Truth or Dare Read online

  12

  A brief flash of light at the edge of the searcher’s field of vision was the only warning this time. The familiar aura heralded the approaching storm and the temporary darkness that would follow.

  Panic struck first.

  No. Got to stay in control.

  The brainstorm descended, turning everything, including the fear, into mindless static.

  The searcher came out of it a short time later, weakened and very shaky. Dread and fear were the first emotions to return. The storms were coming with increasing frequency these days.

  The searcher sat up slowly and looked around quickly. Fell across the footstool. Could have been worse. Could have cut my head on the corner of the table and knocked myself unconscious or left traces of blood for someone to find in the morning.

  That would have been a disaster.

  The flashlight had fallen to the carpet beside the reading chair. Its beam lanced aimlessly across the library, illuminating a red mug on a low table.

  The searcher reached down for the flashlight and encountered a small, sharp object on the carpet next to the table. A shard of broken glass.

  Alarmed, the searcher aimed the flashlight at the table and saw that the vase that had been there a short time earlier was gone. The fragile object was now in a dozen little pieces on the floor.

  Must have knocked it off when I fell. It’s okay. Just a little bud vase. She’ll assume one of the workers broke it.

  The hands on the whimsical wall clock showed that only three minutes had passed. The security guard wasn’t due to drive back down the street in front of the Designers’ Dream Home for another fifteen minutes.

  There was time to find a souvenir. Couldn’t leave without one.

  13

  Zoe was thinking about how Ethan had seemed more energized and less moody at breakfast and about how that was probably because he was involved in the Kirwan murder case, when she parked in front of the Designers’ Dream Home the next morning. Maybe solving the old mystery was just the kind of intellectual distraction he needed to help him get through the bad time this November.

  A sleek silver Jaguar pulled into the drive and stopped directly behind her. In her rearview mirror she watched Lindsey Voyle climb out from behind the wheel in all her stylish, minimalist glory.

  She was an attractive, assertive woman in her late thirties or maybe very early forties. Her expensively cut dark hair was discreetly tinted and showed no trace of gray. Zoe found Lindsey’s hazel gaze disconcerting. It seemed to follow her the way the eyes of the figures in an old master’s painting did. It was as if Lindsey were tracking her on some inner radar screen.

  Lindsey wore so much black that it would have been easy to assume she was from New York, but it turned out that she was a recent arrival from Los Angeles. Today she had on a black knit pullover of very fine cotton, black pants and black sandals. She carried a black leather satchel in one hand. The only pop of color was the unusual turquoise-and-silver necklace around her throat. Zoe recognized the piece. It was a one-of-a-kind creation that Lindsey had purchased at Arcadia’s boutique, Gallery Euphoria.

  Zoe was suddenly very much aware of her own attire, which consisted of a long, sleeveless dress in brilliant violet topped with a gauzy green duster that floated around her ankles. In the mirror that morning the outfit had looked good, vivid and cheerful. Now, compared to Lindsey’s slick, dramatic black, she had a nasty suspicion that she bore a strong resemblance to a circus clown.

  Their tastes in clothes pretty much echoed their personal design styles, she decided. The bedroom that Lindsey was doing inside the Designers’ Dream Home was a study in minimalist white accented with the palest of woods.

  Zoe was doing the library in a look that was the polar opposite: an eclectic mix of rich, saturated colors and textures.

  She got out of the car and reached into the backseat to hoist the large, red tote. It was one of a half dozen that she owned, each in a different color. The bag contained several of the necessities of her profession, including a camera, measuring tape, appointment calendar, sketchbook, small tool kit and a box of colored pencils and felt markers. It also held several heavy tile samples and some fabric swatches she intended to take to another project later in the day. And then there was the antique brass doorknob that served as her key ring.

  The interior design business was not a career for weaklings, she mused.

  She summoned up what she hoped would pass for a friendly smile. “Good morning, Lindsey.” She slung the tote over her shoulder, slammed the car door shut and started toward the front steps. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Lindsey said neutrally. She paused. “I had a visit from Tabitha Pine.”

  “So did I. She seems to feel that we need to experience some of her meditation sessions before we can draw up our proposals.”

  “I think she’s right,” Lindsey said. “I signed up for a full course of twenty sessions.”

  Zoe did a silent aaaargh. She had been considering dropping in on one or two of the classes. A full course of sessions probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars.

  The front door of the show house was locked.

  “Looks like we’re the first to arrive today,” Zoe said. Each of the designers had been assigned a key. She reached into the red tote to find hers.

  “I’ll get it.” Lindsey already had her key in hand. She fitted it into the lock and opened the door.

  “Thanks.”

  Zoe found Lindsey’s efficiency one of her more irritating characteristics.

  Zoe went briskly across the threshold, not hesitating as she usually did before entering a structure because she had already been inside the Designers’ Dream Home on several occasions during the past few weeks. There was no need to brace herself for the unknown.

