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Beth reached into her bag for tissues and handed them across the table to Stacy. “Do you want to go to the ladies’ room?” she asked in a whisper.
Stacy mopped at her eyes and nose and shook her head. “Just give me a minute, Beth. I have so much to tell you and I want to think about how to start.” Her tears seemed to be abating. “How about ordering me a gin and tonic.”
Stacy was in control by the time the waiter brought her drink. After a healthy swallow of it, she began to enlighten Beth as to what had passed in the last few weeks.
“I thought I had painted all of the changes out,” she said, “but when I woke up the next afternoon, not only were they still there, but other things had been added.” She reached for her drink and took another gulp, barely noticing when Beth raised her hand to signal to the waiter for another round.
“Other things?” Beth prompted.
Stacy’s eyes were huge and round. “Another rope alongside the first one, and further into the painting a doll lying on a path and moonlight streaming down onto the path. Th-there was a group of men standing beneath the tree. And Beth...they...they had no faces.” She shuddered and drank from her glass again.
“Wait a minute,” Beth ordered. “Isn’t that painting a day scene as all the others are?”
Stacy’s voice cracked. “Yes. But the moonlight is in the interior of the painting, as if time had changed from the beginning edge to that point.”
Beth sat silent and thoughtful for a moment and Stacy automatically began on her second drink.
Finally she asked, “Have you had someone else look at the painting, dear?”
Stacy’s mouth fell open. “You mean as in ‘Maybe you’re imagining the whole thing, dear’?”
“No...no of course not,” Beth protested. “I only meant—”
“Listen, Beth, it isn’t only the painting.”
Beth waited, afraid of making another mistake with Stacy. “Go on,” she said, softly.
“I’ve been having dreams that wake me up in a cold sweat. And visions.”
“Visions?”
“You know, like daydreams, only they usually happen when I’m painting. When I come out of them, I’m dizzy and disoriented and totally wiped out.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” Beth was already searching her bag for her address book and pen. “I can give you my doctor’s number. He’s—”
“No!” Stacy took a breath and lowered her voice. “It’s not physical, Beth, I’m sure of that.”
“Honey, it’s obviously affecting your health.”
Stacy’s chin took on a familiar jut of defiance. “I don’t have time for tests and examinations, Beth. This is something I have to nip in the bud as quickly as I can.” Her voice cracked again. “I can’t go on like this.”
Beth’s common sense took hold and she sat back, her own chin lifted in a businesslike manner.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s look at your options.”
Stacy took a small sip of her drink this time and nodded.
“First, you can see a psychiatrist, in case this is some kind of little breakdown.” She ignored Stacy’s gesture of refusal and pushed on. “Or maybe this is actually some kind of occult thing...like, oh, you know, possession. In which case you could see someone at the Psychic Institute.”
“A ghostbuster?” Stacy’s laughter came out a gurgle.
“Or,” Beth continued, giving her friend a frown of disapproval, “something from your past is trying to break through and you could see a hypnotist.”
She stopped, waiting for another snort of derision from Stacy, but this time Stacy’s eyes widened with surprise and she sat back and put her hands to her mouth.
“Well?”
“I think you’re onto something, Beth,” Stacy said, lowering her hands slowly. “One of the things that happened last week is that I came across an envelope addressed to my mother. It was at the back of a drawer and the envelope was empty. But it had a clear postmark, dated 1969, from a place called Hunter’s Bay, Minnesota.”
“Hunter’s Bay? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Neither have I. But though my mother refused to ever tell me about her past, or mine, she did tell me that I was born in Minnesota.” She leaned toward Beth again, moving her place setting out of her way. “The strange thing is, when I took a magnifying glass up to the painting, I saw that I’d printed in the letters HUN on the signpost by the roadside.”
“Before or after you found the envelope?”
“Before.”
They shared a moment of troubled musing and then Beth said, “I think you should go there.”
“To Hunter’s Bay?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t just up and leave my work to go to a strange place to look for...what?”
“The answer to whatever is trying to break through your subconscious. And as for your work, you do all your studies on-site with watercolor. We’re three days from May. From what little I know of Minnesota, you ought to be able to find some gorgeous springtime landscape environments there. You can combine your painting with a little detective work. If all else fails, it seems to me it would be good for you to get away from your studio for a while.”
