House of Dreams (39 page)

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Authors: Brenda Joyce

BOOK: House of Dreams
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Cass stopped breathing; and then she shoved Tracey's hair away from her face, saw her wide, unblinking eyes, but she also saw the vapor of breath coming from her parted lips, and then she saw how white her knuckles were—and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest.
“Tracey!” Cass threw her arms around her, but Tracey did not budge.
“Cassandra!” Antonio shouted from behind her.
Cass barely heard him. “She's alive! Tracey, what's happened, Tracey!” Cass wept, caressing her, stroking her, holding her, trying not to think about the blood.
What happened?
And Cass felt her sister soften in her arms. Her body relaxed in waves, until Tracey was in her embrace, trembling wildly, uncontrollably.
Cass took her by her shoulders, intent on getting her out of the car, when Tracey slowly looked at her—her eyes huge and vacant, like the sightless eyes of a blind person. And Cass was terrified.
“I … want … to … die,” Tracey said.
Unlike most Europeans, he worked out regularly, and ran several times a week in El Retiro Parque. Gregory had left the villa at a jog, but after an hour had gone by, he was tiring, and now, another hour later, he was walking, but briskly. The two-lane highway he was on was completely deserted, and the fact that it was the weekend did not help. The road ran now through high, rolling terrain, wooded hills sloping upward on the other side of the road, a shallow ravine on his right. The nearest town, the walled medieval village of Pedraza, was perhaps forty kilometers from the house, most of the going uphill. If he could sustain his current pace, even if no one came along to offer him a ride, he would make it in two more hours or so.
He was determined to sustain the pace.
He was so close.
But God, it was so hot.
And as the sweat trickled down his face, burning into his eyes, he could not stop thinking about the horror of turning in bed to Tracey and being greeted with Isabel de la Barca's chilling smile instead.
Chilling, taunting … haunting.
He had imagined it. Either he had imagined Tracey turning into a replica of the dead woman, or he had dreamed up the entire episode of sex.
The latter was far more likely, he told himself firmly. But his sheets had smelled of sex that morning, very distinctly, in a way that could not be produced by a wet dream.
Gregory did not want to think. But there was nothing else to do. His gut remained tight and curled with fear, with panic, and with the worst of premonitions.
Someone was going to die. He just knew it, the way he'd always known it, ever since he was a small boy hiding in terror from the demon of his dreams. The demon who he now knew was no demon, no figment of the imagination, but a goddamned ghost—and the proof was right there in that photograph Cass had taken.
And even as he hurried on, chills broke out over his entire body.
Now he wondered whether Tracey had returned last night. If so, why had she then disappeared? Of course, he had screamed at her like a lunatic, and she had bolted from the room. Had he chased her away? Or had he been in the throes of an incredibly real dream? A dream brought on by his own cowardice, his own worst fears?
If only he had never seen that photo—then he could tell himself that this was all a weird obsession left over from his childhood.
But far more than childhood nightmares were at work at Casa de Suenos, he thought grimly. Catherine Belford and another man were dead. Two women were missing. And
she
was somehow to blame.
The moment he thought that, he denied it with all of his being. That ghost was haunting them, but ghosts did not murder people. Ghosts did not slash tires. Ghosts did not destroy wiring. Ghosts were nothing but formless energy. When had anyone
ever
died at the hand of a ghost?
Reflecting light broke into his musings. Gregory suddenly realized that something was ahead of him on the highway—and he blinked.
And for one instant he made out a man, approaching slowly, and he blinked again, halting in his tracks—afraid he was hallucinating.
But he was not. For as he caught his breath, he saw a man on a bicycle, pedaling slowly, steadily, toward him.
Exultation filled him, and with it, hope. Gregory ran forward, waving frantically, calling out,
“Hola, señor! Hola!”
The man was actually a teenaged boy and he cruised to a stop, his gaze hardly suspicious, as there was no crime in these parts. Gregory produced his wallet, ripped out a two-thousand-peseta bill, and handed it to him, explaining that he needed the bike.
