Now You See Her Read online

  But in all the books on paranormal subjects she had read, she hadn’t found anything to explain that death scene she had painted. She didn’t remember painting it, so she had to assume she had been sleepwalking and had done the painting in her sleep. When she had gone out to mail the sketch she had stopped by the library and checked out some books on sleepwalking, but she hadn’t had a chance to read them yet. She had flipped through one, though, and found the explanation that people who walked in their sleep were often under stress.

  Well, duh. Like seeing ghosts was supposed to be relaxing. But she had been seeing ghosts for a year, and the night the old vendor died was the first time she had ever sleepwalked. The books didn’t even have chapters on sleep-painting.

  But that wasn’t even what bothered her most. Guessing the questions to the Jeopardy! answers before she knew anything more than the categories was a little annoying, but not alarming. Anyone who had watched the show for years, as she had, was familiar with the categories and possible answers, and could guess right occasionally. Her success rate was a lot higher than that, like one hundred percent, but at least she could rationalize that.

  She couldn’t rationalize painting in her sleep, especially not the death scene of a man she hadn’t known had died. That wasn’t just chance, that was ... weird. Strange. Spooky.

  Who was she kidding? She knew the word that applied, having come across it a lot in her research on ghosts.

  Clairvoyant.

  She kept fighting down a sense of panic. This frightened her more than anything else that had ever happened to her. She had thought her situation was static, but instead it seemed to be intensifying, with new situations being thrown at her just as she thought she had a handle on the old ones. She had even adjusted to seeing ghosts, though that was neither amusing nor enjoyable, like her effect on traffic signals and the growth of plants. The constant cold wasn’t enjoyable either, but she had decided that came with the ghosts.

  Jeopardy! she realized, had probably just signaled the beginning of clairvoyance. She was terrified that the ugly death-scene painting was just the next step in a progression that would have her foreseeing massacres, plane crashes, famines, and plagues. What did it matter that her plants were beautiful, when mentally she would live with constant death and suffering? The part of painting she loved most was the creation of beauty, and this development threatened to take that away from her.

  She had always enjoyed her solitude, but now for the first time she wished she didn’t live alone. Even a cat or a dog would be better than this sense of being completely on her own, with no one to turn to for help.

  She could always call Richard.

  The temptation was almost overpowering. He would hold her as he had before, and she could sleep, warm and safe, in his arms. She had never before felt that way with anyone, certainly not her parents. She had grown up knowing she had to handle things herself, that there was no soft, comforting lap in which she could rest. Not that Richard’s lap had been soft; she had a very clear memory of exactly how hard he had been. Nor had his lap been particularly comforting. But she had felt secure, and . . . and cherished. Or at least desired.

  She couldn’t call him. She had been right to send him away, and her reasons for doing so still existed. She knew her views on morality were much more stringent than was generally held to be normal, but after seeing the harm done by her parents’ indiscriminate infidelities, the wonder was she hadn’t entered a convent. She was more than a little startled by Richard’s desire for her, but she was absolutely astounded by her own desire for him. That had never happened before, and she wasn’t certain of her ability to resist it. The urge to lie down with him was so potent she could feel her insides tighten now, just thinking about him. With Richard around, she thought, she would never be cold again. Every time she felt a chill, she could crawl into his lap and let him warm her, maybe from the inside out.

  Whoa! She had to stop that line of thinking right now, or she’d be on the phone before she knew it. But she had a very clear vision of herself astride him, his mouth spreading kisses over her breasts and his big hands gripping her hips as he moved her up and down—

  Oh, damn. Stop it, she admonished herself. There were serious problems in her life, and she was letting herself get distracted into thinking about Richard. Mother Nature had rigged the game in her favor, making sexual attraction so damn fascinating that once you felt it, you couldn’t tune it out. On the other hand, thinking about Richard, picturing him naked, was a lot more pleasant than thinking about death and clairvoyance.

  She admitted to herself that she had half-expected him to call or stop by that day. If she read him correctly, and she thought she did, his middle name was persistence. Even though he had agreed to lay off, he had also promised that this thing between them, whatever it was, wasn’t over. I’ll be back, he’d said, and she knew he meant it. The question was, how long would he lay off and when would he be back? To her shame, she had hoped to see him today.

  But no one had rung her doorbell all day long, and bedtime was fast approaching. She hadn’t slept well the night before—she’d been edgy after the morning’s encounter with Richard and the afternoon’s encounter with the vendor’s ghost—but even though she was tired, she didn’t want to go to bed. She was afraid to sleep, she realized, afraid she would sleepwalk or go into a trance, or whatever had happened, and paint another death scene. She had always loved sleeping, and now that pleasure was being stolen from her. That thought made her mad as hell, and it scared her. Most of all, it scared her.

  Fear was something she had seldom known in her life, at least as an adult. Once as a child she had spent two days alone, because her father had taken her brother with him on some shoot and her mother had gone to a party and forgotten to come home, and she had been very scared then. She had been only nine years old and afraid they had all left her behind and were never coming home. And once, when she was fourteen, one of her mother’s many lovers—his name was Raz, she would never forget that name—had agreed with her mother that Sweeney was old enough to learn about sex.

