“Will you come with me, to the other side? Will you die with me so we can be together again?”
Gwyn looked away from the dead girl, trying to block her out altogether, uselessly hoping that her eyes would light upon some distraction which — by completely dominating her attention — would force the apparition to disappear. After passing over a dozen objects and rejecting them, her gaze come to rest on the bottle of sleeping tablets which stood on her nightstand, almost within her reach.
“You'll like the other side, I promise you, Gwyn,” the specter said, leaning closer.
Its voice was like the sough of a night wind through the tilted stones of a deserted graveyard. It curdled Gwyn's blood and made her look all the more intently at the escape offered in the contents of that small medicine bottle.
“I could open your window,” the apparition said. “Straight down under it is a flagstone walk. If you jumped—”
Gwyn ignored the whispering voice and rose onto one elbow, leaned out and grasped the bottle of tablets. She took the cap off and shook out one pill. It was white, very shiny and hard; she supposed she could take it even without water. She put it in her mouth, after gathering saliva, and swallowed it.
“Sleeping pills?” the ghost asked.
Gwyn lay back.
The ghost took the bottle out of her hand. “Yes, dear, this would also be a good way to do it.” She took a second pill out and held it up to Gwyn's lips.
Gwyn kept her mouth pressed tightly shut, biting into her lower lip so hard that she thought she would soon draw blood if she weren't more careful.
“Dear Gwyn, it would be much less painful than jumping from the window or drowning in the sea. Just a long sleep leading into an even longer sleep…”
Though she knew that this was only an hallucination, had to be, Gwyn was not about to open her mouth and accept the tablet, even if it were imaginary.
“Say, a dozen of them,” the ghost said. “If you could manage to swallow only a dozen of them, that ought to do the trick.” She pushed the pill against Gwyn's lips.
Gwyn turned her head.
“Perhaps you'd like a glass of water to take it with,” the specter said, rising. She put the bottle and the tablet on the nightstand and went into the bathroom.
Please let me sleep, Gwyn begged. I can't stand it anymore… I just can't… I'll start to scream, and I won't be able to stop screaming again, ever.
But, as mentally and physically exhausted as she was, she did not sleep, but lay on the edge of it, ready to fall.
She heard water running in the bathroom.
Then it stopped, and the specter came back with a glass in her hand.
“Now,” the ghost said, “we'll get them down, won't we?”
Gwyn closed her eyes as tightly as she closed her mouth, bringing creases to her forehead and colorful streaks of light to the blackness behind her lids. She wished that she had the ability to close her ears, too, to seal out that cool, hypnotic whisper.
The pill touched her lips.
“It will be easy, Gwyn.”
She turned her head, felt the pill follow her, still jammed against her mouth.
“Gwyn?”
Panic began to rise in her as she felt a scream straining at the back of her throat. But then, mercifully, she also felt the pill she had taken beginning to work on her. Sleep came closer. She relaxed and gave herself over to it and was carried away into darkness, away from the ghost, away from everything.
SIXTEEN
Forty-five minutes later, in the kitchen downstairs, while Gwyn remained sound asleep in her room, the other six members of the manor household sat around the big table drinking freshly brewed coffee and eating pastries which Grace had baked earlier in the day. No one felt much like eating a full, cooked meal; there were too many building tensions in the air, and there was too much immediately at stake to permit proper digestion.
However, the four different kinds of pastries were all crisp and delicious.
“Maybe you really should have been a cook, Grace,” Ben Groves said, grinning at the gray-haired woman over a half-eaten apple tart. “I mean, you do have a flair for it.”
“I was a cook once,” she said. “Long hours, lots of work, and only mediocre pay — unless you've style to handle the so-called gourmet dishes. Which I don't.” She took a bite of her own pastry and said, “I prefer life with Fritz, here. It's infinitely more exciting than spending your days in a hot kitchen.”
“With Fritz,” Ben said, “you're lucky you haven't been spending your time in a hot jail.”
“I resent that,” Fritz said. “I've worked the con games in half the countries of Europe, and I've not been caught once.”
This sort of light banter continued for another several minutes, though neither Elaine nor William Barnaby joined into it. They drank their coffee and ate their pastries like two strangers at a table of close friends, though the illusion of rejection was not the fault of the other four. Fritz, Grace, Ben, and Penny had learned, very early in this strange association with the Barnabys, man and wife, that their wealthy patrons were not inclined to camaraderie.
At last, when he was finished eating and had wiped his hands on a linen napkin heretofore folded on his lap, Will Barnaby interrupted their chatter and directed a distinctly admonitory remark to Penny Groves. “You were pretty damned foolish upstairs, just a while ago,” he said. “And I mean by your own account of it.”
The girl looked up, finished chewing a mouthful of blueberry muffin and said, with surprise, “I was?”
“You did say that you attempted to force her to take another sleeping tablet, didn't you?”
“Yes.”
“Didn't that strike you as foolish?”
She said, “I didn't mean her to have it. I was only trying to scare her, and I succeeded.”
“Suppose she had taken it?” Barnaby asked.
“She wouldn't have.”
“But suppose that she'd opened her mouth. Would you have given it to her then?” His face was tied up in an ugly, dark knot.
The blonde thought about it for a moment, then said, “Well, I would have had to, wouldn't I? I mean, if she'd opened her mouth for it, and if I'd taken it away after all of the spooky act I'd put on, she'd have been sure to smell a rat.”
“Then,” Barnaby said, “you were inexcusably foolish.”
“Look here,” Ben Groves argued, “those pills aren't all that powerful. Two of them wouldn't have killed her, by any means.”
Barnaby suddenly slammed a large fist down onto the table, rattling all the dishes and startling his associates. Elaine was not startled at all, for she knew him too well not to anticipate his outbursts. He said, “Gwyn must not be physically harmed. We mustn't take the slightest chance of killing her. It's not a matter of mercy, or anything like that, God knows; but if she dies, her estate might never come my way.”
“It would be sure to,” Fritz said, dusting powdered sugar from his hands. “You are her last living relative.”
“It would take years,” Barnaby said. “And the state would be right in there, shouting about a lack of last wills and testaments; the state would want it all and would get a huge chunk of it, no matter what a court finally decided.” He was red-faced just thinking about that delay.
To head off another explosion on her husband's part, for the sake of group unity, Elaine said, in a more reasonable tone, “You see, the girl's got a history of mental instability. It shouldn't be difficult to convince a court that she's gone past the edge — especially if she goes on about ghosts or even hoaxes of ghosts. If she can be certified incompetent to control her own affairs, Will is sure to be given management of her estate, without any of the fortune being lost to inheritance taxes.”