There was no negotiation to be had—the boy could buy another bicycle for five or six hundred pesetas—and as Gregory climbed onto the seat, he felt a wave of relief. For he had been afraid, in the back of his mind, that somehow he would be prevented from making it to the police that day.
He took off, riding hard. He estimated that he would reach the town in less than half an hour now, and he smiled as he glanced up at the sun—he would be speaking to the local gendarmes well before noon.
Por Dios.
The horn blared behind him.
Gregory almost lost his seat, the horn was so loud and so close behind him, when he had been alone on the road all morning. He slowed, glancing over his shoulder—and saw the huge twelve-wheeler truck bearing down upon him.
His heart slammed wildly; the horn blared again, two huge headlights and an even larger, shining metal bumper bearing down at eighty or ninety kilometers per hour upon him.
The idiot,
Gregory thought, his pulse rocketing with sheer fear. What was he trying to do, run him off the road?
Gregory veered onto the very narrow dirt shoulder, which was no more than eight inches wide, felt the blast of heat from the truck's engine, heard its roar, directly behind him, looked back—and saw the driver's face in the windshield, just meters away.
He screamed.
The driver was a woman.
And as the truck continued, swerving onto the shoulder of the road,
swerving toward him,
Gregory jerked hard on the handlebars, the bike hit the rocky ground beside the road, and then a huge tire brushed the bike. And he knew.
He knew as he flipped upward, high into the air, still astride the bike, and then as he came down, the bike wrenched from his hands, he knew as his body hit the side of the ravine, pain exploding everywhere, almost at once, and he knew as he flipped again and again, picking up speed, tumbling down the cliff, that this was the end.
He landed hard on rocks, in a trickle of water at the ravine's bottom. And just before he lost consciousness, he thought,
This is what she has always wanted, ever since I was a boy.
How could he have ever had doubts?
She had won.
 
 
Cass was already frightened; now her sister's words made her terrified.
“Cassandra, let me help.”
Antonio. Eagerly Cass slid out of the car. “She's hurt. She badly hurt.” Her heart would not slow. Every racing beat was filled with pain and dread.
Antonio reached into the car and lifted Tracey into his arms. Tracey clung to him, burying her face in his shoulder.
“I'll take her up to her room,” Antonio said grimly.
Inside … her room … the children. “God! I don't want the children to see her like this,” Cass cried as they hurried toward the house.
“I am in absolute agreement,” Antonio muttered darkly.
With shaking hands Cass unlocked the front door for Antonio, and followed him as he carried her sister upstairs. On the landing, she rushed ahead of them; the bedroom door was open. As Cass glanced into the room, it occurred to her that something was wrong, but she dismissed whatever her mind was trying to tell her, because the first order of business was cleaning Tracey up. “Put her in the shower,” she told Antonio, and he nodded in agreement.
As Antonio set her down on her feet in the claw-footed bathtub, Tracey continued to hold tightly on to him for support. She continued to tremble and shake, and she kept her eyes squeezed shut. Cass turned on the faucets, adjusted the water temperature, then picked up the shower hose. And as she directed it over her sister, she felt violently sick.
The water mixed with the dried encrusted blood on her clothes, and ran red in the tub beneath her feet.
Cass fought not to vomit. She quickly stripped her sister but it was too late, for her white tank top and shorts were already turning pinkish red. And Cass inhaled.
Her legs were scratched everywhere, but that was nothing compared to the huge bruises on her torso, and then Cass glimpsed her breasts. A series of thin red lines radiated across them. Cass's gaze slammed to her arms. The same thin red lines were slashed across the undersides of her wrists and forearms.
As she held the hose over her sister, she turned to look at Antonio, knowing her shock was there in her wide eyes. His eyes were as wide as hers felt, as wide and as grim. Cass found herself shaking her head. Those cuts—whoever had done that to her sister, he had used a knife. Oh, God.
