The Dark of Summer

neck on the stairs, and if I start giving her that spiel about dying so she can be with us, she's bound to flip out. Then we'll both be sure the job's done right.”

The dead girl said, “I don't like this whole job. I like it less and less every minute, and I wish we'd never taken it.”

He put his arm around her and said, “There, there, love. You don't mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

“Just hang on a couple of more hours,” he said. “Then we're done, and we only have to sit around and wait for the money to pour in.”

“If he pays us.”

“He has to pay us.”

“Not if he can find some way around it,” she said. “And what can we do if he refuses to pay — go to the Better Business Bureau?” She laughed somewhat bitterly.

In the cupboard, Gwyn shook her head, as if she thought this was all another delusion and that she could rattle it out of the way. It remained, however, unfolding slowly, whether delusion or reality.

Ben said, “Barnaby will pay. Look, he'll be grateful as hell to us when this is done; without you, he'd not have been able to pull it off. Hell, if he hadn't seen you, he wouldn't even have thought of the whole bit. Besides, he's as deep into this as we are. And, baby, what he's giving us is only a little dribble of the bucketful he'll get his hands on.”

“I guess you're right.”

He kissed her cheek. “I always am. Now come along, love, and let's see where the kid's gotten to.”

She said, “What if she ran for help?”

“The nearest help, by foot, is an hour away,” he said. “And I don't think she's got the strength or the sense of mind to make it. The best thing about the manor is its isolation.”

“But just suppose she does make it,” the dead girl said.

“Playing pessimist tonight, are you?” he asked. “Okay. Even if she reaches help somewhere, they'll need to settle her down before they can get the story out of her. Then, when she's told them about me — and about you — they'll most likely not believe a word of it. If they do, and if they come back here with her, we'll have you tucked away in the attic. I'll have got all the chicken blood cleaned up, and I'll simply explain that the kid has been having — unfortunate emotional problems.” He laughed, coldly. “We just can't lose. If we don't find her in an hour, we come back to the house and clean up and get ready for visitors. But my guess is that she's out there somewhere, completely cracked.”

“I don't know,” the dead girl said. “I wouldn't have fallen for this. It makes me creepy to think she would swallow it so easily.”

“She's been mentally ill before,” he said. “It was natural for her to think she was having a relapse.”

“I guess…”

“Come on,” he said, opening the kitchen door.

Together, they went outside, closing the door after themselves.

Slowly, cautiously, Gwyn pushed open the pantry door, waited in the shadows a moment longer to be certain that they were not going to return, then stepped out into the kitchen, crossed the room to the back door and looked outside. The pair of specters, who were not specters at all, stood on the lawn ten yards away from the house, still a frightening couple. They were calling her name in that same, eerie voice which she had thought, at one time, was so inhuman: “Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn…” That unsettling vocal effect was merely a gimmick, a phony pitch that a professional actor might easily employ, though it sounded hollow and supernatural. They were surveying the woods where they thought she might have hidden, and gradually they became more comical and less terrifying, more human and less unnatural.

As she stood there, Gwyn began to piece together tiny bits of data, previously unremarkable events which now linked into one chain of cause and effect and produced a bracelet of deception…

How unnatural it had been, after all these years, for Uncle Will to write the sort of letter that he had, how pat and perfect and too like a wish or a dream.

And, too, how odd that she had suffered no illusions of ghosts until she was securely in the manor house, under the watchful eyes of — she now realized — complete strangers…

She realized other things as well: The interest which Elaine and Will had shown in hearing of her previous illness was not innocent, but the interest of a pair of vultures listening to their wounded victim tell them how and when it would die and be available for a feast; Fritz and Grace's air of not belonging in the jobs they held — they too must be in on this scheme; the careful admonitions not to go near Jack Younger, not because he would harm her, but because he might convince her of a bit of the truth which would help her to discover the ruse they planned; the sleeping tablets, not meant to help her get better, but to weaken her, to let her slide back into the patterns of her old illness where she would be an easier target for the horrors they had planned to show her tonight; Jack Younger's assurance that her uncle was a bigot, so far as social stations went, though she had thought he had outgrown that pettiness; all the talk at the beginning of her stay in the manor, about the view from her bedroom windows, so silly at the time, but effectively reminding her of Ginny and priming her for the first visit of the ghost; the broom marks which she had seen and which her uncle professed not to be able to pick out… The list went on and on, so that Gwyn wondered, now, how she could ever have overlooked so many things, how she could have let them almost get away with this. She had been near to madness, after all.

However, even now, so soon after the revelation of the hoax, she could understand, just a little, why she had been ripe for this kind of thing. She had wanted to have a family again, wanted that so desperately, that she had been not only capable of overlooking flaws in Will and Elaine, but had been eager to see only the good in them. She had not wanted to do anything to shatter the hope they had given her, and as a result, she had played right into their hands.

There were various bits and pieces of the hoax which she had not yet found satisfactory explanations for: how the blonde girl could look so very much like her, and like Ginny, her exact double, in fact; how she could have known about the Teckert boy, whom Gwyn had forgotten about a long time ago… But, in the end, these were nothing more than technicalities, and they did not change the basic explanation of why she had fallen so completely and so quickly for their deception: she wanted a family; she needed to be loved.

Out on the lawn, still calling her name to the night in those cold and unnatural voices, Ben Groves and the unnamed girl moved out of Gwyn's line of sight as they continued with their fruitless search. There was no kid sitting beneath a tree and babbling…

Gwyn turned away from the window.

She was not particularly angry with anyone, not with Will or Elaine or Ben or this unknown woman, not even as — moment by moment — she realized more fully just what they had been trying to do to her, how little they had cared about her, how utterly ruthless they had been. Instead of anger, she felt a deep, welling sorrow. She was depressed beyond measure by what had happened. Her love had been met by deception, her trust twisted and used against her. Because she had passed through so much of life without loved ones, she had passed through life alone — and, alone, she had never had the opportunity to learn, first-hand, how duplicitous human nature was, how often people used false affection to hide an inner hate. Now, having learned this lesson in one sudden sortie, she was literally stunned.

“Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn… Gwyn. “ hollow and strange, but no longer frightening.

She shook herself out of her negative reverie, aware that she had no time to waste with her sorrow, and she tried to decide what she must do next. Because her own belief in the hoax was, after all she had heard, still rather shaky, she felt that she must do some detective work, snoop around and find out as much as she could, to fortify her belief. Besides, though she knew, almost for certain, what hoax had been played and why, she had no proof of it to take to the authorities. Indeed, if she went to them with what she had now, they would humor her and, as her uncle evidently wished, eventually decide that she was quite incompetent.

She wondered why Uncle Will, a millionaire in his own right, would go to such lengths to get his hands on her fortune. Was it sheer malice, grown from dissatisfaction with his dead sister's husband's successes? Or had his own fortune, somehow, been dissipated, until he had nothing left of the Barnaby estate? Was his hoax, his ruthlessness, based on a desperate need rather than on jealousy and hatred?

No matter. She would find that out eventually, when all of the details were brought into the light. Right now, the most important thing was to take advantage of her solitary inhabitance of the manor, to do some unauthorized