Never Sleep With Strangers Read online

  Sabrina nodded. Leaving the warriors to Joshua, she walked outside to her horse and mounted.

  Soon after she did so, the two combatants came out of the cottage, neither of them speaking. Jon’s features remained tense, his eyes hard and crystalline. Brett, too, oozed tightly leashed anger. Joshua emerged a few moments later, having evidently seen to closing up the lodge.

  In silence, the men went for their horses. As they mounted, Sabrina started moving. The day that had seemed so crisp and beautiful when she rode out earlier had undergone a startling transformation. The landscape didn’t seem the same at all; she might have been riding into an endless world of nothingness. She couldn’t see trees, foliage or even a distinction between sky and ground. In the short time they had been indoors, the snow had become blinding, and she was surrounded by a sea of white.

  Jon apparently knew she was lost and had every intention of leading the way. He kneed his mount past hers without looking at or speaking to her. But she knew enough to stay behind him, followed by Joshua and then Brett.

  The snow pelted harder and harder, icy crystals that hurt her face.

  Jon turned back, shouting to them, “We’ve got to move as quickly as possible!”

  They nodded, and Jon began to ride hard, taking advantage of an open field and level land. They followed closely.

  Suddenly Sabrina heard a cracking sound and an abrupt cry. Turning back, she saw that Brett had fallen. His horse raced pell-mell past her.

  “Brett!” she cried, reining in, turning back. She raced to his side, hastily dismounting. The snow was falling with a vengeance. “Brett!”

  He lay facedown in the snow, seemingly stretched atop a red ribbon.

  As she reached for him, she realized that it wasn’t a red ribbon at all.

  It was a splatter of blood, brilliantly crimson against the white purity of the snow.

  10

  Susan Sharp was lying just inside the doorway as the men burst through to the chamber of horrors.

  She was sprawled on her side, her hair covering her face. Staring at her, V.J. felt as if her heart stopped, then slammed back into a frenzied beat.

  “My God!” she breathed, hurrying to Susan, her mind racing with flights of horrible fancy. Had Jack the Ripper truly come to life to kill her?

  She knelt by the woman’s side, as did Thayer. The ex-cop, evidently accustomed to emergencies—and even to dead bodies—was calmly lifting Susan’s wrist and checking for a pulse. He slowly smiled across Susan’s body at V.J.

  “She’s not dead. She has a strong, steady pulse and easy respirations. She’s just passed out. It seems she scared herself half to death.”

  “She’s not hurt?”

  “She doesn’t appear to be,” he said as he quickly and expertly guided his hands over her, checking for injuries.

  “Well, how’d she get locked in here?” Tom Heart asked, studying the doors.

  Thayer rose, looking over the doors with Tom and Joe. “She didn’t. We couldn’t get in because the bolt wasn’t completely free of the catch. As to why she couldn’t get out, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t realize that the bolt wasn’t quite open. The doors themselves might be swollen, too. Damp weather causes stuff like that, you know. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Just swollen wood, a loose bolt and panic.”

  Dianne stared at Thayer. “She scared herself into thinking she was locked in?”

  Thayer shrugged. “That’s what it looks like. What else could it be? It’s obvious, swollen wood can stick. It took the three of us slamming ourselves against these doors to get in. And we didn’t break the bolt free. Look yourself. The wood is barely damaged.”

  “Strong wood, though,” Tom Heart said dryly. “If someone was bolted in here…”

  “But the bolt was only a hair over, right?” Dianne persisted.

  “This really can be an incredibly creepy old castle!” Anna Lee said with a shudder.

  “People are creepy, dear,” Reggie said dryly. “And, at my age, at least, creepy and creaky and cranky. I’m old, I’ve had it, I’m going up for a drink and some lunch.” She turned and walked out.

  “Maybe one of us should go with her,” Joe mused aloud.

  “Reggie will be fine. Woe to the spirits who mess with her. But shouldn’t we do something about Susan?” V.J. said. “She is lying on a cold stone floor.”

  They all looked at one another, slow, guilty smiles on their faces. It occurred to V.J. that there probably wasn’t a human being here Susan hadn’t hurt in some way at one time or another. If they had found her dead, would any of them have felt deep sorrow?

