Page 41 of From the Darkness

Deliberately, she went back to whatever had happened while she’d been in the bathroom with the door closed.

It had started with Troy asking a question. Then getting ambushed.

She swallowed the sick feeling that had suddenly risen in her throat. She’d asked Troy what had happened to him, and he’d said he didn’t remember. Had the memory come back to him? And he’d chosen this way to answer her question? Or was it a fantasy he was showing her?

And if he was only showing her a fantasy, why frighten her? So he would have an excuse to comfort her afterward? That hardly seemed like something he would do. At least the old Troy London. The new Troy was mysterious and secretive. And devious. He’d manipulated her before. Why not again? Maybe he wanted to frighten her, so she’d take Dinah and leave the estate—as he’d asked her to do.

There was no way to be sure what had happened. But it was impossible not to feel like someone—maybe Troy—was playing with her mind.

Pushing herself up, she stiffened her knees, then crossed to the bathroom again, where she splashed water on her face before taking several sips.

Feeling like she could think better, she turned back to the bedroom, examining it in a new light. Bringing back each detail of the attack—examining it in isolation.

The episode had ended with glass breaking.

Glass.

She focused on that detail, then ran to the light switch and turned on the overhead fixture as well as all the lamps. If someone had broken a bottle or a vase in here, they had obviously cleaned it up, because she hadn’t found any glass earlier. But had they gotten it all? Maybe there was some evidence left at the edges of the room.

At first, she saw nothing when she started to search along the baseboards. Then her heart leaped into her windpipe when she saw the tiny speck glittering in the crack where the floor met the wall. There were more tiny pieces that would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t been searching for them, and a larger one—a quarter of an inch long, sticking upright.

When she reached to pick it up, a sharp edge dug itself into her finger, and she made a small sound as blood welled from the injury. Cupping her palm around the dripping finger, she hurried to the bathroom, grabbed a tissue from the box on the shelf next to the sink, and pulled on the piece of glass. Luckily, it came right out. She washed off the finger and held it under running water. After drying it on another tissue, she found a Band-Aid in her medicine kit.

Taking care of the small injury had absorbed her attention. Finished with the first aid, she sat back down in the chair as she looked around the room once more. It could be that something totally unrelated to Troy had happened here. Something from long ago. Like the ghost. But she didn’t think so.

The speculation made her chest tighten. She hated to think that Troy had been attacked in this bedroom where she was sleeping. But it might be one of the reasons he kept coming here. Even when he’d lost his conscious memory of the incident, he might have remembered it on some level.

Suppose he’d been hit on the head—and that had created strange side effects—like awakening psychic powers. Or suppose he already had rudimentary powers, and the blow to the head had somehow sharpened them. Now he was calling forth those arcane abilities while he traveled silently around the estate—using the secret passages he and Helen had discovered when they were children.

She sighed. All of that was simply speculation. She really didn’t know what had happened—or how he was creating the special effects that seemed to accompany her contact with him.

There was an even more important question. Who had hurt him? She’d come here thinking the Sterlings were the prime candidates. Suppose they were working with Graves, or he was directing the show?

One more point nagged at her. Strange things had been happening since she’d arrived here, and she’d basically accepted them all at face value. Did that mean she should be calling her own sanity into question? Abner Sterling had called this place an insane asylum. Maybe all you had to do was live in this house to go insane.

Chapter Ten

Resolutely, Bree pulled her mind away from the abyss, then took the next half hour to regain her composure. When she felt she was equipped to handle human contact, she went down to the kitchen and found Mrs. Martindale preparing dinner.

“I’ve been thinking about Dinah’s meals being served in the schoolroom. She’s there so much. Is there somewhere else she and I could have dinner?” Bree asked

Mrs. Martindale considered the question. “We have lots of rooms that aren’t much used. There’s a sunporch near her bedroom. Would that do?”

“I think so.” She cleared her throat. “Uh, can I help you get dinner ready?”

“Oh no, dear. That’s not your job. I’m almost finished. You could help me fill plates for you and the little girl, though.”

Bree helped transfer peas and carrots, pieces of roast chicken, and parsley potatoes to dinner plates, then cleared her throat. The last time she’d asked the housekeeper questions, the answers hadn’t been much help. Now she felt she had to try again.

“Can I ask you a question?” she murmured.

“Certainly.”

“When Ms. London hired me, she said that Mr. London’s wife had died. Do you know how it happened?”

The housekeeper paused in the act of setting a slice of whole wheat bread on one of the plates. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Well, Dinah seems so shy. I’d like to . . . uh . . . draw her out. But I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

---