When they left Oliver’s house, Hayden seemed lost in some inner maze of his own. The shock of learning that Deirdre must really be alive, and that she’d been hiding from him—living with Oliver—perhaps had even been the cause of Oliver’s death—was more than he could understand or endure. There was nothing anyone could say, no comfort to be offered. He was alone with a terrible enigma he still had no means of solving. There would be no use combing the woods for Deirdre in the rain—she could have gone anywhere, concealed herself in a hundred places in or out of Redlands. There were even caves in the mountains, and she was an outdoor creature.
Victor took charge quietly. “Come down to my place for a drink, Hay. You can stay the night, if you want, and tomorrow you can decide what’s possible. She may come back to Oliver’s during the night, and we can find her in the morning.”
“Thanks, Victor. First, I’ll drive Christy back to Nona’s, and then take you up on staying here. Donny will be okay with Leonie. I ought to stick close to where she’s likely to appear. If I could just talk with her . . .”
When they left, Victor stood in his lighted doorway, watching them drive away. He must carry his own guilt, Christy thought, for not bringing his suspicions into the open. If he’d acted, Oliver might still be alive. But perhaps it hadn’t been possible for him to behave in any other way. There were those who believed that everyone was bonded into a pattern accepted at birth. But where did that leave free choice?
“We can make choices.” Hayden’s words seemed to read her thoughts—but she didn’t think he was talking about Victor.
“I know,” she said. “Lili believes there’s a master plan, but that every move within it isn’t ordained. It’s up to us to decide what to do. Lili knows how to manage that with the greatest assurance. I seem to wind up in a state of confusion.”
Unexpectedly, he reached out to touch her arm. “You do all right. Better than I’ve done.”
He drove the rest of the way to Nona’s in bleak silence, and she didn’t speak again until she got out of the Jeep. “I’m sorry—about everything,” she told him, knowing how inadequate words could be. He only nodded and drove away.
No one could help him now. No sympathy could reach him, much as she longed to offer it. She went into the house feeling almost as dazed as Hayden looked.
Lights were on in Nona’s kitchen when she went along the deck, and through the bay windows she could see Nona and Lili at the table with cups before them. Lili’s drink would be herbal tea, but Nona seemed to be drinking black coffee. When Christy went through the door, prepared to resist the questioning that was sure to greet her, Nona put a finger to her lips.
“Ssh—it’s Josef.”
Christy sat down quietly and watched her mother. Lili’s eyes were closed and she breathed deeply, swaying a little. This was the time to ask Josef a few questions herself, Christy thought, waiting for his voice.
After a moment or two he spoke. “Good evening to my friends.”
Only Nona said, “Good evening,” on cue. Then she spoke directly to Josef. “You wanted to talk with us.”
“To Christy,” Josef said. “She is here now. She must listen carefully. There is something to be done at once.”
“I will listen,” Christy said.
Josef went on. “You must go to the house of the spirit woman. Go by car. Go quickly.”
“You mean Deirdre’s house? What must I do there, Josef?”
“You will know. Take your aunt and your mother with you. Lili will help you. Good night to you for now.”
Not at all satisfactory, Christy thought, but she’d better do as Josef said.
Lili shook herself and returned to the real world. “Let’s go,” she told them briskly.
They took the station wagon, driving the short distance, as Josef had directed. Lights burned in several rooms of Hayden’s house.
Leonie met them at the door, looking frightened and uncertain. “Please go upstairs right away. Donny is asleep in his room—don’t wake him up.”
Christy ran up the stairs ahead of the others. She had no doubt at all where she must go. Deirdre’s door was closed. Christy opened it without a warning knock, and stood with Nona and Lili behind her, looking into the room.
Several lamps had been lighted and the woman sat in her favorite chair. She had taken one of her own filmy gowns from the closet and put it on over jeans that showed at her ankles. The crystal Christy had returned to Donny rested in her cupped hands. She sat watching them quietly, almost as though she had expected them to come.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Deirdre said. Tearstains had dried on her cheeks, and she looked forlorn and helpless.
This was Hayden’s wife, and for a moment an intense unhappiness filled Christy—until pity for Deirdre surfaced. Pity for the sadness and fear that possessed this wraith of a woman who sat before them.
Lili knew what to do. She went quickly to drop to her knees before Deirdre, taking her hands in hers, crystal and all.
“You are safe now. Nothing can hurt you. If there is anything you’d like to tell us—any way we can help you—we will listen.”
Lili carried the power of healing in her hands, and Deirdre seemed to relax a little at her touch. When Lili put an arm around her, she leaned into it.
