Page 18 of The Other Lady Vanishes

Slowly, deliberately, Madam Zolanda began to speak.

“I am floating above the town of Burning Cove. It is bathed in the light of the moon. I can see the Burning Cove Hotel and the Paradise Club. There is a small dog barking at me. The dog can sense my presence. I am being tugged toward a certain location. It is imperative that I go there. I must warn someone. Wait. I am being drawn to this very theater. I don’t understand.”

There was a collective gasp from the audience. Madam Zolanda continued, her voice rising with alarm.

“Now I am inside the theater looking down from the ceiling. Spirit Guide, tell me why you have summoned me to this place.”

By now almost everyone in the audience was looking up at the darkened ceiling. There was a breathless pause...

...Shattered by a nerve-jangling scream.

Zolanda.

As one the audience turned back to watch, shocked, as Zolanda rose to her feet and tore off the blindfold. There was an expression ofraw horror on her face. Her eyes were wild with panic as though she found herself in a hellish nightmare.

“I see blood. Blood and death. Mark my words, someone in this theater will be dead by morning.”

The audience was absolutely motionless now. All eyes were on the stage.

Zolanda gave a high, shrill cry and collapsed. Her silk scarves cascaded around her in crimson waves.

Chapter 10

“You’ll have to admit it made for a dramatic finish to the act,” Adelaide said. She slipped into the buttery-soft leather seats of Jake’s dark green speedster. “But why on earth would Zolanda make such a ghastly prediction when it is unlikely to come true?”

“Good question,” Jake said.

There was a solid, satisfyingker-chunkas he closed the passenger side door.

Adelaide watched him walk around the front of the long hood. He looked very good in an elegantly tailored evening jacket and trousers and a perfectly knotted tie. If human auras really did exist, she was sure that his would radiate strength of will and a deeply passionate nature held in check by ironclad self-control.

She could tell that he had been affected by Zolanda’s final act but his interest was of a detached, clinical nature. He was curious, she realized, but, unlike her, he was not disturbed.

Her nerves, on the other hand, had been badly rattled. She wouldnot sleep well tonight, if she slept at all. The mere prediction of bloody death, even if only for dramatic effect, shocked her senses. It hurled her thoughts straight back to the night of her escape. Memories of the laboratory window exploding beneath the weight of Ormsby’s body and visions of the killer emerging from the hallway that led to her room would haunt her until dawn.

She suppressed a small sigh. It wouldn’t be the first time she had tossed and turned and finally given up on sleep. She had not had a single night of truly sound sleep in months, not since the terrible day when the police had come to her door to inform her that her parents had been killed in an explosion in their lab.

True, the authorities were not searching for a homicidal escapee from an insane asylum, but she was very sure that someone was looking for her.

There were excellent reasons for keeping the news of her escape a secret, of course. As long as she was assumed to be under lock and key at Rushbrook, Conrad Massey could continue to drain her inheritance and Dr. Gill could continue to hope that the FBI would not become aware of his experiments with Daydream. But it also meant that a killer was on the loose and quite likely searching for her.

She was well aware of her own reasons for having been unnerved by Zolanda’s prediction, but Jake’s odd silence made her wary. Instead of dismissing the final act as the melodramatic finale of a fraudulent psychic, he had gone very quiet after the curtain came down.

She thought about what Raina had said that afternoon when she had telephoned with the news that Jake Truett was evidently exactly who he claimed to be—a successful businessman and a widower who had sold his import-export business in the wake of his wife’s tragic death. Under the circumstances it was probably not surprising that he would find such a dire prediction unsettling, even if it had been delivered by a charlatan. Nevertheless, his abrupt lapse into near silence struck her as strange.

He opened the driver’s side door, got behind the wheel, and turned the key in the ignition. The powerful engine purred to life. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

She was very aware of the shadowed intimacy of the front seat of the speedster, but as far as she could tell, Jake was oblivious. He was lost in his own thoughts. Whatever those thoughts were, she had a feeling they were dark. She waited, tense and uncertain, for him to make another comment about Zolanda’s prediction. When she could not abide the silence any longer, she tried to restart the conversation.

“This is Burning Cove, after all,” she said. “I’m told there is very little serious crime here.”

That comment had the effect of hauling Jake up out of some deep place—temporarily, at least.

“A friend informed me that a while back an aspiring actress died in the spa pool at the Burning Cove Hotel under suspicious circumstances,” he said.

“I did hear something about that. Still, Florence assured me that was a very unusual situation. Murder is hardly a common crime in this town. This isn’t New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco, where a fake psychic could play the odds and assume that somewhere in the city someone might die by violence in any given twenty-four-hour period. As it stands now, everyone will be opening up their copies of theBurning Cove Heraldfirst thing in the morning looking for a report of a murder.”

“She predicted a bloody death,” Jake said. “She did not predict murder.”

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