Truth or Dare

“You’re not going crazy,” Arcadia said calmly.

  “Someone sure is.”

  40

  She dreamed of Xanadu that night.

  She walked down the endless corridor of H Ward, past one locked door after another, following the trail left by the dark strands of psychic energy.

  The sticky web became denser and more terrifying as she drew closer to the room where they originated.

  Stop. Turn around. You don’t want to do this.

  But she had no choice. It is fear that makes us avoid other perspectives.

  At last she reached the locked door that concealed the source of the ghastly pulsing energy. She reached out to open it.

  Then she noticed the number of the room.

  232.

  She came awake in a cold sweat, panting for breath, trembling violently. Room 232 in Xanadu had been her room.

  Beside her Ethan slept. Evidently she had not cried out this time.

  She pushed the covers aside and sat up carefully, trying not to disturb Ethan. The residue of panic washing through her veins made her so shaky she almost lost her balance when she got to her feet.

  She took her robe off the hook, put it on and made her way along the hall to the living room. Standing at the window, she looked out at the predawn sky.

  How much longer could she pretend that nothing was wrong? It was bad enough that she had managed to fool herself for the past couple of weeks. Now she had to face the fact that she was guilty of concealing what might prove to be the truth from the man she loved.

  You wouldn’t lie to me.

  She had not lied to him. Not exactly. But he deserved the whole truth, not just the sanitized version she had given him.

  She felt tears gather in her eyes. If the truth turned out to be the stuff of her nightmares, she would have to set Ethan free. It was the right thing to do. She knew that.

  She also knew that it would break her heart.

  In the morning, she decided. She would tell him at breakfast. That would be soon enough. It was nearly dawn, already.

  The tears dampened her cheeks. She brushed them away on the sleeve of her robe.

  “You going to tell me what’s wrong this time?” Ethan asked very evenly. “Or just leave me hanging in limbo?”

  Jolted, she turned sharply to see him standing in the shadows. He had pulled on his trousers but nothing else.

  Barefooted, he walked toward her and stopped a short distance away.

  “Breakfast,” she managed.

  “I’m not real hungry.”

  “I meant that I was going to tell you at breakfast.”

  “Tell me what?”

  This was it. Time to walk through the fire. “Oh, Ethan . . .”

  “You want out, don’t you?” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “We might as well get it on the table. I appreciate the fact that you don’t want to hurt me, but you’re not doing me any favors by trying to force yourself to make this marriage work.”

  Understanding dawned. It shook her to the core.

  “Don’t say that,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t even think it. Not for one moment. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else. I will love you for the rest of my life. I will never stop loving you.”

  He went very still. “But?”

  She braced herself against the wave of despair. “But I think there is a very good chance that I am going insane, and I love you too much to let you stay married to a crazy woman.”

  An eerie silence fell.

  “Let’s try that again,” he said very carefully.

  She sank down onto the edge of the sofa, wrapped her arms around her waist. “You heard me.”

  “You actually believe you may be going nuts?”

  “Yes.” She focused on the gold-and-pink orchids that floated in a low glass bowl on the coffee table. “For a while, I tried to tell myself that the spiderwebs I ran into in Arcadia’s office and at the Designers’ Dream Home were left by John Branch or Lindsey Voyle. But I’m sure now that neither of them was the source.”

  “So you figure you’re the one who’s leaving the psychic junk behind?”

  “It’s a possibility, Ethan. A strong one. I’m the only other person who was in both of those places.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  She tore her gaze off the orchids and looked up at him. “I know you don’t believe that I can sense psychic energy. But it’s the truth and I have to deal with it, even if you can’t.”

  He reached down and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s say for the sake of this particular discussion that you are psychic and that you have begun to give off some kind of weird vibes. There’s one real big flaw in your analysis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you were the source, the crazy energy would be all over this apartment. Think about it. This is where you live, remember?”

  She blinked back more tears. “Believe me, I’m hanging on to that possibility because it’s my one remaining hope. But it’s also possible that whatever is happening to me on the psychic plane is sporadic and intermittent. Like occasional bursts of static interfering with a radio signal at dusk. It starts out slowly and gradually gets worse as night comes on.”

  “Bullshit,” Ethan said again.

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Listen up, honey. I understand one thing just fine and that is that you are not going crazy.”

  “How can you be so sure?” She fought to keep her voice from climbing. The terror of going insane was bound up with the fear of losing Ethan. Both were threatening to crush her. “How can you be so damned sure? You don’t even believe that I’m psychic, so how the hell can you know I’m not a crazy psychic?”

  “For the same reason that you don’t believe that I’m a homicidal maniac even though I told you that I deliberately plotted a man’s death.”

  There was a short, stark silence.

  She frowned. “For heaven’s sake, Ethan, that was different. You’re not a cold-blooded murderer.”

  “When I look in your eyes, I don’t see any craziness.”

  “It’s not something you can see.”

