“Is that what you’ve got? A love life?” Tessa’s vividly outlined eyes held an old-fashioned expression that was disconcertingly at odds with her nose ring, neon hair, and clashing arm chains. “Or are we talking just a sex life here?”
The question had a strange effect on Molly. She felt as though she had suddenly stepped out into space. Her insides fluttered wildly in the weightless environment. “I wish I knew.”
“Damn. I was afraid of this.”
“Tessa, it’s after five. Begone.”
“Look, if you want to talk—”
“I don’t. But thanks, anyway.”
Tessa hesitated. “Sure. Whatever you say, boss. I’m here if you need me.”
“I know. Thanks.”
Tessa opened the front door. “Hey, I almost forgot.”
“About what?”
“A friend of mine in the band wants to talk to you. She’s working on a really strange gadget. I told her about your foundation, and she got excited. She could use the money to help finance her project.”
Molly was momentarily distracted from her own problems. “Your friend is an inventor?”
“Yeah. Her name is Heloise Stickley. Plays bass guitar in the band. But her main interest is alternate levels of consciousness.”
“How nice,” Molly said. “What are alternate levels of consciousness?”
“Beats me. She’s got some kind of theory about people who can sense things that the rest of us can’t. You know, like colors that go beyond the normal spectrum. Stuff like that. She’s working on a machine that detects special brain waves or something.”
Molly winced. “Uh, maybe you’d better not encourage her to apply for funding to the Abberwick Foundation. Harry is a little biased against inventors who work in the field of paranormal studies. To be perfectly blunt, he thinks it’s all garbage.”
“You don’t need T-Rex’s permission for every single project, do you?”
“Well, no. But I’m paying big bucks for his advice. It would be stupid not to follow it.”
“Just talk to Heloise, okay? There’s no harm in that, is there?”
“No, of course not.” Molly smiled wryly. “You could sell ice in Alaska during the winter, Tessa. Tell Heloise that I’ll be glad to talk to her.”
“Great.” Tessa grinned as she went through the door. “See you tomorrow.”
Molly waited until the door had closed again. Then she walked through the shop one last time, going through her evening ritual. She straightened canisters of tea. Checked the special orders file. Pulled the shades in the front windows.
When all was in order, she let herself out the front door and secured it firmly. The steps in front of the shop were still cluttered with people, but the crowd was thinning rapidly. The fountains sparkled in the late afternoon sun.
Molly walked up toward First Avenue, heading toward the nearest bus stop. Gordon Brooke stepped out of the front door of his coffee bar as she went past.
“Molly.” He gave her an ingratiating smile. “On your way home?”
“Yes.” She paused briefly. “Did you have a good day?”
“Fair. Look, I wanted to apologize for my behavior in your office the other day. I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of Trevelyan.”
“Forget it.”
Gordon sighed. “I didn’t handle that scene very well, but I am genuinely concerned. You seem to be getting serious about him.”
“Don’t worry about me, Gordon.”
“That’s just it, I do worry about you.” He shoved one hand into the pocket of his fashionable bronze-colored trousers. “If nothing else, we’re old friends. I don’t want to see you get in over your head with a guy like Trevelyan. He’s not really your type.”
“Amazing how everyone seems to have an opinion on the subject. You’ll have to excuse me, Gordon. I’ve got a bus to catch.”
Molly hurried up the remainder of the steps, crossed the street, and caught a crowded bus to Capitol Hill. There was one empty seat in the middle of the bus, but it was next to a bag lady who had stacked all of her worldly possessions on it. This being Seattle, none of the standing passengers stooped to the incivility of requesting that the woman move her things.
The bus made its way past the eclectic collection of bookstores, cafés, body-piercing parlors, and leather clothing shops that gave the Capitol Hill district its colorful identity. When it lumbered into the old residential district beyond, Molly got off.
She walked along the quiet, tree-lined streets to the Abberwick mansion. The sight of the sprawling old house beyond the iron gates filled her with an unexpected rush of affection. Kelsey was wrong, she thought. She could not sell the mansion. It was home.
The massive front gates swung open when she keyed in the code. She walked up the drive, noting that everything seemed to be in order so far as the gardens were concerned. The perpetual sprinkling system that her father had designed had obviously been working without a hitch.
She went up the steps and let herself into the hall. For a moment she stood there in the shadows, allowing memories to coalesce around her. There were ghosts in this house, but they were part of the family, part of her. She could not abandon them.
After a moment Molly looked down. The wooden floor gleamed. The polishing robot had been at work. She walked into the front parlor. The bookcases had all been recently dusted by the dusting machine.
She left the parlor and went up the massive staircase to the second floor. There, she turned and went down the hall to her bedroom.
No, she definitely would not put the house on the market, Molly thought as she took fresh clothes out of the closet and stuffed them into a patented Abberwick Nonwrinkling Suitcase. The crazy old mansion would never sell, anyway, except possibly to a developer who would tear it down to make room for condominiums or apartments. Only someone who valued the unique and the bizarre would love it the way she did.
