Dream Eyes
Jayne Ann Krentz
OTHER TITLES BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ
Copper Beach
In Too Deep
Fired Up
Running Hot
Sizzle and Burn
White Lies
All Night Long
Falling Awake
Truth or Dare
Light in Shadow
Summer in Eclipse Bay
Smoke in Mirrors
Dawn in Eclipse Bay
Lost & Found
Eclipse Bay
Soft Focus
Eye of the Beholder
Flash
Sharp Edges
Deep Waters
Absolutely, Positively
Trust Me
Grand Passion
Hidden Talents
Wildest Hearts
Family Man
Perfect Partners
Sweet Fortune
Silver Linings
The Golden Chance
BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ WRITING AS AMANDA QUICK
Crystal Gardens
Quicksilver
Burning Lamp
The Perfect Poison
The Third Circle
The River Knows
Second Sight
Lie by Moonlight
Wait Until Midnight
The Paid Companion
Late for the Wedding
Don’t Look Back
Slightly Shady
Wicked Widow
I Thee Wed
Seduction
Affair
Mischief
Mystique
Mistress
Deception
Desire
Dangerous
Reckless
Ravished
Rendezvous
Scandal
Surrender
With This Ring
BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ WRITING AS JAYNE CASTLE
The Lost Night
Canyons of Night
Midnight Crystal
Obsidian Prey
Dark Light
Silver Master
Ghost Hunter
After Glow
Harmony
After Dark
Amaryllis
Zinnia
Orchid
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2013 by Jayne Ann Krentz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krentz, Jayne Ann.
Dream eyes / Jayne Ann Krentz.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-60914-9
1. Psychics—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.R44D74 2013 2012027313
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Frank, as always, with love
Acknowledgments
A very special thanks to Stephen Castle, a course director for the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI), an instructor trainer for the Public Safety Diving Association (PSDA) and an instructor trainer for TDI. He owns AAI Neptune Divers, Las Vegas, and he is cavern/cave–certified. I am grateful for his technical assistance and advice. Also, I’m proud to say, he is my brother. Really, it is just so useful having an expert in the family. Any errors in the text are mine, all mine.
Contents
Also by Jayne Ann Krentz
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
One
The dead diver was wedged like a bone in the stone throat of the underwater cave they called the Monster. The body—still clad in a tank and regulator, fins, buoyancy compensator and mask—shifted gently in the subtle current. One gloved hand rose and fell in spectral warning.
Turn back.
But for Judson Coppersmith there was no going back.
The locals on the island claimed that the flooded cave beast swallowed divers whole. The adrenaline junkies who were foolish enough to ignore the signs outside at the entrance never got far inside the uncharted labyrinth of underwater passages. The smart ones turned back in time. But the explosion in the dry section of the cavern had sealed the aboveground exit and canceled that option. His only hope was to try to swim out to the sea through the Monster.
There was no darkness as dense and relentless as that of the interior of an underwater cave. But the clarity of the water was surreal. The beam of the flashlight sliced through the deep night like a laser, pinning the body.
He swam closer and took stock of the dead man’s equipment. Relief swept through him when he saw that the killers had not bothered to drain the victim’s air tank. He stripped it off the bloated body, tucked it under one arm and helped himself to the diver’s flashlight as well. Throughout the process, the dead eyes stared at him reproachfully through the mask.
Sorry, pal, but your gear is of no use to you now. Not sure it will do me any good, either, but it will buy me a little time.
He eased past the body and focused the sharp light on the twisted rock passage. The urge to swim forward as quickly as possible was almost overwhelming.
But impulsive decisions would kill him as surely as running out of air. He forced himself to drift for a few seconds.
There it was, the faint but steady pull of the current. It would either be his lifeline or the false lure that drew him to his death. He slipped into the stream of the ultra-clear water and allowed it to guide him deeper into the maze.
The islanders claimed that there was an exit to the sea. That had been proven years ago by a simple dye test. A coloring agent poured into the cavern pool had emerged a short distance offshore. But the island was riddled with caves, and no one had been able to find the underwater exit point. Divers had died trying.