What had happened?
“I'll do this for you,” Antonio said firmly.
“No! She's my sister,” Cass shouted, and then hated herself for screaming at him when he was trying to help, and none of this was his fault—or was it? Maybe it was even her fault. Tracey had run away because she was unstable, but the growing attraction between her and
Antonio had added to her fragility. Had they triggered her disappearance?
Guilt choked Cass.
And she wanted, desperately, to convince herself that all was well, that she was in no way responsible for what she was now seeing, but her mind had shut down, and there were no mental arguments for her to make.
And then she grabbed the shampoo and washed her sister's hair, the activity a refuge. But she could not stop telling herself that she could have prevented what had happened to Tracey. It was something she would never forgive or forget.
Cass realized she was crying.
“Please go and let me finish,” Antonio whispered.
Through her tears, Cass looked at him. His tone had been amazingly kind, incredibly gentle, filled with empathy and compassion. But it was too late. This was the last straw. Cass didn't think that they were ever going to be able to go forward in the future, not after this singular moment in time.
“I can't leave her,” she said hoarsely.
When Tracey was as clean as possible, they wrapped her in a towel and Antonio carried her to her bed. Cass sat down beside her, but Tracey's eyes were already closed, and as Cass covered her with a blanket, she felt hot, fresh tears gathering in her eyes, and they began to fall, steadily, in earnest and in torrents.
He touched her shoulder.
Cass shook her head. She could not speak.
Which was fortunate, because if she could, she would tell him to go away.
His hand remained until she shrugged him off. She didn't want him comforting her. After a silence, he said, “When you need me, I will be downstairs. I am going to get the children and Alfonso.”
Cass did not reply, and she didn't look up as he left the room, either.
But what she did do was cover her face with her hands and weep.
“Cass?”
The whisper was low and somehow pitiful; Cass jerked and met Tracy's own tear-filled stare. Instantly she reached out to stroke her brow, her cheek, and then take her hand. “I love you.”
Tracey blinked at her as tears slipped down her cheeks. “Alyssa. Is she all right?”
Cass stiffened. “Of course,” she began, but then she realized she hadn't seen Alyssa since earlier that morning. She recovered her composure, forced a smile, even as tears made it hard for her to see clearly, and she said, “She's fine.”
“Tell her I love her,” Tracey whispered.
Cass was frightened. Her sister had endured some kind of horror, but she was not the kind of person to talk this way. “You can tell her yourself when you feel up to it.”
Tracey shook her head. “No. No. Don't bring her here. Please don't.”
Tracey was growing distraught. “Fine,” Cass said, realizing that Tracey was right. The condition she was in would only frighten Alyssa. She continued to hold her hand tightly. “Tracey, please, tell me what has happened—who did this to you?!”
Tracey stared at her. “I don't know what happened,” she finally said.
Cass stared back, in dismay. “How … how can you not know?” But even as she spoke, the word
shock
went through her mind, followed by
trauma
and
amnesia.
“Everything's a blur,” Tracey whispered, more tears falling. “I'm so tired. How did you find me?”
Cass stared. “You came back,” she finally said. “You were in Gregory's car.”
She looked at Cass with bewilderment in her eyes.
“Do you remember leaving the house?” Cass had to ask.
Tracey hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, I do. I was so angry. So incredibly angry. At you.”
Cass felt as if she had been struck. She had to close her eyes. “I'm sorry,” she choked. And she was. God, she was. Now she regretted every moment spent with Antonio. What had she been thinking?
“I don't want to be angry. It scares me,” Tracey whispered.
Cass stroked her brow again. “You don't have to be angry now. You're here, and safe. I'll take care of you, Trace, I promise. I promise,” she repeated firmly. And she meant it.
“I'm scared,” Tracey said hoarsely, again.
Cass met her gaze. “Don't be scared now,” she finally said, forcing a reassuring smile which was a monumental lie. Then, “Why are you scared? Because you can't remember what happened?”

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