Кей Хупер - Chill Of Fear

Three faulty tests in a row were hardly likely, she knew that all too well. So they hadn't been faulty. And she could no longer ignore or pretend to ignore the awful truth.

She was unmarried, going to have a baby, and the father of her child was — he had told her, by way of ending their affair — already married. Happily.

Happily married. Christ.

Men were bastards, every last one of them. Her father had been a bastard, and every man she'd been involved with in her twenty-seven years had been a bastard.

"You're just not lucky with men," her friend and fellow maid at The Lodge, Alison, had offered sympathetically when Ellie had confessed to a heartbreaking "fling" without going into details as to who the man was and where the affair had taken place. "My Charles is a fine man. He has a brother, you know."

Ellie, queasy with morning sickness and a gnawing bitterness, had informed her friend that she never wanted to hear from another man as long as she lived, no matter how fine their brothers were.

Now, as she pushed the noisy vacuum over the carpet of the Ginger Room in the North Wing, Ellie wondered miserably what was going to happen to her. She figured she had, maybe, three or four months before her pregnancy became obvious to everyone. And then she'd be fired, out on her ass with no savings and nobody to turn to for help. With a baby on the way.

If she had the nerve, she'd contact the baby's father. But he was not only wealthy and famous, he was a politician, and Ellie had the uneasy suspicion that he'd know plenty of people who could and would take care of a little problem like a pregnant ex-lover turning up. And it wouldn't be by paying her off, either.

Ellie wasn't that lucky.

The vacuum began making an unholy racket then, and she hastily turned it off. She hadn't noticed anything in the deep pile carpet, but obviously somebody had dropped a coin or something else metallic. She knelt and turned the vacuum on its side, peering at the rotating brush head.

It turned easily under her probing touch, so she shook the vacuum a few times, until what had been rattling around inside dropped to the carpet.

It was a little silver locket, heart-shaped and engraved on the front with a name. Ellie picked it up and studied it. The sort of thing a child might wear, she thought. She used a thumbnail to try prying it open, but it stubbornly resisted her attempts, and she finally gave up.

She knew better than to merely leave it on the nightstand or dresser. Climbing to her feet, she went to her cart in the hall and got one of the envelopes provided for just this sort of thing. She wrote the date, the time, and the room name on the outside, then gave the locket a last look before dropping it into the envelope and sealing it. Then she put the envelope in one of the cart's lower compartments.

"Okay, Missy," she murmured, "your locket will be at the Lost and Found in Housekeeping. Safe and sound."

Then she went back into the Ginger Room and continued her work, the roar of the vacuum drowning the sound of her voice when she murmured aloud, "I just don't know what I'm going to do...."

Diana was glad there was a workshop class scheduled later that morning. Meeting Quentin had shaken her more than she wanted to admit; left with nothing to do but brood over the question of how she had been able to draw a very fair likeness of him before ever setting eyes on him, she might well have bolted.

Instead, she found herself standing in her usual corner of the conservatory, the easel with her large working sketchpad open to a fresh page before her, frowning as she half listened to the pleasant murmur of Beau Rafferty's voice. He was instructing his students to use their charcoal sticks to sketch whatever was uppermost in their minds this morning, whether it be an idea, an emotion, a problem, or whatever else bothered or preoccupied them.

"Don't think about what you're doing," he told them, repeating what he had told Diana privately the day before. "Let your thoughts wander. Just draw."

Diana resisted the impulse to once again sketch Quentin's face.

Instead, she thought about her predawn experience and the maybe-dream of the plea for help traced on a windowpane.

Help us.

Us? Who was "us"? No. Never mind. It was a dream. Only a dream.

Just another strange dream, another symptom, another sign she was getting worse instead of better.

It scared her. This illness of hers had disrupted her life from the time she was eight years old, and twenty-five years was a long time to deal with anything like that. But at least in those early years she had been able to function normally most of the time. There had been some dreams, scattered instances of thinking she had heard someone speaking to her when there had been no one nearby, even eerie glimpses of people or things, like a flicker of motion caught from the corner of her eye but gone when she tried to look straight at them.

Unsettling, to be sure, and it had worried her father when she had mentioned this or that occurrence. But it was only when Diana hit adolescence that the symptoms had begun to seriously interfere with her life.

The blackouts had been the most frightening. "Waking up" to find herself in a strange place or doing something she never would have done consciously. Dangerous things, sometimes. Once, she had opened her eyes to realize, to her terror, that she was up to her waist in the lake near her home.

Fully clothed. In the middle of the night. Just wading out toward the middle of the lake. And at the time, she hadn't been able to swim.

After that, she learned.

What had been called "disturbances" by school officials had led to special private tutors who struggled to complete her education while doctors struggled to find the right combination of medication and therapy to enable her to function.

There were times she was so heavily medicated she'd been little more than a zombie, resulting in whole stretches of her life she could barely remember. Times when new medications caused "adverse" reactions far worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat. And many times when yet another doctor with yet another theory offered hope of a cure only to ultimately admit defeat.

Through it all, through twenty-five years of doctors and clinics and therapies and medications, Diana had, at least, learned to play their games. She had learned, through painful trial and error, which responses and answers would lead to more drugs and which signaled "improvement" to the doctors.

She had learned to fake it.

Not that she didn't sincerely try to get better. Try to listen to what they told her. Try to be as honest as she could, if only silently, to herself, in weighing what she thought and felt.

Because even with all the unsettling, frightening occurrences in her life, with all the confusion in her mind and her troubled emotional state, deep inside herself Diana truly believed she was sane.

Which, sometimes, frightened her most of all.

Beau moved among his students, offering a quiet word or smile here and there, gradually working his way back to the far corner where Diana had set up her easel on the first day. He wondered if she was even aware of what signal that sent, that she cornered herself deliberately, looking out on those around her with wary defensiveness, her back to the wall.

Probably. She didn't lack self-awareness, despite the concerted efforts of mainstream doctors to convince her that she only had to understand herself to be able to heal herself.

Which, of course, was bullshit, at least in the strictest sense.

Diana didn't need to understand herself, she needed to understand her abilities and accept them as natural and normal for her.

She needed to stop believing she was crazy.

As he neared her corner, Beau was conscious of a surge of satisfaction, not unmixed with concern. Her gaze was fixed on the open workbook on her easel, but at the same time it was a distant, unfocused look. She was expressionless, yet her hand moved rapidly, the scratching of charcoal on paper not at all tentative.