She could live here by herself, Molly decided. Granted, the house was technically too big for one person, but her father’s endless household inventions would take care of most of the work involved in maintaining the mansion.
What it really needed was a family. A very special sort of family, one with an extraordinary father who’s brilliant eyes were the color of ancient amber.
The thought came out of nowhere. Molly stood very still in the center of the bedroom, clutching the red jacket she had just taken off a hanger.
An image of two dark-haired, amber-eyed children materialized in the gloom. The pair, a boy and a girl, were laughing with gleeful anticipation. She sensed that they were eager to run downstairs to her father’s old workshop. They wanted to play with the automated toys that Jasper Abberwick had invented years ago for Molly and Kelsey.
For a few seconds Molly could not breathe. Harry’s children.
The vision faded, but the emotions it had generated inside Molly did not.
After a while she adjusted the cleverly engineered clothes-folding mechanism inside the suitcase and shut the lid. She made a quick tour of the remainder of the rooms on the second floor to make certain that all was in order. Then she went downstairs.
She left the suitcase in the hall while she toured the rooms on the first floor. Nothing was amiss. The only thing left to do was to make her way down to the basement to check the machinery that powered the household robots.
She went down the steps into the windowless rooms below the house. The bright, overhead lights winked on in the workshop when she opened the door. Across the room she saw the glowing lights on the control panel that regulated all the various mechanical and electrical systems in the house.
Molly heard the faint creak just as she stepped into the workshop.
Two thoughts struck her simultaneously. One was rational, intellectual, and based on common sense. It held that such creaks and groans were to be
expected in an old house.
The second thought was irrational and intuitive. It emanated straight from the most primitive part of her mind, the region charged with the tasks of survival. It told her with grave certainty that she was not alone in the mansion. She was being stalked.
Someone had been hiding in one of the basement storage rooms while she methodically toured the upstairs rooms.
A floorboard groaned.
Panic seized Molly. She glanced back toward the stairs and knew a searing helplessness. She would have to go past a long line of storage rooms in order to escape. Someone waited in one of those rooms.
Even as she contemplated her chances, a door opened at the end of the hall. A man materialized in the shadows. His face was covered with a ski mask. He raised his hand. Molly saw the gun in his fist.
She chose the only option open to her. She dashed through the workshop doorway, whirled around, and slammed the old wooden door closed. She threw the bolt.
Muffled footsteps thudded down the hall. They came to a halt on the other side of the door. The antique glass knob rattled under Molly’s hand. Instinctively she jerked her fingers away from it.
Belatedly she realized that it was not smart to stand directly in front of the door. The intruder could easily shoot through the aging wood.
She took several more steps back from the door until she reached the center of the workshop. A heavy, jarring crash shook the door. It rattled on its hinges. The gunman intended to force his way into the workshop. It was only a matter of time before he achieved his goal.
Molly turned in a slow, desperate circle, feeling like a trapped animal. There was no escape from the workshop. The brick walls of the basement loomed around her, confining her in a space that was no larger than the upstairs parlor. There was no place to hide.
Her gaze fell on the brooding, shrouded shapes that lined one wall of the room. The image of two black-haired children with intelligent amber eyes popped into her head again.
The children wanted to play with the glittering, flashing, mechanical toys that Jasper Abberwick had built for his daughters.
There was another thud. The door shuddered and groaned as if it had taken a mortal wound. Molly knew now that the intruder meant to kill her. She felt the menace in her bones. She had to act or else she would die right here in the basement of her own home.
Harry. Harry, I need you.
The silent scream for help shrieked through her head. There was no point calling out. No one would hear her.
The amber-eyed children wanted to play.
Molly gathered herself and hurried across the room to the nearest tarp-covered form. She yanked the canvas aside to reveal the huge, lumbering toy she had once named the Creature from the Purple Lagoon. It was as tall as she was, with a great, gaping, toothy mouth and a long tail. When she had been eight years old she had thrilled to the knowledge that she could control such a grand beast.
Molly steadied the monster on its wonderfully hideous feet and punched a button on the control panel. Her faithful, semiannual attention to the special long-life batteries was rewarded.
Red lights flashed in the creature’s eyes. With a hiss of fake steam, the monster cranked slowly into motion. It started forward on its huge, claw-footed legs. The thick tail shifted from side to side.
The door trembled beneath another blow.
Molly jerked the canvas shroud off another one of the mechanical toys. This one was a spaceship. Two large dolls dressed in bizarre costumes manned the ray guns. Molly punched a button. The ship hummed to life. Strobes pulsed around the outer edge. The imitation weapons beamed green rays into the shadows.
There was another jarring crash of noise from the door. Molly uncovered more toys. One by one she powered up the robots, monsters, and vehicles of her small army.
She was working on a miniature glider, a prototype of the machine that had killed her father and her uncle, when she heard the door give way with a splintering crack.