“My studio? Why?”
“Because that’s where you’re having these...episodes. Think about it, Stacy. It’s just possible that it’s your studio, and not you, that’s haunted.”
* * *
THE DRIVE NORTHWEST had been uneventful. Stacy took her time, enjoying the changing of the season in the various states through which she passed. At times she’d leave her car at the side of the road to snap pictures of scenery with her camera. She stopped when the driving became tiring and stayed in motels, prolonging her arrival at her final destination. The drive was so free of the visions and her sleep so undisturbed by dreams, that she hated to leave the serenity of the road.
But by the fourth day, she realized she was only wasting time, putting off the inevitable, and since her map showed her destination only four hours’ drive from the motel where she’d spent the night, she couldn’t justify delaying any longer.
A last glance in the bathroom mirror before she checked out assured her that the meals she’d eaten en route and the restful night hours had restored her to her natural healthy look. Her red hair was shiny and bouncy and her green eyes clear as spring water. The pasty look was gone from her face and she even appeared to have put back a few of her lost pounds.
She settled behind the wheel with a sigh of satisfaction. Perhaps Beth had been right. The feeling of being haunted was gone. And if indeed her studio contained some presence from beyond, she didn’t have to worry about that until she returned from her trip.
She reached the outskirts of St. Paul feeling hungry and only a little bottom sore. She checked her map and decided this was a good place to stop for breakfast.
“About two hours to Hunter’s Bay,” the waitress told her as she refilled Stacy’s coffee cup. “You going to visit family?”
Family. Almost a foreign concept to Stacy, who couldn’t remember anything about her father and who had been raised by a silent, aloof mother who had died two years before, leaving no hint of any relatives anywhere.
“No. I’m on a little traveling vacation.”
“You got lucky. We’re having a really early spring for Minnesota.”
Stacy laughed. “I know. Everyone told me to bring woollies, but so far I haven’t needed more than a sweater in the early mornings and late evenings.”
“Yeah, well, hang on to those woollies, though. Around here we could just as easily meet with a blizzard next week as anything else.”
The threat of bad weather aside, Stacy finished the last lap of her journey with an air of optimism. She found a classical station on her radio and was humming along with Vivaldi when she turned off Highway 61 onto a ramp that swung toward the river.
The road went uphill for a short stretch and then fell away to reveal a town nestled around a bay that led out to the river. For a moment she felt as if she’d ended up back on the East Coast, in one of the many small Colonial-imprinted New England towns. And then she looked to her right and saw a huge gnarled tree at the road’s edge. The shape and size were so familiar that Stacy felt a surge of the old dizziness take hold. She clung to the wheel, pushing repeatedly at her brakes as a road sign came into her view. She saw the letters HUN and then her vision blurred and she lost control completely.
* * *
WHEN SHE CAME TO, she was in an unfamiliar room. She squinted to clear her vision and saw a group of people surrounding the bed upon which she lay. A man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling from his neck. Obviously a doctor. Beside him, a young, pretty woman also dressed in white. A nurse. Stacy didn’t need the smell of medications to tell her she was in a hospital.
She turned her head slightly, wincing at the pain at the back of her neck. There were two men and two women, all elderly, to the right of the bed and at the foot, a man in a sheriff’s uniform.
“She’s come to,” one of the women whispered.
“Shh,” someone else muttered.
“Hello there,” the doctor said, taking Stacy’s wrist in his hand. “I’m Dr. Farbish. Do you know where you are?”
Stacy made the mistake of shaking her head. “N-no,” she said, cringing at another onslaught of pain. She put her hand to the back of her neck. “Hurts.”
“Yes. You gave yourself a slight whiplash, but I didn’t find any other signs of trauma. No broken bones or such.”
He lifted her eyelids and put a light to her eyes. She could smell his after-shave and a hint of tobacco. She wanted to comment but couldn’t summon the humor.
“Do you know your name?” Dr. Farbish asked.
“Anastasia. But everyone calls me Stacy. Stacy Millman.”
A murmur came from her right. Stacy blinked and tried to focus on the faces of the older people who had gathered in her room.
A movement from the foot of the bed caught her attention as the sheriff shifted to catch her eye.
“I’m Derek Chancelor, sheriff of this county. I found your car just outside Hunter’s Bay and brought you in.”