  “Well, she is quiet this way,” Dianne commented. A chorus of grunts and chuckles from the others seemed to back the truth of her observations.

  “Oh, come now!” V.J. said. “What are we, a bunch of monsters? If someone would just please—”

  “I’ll get her, I’ll get her!” Thayer grumbled. “I can consider her my weight-lifting exercise for the day. Anyone know which one is Susan’s room up there? She should be coming to soon.”

  Just as he began to lift Susan, her eyes flew open. “Put me down, you ox!” she fumed.

  Obligingly, Thayer let go, and Susan’s rear bounced back onto the cold stone floor. V.J. turned away, suppressing a laugh.

  “You bastards!” Susan charged them all. “Who did this to me? What kind of sick joke is this? I swear, you should all be hanged. So, you think this is funny, Victoria Jane Newfield? You’ll be sorry, I swear you’ll be sorry.”

  “Quit threatening V.J., Susan,” Tom Heart said angrily. “She was the one among us most concerned about you.”

  “She probably locked me in, or pretended to be Jack the Ripper coming after me!”

  “Susan,” Anna Lee said impatiently, “No one was pretending to be Jack the Ripper. Your imagination just got the best of you because you thought you were locked in.”

  “I didn’t think I was locked in. I was locked in,” Susan said stubbornly. “And somebody must have taken the Jack the Ripper costume and come after me.”

  “Susan, Jack the Ripper is wearing his costume,” Joe said, stroking his beard absently as he looked around the horror chamber. “If you take a good look,” he said gently, “you’ll notice that nothing has changed in here at all. You were a victim of your own imagination.”

  “Or your guilty conscience,” Anna Lee suggested pleasantly.

  Susan rewarded her with a look that could kill. “I’m telling you something sick happened here!” she snapped furiously, tossing her head. “I was locked in here and deliberately terrorized. I came because my note said to attend a séance here, and—”

  “The séance was in the crypt,” Dianne stated, slinging her hair back and kneeling down by Susan. “Didn’t your note send you to the crypt?”

  “No, to the chamber of horrors,” Susan said. “So one of you bastards switched it and locked me in here. When I find out who did this—”

  “Where’s your note?” V.J. demanded. She looked around the room. All wore masks of complete innocence.

  “I had it. It was right here,” Susan insisted. She stood, looking around the area where she had fallen. There was no note. “Whoever tricked me stole the note!”

  “Maybe you were sent here as part of the game,” Joe suggested, still trying to ease troubled waters.

  V.J. glared at him with a bit of contempt. There would be no placating Susan Sharp, and she would be damned if she’d suck up to her or tolerate her nonsense, no matter what the woman might write in a column. She’d come too far to play the sycophant to the likes of Susan.

  “Look,” Thayer said with an air of practicality, “the other ladies were in the crypt when we came down, and we men all came down together, so no one of us could have done anything evil to you without someone else knowing it, Susan. I think you accidentally scared yourself silly and in your panic inadvertently locked yourself in.”

  “Oh, bullshit!” Susan snapped furiously. She dramatically pa
ced around the room. “This old place is full of false doors and secret panels. Any one of you could have slipped in to torture me.”

  “Susan, frankly, if I were going to torture you, I’d do a more thorough job of it,” Thayer barked.

  “Maybe it was the master of the castle himself, Jon Stuart, who locked you in,” Dianne suggested suddenly. “Jon was here earlier, you know. And he would certainly know the castle’s secret passages, wouldn’t he?”

  “Jon would never do such a thing to me,” Susan said affectedly, smoothing back her hair. “Where is he now? We’re going to get to the bottom of this!”

  Once again, everyone in the room looked away from her, evidently reluctant to give Susan any bit of information she might use against someone else.

  Then V.J. shrugged, because it was no great secret that Jon had gone after Sabrina and Brett. “There’s a storm coming in. Some of the others had gone riding, and he went out to make sure they made it back in,” she said.