  When she was younger she had assumed that everyone picked up on the invisible miasma of strong psychic energy that sometimes clung to the places where people had lived, loved, laughed or died. It was only when she was older that she had come to understand that, while a lot of folks did get occasional twinges of sensation or experience an inexplicable sense of déjà vu when they walked into a strange house or room, what she felt was quite different.

  It had not taken her long to figure out that, as far as most people were concerned, “different” usually translated into “crazy.” As a result, she had gotten very good at hiding her sensitivity to the psychic energy that was sometimes trapped in the walls of a house or building.

  She had gotten so good at concealing the truth about her psychic side that she had been able to keep it from her first husband. She had loved Preston dearly and she knew that he had loved her. But deep down she had always known that if she told him her secrets he would have worried desperately about the state of her mental health. He never would have been able to look at her the same way again.

  She would not have blamed him. There were times in the past when she herself had feared for her sanity, especially during those ghastly months at Candle Lake Manor.

  The most unsettling aspect of her relationship with Ethan was that, although she had told him about her sixth sense, he had been relatively unfazed. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that she was pretty sure the reason he had taken her revelation so calmly was because he did not really believe that she was psychic. In his opinion, she was merely extremely intuitive. As a private investigator who relied heavily on his own intuition, Ethan could accept and deal with that explanation.

  Lindsey went ahead of her down the hall, heading for the wide staircase that led to the second level of the big house.

  “I took a look at your library yesterday on my way out,” Lindsey said over her shoulder. “I see you decided to go with those dark red bookshelves. Don’t you think that color will be too strong in that space? You’ve already got a lot going on in there.”

  Take deep breaths, Zoe told herself. Whatever you do, don’t get defensive.
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br />   “The effect will be much different once the books are on the shelves,” she said.

  “Well, it’s your space.” Lindsey started up the stairs, clutching her satchel. “But you’ve already got so many colors in there. All that ocher and terra-cotta is a bit much. The room seems very warm, especially for such a hot climate.”

  Zoe ground her teeth but managed to keep her mouth shut.

  Lindsey did not wait for a response. At the top of the stairs she turned and disappeared in the direction of the master bedroom suite.

  Promising herself that she would not swear, not even under her breath, Zoe continued down the hall to her library.

  Lindsey was wrong, she thought. The deep red squares of the floor-to-ceiling shelves would act as punchy frames for the books and objets d’art displayed against the blue-trimmed ocher walls. They would also accent the terra-cotta tiles and the colorful rugs.

  She told herself that Lindsey was also mistaken when she said that the colors in the library were too hot for a desert climate. The hues did not look warm; on the contrary, they made a cool contrast to the heat. The long-standing success of the Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean styles was proof that rich jewel-toned colors worked in a bright environment. They provided the illusion of shade and helped cut the glare of an intense sun.

  In her opinion, white was the wrong choice for the desert, Zoe thought as she rounded the corner into her library. Especially when it was used as starkly and extensively as Lindsey had used it in that bedroom upstairs. The last thing you wanted to do in this brightly lit landscape was reflect the light. White could easily act like a mirror when it came to glare.

  There were exceptions to every rule, of course. Arcadia could get away with white in her apartment because Arcadia was Arcadia. Pales suited her personality and created the right kind of energy in her living space. But the energy flow upstairs in Lindsey’s bedroom was going to be less than optimal, Zoe concluded.

  She stopped on the threshold and surveyed her library. She had designed it with a family in mind. She was not sure why, but for some reason she’d had a picture of a mom and a dad and two little kids in her head from the very start of the project. Both children had Ethan’s dark hair and amber eyes.

  She had told herself that it was just a useful mental image constructed by her imagination to help her give the space a focus. She was accustomed to working with the needs of an actual client, but in this instance there wasn’t a real homeowner with unique requirements and a personality. So she had invented her little family and tried not to think too much about why the kids looked a lot like Ethan.

  She was pleased with the way the room had turned out. It was comfortable and inviting. There was something interesting or intriguing going on in every corner.

  She walked slowly through the space, opening her senses to the energy flows, making certain that things felt right. It was an old-fashioned space in many ways, imbued with the atmosphere of an early-nineteenth-century library. There was no big-screen television or state-of-the-art sound system. Fortunately, another designer had been assigned the media room down the hall.

  This was a room designed for contemplation, study and personal time. She wanted this space to be a refuge for every member of the household, a place where dreams could take shape.

  She paused beside the miniature chairs and table she had arranged for the imaginary children and adjusted the position of the globe. Then she crossed to the large writing desk and stood behind it, making certain that whoever sat there would have a view of the fountain in the garden outside.

  She liked to incorporate water or a view of it into her rooms. It provided its own special kind of energy. So did plants, which was why she had placed a large cluster of them on the other side of this space. They not only purified the air in a room, they cleansed the energy that flowed through it.

