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Jessica followed her sister’s gaze and sighed. At least one part of this nightmare was over.
Brenda continued, unaware of Jessica’s disinterest. “The boss is out of town and probably frantic because no one’s there. However, I doubt there’s a soul in town who’s interested in redecorating their home right now.”
Jessica nodded. “I know. I was in the middle of payroll at the lodge when the power went off. Everyone’s probably having a fit because their checks will be late, but I didn’t want to risk direct deposit—and I was right. Who knows if the bank would have received everything.”
Brenda picked up her bag and then fixed her baby sister with a long, assessing stare.
“Jessie.”
Jessica looked up.
“About last night and what you said…”
“What about it?” Jessica asked. Her voice was defensive and she knew it.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be telling just anyone that you’re having hallucinations. They might get the wrong idea.”
Jessica’s lower lip slid slightly forward. “What if it’s not a hallucination?”
Brenda shrugged. “I still wouldn’t be talking about them.” Then she glanced down at her watch. “I’ve got to run. You’ve got juice in the fridge and cereal in the cabinet. However, your milk is sour.”
“Oh, yummy.”
Jessica’s sarcasm was not lost on Brenda. She grinned. “I’ll call you later. Stay in bed. Rest. I love you.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “In spite of your incessant need to boss me around, I love you, too.”
Brenda left, and then moments later, came back on the run.
“Jessie, have you seen my car keys? I can’t find them anywhere. I thought they were in my bag, but they’re not.”
Without waiting for Jessica to answer, she began turning the bedroom upside down, looking under cushions and then dashing into the adjoining bathroom to see if they might be there.
Just as Brenda slammed a cabinet door, Jessica began to lose track of where she was. The air in front of her seemed to shift, and suddenly she had a clear and perfect vision of a set of keys sticking out of the lock on a trunk. She got out of bed just as Brenda came out of the bathroom.
“Shoot,” Brenda muttered. “I can’t seem to find them—”
“You left them in the trunk lock last night.”
In the act of looking under the bed, Brenda froze. Slowly, she looked up, meeting her sister’s gaze over the edge of the mattress.
“What did you say?”
“I said, they’re in the lock on the trunk.”
Realization dawned. Brenda remembered opening the trunk to get her bag. Yes! That was the last time she’d had them! She got to her feet with a look of relief on her face and was almost out of the room before it hit her.
Jessica hadn’t been outside. In fact, she hadn’t been out of her bed since Brenda had put her there last night. She stopped and turned.
“Jessie?”
“What?”
“Why did you just say that?”
Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know. I just suddenly saw them dangling out of the lock.”
The hairs stood up at the nape of Brenda’s neck. She shivered, refusing to give way to what she was thinking. “Nothing more than a lucky guess. That’s all it could be.”
Jessica’s expression didn’t change. “Go see if I’m right.”
She listened, and when she heard the sound of a car engine firing, she shuddered and crawled back into bed.
Toad tracks. Now I am scaring myself.
She lay back on her pillow and flung her arms above her head in a dramatic gesture of disgust. The longer she lay there, the more convinced she became that something out of the ordinary was happening to her. The question remained—what was she going to do about it?
Chapter Three
That night, Jessica ate her evening meal by the light of the moon. Although the power had been restored all over town, she still felt the need to escape, and the dark of her backyard was as far as she could go. She sat on her porch with a can of pop in one hand and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the other, unwilling to move indoors.
Grape jelly squished out of the edge of the bread as she took a big bite. Before it could drip, she caught it with the tip of her tongue and swallowed it whole. It wasn’t exactly fine dining, but for Jessica, who at her best was just a fair cook, it sufficed.
Thanks to a co-worker at the lodge, her car was back in her driveway and her purse and cell phone were safely on a chair in her bedroom. But her stitches kept pulling beneath the bandage and her long hair was driving her crazy. The longer she sat, the more she thought about cutting part of it off. At least, the part that was making her nuts.
It shouldn’t be all that hard. She had scissors, and thanks to the power company, a good light by which to see. Since she could work any computer program on the market, she could surely cut her own hair without making a mess. Besides, Dr. Howell had given her a jump start by shaving the part around her stitches. All she had to do was tidy it up a bit.
An hour and a half later, she stood before her bathroom mirror, staring at herself in disbelief. Yes, she was a whiz with figures, but she should have remembered that she couldn’t sew on a button without bringing blood.