  “Sure it is. How do you think we diagnose mental illness in the first place? People who are genuinely crazy are usually the last to figure it out. It’s the folks around them who notice that something’s not right. Trust me, none of your friends thinks you’re nuts.”

  “Ethan, something’s wrong.” She was shivering now, hope and fear combining in her system to create a terrible tonic. “I can feel it. I think Tabitha Pine had a point. I need to get past my fear and examine reality from a clear perspective.”

  “Tabitha Pine may have a few nifty, all-occasion guru sayings, but like I told you the other day, we’ve got some of our own in the detective business. One of which is, don’t look for complicated answers if you’ve got a perfectly good, simple answer right in front of you. And the simplest answer in this case is that you’ve been under a lot of stress lately and you’re reacting to it in your own unique way. You’re tough, but you’re not invulnerable. No one is. Give yourself a chance to get back to normal before you start worrying about the psychic static.”

  “But what if it gets worse even after life returns to normal?”

  “I’m pretty sure it won’t. I’ve got a hunch your so-called spiderwebs will turn out to have a lot in common with the bad times I go through in November each year. Some kind of post-trauma thing.”

  “But, Ethan—”

  “If it does get worse, we’ll deal with it.” He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Together.”

  Together. The word glowed in the darkness. She had been alone for so much of her life that the condition had come to feel normal. Even during the course of her short marriage to Preston she had known a degree of loneliness because she had never been able to confide the truth about herself to him.

  But Ethan could handle anything, even a wife who believed she was psychic.

  “I love you.
” She put her arms around his waist and held him with all of her strength.

  He lifted his hands, cradled her face in his palms and kissed her.

  “I love you, too,” he said. “We’re a team now. Regardless of what comes, we stick together. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  After a while he took her hand and led her back to bed. There, in the light of the new dawn, he made love to her with a consuming passion that effectively blotted out all her fears.

  At least for a while.

  41

  Hooper emerged from the rear door of Casa de Oro just as Zoe pulled into her assigned parking slot. He had an unflattened cardboard box in one hand and a white plastic garbage bag in the other.

  Zoe got out of the car and watched him toss first the garbage bag and then the cardboard box into the metal bin. He managed to prop the fully erect carton directly in front of the FLATTEN ALL BOXES sign.

  She was not sure why she had come back to the apartment so early in the day. She had spent the past few hours alone in her office, unable to concentrate on any of her design projects because of an uneasy, edgy sensation that grew steadily stronger.

  She had tried immersing herself in her research on spiderwebs, but as soon as she opened the first book—a treatise on the ancient system of Vastu—the restlessness had become impossible to ignore.

  The need to return to Casa de Oro had become so overpowering that she finally stopped fighting it. Somewhere, somehow, she sensed that she had overlooked something important there.

  She looked at the unflattened carton and tut-tutted. “Petty, Hooper, very petty.”

  “It’s my gesture of triumph.” Hooper dusted off his hands, admiring his handiwork. “The rest of you may have abandoned the war, but I intend to fight on. What’s more, I’ve got a secret weapon. I can’t wait until Sergeant Duncan knocks on my door to give me another lecture about breaking down the boxes. I’m really going to let her have it.”

  “You’re planning to terminate your lease?”

  “Hell, no.” Hooper tossed his car keys into the air. “I’ve got the goods on Ms. Anal-Retentive.”

  “What goods?”

  Hooper looked smug. “Get this. Robyn Duncan was fired from her last job here in Whispering Springs because she lied on her job application. All I have to do is pick up the phone and call the folks who own Casa de Oro and she’s history.”

  “How did you find out that Robyn lost her other position?”

  Hooper surveyed the parking lot quickly to make sure no one could overhear, and then he took a step closer to Zoe.

  “Last night I had a couple of beers with a friend of mine. I started telling him about the drill sergeant we’ve got for an apartment house manager and he said it sounded just like a woman who worked for him for a few days at the end of last month. When I mentioned her name, it turned out to be none other than our Robyn.”

  Zoe tightened her grip on her purse strap. “You’re certain that she lied on her job application?”

  “That’s what my buddy said. She was hired on a provisional basis because they were shorthanded, but after the background check went through they let her go because they found out she’d faked her previous work history for the past two or three years.”

  “What was wrong? Was she in prison or something?”

  “Worse.” Hooper uttered a malicious chuckle. “Get this, she was locked up in some kind of private mental hospital.”

  Zoe went cold. “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what my buddy said.” Hooper tossed his keys again and strode off toward his car. “I can’t wait until she hits me up about that damned unflattened carton. I’m really looking forward to telling her that I know she’s a certified loony.”

  “Hooper?”

  “Yeah?” He unlocked his car.

  “Where does your buddy work?”

  “He’s a supervisor at Radnor Security Services.”

  She stood there, stunned, while Hooper drove out of the parking lot.

