Legacy Of Terror

everything and anything, she felt fine.
    Because of Gordon.
    When she dreamed, it was of Gordon. They were walking together in an endless garden, where all the grass was mown and all the shrubs tended to. Wild fruit grew on many of the trees. Birds sang overhead and followed them, like special servants, wherever they went. The sky was blue, the air warm, and the rest of the world a million-billion years away.
    She woke up to thunder that exploded like a bomb on the roof…
    At first, she did not recognize the source of the noise or, indeed, the room in which she had awakened. The thunder shattered the flat, gray sky again and again, slammed ethereal fists upon the Matherly house, rattled the windows in their mountings and set the very air itself into sympathetic vibration. Lightning, coaxed from another dimension by the heavenly cannonade, played yellow-white fingers on the glass and thrust brittle shards of ghostly light across the floor and over the spread on the bed in which she lay. When half a dozen bursts of that strobe-like illumination had stabbed into the dimly lighted room, she remembered the Matherly house, her job, her patient, the attack on Celia Tamlin, the story of Christmas Eve…
    Her dream of peace was gone.
    Her dream of Gordon had evaporated.
    She rose and went to the window.
    The morning was intensely black, the low sky heavy with sheets of cold rain which swept through the trees and across the tidy grounds of the estate. The storm was so fierce, the rain so dense, that she could not even see the colonial Bradshaw house which was usually visible from her window, even at dusk.
    A particularly violent thunderclap made her start and jump backwards. When it was gone, she was angry. There was a time-of very recent vintage- when she would never have been frightened of thunder, when she would have thought of it only as noise, harmless noise. This house was changing her, and she was not offering enough of a battle against it.
    She turned away from the storm, showered, dressed, and checked on Jacob. He was still filled with a false certainty that the would-be killer of Celia Tamlin was a stranger.
    Downstairs, the rooms were dark, lighted only by the cloud- filtered sun which shone dimly through the deep-set, rain-streaked windows. In the kitchen, she found dirty dishes stacked in the sink. Bess was neither clearing up the morning's debris nor preparing the afternoon meal, though it was now a few minutes before ten o'clock. That meant, she decided, that the old couple had the day off and were away shopping or visiting. Bess was too compulsively neat to have left work to be done.
    She fixed herself toast and coffee, finished them at the kitchen table where she had a view of the back lawn, the scudding clouds, the willows whipped by the wind. She was dawdling over a second cup of coffee when the kitchen door opened, and Dennis Matherly entered the room. His face was flecked with red paint along the left cheek, and his hands were stained with green. He wore tattered jeans and a work shirt, quite a less affected costume than what she was used to seeing him in.
    “Good morning!” he said, cheery despite the rain and the mood of this old house.
    Uneasily, she said, “Good morning, Denny.”
    “I see you made coffee.”
    “I didn't fill the pot,” she said. “But there should be another cup or two.”
    He poured a cup, added sugar and cream in doses she found excessive, then sat down at the table, directly across from her, sipping cautiously at the steaming brew.
    “Have you heard about Celia?” he asked.
    She found she did not want to look directly at him. She said, still staring past his shoulder at the rain, “I haven't, no.”
    “She's past the crisis,” Dennis said.
    She looked at him. “Out of the coma?”
    He frowned and pulled at his lip. “Not yet. But the doctors say that her chances are very good for a complete recovery. They're intent on keeping her under heavy sedation whenever she does regain consciousness, so we probably won't know for some time who was responsible.”
    She did not know what to say in response. She did not want to talk to him at all, and especially not about the stabbing of the young girl he had originally brought to this house. Looking at him, somewhat entranced by the perfection of his good looks, she saw something behind his eyes that she did not want to face and could not clearly identify, something that frightened her more than a little.
    “Is it Bess and Jerry's day off?” she