The length was gone, just like she’d wanted. But so was the shape and the style. And for hair that was remarkably straight and limp, she’d somehow given it a life of its own. It no longer lay on her head. Instead, it sort of sprang from it, like new sprouts on a severely pruned tree. Oddly enough, the new cut gave her gamine features an engaging quality that her old style had not. The flyaway do was, in its own way, quite charming. But Jessica couldn’t see the charm for the harm. She dropped the scissors in the sink and sighed.
“Mouse poop.”
That pretty much said it all.
* * *
The next day dawned with an inevitability she couldn’t ignore. She needed to go to Squaw Creek Lodge and finish the payroll. When she got in her car, her nerves began to draw. A short while later, she turned into the parking lot and sat with the engine running, staring up at the grand log-and-stone edifice with dread. And as she stared, the same thought kept running through her mind. This is where it happened.
But she wasn’t referring to the accident. It was what happened afterward that was making her nuts. While she sat, lost in thought, someone knocked on her window. She turned with a jerk, expecting to see Olivia Stuart’s ghost.
But it wasn’t a ghost. It was Sheila Biggers, administrative assistant to the manager of the lodge. Jessica glanced at herself in the rearview mirror as she killed the engine. No use putting this off any longer. At least she wouldn’t have to go inside alone.
Sheila squealed. “Jessica, ooh, your poor little head.” She pushed aside a swag of Jessica’s gypsy-cut hair to peek at the bandage beneath and made a face.
But Jessica didn’t bother to answer, because Sheila Biggers could shift conversational gears faster than a drag racer on a hot track. They started toward the lodge, and Sheila continued without taking a breath in between.
“Did you hear! That bride-to-be, Randi Howell, disappeared the night of the blackout! The Stuart wedding never did take place!” She took a deep breath and moved on to another subject. “I love, love, love your hair! Who did it?”
Jessica’s mouth dropped. “Really? You don’t think it’s too drastic a change?”
Sheila reached out to touch the ends of Jessica’s hair. “I always said you looked like a younger Goldie Hawn. Didn’t I say you looked like Goldie Hawn?”
“Yes, you did, although I must say I never saw why.”
“Never mind, because I was wrong. I see it all now. It’s the hair that does it. It’s not Goldie Hawn. It’s Charlize Theron.” She fluffed the back of Jessica’s hair with her fingers and shrieked in delight when it fell back in disarray. “Cute, cute, cute!” She glanced up, realizing that she was already at her office. “Gotta run. Talk to you later.”
Jessica continued down the hallway, wondering how far a cute chin would take her in life. She opened the door to her office and turned on the lights, then hesitated, almost afraid to shut herself in the place where she’d first had the dream. When nothing out of the ordinary happened, she stepped inside and closed the door.
A dark stain shadowed the carpet near the bank of file cabinets. Blood. Her blood. She shuddered. A couple of steps farther, she saw her umbrella sticking out from beneath the desk where it had rolled after she’d tripped. She picked it up and put it safely on top of the cabinets where it belonged.
When she sat down behind her desk and turned on the computer, a feeling of well-being settled upon her. The familiarity of her desk, her computer, her things, eased the tension she’d been feeling. Now maybe everything would return to normal.
Before the program came up on the screen, she caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection and grimaced. Everything else might be normal, but her hair was not. Although it still made her look like a waif, there was an unplanned benefit to the shaggy style. The wild fall of bangs across her forehead hid the lump of white bandage quite nicely. Then the program came up and her reflection disappeared and she forgot about everything except payroll checks.
Less than an hour later, she picked up the house phone. Her part of the job was finished. Now all she needed was Jeff Dolby’s signature on the checks and she, along with the other employees of Squaw Creek Lodge, would get paid.
It should have been a simple call. Punch in the three numbers that dialed the manager’s office, then tell Sheila that the checks were ready to be signed.
She punched the numbers, and as she’d expected, Sheila answered the phone. But Jessica didn’t tell her the checks were ready. Between dialing and waiting for her call to be answered, something else started to happen. When she heard Sheila’s voice, she started to shake. And when Sheila raised her voice to repeat her hello, Jessica heard herself shouting.
“Your house is on fire!”
Sheila’s gasp was audible. “Who is this? If this is a joke, it’s not funny.”
