Perfect Nightmare

Chapter Twenty-three

Flames!

Flames so virulent they threatened to suck the breath from Patrick’s lungs even as their crackling whispered in his ears with a seductive passion. Its heat, warm and comforting when he first felt it, made him feel as if he was melting an instant later.

Flames so beautiful he wanted to embrace them.

Flames that sang to him, beckoned to him, urged him closer.

No! The flames were evil! They were destroying his home, devouring his family, consuming his very life! Now their soft lullabies were drowned out by the screams of his wife and children, and though he wanted to rush to them, to reach into the flames and pull them to safety, he couldn’t.

He couldn’t even see them. All he could see were the flames dancing in front of him, mocking him, laughing at him, torturing him.

And drawing him closer…

It wasn’t too late — he could still save them, could still rush into the flames and find them and—

But their screams were fading, and he knew they were dying and there was nothing he could do and—

As if to punish him for his helplessness, a tongue of flame lashed out at him, and he jerked back just as an alarm bell sounded.

Patrick’s head slammed into a wall, and the fire abruptly vanished, its heat instantly replaced by a terrible cold.

The cold of death itself.

Yet the alarm was sounding again.

But how could that be? If there was no fire—

He groped in the fading amber light that was all that remained of the glow of the flames, and his hand met cold concrete.

His left leg felt numb, and when he tried to move it, he discovered that it was twisted around, pinned beneath his right leg.

As the last vestiges of the nightmare faded from his consciousness, Patrick opened his eyes and found no fire, no heat. Rather, he was in near darkness, in the cold, his muscles cramped, his joints aching.

His left leg, though, was beginning to come back to life and tingling painfully. He groped again, but found only a pair of concrete walls coming together into a corner.

A corner in which he was huddled like some kind of vermin trying to hide from a predator.

The fire! That had been the predator! It had hunted down and devoured his entire family, and all he’d been able to do was cower helplessly, just as he was cowering now.

But where was he? He tried to concentrate, to think of what he last remembered, but his mind was still filled with the memory of the flames, flames that even now seemed ready to leap at him once more.

The alarm sounded again, but now he knew he was awake, and the sound seemed unnaturally loud in the small confines of the concrete room.

He flailed about, and slowly his mind cleared until he recognized the alarm for what it was: the ringing of his cell phone.

And the phone was in the pocket of his robe.

As it rang again, he realized he was wearing only his robe and his pajama bottoms and was no longer in the house.

Then he recognized the amber light slanting down through a small stained-glass window above a heavy door, and he knew.

He knew where he was, though he had no memory of how he had gotten himself there.

The mausoleum.

The huge concrete structure in which generations of Shieldses were interred. In front of him was his wife’s crypt, and below were those of their children. He could see the brass plates with their names engraved. He could see the wilting flowers in their teardrop vases.

And he could see the still empty crypt next to Renee where he himself would someday be entombed.

The cell phone rang again, and with fingers that seemed to be operating under their own volition, he found the key that would answer it. “Yes?” he asked, his voice sounding distant even to himself.

“Patrick?” an unfamiliar voice said. “It’s Alison Montgomery.”

The name meant nothing to him.

“We met once, through Claire, though I doubt you’d remember.”

He did not remember.

“Claire tells me that you’re having a difficult time getting through your grief.”

Patrick stared numbly at the empty crypt next to the one that held his wife’s remains.

“Patrick?”

A faint grunt emerged from his throat.

“Grief is a hard thing to handle,” the woman went on, and he could tell she was choosing her words carefully, as if he might bolt if she said the wrong thing. “Especially the feelings of guilt that always go along with it. I lost my son last year, and I don’t think I’d be here today if it weren’t for the weekly support group.”

Suddenly he understood.

“How about if I pick you up this morning and take you for a cup of coffee?”

Patrick ran his fingers through his hair. He wasn’t sure he could make his way back to the house, much less dress and go to coffee with this woman. And how could he tell her — or anyone else — that he had awakened this morning in the mausoleum, and not for the first time?

How could he describe to her what he was feeling? How could he explain that it wasn’t just the grief — it was the guilt.

She’d just said something about guilt, but how could anyone understand the guilt he felt at not being able to save them?

“Patrick?”

“Yes.”

“Are you having some trouble?”

A small strangled sob erupted from his throat.

“I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock,” Alison Montgomery said, seemingly having understood every emotion that had been packed into his single sob. “That’s an hour from now.”

“All right,” he breathed, and without waiting to hear her response, he closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. Maybe Claire was right — maybe he did need help. Certainly he couldn’t go on much longer the way he was.

If he hadn’t seen Claire’s Range Rover parked in the drive when he came back from his meeting with Alison Montgomery, the massed yellow tulips that greeted Patrick would have come as far more of a shock than they did. Still, he felt his heart race when he saw them — the first perfect blooms of the season — arranged in Renee’s favorite vase on the circular table in the center of the great foyer.

Exactly as Renee herself would have arranged them.

But it wasn’t Renee who had cut the flowers — it was Claire.

With a surge of energy he hadn’t felt in a long time, Patrick strode through the hall to the kitchen, where Neville was disposing of the leftover stems and leaves, as well as the dozens of not-quite-perfect blooms that Claire had rejected for the foyer’s centerpiece. Through the windows, he could see Claire in a blue sundress with hat to match.