  Eventually she pulled her wildly skittering thoughts together and let herself into the lobby. There was a neatly lettered sign on the door of the manager’s office informing tenants that the manager was away from her desk due to personal business.

  Zoe tried the office door and was not surprised to discover that it was locked. She stepped back and checked the small lobby and the stairs that led to the second floor. There was no one in sight. The apartment complex felt empty, as it usually did in the afternoons when most of the tenants were away at work.

  She considered her options. She could call Ethan and ask his advice, but she was pretty sure he’d tell her not to do anything.

  Doing nothing was no longer an option. The edgy feeling was rapidly metamorphosing into acute anxiety.

  It was impossible to wait. She had to know.

  Robyn’s apartment was the last one at the end of the first-floor hall. It was no doubt locked, too. But she had noticed that Robyn usually left her bedroom window open during the day.

  She went outside and followed the sidewalk around to the back of the building. The storage locker that contained gardening and pool equipment partially concealed the open window. She took another quick look over her shoulder. There was no one around to witness her somewhat less than legal entry.

  She reached into her bottomless tote and found the small tool kit she always carried with her.

  It was no trick at all to pry the screen out of its aluminum frame.

  She gathered her nerve and swung first one leg over the window ledge and then the other.

  The first touch of the dark energy was no worse than what she had encountered in Arcadia’s office and at the show house.

  Not too bad. She had been prepared for it. She could deal with it. An exultant sense of relief flashed through her. She wasn’t the crazy one, after all.

  She stood on the carpet near the window and studied the bedroom.

  To describe the space as spartan in design would have been to understate the painful precision with which the minimal furnishings were arranged. The narrow bed, with its crisply folded white spread, was eerily reminiscent of a patient bed at Candle Lake.

  She looked across the room at the small chest of drawers. The photo that had gone missing from the envelope she had left in Arcadia’s office stood propped against the mirror. The chili-pepper red mug was positioned next to it.

  She took a step toward the dresser. There was no warning. She blundered straight into a tangle of dense, seething energy.

  Panic ripped through her. She was caught in the heart of the spider’s web.

  The ghastly stuff shrouded her senses, blinding all of them, not just the part of her that was psychic. She was plunged into total darkness. The sudden absence of light was disorienting. She reached out to grab hold of some object of furniture to steady herself and realized that she could not feel anything through her fingertips.

  Terror arced through her. She had to get out of there. But how could she do that when she could not see, hear, touch or feel? She willed her legs to move but had no way of knowing if they got the message.

  She was trapped in a waking nightmare. She would go mad if she did not regain her senses. She opened her mouth to scream for help but could no longer hear so she had no way of knowing if she had even made a sound.

  She flailed wildly at nothing for what seemed an eternity, fighting the cloaking static. She knew she had to regain control or she would be lost forever in this terrible darkness.

  She remembered how to shut out the low-level stuff. The technique for getting through this mess couldn’t be all that much different. It was all about fine-tuning the energy flow and finding harmony in the patterns.

  Feng shui of the mind.

  Slowly, painfully, exerting every ounce of will and psychic energy she possessed, she forced back some of the static. Gradually some of the dark vibes faded and fell away.

  Without warning, the light came back. So did the rest of her senses. She was aware
of the rough feel of carpet under her hands and realized that she had fallen to the floor.

  She opened her eyes, weak from her internal struggle, and looked toward the doorway of the bedroom.

  Robyn Duncan stood in the opening. She had a pistol in her hand.

  “You could have knocked,” Robyn said.

  Ethan stood behind Singleton and looked at the computer screen.

  “Nice job getting into those files,” Ethan said absently. Most of his attention was focused on the one name that stood out from all the rest.

  “No problem,” Singleton said. “Radnor’s computer security is an off-the-shelf program. Any halfway decent hacker could get through it in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Only took you five.”

  “That is because I’m way better than halfway decent.”

  “True.”

  Singleton tilted his head slightly. The light from the screen glinted on his glasses. “What made you think that the person who invaded Arcadia’s office and Zoe’s library might work for Radnor?”

  “Harry mentioned that he got sidetracked by a Radnor guard the other night at Fountain Square. He said security guards make him nervous because they can go anywhere without drawing attention and they’ve usually got access to keys. It occurred to me this morning that Radnor handles security for the show house neighborhood as well as the square. Someone with a Radnor uniform who knew where the keys were kept and who also knew the security layout could get in and out of both locations without leaving any tracks.”

  “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  “It was a long shot,” Ethan admitted.

  Singleton leaned back in his chair. “So why didn’t you just come right out and ask Radnor for a list of employees?”

  “I didn’t want to put him into what we in the trade like to call an untenable ethical position.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. A responsible employer isn’t supposed to release that kind of info unless the cops come calling with a warrant.”

  “Besides, it’s a hell of a lot easier this way.”

  “Sure is,” Singleton agreed.

  “And, naturally, I’ve got no qualms at all about invading the Candle Lake Manor files, not after what the folks at that place did to Zoe.”