“Did I hit someone?” Stacy asked.
The sheriff scratched his head and then shook it. “Nope. You didn’t hit anyone and your car isn’t damaged. About the only thing disturbed was the signpost you knocked down, and we can right that easily enough. But you must have thrown on your brakes awfully hard to have given your neck such a twist.”
Stacy stared at the young sheriff, a man of about her age, who, she suddenly realized, was terrifically good-looking. He had thick blond hair cut short in the back but long enough on top to fall over his brow in a careless wave. His eyes were cerulean blue and his complexion that ruddy gold that came from spending a lot of time outdoors in all kinds of weather.
He cleared his throat, distracting her from her preoccupation with his looks, and she felt herself grow warm with embarrassment. Would he believe she’d been staring at him with an artist’s eye, or was he used to women reacting foolishly to his vibrant masculinity?
“I...I’m sorry,” she stammered, putting her hand to her head as if she were confused. “What did you say?”
“I was just commenting on the force with which you hit that sign. It was cemented into the ground.”
The memory of the painting in her studio flashed into Stacy’s mind. She remembered the way it had stood up in the first version and then, a couple of days later, she’d discovered that she’d repainted it, lying on its side. A chill ran up her spine and she pulled the bed sheet up to her chin.
“That means,” she said in a near whisper, “that somehow I knew it was going to get knocked down, long before I ever got here.”
Chapter Two
The four people who sat around the table in his office were all talking at once.
Derek Chancelor, whose chair was balanced on the two back legs let the front legs fall to the floor with an authoritative thud. “Quiet down!”
The clatter dwindled away to silence.
“Okay, now let’s start over. First of all, what were the four of you doing in Ms. Millman’s room at the hospital?” He turned and faced the older of the two men. “Mayor?”
William Hunter tugged on his beard and glared at Derek. “I’m the mayor. It’s my job to know everything that goes on in this town.”
“In other words, you were snooping around the sheriff’s department again and you heard it over the radio?”
The man shrugged, his mouth held in a tight, stubborn line.
Derek decided not to point out that the mayor needed to keep busy at his own work rather than meddling in the sheriff’s.
“So you called your family and decided to go make a courtesy call on a stranger?” He grinned, leaned back in his chair. “That’s a little noblesse oblige even for the Hunters, isn’t it?”
None of the group responded to his sarcasm.
Derek tried another approach. “Carly, what’s this Stacy Millman got to do with any of you and why are you all so concerned about her arrival?”
Carly Samos looked at the others and patted the collar of her blue knit dress with self-importance. “Let’s just say that she doesn’t belong here,” she said, snapping her mouth shut around her words.
“Let’s just say I find that no answer at all. Since when do we ostracize tourists?”
“Tourists!” Mayor Hunter’s tone reverberated with derision.
Derek turned to him. “You think Ms. Millman is here for something other than a holiday? What?”
The mayor shrugged. A sly look crossed his face. “Maybe she’s been sent to get some dirt on us so MacroData decides this isn’t a good place to build their new plant.”
Derek frowned. “What kind of dirt?”
The elderly man shrugged again. “Who knows? This is a fair-size county. Any of the other towns could have an administration that’s not quite up to scrutiny. They’d probably love to make us look bad.”
Derek looked at Bob Hunter, the mayor’s brother and publisher of the local newspaper. “This is what’s bothering you, too, Bob?”
But before Bob could answer, his wife, Isabelle, spoke up. “It doesn’t matter what we think, Derek. The point is that we know nothing about this girl and we can’t afford to take any chances at this time. We need that plant badly, as I’m sure you know. We’re already losing too many young people from the area due to the shortage of jobs.”
For some reason, Derek was having trouble believing any of what he was hearing. He knew they were right about the county needing the economic boost of new industry. But these four elderly citizens, the elite of Hunter’s Bay, had not reacted so much upon hearing of the stranger in town as to hearing her name. Derek rubbed his forehead, trying to tie in the name Millman with anyone he knew or had ever heard of. He drew a blank.
“I’m going to warn you all, now. I want you to stay away from Stacy Millman and that includes your little welcoming committee descending upon the hospital. We don’t know if she’s on her way elsewhere or planning to visit but I won’t have you harassing her, whatever her reason for being here.”