It was getting hard to breathe off the first tank of air, the one he had grabbed when he had been forced into the water. It was almost empty. He took it off and set it down on a rocky ledge with great care. The last thing he needed now was to stir up the sediment on the floor of the cave. If that happened, he would be forced to waste precious time waiting for the current to clear out the storm of debris. Time meant air usage. He had none to spare. There was, in fact, a staggeringly high probability that he would not have enough air regardless of how carefully he managed the one commodity that meant life or death.
He slipped on the dead man’s tank and waited a beat, drifting upward a little. Sometimes in a flooded cave the current was stronger toward the roof of the tunnel.
Once again he sensed it, the faint, invisible tug that urged him deeper into the flooded labyrinth.
Sometime later—he refused to look at his watch because there was no point—the flashlight began to go dark. He used it as long as possible, but the beam faded rapidly. The endless night closed in around him. Until now he had never had a problem with darkness. His paranormal night vision allowed him to navigate without the aid of normal light. In other circumstances, the natural para-radiation in the rocks would have been sufficient to illuminate his surroundings. But the strange aurora that had appeared in the cavern and the explosion that had followed had seared his senses, rendering him psychically blind. There was no way to know if the effects would be permanent and not much point in worrying about it now. The loss of his talent would not matter if he did not make it out of the flooded catacombs alive.
He fumbled with the flashlight that he had taken off the body, nearly dropping it in the process of switching it on. The chill of the water was making him clumsy. The thin 3mm suit he wore provided only limited protection. Although the island was in the Caribbean, he was in freshwater here in the cave, and the temperature at this depth was unpleasantly cold.
Ten minutes later, he rounded a bend and saw that the rocky corridor through which he was swimming narrowed drastically. He was forced to take off his tank and push it into and beyond the choke point. He barely managed to squeeze through after it. The nightmare scenario of getting stuck—unable to go forward or back—sent his heart rate climbing. He was suddenly using air at an even faster rate.
And then he was on the other side. The passage widened once more. Gradually, he got his breathing back under control. But the damage had been done. He had used up a lot of air.
He got the first clue that the current was guiding him in the right direction when he noticed that the once crystal-clear water was starting to become somewhat murky. It was an indication that he had reached the point where the freshwater of the underground river was converging with seawater. That still left a lot of room for things to go wrong. It was entirely possible that he would discover the exit only to find out that he could not fit through it. If that happened, he would spend his last minutes as a condemned man gazing upward through the stone bars of his cell at the summer sunlight filtering through the tropical sea.
The second flashlight slowly died, plunging him into absolute darkness. Instinctively he tried to heighten his talent. Nothing happened. He was still psi-blind.
All he could do now was try to follow the current. He swam slowly, his hands outstretched in an attempt to ward off a close encounter with the rocky walls of the cave.
At one point, to keep his spirits up more than anything else, he took the regulator out of his mouth long enough to taste the water. It was unmistakably salty. He was now in a sea cave.
When he perceived the first, faint glow infusing the endless realm of night, he considered the possibility that he was hallucinating. It was a reasonable assumption, given the sensory disorientation created by the absolute darkness and the fact that he knew he was sucking up the last of his air. Maybe this was the mysterious bright light that those who had survived near-death experiences described. In his case, it would be followed by for-real death.
One thing was certain. If he survived, he would never again take the light of a summer day for granted.
The pale glow brightened steadily. He swam faster. Nothing to lose.
Two
You’re too late,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I’m already dead.”
There was no accusation in the words, just a calm statement of fact. Dr. Evelyn Ballinger had always been logical and even-tempered in life, reserving her deepest passions for her work. There was no reason why death would give her a personality transplant. But knowing that did nothing to temper the terrible sense of dread and guilt that chilled Gwen Frazier’s blood. If only she had opened the e-mail last night instead of this morning.
If only. The two most despairing words in the English language.
