She frowned. "I remember coming home, letting myself in. I remember checking the machine out in the hall. And then . . . your voice in my head telling me I was dying."
Wary that she might believe he'd latched on to any excuse to invade her mind, Bishop said, "I found you in the living room, on the floor, as if you'd just fallen. No outward sign of injury. I'm no doctor, but I've seen plenty of dead and dying, Miranda. You were dying. It wasn't just the dropping temperature; your pulse was fading away, respiration slowing. It was like your body was just. . . stopping. Your mind had let go or been cut off somehow, was drifting away, and without it, all your systems were shutting down."
She accepted that only because she didn't have an alternate explanation. "But what caused it to happen? That's what I don't understand."
Bishop hadn't wasted much time in working it all out then, not with Miranda so still and seemingly lifeless. He hadn't thought about anything but getting her back, and had acted instantly and instinctively to do that.
But now he realized that her abrupt collapse was more than a little odd. "I assumed it was because of your shield. That all the energy you had trapped inside all this time had finally burst free. I knew as soon as I touched you that the shield was completely gone; that's how I was able to get through to you."
She got up to refill her coffee cup, still frowning. Instead of returning to the table, she leaned back against the counter near the sink and looked at him steadily. "No, that isn't what happened. I know it's what you were worried about, but I was able to control that energy without letting it damage me. Years of practice. There were side effects, sure — the headaches, for one. But nothing that could have caused that sort of ultimate collapse, and certainly not without warning."
"Then what did cause it?"
Miranda set her cup on the counter. "I was in the living room?"
"Yeah."
"Then whatever caused it must have been in there." She went into the living room and Bishop followed. They studied the room, which looked entirely peaceful and unthreatening.
Miranda sat on the couch, gazing at the Ouija board on the coffee table. "Why is this here? I could swear Bonnie told me they were up in her room when they used it."
"They wouldn't have carried it down here for any reason?"
"I can't think why they would have. Or why my housekeeper would have."
Bishop sat beside her. He reached out and idly moved the planchette to the center of the board. "If this is what they used to contact. .. whoever it was they contacted . . . then it's a literal doorway."
She looked at him. "And maybe Bonnie forgot to close the door."
"Or closed it too late," he suggested. "I don't know too much about this sort of thing; like I told you, we've had trouble coming up with any viable tests or measurements, and the research on the subject is shaky at best. But I seem to remember you telling me once that there was no way for a medium to control what came through an open door."
"As far as I know, that's true. Sometimes a medium can partially block a doorway to narrow the opening, but that's it. And the danger is that it's usually the angriest, most negative spirit that rushes through the first open door it sees."
"The most recently and violently killed."
Miranda nodded. "Usually."
"Which in this case is likely to be Steve Penman, or maybe Lynet Grainger. Both were killed more quickly than the other two, with less time to even try to accept what was going to happen to them."
"True." Miranda thought about it for a minute. "Bonnie confessed that she and Amy had tried once before to contact someone who could help us locate Steve. It was a brief attempt, stopped pretty abruptly — but the name spelled out as their contact was Lynet's."
"She didn't strike me as the angry sort," Bishop said.
"No, she was a ... very quiet, sweet-tempered girl." Miranda drew a breath. "But she died an adolescent, and the sheer emotional energy of that could easily be destructive. She could be desperate enough to live that she didn't stop to count the cost to anyone else."
Bishop tapped the board with a finger. "If this is the doorway Bonnie used, the place where she focused her energies, then her own mind was somewhat protected. Right?"
"Yes, especially if she raised her own shields immediately after they made contact. Kara and I taught her when she was very small how to protect herself as much as possible, and by now it's an automatic defense."
"Then what would happen if the doorway was open just long enough for a spirit to come through — but not long enough for it to find Bonnie's mind accessible?"
"Then the spirit would be... here." Miranda looked around. "In the house."
"Confined here?"
"Probably, at least for a while. Some are able to migrate to other places through connections with people they knew in life, but if this is where it came in, then it's stuck here until it gets its bearings and is able to gain and focus strength."
Slightly distracted by possibilities, Bishop said, "In that case, I hope the kid isn't a voyeur."
Miranda smiled. "According to Bonnie and other mediums I've talked to, spirits trapped in our world aren't completely here. They're only able to see the living people who are able to see them; the rest of us exist to them only as ... the flicker of shadows caught out of the corner of their eyes."
Bishop grimaced. "The way most of us see them."
"Exactly. They don't drift around watching the living because they can't really see us. We just happen to inhabit the same space, I suppose on different dimensional planes."
Bishop thought about that. "Okay, that relieves my mind, at least on that point. Now — Bonnie and her friends make contact and then promptly leave the house. The only person left here is your housekeeper, who is probably not psychic."
"Definitely not psychic."
"Then she leaves. And the next person to come in — is you."
"Yes, but my shields were — " Miranda broke off, the wheels of memory almost visibly turning. "Wait a minute. I remember now. I came in here after taking a shower, and something made me think there might be an intruder in the house."
"What?"
"The board. The Ouija board was on the floor. When I first got home it was here on the coffee table. I knew I should search the house, but I... I decided to drop my shields instead. Just for a moment, so I could check the house faster and more thoroughly."
"And you opened a door," Bishop said.
With the clinic all but empty, they'd had their choice of rooms, but Seth's father had casually asked his son and Bonnie to sleep in the four-bed ward with the youngest patients, two little girls, and "keep them company."
Whether it was for the sake of propriety or in case the girls needed them, neither Seth nor Bonnie objected. In any case, Seth didn't intend to close his eyes, not tonight. Long after the girls and Bonnie had settled into sleep, he sat in the lounge near the door and listened to the storm raging outside the dim, quiet room.
As the hours passed, he fought off drowsiness several times, jerking awake to peer around the room uneasily, to listen the way someone snatched from sleep by a nightmare would listen for the stealthy footsteps of an intruder.
If asked, he couldn't have explained just what he was feeling. Anxiety over Bonnie, of course, because he thought this spirit business upset her more than she was saying. Lingering shock over the tragedy that had all but destroyed her family, and lingering astonishment that Steve's body had been found just where that damned Ouija board had claimed it would be.