  “Some of the others?” Susan repeated. Then she smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Could it be that Brett and Sabrina took off—to be alone? How positively darling. Perhaps they’re the ones hiding guilty consciences!”

  “Oh, right,” Anna Lee murmured dryly. “After one of them locked you in here while the other pretended to be Jack the Ripper. An incredible feat, when you consider that both of them would have had to be in two places at the same time.”

  “Well, one of you bastards did this, and I will find out which one,” Susan assured them bitterly. “Where’s Reggie?” she demanded.

  “Probably sipping a martini in comfort by now,” Tom said.

  Susan’s eyes narrowed. “And that wretched Joshua, who made these horrid creatures—”

  “He was never even down here this morning,” Joe said.

  “And that despicable little worm of a woman who works for Jon?” Susan asked.

  “Upstairs somewhere,” Joe said with a shrug.

  “I wouldn’t put it past that horrid little mouse to have been in on something like this!” Susan said. “In fact, I’m sure she planned this, the sniveling wretch. I will demand the truth from her, and—”

  “Susan, I’m telling you, it looks as if you accidentally locked yourself in,” Thayer reminded her firmly.

  “Oh, and dressed myself up like Jack the Ripper?”

  “Jack the Ripper is wearing his own clothes,” Joe Johnston said, walking impatiently to the tableau. “Look, Susan. He’s dressed, he’s in place, okay? But fear is a terrible thing. It plays upon the imagination. We all know that—we make a living out of the concept. It’s dark down here, scary, shadowy—easy to imagine things.”

  Susan’s eyes narrowed. “Joe Johnston, you are an ass. I’m going upstairs, and I’m going to gouge Camy Clark’s little eyes out!” she announced, turning on her heel and stomping off rather dramatically for someone who had just been unconscious.

  Joe groaned.

  “We’d all better go with her and protect Camy,” Tom advised.

  “Actually, maybe questioning Camy isn’t such a bad idea,” Dianne said. “We can ask her about the game note sent to Susan and find out if someone was maybe playing a trick with different notes.”

  “Good idea,” V.J. exclaimed.

  Dianne smiled, pleased. To V.J., she suddenly looked very young again. Despite her outlandish determination to be different, she was really just a little girl cast into an intimidating adult world, V.J. mused. She determined to be a better friend to the young writer, even if she did happen to be stealing places on the all-important bestseller lists!

  Well, that was life, V.J. reasoned. No one said life—or death—had to be fair.

  “All right, then let’s all go up—” Thayer began.

  But at that moment, the room was plunged into darkness. And the only thing to cut through the wall of black was a hysterical scream.

  Down by Brett’s side in the snow, Sabrina suffered a wealth of fear and agony. Okay, so he could be a jerk. Their marriage had been over before it had begun. But she did love him in a way. And he was a friend. And she was suddenly so scared.

  “Oh, God!” she breathed, looking at the splatter of blood, tenderly touching his cold face. So cold. “Brett!” she cried.

  Jon rode back and reined in, snow whirling in the air around him. He came down by her side, Sabrina found the courage to feel for a pulse at Brett’s throat.

  A beat. Another beat. Another. He was alive!

  Jon looked at her, and she nodded, tears brimming in her eyes. She saw the relief flood his handsome face, and she knew that whatever differences there were between the two, Jon cared deeply for his friend, as well.

  With long, supple fingers, he carefully searched for the wound emitting the blood. “It looks as if he struck his head when he fell. We have to get him back to the castle and get him warm before we lose him to shock. I’ve had some emergency medical training, but not much. I hope to God he’s not hurt too badly, since we’re likely to be snowed in.”

  “What about broken bones, or his neck?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure his neck isn’t broken,” Jon murmured, carefully fingering muscle and bone. He began gently skimming his fingers over Brett’s limbs.

  “Wait, I’ve taken lots of anatomy,” Joshua said, dismounting and joining them. He knelt down in the snow, studying Brett and touching him carefully with the gentle hands of an artist. After a moment he looked up at them both. “The only injury seems to be the crack to his head from that rock there. I can’t find any breaks.”

