But she was startled to encounter Eric just outside the side door she always used.
"Why are you up here? If Mrs. Kincaid sees you—"
"She won't. Look, I don't have much time, because that damned storm earlier postponed one of my classes." Eric often led the trail rides into the mountains, but also taught the occasional beginning rider classes The Lodge offered.
"People want to ride this late?" she asked, allowing herself to be led around the corner and along a narrow path through the shrubbery toward one of their favorite meeting places.
"Maybe three," he grunted. "I told Cullen it was hardly worth the bother of saddling the horses, but he gave me the old company line about always entertaining the guests."
"Well, it is what The Lodge is famous for, after all," Alison said. Suddenly uneasy, she added, "Maybe we'd better not do this, Eric."
"My work's caught up, and I'm on a break."
Alison hadn't told him that her own "breaks" were slightly on the unofficial side, and she didn't want to confess now. Eric was the best-looking single man under thirty employed at The Lodge, and she was still astonished that she'd caught him.
Well, sort of caught him. That wasn't exactly official either.
"Nobody's going to give us grief for taking our breaks," he added, still pulling her along.
His eagerness sparked her own, helped along by her usual gleeful awareness of having pulled one over on Mrs. Kincaid. No fraternizing among the staff — yeah, right.
"Okay, but we'd better be quick," she told him.
He grinned at her over one shoulder. "When weren't we quick?"
Alison was about to offer a witty response to that when Eric suddenly stumbled and lurched forward, pulling her with him. They ended in a tangle on the ground, and her breathless laugh was cut off with brutal suddenness when she looked to see what they'd fallen over.
Once she started screaming, she couldn't stop.
The body of Ellie Weeks lay sprawled just past the overgrown arbor, one outflung hand resting among a few bright flowers that had probably been planted long ago and just as long ago forgotten.
Her maid's uniform was neat, her hair still in its accustomed and girlish high ponytail. But a braided leather strip cut deeply into the flesh of her neck, and above it her face was mottled, her eyes wide and tongue thrusting between her parted lips.
The big, bright lights illuminating the area so that the police could work as darkness fell lent the area a garish, almost stagelike glow. The young woman might have been posed, as though playing the part of murder victim only to rise unhurt when the curtain fell.
Except that she wouldn't do that.
"It's here," Diana said softly.
Quentin reached for her hand. "This time we'll stop it," he said.
"You don't know that."
"I believe it."
"I wish I did."
Nate looked at them both rather curiously, but said, "Apparently, this was fairly popular as a meeting place for young lovers. Not far from the main building but more or less isolated, at least from the areas used by guests. It was a part of the original garden, but they'd allowed the hedges to overgrow and hide the two garden sheds."
"That isn't a garden shed." Diana was gazing at the nearby small building that seemed clearly intended to have a different life than the prosaic one of storage. It was rather sadly pretty even with its paint peeling and the few faded plastic flowers that had survived, drooping, in its cottagelike window boxes.
Diana felt cold just looking at it, even more so than when she'd seen the young maid's body. Every sense and instinct she could claim said there was something wrong with this place, something dark.
It was Stephanie, still pale and obviously shocked by the murder, who said, "According to what I was told, that was once a playhouse. For the children of guests. I don't know why it fell into disuse."
"I do," Diana murmured.
"So do I," Quentin said.
She looked up at him, a little surprised. "You remember?"
"I do now." He glanced at Nate, who was waiting with brows lifted. "The summer Missy was murdered, weeks before she died, we had all gotten into the habit of using the playhouse as a sort of clubhouse, a meeting place. This area wasn't so overgrown then, but it wasn't commonly used by the adults and we liked the illusion of secrecy."
Nate nodded. "Okay. And?"
"And... we were all heading here one morning, sort of in a loose group. Missy ran ahead and was the first one through the door. We heard her scream and came running." He shook his head slightly. "The inside of the playhouse was a bloody mess. Someone had butchered a couple of rabbits and a fox, scattered pieces of them everywhere."
"I don't remember seeing a report about that," Nate said.
"I don't remember seeing a cop." Quentin shrugged. "I assume The Lodge management at the time decided not to call the police, and I guess our parents agreed. They probably all chalked it up to some kind of sick joke or prank. The playhouse was cleaned up, even repainted. But none of us wanted to go near it again. Maybe the kids who came after us felt the same way about the place."
Still frowning, Nate said to Diana, "Quentin was here; how do you know what happened?"
She answered readily. "I dreamed about it. When I first came here, before I met Quentin, I was having nightmares just about every night. I could never remember much about them after I woke up. But as soon as I saw the playhouse a few minutes ago, I remembered one of them. It's like I was... Missy. Happy, running toward the playhouse, opening the door. And then seeing. All the blood, the... pieces. Trying to scream and not being able to at first."
Quentin's fingers tightened around hers. "Diana—"
"There was a little table and chairs inside," she went on steadily, gazing toward the playhouse. "Whoever had done it... had put the severed heads of the rabbits and the fox in the middle of the table. Carefully arranged. Like a centerpiece."
"Christ," Nate said. "Quentin, was that—?"
"Yeah. That's exactly the way it looked. Almost ritualistic. Probably what spooked the parents even more and kept everybody quiet about it, reluctant to investigate. I've seen that kind of thing before." To Diana, he added, "Missy took it hard. She was never the same after that morning."
Nate seemed to grope for words, then said, "So, Diana, you're saying you dreamed about this because Missy, who might have been your sister, experienced it?"
"I guess so," she replied. "Maybe a lot of my nightmares here were actually Missy's. If she was as scared that summer as Quentin remembers."
Quentin said, "It's not that uncommon, Nate. These sorts of abilities often run in families, and a blood connection between Missy and Diana could have helped form a psychic bond that survived separation."
"And survived the death of one of them?"
"Stranger things have happened, believe me." He wasn't quite ready to confide that he and Diana believed a far stranger thing was happening here and now, not when they had no more than the century-old story of a murderer caught and punished.
Nate shook his head, but said, "Look, guys, I know we've all seen a lot of weird stuff here in the last few days, and I get that you two believe most of it is somehow connected. But this" — he gestured toward the sprawled body only a few yards away — "is a murder. Not a nightmare memory. Not buried bones ten years dead, not remains that may or may not have been left by some animals in a cave, but a victim of a flesh-and-blood killer, a victim who was still breathing a couple of hours ago. Somebody choked the life out of this girl, and my job is to find out who and catch the son of a bitch. With all due respect, that's really the only thing I'm thinking about right now."