  She tweaked the frame of the picture over the fireplace. It was a photograph of Nightwinds Canyon at dawn. She had taken it herself late last month. Ethan had risen with her every morning in the dark for four days in a row to keep her company at the edge of the canyon while she went through roll after roll of film, waiting for the one right shot.

  Turning away from the photo, she moved toward the first of the two adult reading chairs, probing for the feel of the energy flow.

  She was only a couple of steps away from the first chair when the whispers of darkness snagged on her fully engaged psychic senses.

  She nearly screamed in shock. It was as if she had blundered into the sticky strands of an invisible spiderweb. Flinching, she hurriedly stepped back out of range. A shiver went through her as her pulse jumped into high gear. She struggled to close down her wide-open senses.

  What on earth?

  An old memory from an especially bad night at Candle Lake rose like a monster from the depths. She squelched it swiftly. This was her show house library, for heaven’s sake, not H Ward.

  Okay, let’s try this again. Maybe she had overreacted. It was true that her imagination coupled with her psychic senses could produce some unnerving moments on occasion.

  But her psychic senses had never betrayed her, she reminded herself. Cautiously she opened them wide once more and took a step forward.

  The cobwebs drifted across her senses, making her shudder. There was something there near the chair. She had experienced a similar sensation once before in her life, and the recollection of it still had the power to chill her blood.

  This is not H Ward.

  She repeated the mantra to herself several times but her throat remained clenched against nausea and she was getting light-headed. She refused to allow herself to retreat. She had to know what this ghastly stuff was.

  The invisible threads drifted around her, so faint she could barely sense them, but unmistakably there.

  Impossible. Just two days before she had come here to add some final touches. She had picked up nothing out of the ordinary that day.

  What is going on here?

  Calm down and think. You’ve been to enough murder scenes to know what they feel like, and this room isn’t giving off those kinds of vibes. The walls aren’t screaming the way they do when blood has been spilled in a room.

  The energy was quite faint but extremely murky. That was not typical of most of the psychic sensations she encountered. Her sixth sense responded keenly to traces of the stronger passions, and those tended to be primitive and raw in nature. Rage, fear, panic, hatred, lust and obsessive need were elemental energies. The taints they left behind were usually sharp and clear.

  This was . . . something else, something very frightening.

  The psychic web seemed to be emanating from an area around the footstool. She examined the space closely. Everything looked exactly as it had the last time she had been in that room. There was no sign of recent violence or destruction.

  No, that wasn’t quite true.

  Light glinted on a shard of glass near the footstool. She reached down and picked it up. The color of the glass was familiar.

  She glanced at the small table beside the chair. The bud vase was gone; smashed.

  There was something else that was not right about the space, but she could not immediately identify it.

  She turned slowly on her heel, examining every inch of the library. When she came to the table in the children’s corner she stopped.

  She had arranged a handful of colorful, everyday objects on the low table. Jeff had supplied a small dinosaur for the informal collection and Theo had given her a tiny model motorcycle. She had added one of her new chili-pepper red mugs because it picked up the color of the bookcase shelves.

  The red mug was gone.

  14

  That night she dreamed of Xanadu.

  She rose from the narrow bed and put on the hospital-issue robe. The garment hung loosely around her. It had fit when she was admitted to Candle Lake Manor, but she had lost a lot of weight during the past few months. The drugs that Dr. McAlister tried to force down her in hopes of in
ducing her cooperation in therapy had effectively smothered her appetite.

  She had eventually learned how to dispose of some of the pills without anyone realizing that she was not swallowing them, but she could not evade all of the meds. And even on those rare days when her mind was relatively clear, she had no appetite. The enormous willpower required to contain the alternating tides of rage, fear and desperation that regularly swept over her left her so exhausted that the task of eating seemed overwhelming.

  That had to change, she thought. She had to start consuming the calories she needed to rebuild her strength. She would never escape if she did not eat right.

  She went to the small, barred window. Her room was on the third floor of the asylum, providing her with a view over the high fence that surrounded the Manor. From there she could see the lake.

  Cold moonlight gleamed on the surface of the evil waters. Sometimes the only possible escape that she could envisage involved swimming out to the middle of the lake and letting herself sink into the depths.

  But she had avoided McAlister’s poison that morning, and tonight her mind was clearer than it had been in some time. She did not want to think about sinking forever into the depths of the lake.

  She needed an objective; she had to start planning her escape. She had to give herself some hope. It was a certainty that no one else around this place would provide it.

  She turned away from the window and went to the door, trying the knob the way she always did, in the hope that someone had forgotten to lock it.

  The door opened. One of the orderlies had been careless again. It wasn’t the first time. The staff at Candle Lake was not composed of what anyone would term dedicated medical professionals.

  Dr. Harper, the head of this very expensive, very private loony bin, wasn’t paid to cure his patients. He got the big bucks from his clients because he was willing to house their crazy relatives out of sight and out of mind.