How lovely she was, Christy thought—in an ethereal sort of way—as delicate in her appearance as she’d been described, and as Nona had painted her. Her violet eyes, still brimming with tears, were fixed on Lili’s face as though she might draw sustenance from someone so strong and confident.
Yet in the end, while Lili was still murmuring words of reassurance, Deirdre gently withdrew her hands, set the crystal aside, and stood up. Sinh, who had crouched unnoticed on a bookcase, startled them all by leaping onto Deirdre’s shoulder and practically circling herself around Deirdre’s slender neck. Deirdre reached up to caress her, and the cat purred and rubbed her head against Deirdre’s chin.
“I’m sorry,” Deirdre whispered softly to the cat, and then released clinging claws and set her on the floor. “I must go now.”
Nona said, “Sit down, Deirdre, please. No one is going to force you to do anything, but it will be better if you talk to us, let us help you. This is Liliana Dukas, of whom you may have heard. She’s Christy’s mother, and Christy is my niece.”
“I know all that,” Deirdre said. “But I must go now. It isn’t safe for me to stay in this house. She mustn’t find me here.”
“She?” Nona repeated.
A terror close to hysteria shone in Deirdre’s eyes. “This time I got away, but she’ll find me. She always does.”
“Tell us who you mean, dear?” Lili asked, her tone calming.
Deirdre was far from calm. “No! She’d punish me. I can’t tell anyone.”
“If we know who you’re talking about, she can be stopped,” Nona told her.
But Deirdre was beyond reason. She ran toward the door, and Christy moved to block her way.
“Wait, please. Hayden’s at Victor’s now. We can phone and ask him to come home. He’d be here in minutes. And he only wants to help you, Deirdre. You must know that.”
“Not any more. Not after Oliver. So many horrible things have happened and she says it’s my fault. I have to save myself and stop her. If I can find the courage. I’ve never been brave.”
“First you must see Hayden,” Nona said firmly. “I’m going to call him now. He has a right to help you.”
“No—I don’t belong to Hayden! We lost each other a long time ago.” She moved away from Christy and raised her arms in a wide arc. “I belong to the woods and the mountains—to moonlight and rainbows. They don’t frighten me, and that’s where I must go. She can’t follow me there.”
“It’s raining hard,” Nona said. “You can’t go out in this.”
“I don’t mind the rain. I can hide better in a storm. It was foolish to come here—I always do foolish things.”
“Deirdre,” Christy pleaded, “what about your son? Donny misses you terribly. Don’t you want to see him before you go?”
She shook her head wildly. “There’s no time. It’s better for him if he doesn’t see me now.”
Lili went quickly to the closet, took out a long green raincoat and helped Deirdre into it. At least she wore heavy shoes. When Christy stepped aside, unable to stop her now, Deirdre ran toward the stairs.
“We have to let her go,” Lili said. “She must meet her own destiny. Her own karma.”
Christy had little use for destiny at the moment, and she hurried downstairs after Deirdre. She was in time to see Hayden come through the front door. He stood still when he saw Deirdre, and spoke quietly.
“I saw the lights from Victor’s, and I thought I’d better come.”
Deirdre faced him down the long room for only a moment. Then she fled toward a door to the rear deck and disappeared into dark, slanting rain.
Hayden went after her and down the back steps. They could hear him crashing around in wet brush down the hill, the sounds gradually diminishing. The three women waited under the overhang of the back deck, listening to the rain. But Deirdre had circled around to the front, where Hayden’s Jeep stood in the driveway. They heard it start, heard Hayden shout, but by the time they reached the front windows the car’s headlights were moving away at a greater speed than was safe for these roads.
“You can take my car,” Nona called to Hayden.
He came up to the house to join them. “It’s no use. Even if I could catch her, I might do more harm than good. I don’t think she’ll go outside of Redlands. There’s something holding her here. I feel that strongly. What did she say to you upstairs?”
Christy told him. “She talked about a ‘she’ who seems to have been holding her captive in some way. But she wouldn’t tell us who it was. It can’t be anyone who lives here, can it—not anyone we know?”
“The evil don’t wear labels,” Nona said. “Masks can fool anyone, and I think we’ve been fooled by someone here for a long time.”
Lili said with her usual assurance, “There is no evil. There are only misguided souls whom we must pity and help.”
“While they go around murdering people?” Hayden was impatient again. “Anyway, there’s one thing I haven’t followed through on. Christy, you had a vision about someone digging in the llama pen—has anything more come to you?”
Christy shook her head. “I’m sorry—nothing.”
