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.