  Fortunately they had both been so drunk that Sweeney was able to pull away and run, her heart pounding so hard in her chest that she had been afraid she would pass out and then they would have her. She had run down to the basement of the apartment building and hidden in the laundry, knowing her mother would never think of looking there, having never set foot in the place. She huddled between a washing machine and the wall for what seemed like hours, afraid to go back go the apartment in case Raz was waiting for her. Finally, growing more disgusted than afraid, she had loosed the handle from a mop and, armed with the handle, returned to the apartment. She didn’t like hiding in the laundry; she was going back to her room and the comfort of her books and paints, and if anyone bothered her, she would hit them on the head as hard as she could.

  Over the years she had developed the habit of confronting problems rather than hiding from them, but in the current case neither seemed to do any good. How could you confront something so nebulous? Clairvoyance wasn’t something you could see, or touch. It was just there, like blue eyes; you either had them or you didn’t. Same with clairvoyance.

  Having blue eyes didn’t frighten her, but clairvoyance did. In itself it was scary enough, but now, looking back, she saw everything that had happened in the past year as a progression, from plants to red lights to ghosts to clairvoyance. Looking at it that way, she didn’t dare try to guess what would be next. Levitation? Or maybe she would start setting things on fire just by looking at them.

  She tried to be amused, but for once her sense of humor wasn’t working.

  But wandering around the studio afraid to go to bed did remind her of hiding in the laundry when she was fourteen, and she growled aloud at herself. Nothing had happened the night before, and just because the more she thought about the trance painting the more worried she became didn’t mean it would happen every night. It might not happen again for a long time, until someon
e else she knew died—

  That was it. A lot of people died every day in New York, but none of their deaths had caused sleepwalking forays. She had known the hot dog vendor, however, so his death had disturbed her on a subconscious level.

  For the first time, she wondered how he had died. After she had seen him yesterday, she had been too shocked to think about it, and he had looked as healthy as any ghost she had ever seen. But in the scene she had painted, blood had been coming from his nostrils, and he had clearly suffered a head injury. Had he been hit by a car or maybe fallen down some steps? Just how accurate was that painting?

  Sweeney shivered. She didn’t want to know the answer to that last question.

  She shivered again and realized how cold she was. She was also very tired, very sleepy, and she was not going to stay awake a minute longer worrying about things she couldn’t control. She put on her pajamas and crawled into the warm bed, curling into a ball and waiting for the heat from the electric blanket to seep into her flesh.

  Just before she slept, she had the drowsy thought that if Richard were in bed with her, she wouldn’t need an electric blanket to keep her warm.

  * * *

  Just after midnight she gasped, pulling in a hard, fast breath. She pushed restlessly at the covers, fighting the blankets. She muttered, the sounds indistinct, and rolled her head as if trying to escape something.

  In the silence of the night her sudden cessation of breathing was as noticeable as her gasping had been. For a long moment she lay utterly still, then breath returned on a long, slow, gentle inhalation.

  She opened her eyes and sat up. Pushing the heavy cover aside, she got out of bed and walked soundlessly through the apartment. When she reached her studio, she put a blank canvas on an easel, stood for a moment with her head cocked to the side as if pondering her next step, then selected a tube of paint and began.

  * * *

  It was the cold that woke her. She huddled under the covers, wondering if her electric blanket was malfunctioning. Even so, the nest she had made for herself should have contained the heat. She fought her way out of the tangle of blankets and rolled over until she could see the blanket control. To her surprise, the little amber light was on, so the blanket should have been warm. She found a coil and pressed her fingers to it. She could feel the heat, but it didn’t seem to be transferring to her.

  Next she looked at the clock and lifted her eyebrows in surprise. It was almost nine, and she seldom slept past dawn. She didn’t have any appointments, though, so it was the cold, not urgency, that drove her from the bed. She paused to turn the thermostat up as high as it would go, then went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, setting the water as hot as she could bear it. By the time she stripped off her pajamas and stepped under the spray, she was shuddering with cold.

  She stood with the hot water beating down on her head and back, warming her spine. The shudders stopped, the fading tension unlocking her taut muscles as it drained away. Maybe there was something physically wrong with her, she thought, almost sagging as her body relaxed. The chills had started about the same time the other stuff had started happening, but that didn’t mean they were related. She wouldn’t have to tell a doctor everything, just that she was cold all the time. The realization that she was actually considering seeing a doctor startled her.

  As she toweled off, her skin roughened as another chill seized her. Swearing under her breath, she hurriedly got dressed. Getting her head wet hadn’t been the brightest idea, she thought, because she didn’t own a hair dryer. One disastrous attempt at blow-drying her hair, which resulted in something resembling a hairy explosion, had persuaded her to let her curls dry naturally rather than outrage them with heat. Wrapping a towel around her head, she went into the kitchen for that first cup of coffee.

