Bones of a Feather - Carolyn Haines [67]
“Jitty?” I couldn’t be certain if she’d actually paid me a visit or if I’d dreamed her presence. It didn’t matter. I’d been left with plenty of cryptic chunks to chew on. Like Anne Bolyne, another of Jitty’s recent incarnations, Mary Stuart had lost her head at the order of her cousin, Elizabeth, a sister queen. Like the Leverts, the royals were a complicated, and convoluted lot.
Sweetie came to the bedside to check on me. Her presence lulled me into a sense of safety, and I fell back into slumber with her warm tongue caressing my hand. I’d been asleep for what seemed like moments when I heard her toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. She left the room and went down the hallway.
At the top of the stairs, she growled. The sound, following on the heels of Jitty’s lurid warning, was as effective in waking me up as a slap. I swung my legs out of the bed as her growl deepened.
“Sweetie.” Grabbing my jeans, shoes, the flashlight, and the .38 I’d taken from Eleanor, I eased out into the upstairs hallway. Sweetie started down the stairs, growling. I followed, pulling on my pants as I went.
When we got to the first floor, she went straight to the front parlor. The sheer curtains billowed on a light breeze. The window where the intruder had entered was wide open; the new lock Jerome had installed lay on the floor. The skin of my arms prickled. Sweetie bared her teeth and growled out the open window.
Before I could snare her collar, she jumped through it and took off.
15
“Sweetie!” I called after her as I leaned out the window. She’d vanished into a blanket of fog that completely covered the grounds of Briarcliff.
Torn between waking Tinkie or chasing Sweetie, I finally dashed out the window after my hound. Someone needed to stay in the house with Eleanor. If I didn’t find Sweetie quickly, I’d call Tinkie on the cell phone in my jeans pocket.
The air was like a cool, damp soup, thick enough that it brushed my skin with an unpleasant sensation. “Sweetie!” I kept to the gravel path, moving around the house and into the rose garden. When I looked behind me, Briarcliff had been swallowed by fog. “Sweetie!”
The fog was so thick she could have been ten feet in front of me and I wouldn’t see her. “Sweetie.” I gave a low whistle. She always responded. Sweetie was loyal to the bone. “Sweet-ie.” The mist swirled and drifted around me, but no hound came out of the night.
The first warning flag went up in my brain. Sweetie had to be nearby, yet she wasn’t responding. I’d been around the estate grounds enough to know my way even in the thick fog. The flashlight I’d taken from Eleanor was all but useless—the light reflected back at me like a mirror.
Pausing for a moment, I listened to the whir of crickets and the cry of a night bird. Predator. I did my best not to let the omen creep me out. Along with the barn owl, the only noises came from the natural world, and those were softened by the fog, blurring my heightened imagination with reality.
Someone had opened the window at Briarcliff—either to enter the house or to spook the inhabitants. That was a fact. Sweetie was on the trail of someone, another fact. My hound wasn’t in the habit of dashing off into the night unless there was good reason.
My heart almost stopped when I realized that while Sweetie and I were pursuing one intruder, a partner could have slipped inside the house. Even now, he or she might be skulking up the stairs to attack Eleanor or Tinkie.
“Sweetie!” I didn’t want to leave her outside, but I also needed to get back to the house. I stopped to listen, but the night surrendered no secrets.
Wrapped in the dense hanging moisture and illuminated by a hidden moon, the grounds of Briarcliff had a magical quality. The sweet scent of roses, trapped in the thick atmosphere, clung to my face as I walked through the cool