“Then I’m going down there now and see if I can find an answer.”
“In the dark, in the rain?” Nona protested.
He paid no attention, and Christy said quickly, “Let me come with you. Perhaps something will filter through if I go down there. We don’t have any time to lose. I have the feeling that Deirdre is desperate enough to do anything.”
Hayden found Christy an old raincoat, and Nona gave him the keys to her car. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll stay right here, or walk home if it stops raining.”
Christy glanced at her mother as she went out. For once, Lili did not look serene. No one had taken her good advice, and she had no more ready answers. Apparently, Josef too was silent.
Tension showed in Hayden’s grip on the wheel as he drove, and Christy felt increasingly fearful, though she had no focus for her fear. Like Hayden, she knew that Deirdre must be helped somehow, and that they must follow any means of rescue they could find.
The stream at the foot of the hill rushed along noisily at high speed as they crossed the bridge. In Floris’s house above, lights shone through the rainy darkness, and Floris came quickly to let them in.
No, she hadn’t seen Deirdre, she said in answer to Hayden’s question, though she didn’t seem especially surprised to learn that his wife had been roaming about in the woods.
“I was sure I sensed her around a few times,” Floris said. “Maybe she even brought the cat here. She should have been born a deer—or perhaps a llama. Though my llamas have better care then Deirdre seems to have had.”
There was criticism of Hayden implied in her words, but he paid no attention. At his urging, Christy described the flash of pictures that had come to her—of someone digging down in the llama pen. Perhaps within the last twenty-four hours.
Again, Floris didn’t seem surprised. “The llamas have been restless on and off, so I knew something was up. They’re in the barn now, and I thought some animal had stirred them up. It’s only when they stop humming and begin to quack like ducks that I know there’s real trouble.”
Hayden borrowed two flashlights, and they went down to where the animals had been closed into the barn for the night. Beyond the main pen was a wide stretch of meadow, but the picture Christy had received was of the pen itself.
When Hayden played his flashlight over the area, it didn’t take long to find the muddy corner where earth had been disturbed. Rain was no longer a downpour, but a steady dripping from trees sounded all around. The air felt cool on Christy’s face, and the smell of woods was fresh and pungent. But there was something else out there among the nearby trees—a presence. It came to her strongly—someone watching. Perhaps Deirdre herself? But any move on Hayden’s part would only precipitate flight, so she said nothing.
With a spade borrowed from Floris, Hayden thrust deeply into the soft red earth, striking something almost at once—something buried hurriedly near the surface. He lifted out a plastic bag and held it up to Christy’s flashlight. The bag contained a large book.
“Let’s go see what we’ve found,” he said. In the barn the llamas hummed among themselves, and eyes looked out curiously, caught in the passing beam of light.
Once more in the kitchen, where Floris spread newspapers over a table, Hayden examined his parcel. The book was thick, and obviously scholarly, and Oliver Vaughn’s bookplate showed on the inside cover. Looking at the title, Christy saw that it was the volume on abnormal psychology that Eve had mentioned. The section on siblings opened to a marker, and Oliver had made notations in the margin—his script cramped and hard to read.
Floris looked over Hayden’s shoulder uneasily. “Oliver came down here one time to talk about the problems I’d had growing up in a large family. He was mostly interested in how I felt about sisters. I told him that sisters come in all varieties, so most anything goes. I think he was planning an article or something on the subject.”
“Thanks, Floris,” Hayden said. “I’ll take this along and have a closer look.”
Floris came with them to the door, looking past them, as though she sensed something out among the dripping trees. “Lately I keep seeing things,” she said.
If it was Deirdre, let her be, Christy thought.
When they reached Hayden’s house, he found that his Jeep had been returned to the garage. It was wet, and muddy, but how long it had been there, there was no telling.
They hurried inside and Leonie came to let them know that Miss Harmony and Miss Dukas had gone home when it stopped raining. Hayden told her to go to bed—he would look in on Donny later.
When he’d turned on more lights in the living room, they saw Deirdre. She lay in shadow on the sofa at the far end, where Leonie hadn’t noticed her. One hand was tucked under her cheek, like a child, and her hair and clothes were soaking wet. If she had gone on foot, Christy thought, she might have been down there in the woods watching, and still have come back here before they could make the trip by car.
When Hayden touched her shoulder, she started up in fright. “It’s all right,” he told her gently. “You mustn’t run away any more. Tonight you will sleep in your own bed.”
For a moment she stared up at him, her eyes wide and doubting. Then she seemed to let go of all resistance and he gathered her slight body into his arms and carried her to the stairs. “Wait, please,” he said to Christy over his shoulder.