  Sabrina looked at him and Jon gratefully. Then Jon began lifting Brett. Staggering a bit, he rose to his feet. He must have seen the fear in Sabrina’s eyes because he paused for a moment and gently teased her. “We’ll get him back, and he’ll be fine. But he sure is a heavy sucker. Must be the weight of a swelled head from his successes lately, huh?”

  She was able to smile weakly in return. Then Jon turned to Joshua for help. They didn’t sling Brett’s unconscious body over his horse as they did in the old western movies. Instead, with Josh’s aid, Jon arranged to hold Brett before him in his own saddle, almost as he might carry a child, sheltering him from the snow with a blanket from his saddlebag. Sabrina quickly mounted her horse and followed closely behind him at a walk.

  When she realized Joshua wasn’t with them, she glanced back.

  He was kneeling by the rock where Brett had fallen, staring at it in a puzzled manner, then looking all around him, though what he sought in the snow-white landscape, she couldn’t begin to fathom. There was no one, nothing. Then again, there might have been an entire army of Highland soldiers advancing over the next rise, and they wouldn’t know it, the snow was swirling in such a heavy, windswept barrage.

  “Joshua!” she called out. But he didn’t seem to hear or see or heed her. Should she go back for him? But they couldn’t turn back; they couldn’t lose any time with Brett unconscious, facing shock and a long ride through the snow.

  Biting her lip, she looked toward Jon, who was moving ahead quickly. Should she call out to him? She turned to glance back at Joshua Valine once again, and she was relieved to see that he had finally risen and was mounting his horse to follow them. She turned quickly away, for some instinctive reason not wanting him to know that she had been watching him.

  They all rode on in silence until, finally, like a giant boulder cast down upon the snowy land, the castle rose out of the sea of white before them. They were almost home.

  “Oh! It just fucking figures, doesn’t it?” Susan swore from a few feet away, her voice sharp in the sudden total darkness. She hadn’t gotten very far before the lights went out.

  Then V.J. thought she heard something else. A whirring or whooshing sound, as if a cape swept by her, nearly touching her.

  A cape.

  Jack the Ripper?

  Jack the Ripper, real and running amok in the chamber of horrors? They’d all been so determined that Susan was dramatizing, that her imagination had been running aw
ay with her. But mightn’t someone dressed up like the figure have been hiding nearby, gloating, laughing, thinking that he—or she—had only to wait for the power to fail, then they’d all be like lambs at a slaughter, helpless, perfect victims?

  A second scream pierced the darkness, and V.J. thought she might perish of a heart attack.

  But it was just Susan, and the sharp cry was followed by swearing. “You burned me, damn it!” she yelped.

  “Well, damn it, you’re standing right on top of me!” Thayer said as his lighter flicked to life, giving them a small spot of illumination.

  V.J. strained her eyes in the darkness. The figure of Jack the Ripper was standing right where he’d been. Silly woman! she taunted herself.

  “Here—a lantern,” Tom said, lifting an old-fashioned candle lamp from a hook by the door. “They probably lose electricity in most of these storms. This thing looks as if it was in use not too long ago.”

  “There’s another here,” Joe stated.

  With the lanterns flaring, the chamber of horrors was alight again, actually brighter than it had ever been before.

  “I’m telling you, someone is—” Susan began.

  “Oh, Susan!” Joe protested, pulling on his beard in total aggravation. “Storms are acts of God, and power outages are failures of mechanics, and neither is a conspiracy against Susan Sharp.”

  “The hell with this storm. You haven’t seen anything yet!” Susan assured them. She strode to Thayer, snatching a lantern from him. “There’s going to be one big hurricane around little Miss Camy Clark.”

  She started once more out of the chamber of horrors, still determined that she’d been the victim of an evil trick. The others followed her.

  V.J. found herself last in the chamber, with the blackness swiftly creeping in around her. She gazed at the wax figures as the light began to fade. It seemed that they were beginning to move, just waiting for the light to dim entirely before leaping fully to life.

  “Wait!” she tried to cry. But her throat was dry, the sound barely a whisper. They were all going to leave her, and she’d be standing here, stupidly paralyzed, as the figures came alive and started menacingly after her, seeking her blood in the black void settling around her.