She crossed the cluttered, heavily draped room that Evelyn had converted into an office. All of the rooms in the house were dark. Evelyn had never liked sunlight. She claimed it interfered with her work.
Gwen’s movement through the room stirred the still air. The crystal wind chimes suspended from the ceiling shivered, producing an eerie music that seemed to come from beyond the grave. The sound raised the hair on the back of Gwen’s neck.
In the doorway behind her, Max, Evelyn’s burly gray cat, meowed plaintively as if demanding that Gwen fix the situation. But there was no fixing death.
The body was crumpled on the floor beside the desk. Evelyn had been in her early seventies, a large, generously proportioned woman who had been caught in a fashion time warp like so many others who resided in the small town of Wilby, Oregon. With her long gray hair, voluminous tie-dyed skirts, and crystal jewelry, she had been a model of the proudly eccentric look that Gwen privately labeled Hippie Couture.
Evelyn’s blue eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. A photo had fallen beside one hand. The pinhole at the top of the picture indicated it had come from the corkboard over the desk. There was no blood or obvious bruising on the body.
“No sign of an injury, you’ll notice,” the mirror ghost said. “What does that tell us?”
“Always the instructor,” Gwen said. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”
“No point changing now, is there, dear? I repeat my question. What does the lack of an obvious injury indicate?”
“Could be natural causes. You were seventy-two years old, a type two diabetic who insisted on eating all the wrong foods, and you were absentminded when it came to taking your meds. You refused to lose weight, and the only exercise you got was an occasional stroll down by the river.”
“Ah, yes, the river,” the ghost said softly. “You won’t forget the river or the falls, will you, dear?”
“No,” Gwen said. “Never.”
She knew there was no hope, but she made herself check for a pulse. There was only the terrible chill and the utter stillness of death. She got slowly to her feet.
“This scene looks dreadfully familiar, doesn’t it?” the ghost said. “Brings to mind what happened two years ago.”
“Yes,” Gwen said. “It does.”
“Another person connected to the study is dead by what appears to be natural causes. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Gwen looked at the vision in the mirror. The ghosts were always wispy, smoky images—never sharp and clear like photographs. For the most part, the specters sh
e encountered were strangers, but she had known a few of them all too well. Evelyn Ballinger had now joined that short list. Evelyn had been both mentor and friend.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said to the ghost. “I didn’t see your e-mail until this morning. I called you right away. When you didn’t answer your phone, I knew something was wrong.”
“Of course you did, dear.” The ghost chuckled. “You’re psychic.”
“I got into the car and drove down here to see you. But it’s a four-hour trip from Seattle.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, dear,” the ghost said. “There is nothing you could have done. It happened last night, as you can see. I was working here in my office. You remember that I was always a night owl.”
“Yes,” Gwen said. “I remember. Your e-mail to me came in around two o’clock this morning.”
“Ah, yes, of course. You would have been asleep.”
But she hadn’t been asleep, Gwen thought. She had been walking the floors of her small condo, trying to work off the disturbing images from the dream. It had been two years since Zander Taylor’s death, but each summer in late August the nightmares struck. Her talent for lucid dreaming allowed her to control the dreams to some extent, but she had not been able to dispel them. Each time she dreamed the terrifying scenes from that summer of death, she came awake with the same unnerving sense that it had not ended with Taylor going over the falls.
“I was up,” Gwen said. “But I wasn’t checking e-mail.”
She stepped back from the body and dug her phone out of her tote. Max meowed again and lashed his tail.
“I’m sorry, Max. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.”
Max did not look satisfied with that response. He watched her intently with his green-gold eyes.
She concentrated on punching in the emergency number and tried not to look at the mirror. Talking to ghosts was not a good thing. It made other people—potential lovers as well as friends—extremely nervous. After all, there were no ghosts. She was really talking to herself, trying to make sense of the messages that her odd form of intuition picked up at the scenes of violent death.
She usually went out of her way to avoid such conversations because she found them incredibly frustrating. There was, after all, very little she could do for the dead. That was the job of the police.
