She headed down to the middle landing’s picture window, ignoring the way her knees wanted to wobble. By daylight, the window was a wall of brilliant glass, flaunting an unrestricted view of the steep hill that rose gently from the surrounding woods. But in these hours just past midnight, the world beyond became an abyss of ominous black.
The chandelier’s glare had turned the window’s beveled panes into an eerie sort of mirror. In its reflection, Shaw appeared no more substantial than a ghost. Her skin was too pale. Her brown eyes too haunted. Her hair was just long enough for a man to grab…
Without warning, she was struck by the mercurial memory of being dragged from the closet.
She pounced on a set of switches that fired the first-story lights to life. Esme meowed, then struggled from Shaw’s grasp and scampered down the back staircase, presumably to find somewhere less unsettling to sleep for the rest of the night.
This was stupid. Shaw was perfectly safe at the top of High Lake Mountain. No one in the small Georgia town below even knew she had returned for the first time since her father’s funeral ten years ago.
“So knock it off,” she ordered herself.
She headed down the front stairs. At the moment, the visual disarray of the chintz furniture in the parlor was more than her nerves could handle. A tin of hot chocolate awaited her in the kitchen. An old-fashioned sugar high was what she needed to obliterate the gooseflesh still rippling across her arms.
The butler’s door leading into the kitchen gleamed with the oil she’d polished into it. It opened at her touch with a worn, disgruntled creak, swinging wide to reveal an unwelcome sea of darkness yawning before her. She’d turned the light off earlier, convincing herself that this time she’d sleep until dawn. That she wouldn’t be coming back down as she was now, scared and needing her path illuminated like a trembling child longing for a night-light.
She stretched out her hand as she inched toward the oak table that dominated the room. A lifetime seemed to pass. The Victorian settled around her in a cacophony of creaks and groans, as if it were somehow going out of its way to spook her.
Her fingers curled around the chain dangling from its overhead fixture. A quick yank doused the room in a sepia-tinged hue.
She glanced around, feeling more foolish by the second. No unearthly creatures and certainly no deadly men lurked in the corners or under the table or beyond the door that swooshed shut behind her. She might not remember the family who’d once lived here with her, all of them now dead and gone. But her grandmother’s house wasn’t a threat to her.
No one was really after her, Chief Inspector Dawson had explained when the U.S. Marshals Service decreed Shaw wasn’t to be assigned a witness security team. Most likely, her shooting had been a random act of violence. In case there was more to it, and due largely to her highly visible position as CEO of Cassidy Global Research, Dawson had extended her the courtesy of having his Atlanta Federal Marshals’ office keep a long-distance eye on her recovery. But formal WITSEC protection was for people whose lives were in immediate danger because of something they’d witnessed. Not for head cases like Shaw.
Dawson had told her that, besides her injury, there’d been no evidence of a shooting at her crime scene or of the meeting and the men in her nightmare. Until she could give the authorities a reason to investigate further, she needed to calm the hell down. He’d said it in slightly more diplomatic terms as he’d driven her up here. But the gist was the same. If she wanted protection, she had to remember enough for the authorities to build a solid case and make an arrest.
She forced herself to take her first full breath since waking. The kitchen never failed to soothe her nerves. Over the last three weeks, she’d spent countless hours there, cooking and thinking, trying to remember something of her life. Anything at all. Unlike the grander decor of the rest of the house, the kitchen and its adjacent storage room had remained utilitarian workspaces that spoke of a simpler, more humble beginning she’d like to think she’d once admired.
She plucked milk from the sixties-era Frigidaire and told herself to get a grip as she poured the liquid into a copper saucepan. She set the pan on the gas stove to boil and found the container of cocoa in the oak cabinet above the range top. The sugar was in the crock beside the burner. The drawer to her right held a mismatched collection of stainless and silver-plated utensils, castoffs of various patterns. She rummaged carelessly through the silverware that she would meticulously re-sort in the morning. Her fingers curled around a spoon with a rose-patterned handle that made her smile.
She took her teacup and saucer from the dish rack, then stirred the warming milk with a wooden spoon. Her nightly routine began to work its magic. The muscles in her shoulders unclenched to a mere ache. Her erratic thoughts cleared. The compulsion to run eased, returning to her the confidence and composure she’d apparently been legendary for as she’d navigated the unforgiving complexities of her career.