Leave it to Claire to be dressed for a garden party despite the lack of even a single guest. And now she was filling yet another basket of blossoms, most of which he was sure would be as firmly rejected as the blooms that now stuffed the wastebasket. He went through the butler’s pantry to the dining room, pushed through the French doors and walked down the path to her.

“Planning to cut every flower we have?” he asked, taking her basket.

“But the tulips are glorious,” Claire replied, surveying the now decimated bed. “I just had to come over and see them!” She turned, shears in one gloved hand, and gave Patrick such an appraising look that he wondered if she was planning to cut him, too, and add him to the basket. Then a hint of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Well, look at you,” she said. “All dressed up, and looking human!”

Patrick rolled his eyes. She was going to gloat.

Instead, she turned back to her task. “So I assume it went well?” she asked.

Patrick understood, then, that her visit had nothing to do with the tulips. “What went well?” he countered, deciding to make her pull the details of his meeting with Alison out of him one by one, if he chose to give her any of them at all. He took the flowers she handed him and laid them carefully in the basket.

“Coffee with Alison,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question, and still not looking at him.

“Well enough, I suppose,” he said, masking his true feelings. In fact, it had been almost impossible trying to talk to a near-total stranger about what his life had been like since Christmas Eve. And yet, after the first few minutes, he had seen something in Alison Montgomery’s eyes that told him that she did, indeed, understand exactly how he felt, and how hard it was even to talk about it, let alone deal with it. “I’m going to a meeting with her tonight. She’s picking me up.”

“That’s marvelous,” Claire said, then stood upright, rubbing her lower back with one gloved hand as she handed Patrick the shears with the other.

“I’m not so sure it’s marvelous at all,” Patrick said, putting even more emphasis on the first syllable of the word than Claire had.

If she noticed the hint of sarcasm in his voice, she ignored it. “Of course it is,” she said, pulling off her gardening gloves and eyeing the heap of tulips in the basket. “I think those should do it. Come along — I’ve told Neville to make his raspberry iced tea.” She brushed his cheek with a kiss as she passed him, and he followed her back along the path toward the house, until he caught a glimpse of the mausoleum and stopped dead in his tracks. Embers of last night’s nightmares were still smoldering in his memory, and when he turned away from the mausoleum, a flash of reflected sunlight from the windows of a yacht on the Sound seemed to fan the embers into hideous flames.

“Patrick?” he heard Claire say, but her voice seemed far in the distance. “What is it, darling? What’s wrong?”

He squeezed his eyes shut against the bright sunlight and shook his head as if that could rid him of the images. When he finally reopened his eyes, he made himself focus on the basket of flowers in his hand.

Brilliant color.

Beauty.

Life.

“Nothing,” he said, finally answering Claire’s question. “I’m all right.” Then he continued to follow his sister up the path.

Claire pulled her sun hat off as they went in the French doors and left it on a sideboard as they passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. “We’ll have our iced tea in the library, please, Neville.”

Patrick shook his head. “Not the library.”

“Why not?” Claire asked, and Patrick thought he detected a hint of steel concealed in her blithe tone. “Let’s open it up and air it out.”

“Not the library,” he repeated.

Her eyes glinted for a split-second, and then she shrugged. “Very well. The conservatory, then.” She selected two vases from the half-dozen Neville had set out for her and began to arrange the tulips into perfectly symmetrical bouquets. “I think we should open the house today,” she said as she worked. “It needs fresh air and sunlight. Spring is here, and it’s time this old rock pile started looking like it.”

Patrick said nothing.

“Including the library,” Claire went on. This time Patrick opened his mouth to protest, but she stopped him with a gesture. “In time,” she temporized. He followed her out of the kitchen, and held the door to the drawing room for her. “Why you even want to keep living in this old sepulcher is beyond me,” she said as they moved on into the conservatory, where she set the flowers on a table and looked straight at him. “Why don’t you sell it, Patrick? Why don’t you get out of here? Buy something new, something fresh! You could get one of those fabulous condos in the city, overlooking the river or something.”

He stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Kidding?” she echoed. “Of course I’m not kidding.” And he could tell by her expression that she was, indeed, serious.

He shook his head, still barely able to believe it. “How could I ever sell this place? All my memories are here — all our memories. Our childhood, our parents. And Renee, the girls…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head again. “I’ll never sell this house. Ever.”

Claire’s eyes fixed on him, but before she could say anything else, Neville appeared in the open door with a tray bearing a silver pitcher, two glasses, a bowl of sugar, napkins, spoons, and a vase containing one single perfect tulip. As he set the tray on the table, Claire nodded toward the two vases she’d placed on it only moments before. “One of those is for the sitting room, Neville. And I’d appreciate it if you’d open it up and air it out. The other should go into Patrick’s bedroom.” Her gaze shifted to Patrick, but when she spoke again, her words were still for his servant. “And maybe tomorrow we’ll air out the library and fill it full of flowers, too.”

A silence hung over the conservatory for a moment, and then Neville took the two vases, offered Claire the smallest of nods, and left the room.

Claire’s eyes still coolly fixed on Patrick, she lifted the pitcher from the tray.

“Tea?” she asked.