The book that had belonged to Oliver lay on a table, where Hayden had placed it. Christy reached to pick it up, and the moment she touched it a sense of warning flashed through her. The book was dangerous—to someone. Without a doubt, she knew that this volume held answers that would illuminate everything. Someone had been frightened enough of its contents to attempt to hide it.
But why in the llama pen? Why not in a dozen other hiding places?
She sat down beside a reading lamp and turned to the marked pages about siblings. Oliver had checked several paragraphs concerning the possessive older sister. In themselves, the passages seemed innocent enough. Perhaps he’d really been interested in the article he meant to write, and nothing else. But she knew there was more. The warning that there was a threat to someone in these pages had been clear. Perhaps to herself, as well as Deirdre?
When Hayden came downstairs he looked depressed, gloomy. “I’ve put her to bed,” he said, and came to sit across from Christy.
She tapped the open book on her lap. “Did Deirdre have a sister? An older sister?”
“It’s strange, but I’m not really sure. She loved to tell all sorts of stories about her childhood, and I could never be certain which ones she was making up. I do know that Deirdre’s mother was her father’s second wife. His first wife had died, and there may have been a half sister. Sometimes she claimed there was, though she said the older girl had quarreled with her father and gone to live with an aunt. The aunt has since died, so that story could never be checked. Other times she’d deny having any sister. Once when I asked questions, she begged me to let it go. I suspect that the sister got in touch with her at one time and said something that alarmed Deirdre—perhaps even threatened her. But whenever I tried to pin her down—just so I could help her—she would say she had no sister, and slip off in her own elusive way.”
When he came to a pause Hayden got up to light the fire against the evening’s chill. As warmth spread through the room, he drew Christy to the couch before the hearth and sat beside her.
“Deirdre’s is a very gentle madness,” he told her, watching the flames. “I’ve known for a long time that there was an imbalance there, but it always seemed harmless enough. I know there were times when she grew too keyed up and excited. She’d be full of talk about moonlight and rainbows and all those eerie tales her Irish nanny had filled her head with as a little girl. Most children outgrow fairy tales, but I don’t think Deirdre ever did. Besides, there was always something enchanting in that childlike quality. She refused to see a psychiatrist, and I never pushed. But now, what if she’s no longer harmless? What if her mind has taken some manic turn, so that she’s out of control?”
He looked somber, hopeless, and Christy could only listen as he went on.
“I’ve always felt that I could never put her away in an institution, where she would be restrained and given drugs; confined between hard bare walls. How could I do that to her bright spirit? She was such a delight when I first knew her. Mischievous and entrancing, but never malicious. It wasn’t until after Donny was born that I began to realize that I’d married an enthralling child-woman who would never grow up. There was nothing dangerous about her. In fact, she was loving toward everyone, though perhaps too easily influenced by others at times. Eve Corey would use her—boss her around, until I put a stop to that. Rose understood her better and was always kind. And Deirdre was comfortable with Nona, and sometimes listened to her. But now—I don’t know what’s happening, or how she could run off to Oliver. I suppose an—illness—like hers doesn’t stay the same. It can take turns for the worse without reason. Yet I can’t see her harming Rose—or Oliver.”
“Did she talk to you just now, while you were putting her to bed?”
“A little. She pleaded with me to let her stay and sleep in her room—where she would be safe. Pleaded, as though I were a stranger and this wasn’t her home. She’s pitifully afraid of something, but the moment I ask questions, she slips away from me. I had the feeling that she’s afraid for her life. All I can do is stay home and watch over her for a few days, try to get the truth out of her. That’s the only way I can help her.”
“I’m sorry,” Christy said. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
He took her hand and held it for a moment against his cheek. “Thank you for staying,” he said. “Thank you for being here.”
Events would have to take their own course, and she could only watch for some way to change what needn’t be inevitable—now that she was forewarned.
“I can get back to Nona’s by myself,” she told him. “It’s not raining, and you mustn’t leave the house now.”
But he wouldn’t let her go alone. It would only take a few moments to drive her over. When they reached the house, he left her and went straight back to Deirdre. Once more, Christy found herself watching until his headlights turned up his own driveway.
Then she went inside to warmth and light. Nona and Lili were waiting for her, and she knew the time had come to tell them everything.
She shut me in and got away!
I never thought she could be that strong. She wants me gone—dead. I know that very well. It will come down in the end to a life-or-death struggle between me and the sister I’ve always hated. And I will win.
But first I must find the means to get out of the prison in which she’s tried to lock me. The same place where I held her.