  The light on the coffeemaker wasn’t on, but the pot was full. Frowning, she touched the pot and found it cold. “Damn it,” she muttered. The coffee had brewed right on time, but she hadn’t been up to drink it and the heat pad turned itself off after two hours, one more example of a manufacturer trying to protect itself from lawsuits by careless or forgetful customers who left their coffeemakers turned on and perhaps caused fires.

  She poured a cup of coffee and popped it into the microwave, then dumped the rest of the pot down the sink and put some fresh coffee on to brew. By the time she finished that, the buzzer on the microwave had sounded. The warmed-up coffee tasted terrible, sort of like old socks, but it was hot, and at the moment that was more important.

  The apartment wasn’t getting any warmer. She’d have to call Richard about getting the heating system repaired, she thought desperately. She leaned down and held her hand over the vent, and felt the warm air pouring out. Okay, so the heating system was working. She went to the thermostat to check the temperature; it was already eighty-two degrees, and the thermostat registered only up to eighty-five.

  She would just have to tough it out until her hair dried, she thought. That was what was making her so cold this morning. She was loath to unwrap the towel covering her head, but common sense told her that the heat in the apartment would dry her hair much faster if it wasn’t wrapped in a towel. Gritting her teeth and bracing for the chill, she ditched the towel. The air on her wet head didn’t feel cold, though. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

  Taking the cup of coffee with her into the bathroom, she sprayed some detangler on her curls and then finger-combed them, noting that most of the moisture had already evaporated. The mirror reflected a face that was white and pinched with cold. Her teeth chattered. “What a lovely sight,” she told her reflection.

  She poured more coffee and went into the studio. Her hands were shaking so much she wouldn’t be able to paint, but the habit was ingrained, so she went.

  There was a new canvas on the easel.

  Sweeney stood just inside the door, dread congealing in her stomach like cold grease. Her body felt leaden. Not again. Not another one. Who had she killed this time?

  No, she thought fiercely. She hadn’t killed anyone. Her painting hadn’t caused the old vendor to die, rather his death had caused the painting. But if this only happened when someone she knew had died . . . She didn’t want to see who was in the painting this time; she didn’t want to lose someone else she liked. What if—what if it was Richard?

  She was unprepared for the violence of the pain that seized her chest, freezing her lungs, constricting her heart. Not Richard, she prayed. Dear God, not Richard.

  Somehow she made her feet move, though she wasn’t aware of crossing the floor. Somehow she steeled herself to walk around the easel, positioned so the bright morning light fell directly on the canvas. And somehow she made herself look.

  The canvas was almost totally blank. She stared at it, the relief so sudden and total she almost couldn’t take it in. Not a death scene, then. Not Richard. Maybe . . . maybe this meant her supposition had been totally wrong, that the sleepwalking and painting didn’t necessarily have anything to do with death. That one time had been a coincidence, just one more part of the weird stuff that had been happening to her.

  She had painted shoes. Two shoes, one a man’s and the other a woman’s. The man’s shoe was the most complete, and it looked as if she had started on the foot inside it. She hadn’t finished the woman’s shoe, a high-heeled pump from the look of it, stopping before she got to the heel. There was no background, no sense of location, nothing but shoes. Just shoes.

  She laughed softly, giddy with relief and happiness. She had let all this funny business get to her, make her imagination go wild. She had almost made herself sick, thinking that Richard was dead when she had no reason to jump to such a hysterical conclusion.

  Humming, clutching her coffee cup with both hands in an effort to warm her fingers, she went back into the kitchen to rustle up some breakfast and drink more coffee. Surely she would be warm soon, and then she would get some work done.

  But the chill intensified, shaking her so violently she barely
managed to eat a slice of toast and it became dangerous to try to drink the hot coffee. She hurt, her muscles were so tight. She grabbed a blanket and sat down on one of the vents, making a tent with the blanket to trap the warm air around her.

  Why was this happening again? Why now, why not yesterday morning? The only other time the chill had been this intense was the morning after she had done the death painting of the old vendor. No, this was worse. This was the coldest she had ever been in her life.

  It had to be linked to the sleepwalking episodes. Once could be coincidence, but not twice. She couldn’t imagine what she could be doing to trigger such an extreme reaction, but at the moment all she cared about was getting warm. Afterward she would worry about the why and hows.

  A vicious cramp knotted her left thigh. Sweeney moaned, folding double with the agony as she massaged the muscle. She got the muscle unknotted, but moments later another cramp hit. She panted as she rubbed it out, then gingerly stretched out her legs. The constant shivering was causing her muscles to knot. She ached in every joint now, every muscle.

  Miserably she began to cry. She felt like a weak crybaby for doing so, but she hurt so much she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t known being cold was so painful. Why didn’t the tears freeze on her cheeks? She felt as if they should, even though she knew the room was warm.

  Richard had gotten her warm before. She couldn’t bear the pain much longer; with everything in her, she wanted him here with her now.

  Keeping the blanket around her, she crawled to the phone and lifted the cordless unit from its stand. She was surprised at how much energy it took to move, how sluggish she was, and she felt the first twinge of fear that her condition was truly serious, rather than being just a major inconvenience.