Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [55]
“Are they here for dinner?” she asked the priest.
“Yes, they’re residents. Ted, he’s the tall one with the beard, arrived about a month ago. The two men in the middle there, John and Albert, have been here for most of the winter. Peter, he’s the one with the glasses and the ponytail, he’s been here on and off for several weeks.”
Her eyes narrowing, Selena continued to stare, until Kendra poked her.
“What?”
“I said, do you want to put the pasta on now?” Kendra waved a hand in front of Selena’s face.
“Oh, yes, sure . . .”
“I’ll go make sure everyone who’s eating with us tonight is at their place.” Father Tim left the room, a pile of white stoneware plates in hand.
“Is something wrong?” Kendra asked.
“No.” Selena shook her head. “Here. Take the rest of these plates in and come back for the flatware. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Dinner was a civilized affair since Father Tim insisted that the residents bring their manners along with their appetites. Following tradition, Kendra and Selena ate with the residents. Twice, Kendra looked over at her friend to find her sitting quietly, her hands folded in her lap, as if she were meditating. On two other occasions, she’d noticed Selena’s eyes moving from man to man, as if searching for something.
“Okay, spill,” Kendra said on the way home. “What was going on back there?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. The eyes roaming around the room like you were . . . I don’t know, expecting something to happen.” Kendra frowned.
“No, I didn’t expect anything would happen.”
“Then what was it?”
“More like . . . a sense of something. Someone. I don’t know.” Selena put on her left signal to make the turn onto the dirt road. “Like someone . . .”
She struggled for her words.
“Out with it,” Kendra sighed.
“Something made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up tonight and I can’t put my finger on what it was,” Selena admitted, “or who it was who made me so uneasy.”
“You’re kidding. One of the residents?”
“It would have had to have been. The only others there were Father Tim and the two of us. I can’t explain it. It was a . . . a foreboding, I guess is the best word. A dark . . . something.” She shook her head. “I tried several times to identify it, to focus on the source, but I couldn’t. There were too many people there, too close together. I just couldn’t separate one from the other. And I’ve ignored these . . . sensations . . . for so long now, that I don’t even know if I could identify the source even if I tried.”
Selena passed her own house and drove another mile down the road to Smith House.
“That’s a little scary,” Kendra said as the car pulled into her driveway. “Maybe you should say something to Father Tim.”
“Something like what? Oh, by the way, I got bad vibes from one of your guests at dinner the other night, but I don’t know which one it was or what it meant, if anything?” Selena shook her head.
“Father Tim knows that you’re, well, sensitive. He respects that.”
“I don’t know how ‘sensitive’ I am anymore. I tried so hard for so long to push that part of me away, that I don’t know how reliable my ‘feelings’ are. I may have pretty much destroyed or distorted any sensitivity I may have had at one time. I don’t know when, if, to trust what I feel anymore.” She shrugged. “In any event, the evening’s over and if anything should have been said, the time is past. I imagine it was nothing anyway.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kendra opened the passenger door and got out, then leaned back in the window. “But if you get any more of those feelings, pass them on, would you? I for one would be interested in knowing what’s behind them. And besides, you know what they say about safe being better than sorry.”
Stretched out on the single mattress on the bed in the second room to the left of the stairs, he crossed his legs in the dark and went over the entire evening, from the minute he realized that she was there, in the Mission. There for him to see, to speak with. He could have reached