"It's all right. It's just a door now."
Diana leaned weakly against Quentin as they both looked at Missy.
A different Missy. Flesh, seemingly, rather than spirit. Still thin and fragile, but smiling now, no longer haunted.
Now, there's a thought. Diana almost wanted to laugh.
Still without letting go of Diana's hand, Quentin said tentatively, "Why can I see you?"
"Because Diana can. You two connected the first time you touched." Her smile widened. "I think some people call it fate." She held up one hand, from which dangled a small locket. "Maybe that's why the thing inside Mrs. Kincaid took this from Ellie's body after it killed her. So I could get it back."
Almost too tired to think, Diana began, "Missy — "
"She's at peace, Diana. Mommy. She crossed over a long, long time ago, after she found me."
"That's why?"
"After I was abducted, she thought she could use her gifts to find me. But they were too strong for her. The door she made was only...one-way."
Softly, Quentin said, "And a body severed from its spirit doesn't live too long."
Missy nodded.
Diana had endless questions, but she knew there was little time left. So she asked the only thing that mattered, to her and to Quentin.
"Are you okay now?" she asked her sister.
"I'm okay now. It worked. The energy of everybody who was ready to cross over was enough to pull that evil out of the vessel holding it and through the gray time to the other side. It can't hurt anyone ever again."
Quentin glanced at Diana. "A basic law of physics. Energy can't be destroyed, only transformed."
Solemn, Missy said, "Yes, it's all about physics."
Again, Diana wanted to laugh. Instead, she said, "You do realize that once the sun comes up, I'm going to be convinced I dreamed all this?"
Missy looked at their clasped hands and smiled again. "I don't think so. I think that from now on, you won't have any trouble at all knowing what's real and what isn't." She stepped past them and opened the green door. There was an oddly blurred moment, and then they could see inside what appeared to be a pretty, old-fashioned bedroom.
"Missy — "
She looked at Quentin. "Thank you. For caring enough to keep coming back here all these years. It helped give me the strength to do what I had to. And it wasn't your fault, you know. It was never your fault. Something that old...that evil...You couldn't have known, and you couldn't have stopped it. And some things are meant to happen just the way they happen."
Diana would have said goodbye, wanted to, but Missy took the choice out of her hands by smiling sweetly at them both and stepping into the pretty bedroom. And closing the door behind her.
Quentin and Diana were left staring at each other, with barely a moment to adjust before Nate hustled around the corner, gun drawn.
"Jesus," he exclaimed, "are you two all right? Cullen said the Kincaid woman went nuts and tried to kill him. He's bleeding like a stuck pig. Where is she?"
Diana hesitated, then reached out and slowly opened the door. Inside, they all saw the orderly shelves of a linen closet with sheets and towels piled high. And in the center of the room, beside an empty laundry cart, lay the sprawled body of Virginia Kincaid, the bloody knife still clutched in her hand.
Nate went in cautiously, kicking the knife away before bending to check her pulse. "She's still alive," he said.
"Breathing, anyway," Quentin murmured.
"The doctors say she had a stroke," Nate told them much later that morning. "She's in a coma, and they don't know if she'll ever come out of it."
"I have a feeling," Diana said, "that she won't." She also had a feeling that much of Virginia Kincaid's spirit had been eroded over the years, and that the final release had been just that. A release from an evil and unrelenting hell.
Unaware of — or studiously ignoring — undercurrents, Nate added, "And Cullen Ruppe is out of danger, since they got the bleeding stopped. He claims not to know why she suddenly went after him. Ask me, the woman just went nuts. I think there's something wrong with the air in this place."
"Not anymore," Quentin said.
The cop eyed them both as they sat side by side on the sofa across from his chair. "You two look pretty chipper, considering a very long night with no sleep."
"Lots of coffee," Diana said.
Nate grunted. "I've had gallons, and I'm still beat. And you'd never know it's Saturday, from all the stuff I'm supposed to be dealing with. Since the Kincaid woman confessed to you that she killed Ellie — the cell phone records show, by the way, that Ellie called an out-of-state number we've traced to a guest who stayed here a couple of months ago, and the doc confirms she was pregnant, so — What was I saying?"
"Since she confessed," Quentin prompted.
"Oh. Yeah. Since she confessed, that pretty well solves the murder. That spelunker team you told me about is coming to check out the caves, but it'll probably be next week before they get here. In the meantime, the forensic anthropological team arrives first thing in the morning, and I'm keeping someone posted in the tack room twenty-four/seven for the duration. The team will also take a look at the skeleton we found in the garden, though the DNA analysis confirms the remains of Jeremy Grant. Thanks for pushing that through so fast, by the way."
"No problem," Quentin said. "Somebody owed me a favor."
"Must have been a doozy. In the state labs, it can take months to get DNA results."
Without responding to that, Quentin merely said, "Has the boy's mother been notified?"
"Yeah. Closure for her."
"Sometimes," Quentin said, "that's what we need before we can put something behind us. And look ahead rather than back."
"The end of an obsession?" Nate asked curiously.
"You could say that."
Stephanie, coming into the lounge just then, said, "I still can't believe my housekeeper was a murderess. Except that part of me can believe it, which is creepy." She, also, looked rather bright-eyed for a night without sleep.
"Think of her as sick," Diana suggested. "Very, very sick."
"Lizzie Borden sick, yeah." Stephanie shivered. "I want to hire a new housekeeper. Soon."
Quentin looked at her. "One who won't write down secrets of the guests?"
"Exactly. Because I'm pretty sure she did. All on her own, though, not because she was paid to."
"That list you showed us of the managers who were paid to record all the secrets they knew of here — it ended with the manager who was here about five years ago?"
She nodded. "Neither of the two managers prior to me was on that list. And neither am I, obviously. I didn't even know about it until I found it. And I wouldn't have recognized it for something suspicious if I hadn't been looking for just that. At first glance, it was just a list of bonuses paid to Management. Nothing unusual, on the face of it. It wasn't until I dug into separate salary records that I could be sure the bonuses were way out of line. Plus, I found the first of the account ledgers to cross-check, and so far at least a couple of those so-called bonuses were paid in cash and off the books."
"I'd call that suspicious," Nate said.
"And I wonder why it ended five years ago," Quentin said. "Stephanie, any idea who was keeping the list?"
She nodded promptly. "If I had to guess — and I do — it was probably Douglas Wallace. I think he instigated the so-called organization of the records in the basement just about five years ago, probably just because he's an anal neat freak. But then he found the sort of stuff he really didn't want to find, and started compiling that list.
"I double-checked some dates, and about the time Doug was going through old records in the basement, the last descendant of one of the original owners had just died."