Sweat beaded on Jessica’s upper lip as she stared down at her desk. The checks were right before her, but she didn’t see them. All she could see were tiny orange-red tongues of flame eating their way up a kitchen wall. Her voice deepened, and she spoke in a vocal shorthand, trying to impart the urgency of what she was seeing.
“In the kitchen! Up the wall. Fire! Smoke! Hurry! Hurry!”
The line disconnected, and Jessica dropped the phone and laid her head on the desk, fighting an overwhelming urge to cry.
Some time later, she made herself get up. Her hands were still shaking as she walked down the hall toward the manager’s office. When she went inside, she made herself look. Just as she’d expected, Sheila’s desk was empty.
What have I done?
But there were no answers, only questions. Taking a deep breath, she knocked on Dolby’s door. When he called out for her to enter, she did.
Trying to focus on something besides the vision she’d just had, she laid the checks on the manager’s desk.
“I thought you might want to sign these now, since we’re a couple of days late getting them out.”
He looked pleased. “Good job! I wasn’t sure you’d show up. I take it you’re not suffering any ugly aftereffects of your fall?”
“Hardly any at all.” Except for losing my mind.
“Wonderful! Wonderful! This was smart going with paper checks since direct deposit could have been screwed up during the storm and take days to fix.” He picked up a pen. “Have a seat, will you? Give me a couple of minutes and they’ll be ready to go out.”
As she sat down, she realized that Jeff Dolby was sporting a new hairpiece. For once, she was thankful she had something besides her own problems on which to concentrate. It was all she could do not to stare. This month’s hairpiece was dark and wavy, which was a unique contrast to the one he’d worn before. This one rode his bald dome like a loose saddle on the back of a swayback horse. It was there, but it just didn’t fit.
Jessica sighed and closed her eyes. She knew about not fitting in. It had been the story of her life. Now, with this thing that kept happening to her, she felt like more of an outcast than ever. Tears burned at the back of her throat as she struggled with her composure.
Dolby’s pen scratched across the surface of the checks as he wrote his name in small and contained flourishes. When he got to the last one, he looked up.
“If you don’t mind, Miss Hanson, I would appreciate it if you would distribute these. Normally that’s Sheila’s job, but she got an emergency phone call and had to leave, and since these are already late—”
He shoved them toward her, expecting her instant acquiescence.
Jessica stared at the checks, but couldn’t bring herself to move. She tensed, then cleared her throat.
“She did?”
He nodded, unaware that his hairpiece went one way as his head went another. In spite of the oddity of Jeff Dolby’s hair, it was what he’d said that gave her pause. She licked her lips, wanting to ask, but afraid of what he might say. Moments passed, and finally, she could stand the suspense no longer.
“I hope it wasn’t serious.”
“Well, yes, I believe that it was,” Dolby said. “She called me just before you came in.” He paused, and then continued. “You know, it was the strangest thing. She got an anonymous phone call here at the office. Someone said her house was on fire.”
“Oh, my,” Jessica said, and felt the skin on her neck starting to crawl.
“As it turns out, the call was on the up and up. If it hadn’t come, her house would have burned down. She said most of the damage was confined to the kitchen.”
And then Dolby gasped and suddenly bolted from his chair. His hairpiece slid forward over his left eye as he made a grab for Jessica. But he was a couple of seconds too late.
She slid out of her chair in a faint.
* * *
Smelling salts stunk. Enough so that wherever Jessica had gone when she fainted, she came back in a rush.
“Easy now,” someone said.
She looked up, noting that Mr. Dolby had more natural hair up his nose than he had on his head.
“Don’t move just yet. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax. When you feel able, we’ll help you up.”
One of the maids was cradling Jessica’s head in her lap while another mopped at her face with a very wet cloth that smelled of disinfectant.
At least I will be clean when I die. “What happened?”
“You fainted.”
She covered her face with her hands.
“Bat barf.”
Dolby patted her arm. “Now, now, you’re going to be fine. I appreciate the fact that you came in this morning to finish payroll, but I think you came back too soon. We’ve called for an ambulance. They’re going to take you—”
She pushed them aside and sat up with a jerk, then clutched her head with both hands, reeling as the room began to spin. Someone pushed her head between her knees and she found herself looking at a dried raisin that was stuck in the carpet. It was a fitting analogy to the way she felt.
