, run her hands over his back, dug her nails into his buttocks. It had not happened any more than the fantasy of having a little girl’s voice in her head had ever happened, or that of a frantic mother. All had been hallucinations.

Likely, she thought, shoving her empty plate away, she’d hallucinated the wood-chopping, as well. And the blisters, she decided, checking her hands again.

Sure. That was it. She really had fallen asleep in the tub—it was another manifestation of that extreme lethargy she’d complained about to the doctor. And sleeping, she’d dreamed of the wood-splitting, dreamed another encounter with the bronze-skinned man.

There would, of course, be ample proof of that. All she had to do was go outside and assure herself that the neatly racked cords of dry poplar remained intact in their round, unsplit state. The axe would still be where the last wood-splitter—likely Angus McQuarrie—had hung it on the wall of the shed. She probably hadn’t even ridden Mystery to town and back today and then left him to wander and nibble at the sparse grass between the cabin and the forest.

Although she knew she was right about what she would find outside, she still had to fight reluctance to go out there and prove it to herself.

Slowly, she walked to the back door where she stuffed her feet into her boots again, dragged a jacket on over her robe. Outside, she wrapped her arms around herself as she stared at the shed. The axe was stuck into the chopping block. A freshly split pile of wood lay in an untidy heap beside it, off to one side of an incomplete cord of sawed logs, which had, earlier in the day, been intact.

With a sick feeling, she remembered she had planned to restack the split wood in a few days’ time when her hands healed.

She paced to the small barn and found it empty. She turned when Mystery trotted up, whickering in the pale light of the newly risen moon. She backed him into his stall, where he went willingly, and tossed his head before hopefully nuzzling her pocket.

It felt normal, tending the horse. He felt real, he smelled real, he sounded real. This, she hoped, was not another delusion, but it was getting to the point where she couldn’t tell. Maybe, she thought, filling Mystery’s feed box with the mixture Angus, who looked after him when neither she nor Caroline was here, had prepared, maybe none of this is real and I’m safely locked away in a padded cell somewhere.

She stood and stroked the horse’s neck while he munched. “I don’t know, Mystery,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

One thing she did know, though, was that she was not spending another night in the house after this one. She’d leave this minute, except she knew negotiating that track down the mountainside in the dark wouldn’t be a sensible move, and she prided herself on being sensible at all times.

“At first light,” she told the horse, “as soon as it’s safe to ride, we’re out of here.”

This night, sensible or otherwise, she planned to sleep not one wink at all.

And when she heard, felt, sensed, a voice saying, “Come! I need you!” she fought it off with every erg of effort she could muster and strode back inside, locking the door firmly behind her.

Angus McQuarrie, lying beside his comfortably plump wife in his big, comfortable bed, in the warm, comfortable ranch house on the flat valley floor below Lenore’s cabin, heard the plea, too. He stirred, woke, and sat erect.

He stumbled from the bed, grabbed his pants and struggled into them. Reaching for his sweater, he knocked over a statue of Elvis, standing on the dresser. It fell to the floor and bounced, waking Jane, who rolled over and waved her hand in front of the light, turning it on.

“What are you doing?”

“Got to go out. I know where it is. I know, this time. I know!”

She picked up the glasses she had affected the day their first grandchild was born, declaring that she wanted to “look like a proper granny,” even though everyone, even in this old-fashioned little backwater, had corrective surgery each time their sight deteriorated in the slightest. Hell, he’d been lasered three times himself! Glasses got in the way. Through the thick lenses, Jane peered at the readout in the base of the lamp. “Angus, it’s after midnight. You’re not going anywhere. Come back to bed.”

His compulsion was too strong to withstand. “I can’t. I saw it.” He shook off her hand and tugged on his socks. “I saw the place. We’ll be rich, Jane. Rich, I tell you.”

“Oh, Angus, you’ve had that dream again, haven’t you?” Sounding weary, disturbed, she followed him into the kitchen, her voluminous nightgown flapping around her ankles. He shouldn’t have told her about the dreams of the last few nights. She believed it was nothing more than his crazy, life-long belief that there was gold just waiting for him up in the mountains, if only he could figure out where to look. “There is no mother-lode,” she insisted, “no gold. You’ve tapped on every chunk of rock in a hundred-klick radius. You’ve panned every stream for the past forty years. There is no gold in or around this valley.”

“There is. It’s there. There’s a cave of some sort. I have to go there. I’ll find the gold where I find the cave. Now let me go, Jane.”

He fought for possession of his hand so he could zip on his high-topped boots. “Jane!”

“All right, all right.” Now, she sounded resigned. “But have something warm to drink, first. You need your strength if you’re going prospecting in the middle of the night. And let me pack you something more to supplement your emergency rations. If I know you, you could be gone for days.” It was true. He had taken other prospecting trips and stayed away longer than he intended. And he knew Jane was right when she gave a puffing, annoyed sigh. “But don’t you realize it’s spring, now, with plowing and planting to do?”

Momentarily, he resented her disapproval. “Not this time, Jane! This time, I know where it is.” Angus closed his eyes for a second, swaying, seeing the vision growing sharper, clearer, until Jane clamped his hand to the back of a chair, steadying him. He looked into her worried, tired eyes, magnified by the lenses of her spectacles, and softened. “Jane...when I bring it home to you, you’ll see what a waste of time trying to wrest a subsistence from the soil of this valley has been. No more plowing. No more planting. No more working ourselves into our graves.”

“Come on, now,” she argued gently, as if he were sick. “It hasn’t been such a bad life, farming here, has it? Just sit down for ten minutes. The gold will wait, and you need food and drink.”

At the thought of food and drink and the strength it would impart, he felt the terrible pressure to move abating, easing just enough that he gave himself permission to sit, to watch her make a big pot of tea. “Yes,” he said. “Food. Drink.”

She set a mug of tea before him and when he picked it up and sipped, found it strong and sweet and creamy, just the way he liked it. He slurped. She served him big wedge of homemade chocolate cake and handed him a fork.

“You get outside of that, then if you still feel like going for a hike, I’ll cook you a proper breakfast and make some sandwiches to take along. Is your emergency pack up-to-date?”