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
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
“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.”
“And with that,” Barnaby added, “I can develop these properties I've been purchasing over the last ten years.”
“But you've got a stake in this too, all of you,” Elaine reminded them. “Every risk you take is as much a danger to your own reward as it is to ours.”
There was silence around the table for a while.
Then Penny said, “I won't make a mistake like that again.”
“Good,” Barnaby said.
Fritz raised his coffee cup and said, “To fortune.”
Three others joined in the unorthodox toast. The Barnabys, as usual, sat back and watched it all as if they were visitors at a zoo.
SEVENTEEN
The following morning, which was Wednesday morning, her Aunt Elaine was there when she woke, shortly past nine o'clock, and she was full of smiles and small jokes to cheer up the patient. The older woman helped her to the bath, where she left her on her own. (Brushing teeth and washing her face, combing the snarls from her long yellow hair, were almost more than Gwyn could manage; she didn't even attempt to shower, for she hadn't the energy or the will to stand up that much longer.) When she was back in bed, propped up on extra pillows, Elaine brought her a huge breakfast on a bed tray, helped her remove the lids from the hot dishes. Though Gwyn was sure that Grace's cooking was as good as usual, all of the food looked colorless and tasted stale, and she had no appetite at all for it, though she forced down more than half of everything. She recognized these often-suffered symptoms of chronic malaise; before, when she had been tempted to sleep her life away, food had been tasteless and without visual appeal. The world had gone by in a senseless blur as she curled tighter and tighter into her own mental cocoon…
But, though she recognized what was happening to her, she no longer wanted to fight it. She had been
