“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said. She turned to Elena Torres. “Would you please telephone the Labyrinth Springs Hotel and see if you can get a reservation for me for tomorrow night? It’s about a four- or five-hour drive. I’ll leave first thing in the morning. I should be there around noon at the latest. I’ll put a sign in the window of Kirk Investigations today explaining that the office is closed for the rest of the week.”
Elena gave her a knowing look and reached for the phone. “Will you be using your real name?”
“Good question,” Lyra said. “I need a cover name.”
“Cage,” Simon said. “Make the reservation in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Simon Cage. Newlyweds. We’ll want the honeymoon suite if it’s available.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lyra said, stunned.
“It’s the perfect cover,” Simon said.
What the hell am I doing?he thought.
Chapter 11
Raina surfaced from the hallucinations with the sense that she was alone. She knew the feeling well, because she had spent much of her adult life alone. She had not realized how empty her world had become until she moved to Burning Cove. There, in the warmth of the California sun, she had begun to discover the treasure of friendships with people she felt she could trust. In Burning Cove she had met Luther Pell.
Burning Cove and Luther and her new friends had given her the ultimate gift: the promise of belonging; the promise of home. But she was a woman with a carefully buried past. She had always feared that one day the specters of that past would rise up out of the grave. Now her nightmare had become real and she had to face it the same way she had everything else in her life—alone. She had to protect Luther and her new friends at all costs.
She suppressed the last fragments of a vision in which she was falling into a whirlpool of hot, violet-colored light and fought to take stock of her situation. A few vague memories flickered and sparked. Thedoor of the hotel room opening. Terrifying monsters leaning over the bed—no, not monsters. Men with their faces covered in the rubber masks that were used in spas and salons to smooth wrinkles. She remembered her frantic struggle to get off the bed and escape. Broken glass. Darkness. Endless darkness. The rumble of a car engine. The strap of her handbag in her fingers. Fumbling with the clasp. More hallucinations.
Panic.
And then a vision of Luther reaching down into the violet whirlpool, trying to grasp her hand. But she kept falling...
She opened her eyes and discovered she was in a bedroom. Not the room she had been booked into at the hotel. She was lying on a large four-poster bed. The faint, lingering scent of a familiar perfume clung to the quilt and the pillowcases. It was the same fragrance that had wafted up from the bedding in room two twenty-one at the Labyrinth Springs Hotel—Madam Guppy’s Violet.
I never did like that perfume. Too heavy.
At least she was no longer blindfolded. And her hands were free. The lamps in the room were on. That was a good thing, because the faded, floral drapes were pulled tightly shut across the window.
She sat up slowly. That was when she heard the clanking of metal links and became aware of an uncomfortable weight on her right foot. She looked down. The light from the wall sconce gleamed on the manacle around her ankle. One end of a metal chain was attached to the manacle. The other end was secured to an iron ring bolted to the wall.
She was wearing the trousers, shirt, and sport shoes she’d had on when she was in her hotel room. At least she was fully dressed. It was always easier to deal with disaster when one was wearing good clothes.
She got up slowly. The chain was just long enough to allow her to go into the adjoining bathroom. She could also get to the dressing table. It would not let her go as far as the door.
She went to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside. Therewas nothing to see except the solid wall of boards that had been nailed across the window.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to create a prison cell—far too much effort for just a single kidnapping. She knew then that she was not the first woman who had been chained in the very nice, somewhat old-fashioned bedroom.
She saw a plate of breakfast rolls, a large teapot, and a cup and saucer sitting on a small table. The design of the plate and the cup and saucer was familiar. The food she had ordered from room service had been served on dishes decorated with the same design. The rolls were not homemade. They looked as if they had come from a professional kitchen—a hotel kitchen.
It occurred to her that food might help settle her queasy stomach. She clanked her way across the room, picked up one of the rolls, and took a bite. It went down and felt like it would stay down.
She lifted the lid of the teapot and inhaled cautiously. The contents were only lukewarm, but that was not what made her decide to forgo a cup of tea. It was the faint trace of an all-too-familiar herbal scent that worried her. It triggered a memory. A pot of the same tea had been brought to her hotel room, courtesy of the hotel management. She’d poured herself a cup while she waited for her visitor. Not long after finishing the tea she had been plunged into the hallucinations. At some point she had collapsed on the bed.
She knew something about poisons. She would not drink the tea. She picked up the pot and went into the black-and-white-tiled bathroom. The towels were monogrammed with the logo of Guppy’s House of Beauty: a violet orchid. She poured the tea down the sink and set the pot aside.
There was a glass on the white-tiled shelf above the sink. She used the soap to wash it out and then drank a full glass of water. When she was finished she clanked her way back into the bedroom, ate the rest of the breakfast rolls, and sank down on the edge of the bed. She examined the manacle around her ankle.
She was a captive locked in a deceptively pleasant prison. With the curtains pulled shut, one didn’t even notice the boarded-up windows.
She knew a lot about outwardly attractive prisons, too. She had spent her short nightmare of a marriage locked in one in Bar Harbor.
She fought back a surging wave of panic and tried to think. She had been tricked. It wasn’t the Ghost Lady who had made the telephone call that had brought her to Labyrinth Springs. Someone else—someone who knew the secrets of her marriage—had made that call.
Her nightmares had come true. The violent psychopath she had married had not died in a fall down the stairs. He was alive and he had hunted her down. This time he would kill her.