She hit the master switch on the panel that controlled all of the household electricity.
The workshop was instantly plunged into a stygian darkness just as the man in the ski mask came through the door. Molly’s mechanical defenders chugged, roared, and hummed through the inky blackness, filling it with a nerve-shattering barrage of flashing lights and whirring, clanking noises.
The toys surged willy-nilly around the room, charging blindly into each other, the walls, and anything that got in their path. Molly ducked down behind a workbench and held her breath.
It was a scene out of a special effects nightmare.
The cavelike darkness was pierced with wildly pulsing strobes. A cacophony of roars, hisses, and grunts created a deafening howl.
“What the hell?” The hoarse shout of surprise from the gunman held a note of raw terror.
Thunder boomed in the lightless chamber. Molly crouched closer to the floor, aware that the intruder had just fired his gun.
“Goddamn it,” the intruder yelled.
This time there was pain in the rasping cry. Molly knew the man had collided with one of the war machines in the darkness.
Molly heard the clang of metal on metal and realized that the gunman had swung out blindly in an attempt to ward off another automated attacker. She heard one of the large toys crash to the floor. Its pulsing lights continued to flash in a crazed rhythm that periodically spotlighted its churning claws.
The spaceship turned its ray guns toward the doorway. Green beams lit the darkness as the toy opened fire. Molly glimpsed the strange, jerky movement of the gunman as he was caught in the path of the strobes. She realized that he was struggling frantically to escape.
He tripped over a dinosaur’s swishing tail. Screaming in rage and fear, he regained his feet and plunged blindly ahead.
A scattered burst of green beams from the spaceship’s armament revealed the doorway. The intruder ran through it into the dark hall.
The erratic strobes swung in another direction, and Molly lost sight of the gunman. The toys were creating too much of a racket to enable her to hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but a moment later Molly thought she felt impact vibrations from the wooden floor over her head. The intruder was running down the front hall.
Molly waited for a long time behind the milling ranks of her toy defenders. Eventually she made her way by feel to the master control panel. She switched on the household lights with trembling fingers and reached for the phone.
Her first call was to 911. The second was to Harry.
As it turned out, the second call was not necessary. Harry came through the front door of the mansion five minutes later.
“It was that crazy bastard, Kendall.” Harry prowled back and forth in front of the wall of windows. He felt as restless and trapped as a lion in a cage. “Had to be him. So much for the theory that he went to California. Damn that son-of-a-bitch. He’s really gone over the edge. We’ve got to find him.”
Molly, coiled in a chair, her feet tucked under her, sipped chardonnay. “Harry, stop pacing. You’re making me dizzy.”
He ignored her. “I keep thinking there’s something else I should do.”
“You’ve given the cops everything we’ve got, and you’ve called your private investigator, Fergus Rice. What else can you do? Try to relax.”
“Relax?” Harry swung around to confront her. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“You could start by doing what I’m doing.” She held her wine glass aloft. “Pour yourself a drink. We both need to unwind.”
Harry knew she was right. He was almost vibrating with a sense of helpless rage.
Kendall had almost killed her this afternoon. The knowledge churned in his guts. He was in a foul mood, and he knew it. The truth was, he had been sinking into this state slowly but inexorably for several hours. He had been seething with a sense o
f terrible urgency since shortly after five that afternoon.
The undefined sensation of doom had descended on him with the force of a tidal wave. He had been working in his study, waiting for the sound of Molly’s key in the front door lock, when it had hit him. He had suddenly needed to know where she was. Needed to know that she was safe.
He had called her shop, but there had been no answer. It had occurred to him that she had gone to the mansion for fresh clothes. He had started to dial the number.
But for some reason, he had felt an overpowering urge to get the car out of the garage and drive to Capitol Hill. He had fought the illogical need as long as he could before he had finally given in to it.
The open front gate had given the first verifiable proof that there was a basis for his alarm. He had heard the sirens in the distance just as he raced through the front door of the mansion.
There had been no sign of Molly. It was the thundering din in the basement that had drawn him downstairs. His first thought was that some of Jasper Abberwick’s machines had run amuck.
As long as he lived, Harry knew he would never forget the sight of Molly surrounded by a herd of bizarre mechanical toys. He had taken one look at her stricken face and known, without her having to explain, that she had very nearly died in that workshop.
He had also known that he would have been too late to save her.
Harry came to a halt in front of Molly. He leaned down and gripped the arms of the chair, forcing her to look up at him. “From this moment until Wharton Kendall is in custody, you are not to go anywhere alone. Is that clear?”
“Harry, I know you’re a little upset over what happened, but there’s no need to overreact.”
“I will walk you to work in the mornings. I will pick you up for lunch. I will meet you after work and escort you back here. Understood?”
“I promise I won’t go home alone again,” she temporized.
He leaned closer. “You won’t go anywhere alone.”
She bit her lip. “Harry, you’ll drive me crazy if you try to make me a prisoner.”