“What makes you ask that?”
Landon looked like he was searching for the right words. “The lodge has . . . a strange history . . . a history of what might be called unsavory sightings.”
“Sightings?”
“Visions? Spectral presences? Visitations? It all sounds rather silly, I admit, but I’ve been told that the individuals involved in these . . . incidents . . . were very sensible people, not the kind who usually report these things.”
“When did these incidents happen?”
“On various occasions, over the years.”
“Did the individuals all report seeing the same thing?”
“No. The way I heard it, each one—”
Gurney broke in. “Heard it from who?”
“From Ethan. It wasn’t something he wanted to advertise. The way he told it to me, each woman’s vision—they were all women, by the way, who had these experiences—each vision was from someone close to her in life who had died. Or, to be more specific, someone close to her who had drowned.”
Gurney showed no reaction beyond normal curiosity. “Did these visions all occur here in the lodge?”
“Well, I did say the lodge, but in the environs as well. In one case, the woman saw a face underwater in the lake. Another claimed she saw her dead brother under a sheet of ice by one of the chalets. The worst incident was an older woman who had a mental breakdown after seeing her first husband—who’d died in a boating accident thirty years earlier—standing in the shower. According to Ethan, she never recovered.”
“Water.”
“Eh?”
“They all involve water. People who drowned. Drowned people who then ‘come back’ in circumstances again involving water.”
Landon nodded thoughtfully. “True. Water was always involved.” He paused. “Well, sorry to take up your time with ghost stories. I’m sure they all have some reasonable explanation. Hearing that scream brought them to mind. Felt I should check on you.”
“I appreciate your concern. But I’m curious about one thing. Why are you still here?”
Landon appeared taken aback.
“I mean here at the lodge. After all that’s happened. Ethan’s death. The deaths of the other guests. The place being essentially shut down. The lurid history and general eeriness of the place. All good reasons not to be here.”
Landon smiled. “It’s all relative, isn’t it? One man’s reason to leave is another man’s reason to stay. I find the absence of other guests a plus, not a minus.”
“And the four unexplained deaths?”
“The fact is, mysteries intrigue me, and those four deaths fascinate me. Which raises an interesting question. I have only myself to be concerned about. But your own situation is more complicated. Another life is involved. You’re not subjecting just yourself to those problems you reeled off. If they apply to me, they apply doubly to you. So the real question is, why are you here?”
“I was invited here to do a job. I feel I should stay until the job is done.”
Landon raised a skeptical eyebrow. “If I had a wife with me, I might not feel that way.”
Gurney produced a polite smile. “I appreciate your perspective. Incidentally, if you have any ideas about the four deaths, I hope you’ll share them with me.” He stepped back, his hand on the door, about to close it.
“What sort of ideas?”
“Ideas about who might be responsible.”
Landon shrugged. “I suppose one does have to remain open to the possibility that Richard orchestrated it. Isn’t the man famous for pushing the boundaries of hypnotic persuasion?”
There was something playful in Landon’s bright, intelligent gaze. And something provocative in his blasé tone. Not to mention the disconnect between his comments and his apparently warm relationship with Jane Hammond.
But Gurney resisted the urge to pursue the issue. He had a more pressing concern.
CHAPTER 37
After locking the door and sliding the bolt in place, he headed for the bedroom to check on Madeleine.
He was startled to find the bed covers thrown back and the bed empty.
His eyes went straight to the balcony, but the door to it was clearly locked. The glass had accumulated a fine layer of snow.
“Maddie,” he called out.
He checked the floor on both sides of the bed, then rushed back out into the main room, frantic now, looking everywhere.
The guitar music playing on her tablet had shifted into a dramatic style with florid Spanish rhythms.
He double-checked the bathroom, even though he was sure she wasn’t there.
But there she was—standing in a shadowed corner, out of his original line of sight.
She’d wrapped herself in a white blanket. Her hair was disarranged. Her gaze was fixed again on the tub.
She was shaking her head slowly. “I don’t understand.”
He stepped closer to the tub and peered into it. “What don’t you understand?”
“How it could have happened.”
“It may be simpler than you think,” he suggested.
Seeing her baffled look as a good sign, one open to a reasonable explanation, he launched into an account of how the human mind can “see” things that aren’t actually there.
She showed little interest in what he was saying, but he pressed on. “Two eyewitnesses to the same event often give contradictory descriptions. They’re both absolutely certain they saw what they saw. The problem is, what they ‘saw’ occurred mainly in their brain circuits, not in the external world.”
“Colin’s body was in the tub.”
“Maddie, everything we ‘see’ is a combination of new data coming in through our eyes and old information stored in our brains. It’s like what happens on the Internet. You type in the first few letters of a word, and it jumps to a word in its data memory that starts with those letters. But when we’re under stress, and our brains are trying to work faster, they sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion. They create the wrong image. We’re positive we’re seeing it. But it’s not really there. We’d swear that it’s out there, but it only exists in our brain.”
Her gaze was moving around the walls of the bathroom. “You’re saying I’m delusional?”
“I’m saying that we’re wired to ‘see’ more than our optic nerves are actually reporting. And sometimes the brain’s image factory races ahead of the optical data and turns the rope on the floor into a snake.”
She pulled the blanket around her like a cloak. “That wasn’t a rope I saw. How could Colin’s body . . . get from Grayson Lake . . . into that tub?”
“Maddie, maybe you should put on some clothes?”
“You know, they never found his body. Did I tell you that?”
“Yes. You told me that.”
“They never found his body,” she repeated slowly, as though that troubling fact could explain what had just happened.
“Maddie? Sweetheart? You had a bad fall. It might be a good idea to lie down.”
“They never found his body. Then it was there.” She pointed at the tub, letting the blanket slip as she did so. It fell from her body to the floor around her feet.
Gurney wrapped his arms around her. He could feel tremors running through her body. The aftershocks of an earthquake.
He held her tightly for a long time.
LATER, AFTER SHE’D FINALLY COLLAPSED INTO A TROUBLED SLEEP, Gurney sat in front of the cold hearth and tried to figure out what to do next.
The wind was keening softly in the chimney, things at Wolf Lake were making less and less sense, and Madeleine’s mental state was undermining his ability to think straight.
Her possible need for psychiatric intervention came to mind, but he pushed the thought aside with a sick feeling. He had no illusions about the dismal state of that art and the practitioners who were too eager to experiment with their mind-altering chemistry sets.