Out of Body coa-1 Read online

  Absently, Marley used her bare toes to squeeze one of Winnie’s feet.

  What if the woman hadn’t died? What if she was still alive and reaching out one last time for help?

  Marley switched off the lights over her bench and reluctantly made her way between aged pieces of furniture and objets d’art awaiting her attention. She was known as one of the best restorers of antique lacquer and gold leaf in the city.

  Her door onto a tiny landing outside was shut. Stained-glass panels, richly emerald, ruby, sapphire and amethyst, glowed, dappled faint colors on the dusty wooden floors in the dim workroom.

  For some seconds, Marley rested her hand on the latch. Then she turned it, thumped the heavy bolt home. Anyone trying the handle from the outside would know to leave her alone.

  She retraced her steps and stood in front of her bench again. All around her, the air buzzed and popped. Here and there she caught sight of partly formed faces, their mouths open as if calling out.

  Slowly, her feet and legs heavy, Marley stepped backward, once, twice, three times until her calves bumped into her cracked brown leather wing chair, and she sank onto the seat.

  “Don’t go,” she told herself aloud.

  Too late. The separation had already begun. Luminous green brushed the funnel, spun quickly and turned the vapor to shimmering water. Inviting. Marley felt its warmth, its temptation. She touched it with her fingertips, drew it open wider. Its matter adhered to her skin. Her own weight slipped away and she was free, gliding through the iridescent tunnel toward a pulsing black membrane.

  The membrane opened, slid apart like the aperture in a camera lens. Scents of age and dampness rushed at her.

  Wetness shone in grimy rivulets on the concrete walls of an empty room. This was the room she had been in last time. Ahead of her the door to some sort of compartment—or locker—stood wide-open, a thick, heavy door with no handle on the inside.

  In the opening a woman in red gradually appeared from clouds of icy mist.

  Not the same woman as the last time.

  Dark haired as the other had been, rather than being striking and voluptuous with a single black birthmark above her mouth, this time the facial features were pointed, the eyes large beneath thickly painted lashes. Behind her thin figure, the mist hovered around hooks hung from a slowly revolving rod, and billowed over white, rectangular boxes placed in a precise row.

  Shapes, indistinct, swung heavily just out of clear sight. Marley thought they were suspended from the hooks.

  She shivered. Cold struck painfully into her brain. She should go back, but she could not look away from the woman, from her pale, pleading face.

  Then the woman smiled. She cocked her head to one side, listening to a deep voice as mellifluous as warm honey falling from a crystal spoon into a golden bowl. The voice said, “Come to me, child.”

  Nodding, the woman appeared in a trance.

  The voice darkened, caressed, but with force. “Join me, child. Now. Come to me, now.”

  And she began to drift away, back into the space behind the heavy door.

  “Wait!” Panicked, Marley moved her presence forward. “Let me help you. Come with me.” From experience, she knew she couldn’t be heard and that only if she managed to bring help from the real world to this place would there be any help for the woman.

  But there were no clues as to where she was.

  The door began to close and Marley could scarcely breathe. She thrust herself forward, clawing at air as if it would help her move faster, and she collided with the creature in red. Instantly she felt consumed into rigid flesh, bone-cold flesh, and she cried out, “I must go back.”

  The wrench to separate again sapped her consciousness. She could not slip into sleep here, must not. The Ushers mumbled very close and Marley focused on their sounds. She gathered strength and once more she heard the thump, thump, thump of a heartbeat that was not her own, and saw through eyes that didn’t belong to her. This woman wasn’t yet dead.

  She struggled, staring ahead, willing herself to break free. And as she did she cried out to the woman, “Hold my hand. Come with me now.” While she talked, she searched around for any clues to her location. Nothing.

  Her fingers, repeatedly reaching for the woman, came back empty each time.

  A man stood with his back to her, a tall, dark-haired man, with wide shoulders and a straight, unyielding spine. He had a different substance and dimension from both the woman and their surroundings.

  Marley had started to shift. Faint warmth entered her, and she caught sight of the funnel regenerating, its direction switched so that the large opening faced her again. Still vaporous, it took on the green tint.

  Thrusting forward like a swimmer with the pool wall in sight, she made to pass the man and he looked at her over his shoulder. For one instant she cringed at the directness of his gaze, the hardness of a mouth that should be beautiful, despite a thin white scar through both lips and upward across one cheek in several slashes.

  But he couldn’t see her, could he? She must be imagining that he was staring at her.

  Marley gave a last, horrified look to where the woman had stood, only she had disappeared. A last thought as she felt a familiar, dragging pull, was that she knew why the man seemed out of place: She saw him not in color as she did the rest of her surroundings, but in the gray shades of a black-and-white photograph. And as she stared at him his face changed again. The corners of his mouth tilted up and the scars faded.

  Chapter 2

  As soon as she felt steady enough, Marley ran down three flights of stairs and left the shop through French doors that led to an enclosed courtyard behind the building.

  Gray-tinged light creeping between the fronds of palms and oversize ferns shouldn’t have bothered her. This afternoon it burned her eyes. Wet heat dampened her skin.

  Her experience with the woman in red had deeply shaken her. Each breath she took barely touched her lungs and came out in jagged puffs. She hugged herself tightly and tried to hurry toward her apartment on the far side of the courtyard.

  She couldn’t hurry. Her legs were still heavy and cold. Tremors racked her in waves. This was the first time she had returned from a disembodied journey and not stayed in her workroom until she had eaten, usually voraciously, and rested in her chair. But this had also been the first time she had been truly afraid for her life. If she had not been strong, she would never have shaken herself free of the icy body she had unwittingly entered.

  The shock of a new and scary experience had sapped her energy.

  The woman hadn’t drawn her in, had she? Surely not. Surely her own dash to reach the other one before she disappeared had caused a collision.

  Marley could find no believable explanation for her absorption into another being.

  Most disturbing of all was knowing she had been unable to help that woman, that she remained in that place and Marley still had no idea where it was. Her responsibility was to follow up and search for a way to get to that room. Only she didn’t have the luxury of talking openly to the police, or to most people, since she was likely to be laughed at.

  Uncle Pascal. Much as she quaked at the thought of his reactions, once she had collected herself, she must go to him.

  She needed food. Chocolate. As always she craved chocolate and sugary food.

  Winnie stayed in front of Marley, her much-chewed plastic bone sticking out each side of her head like a magnificent handlebar mustache, but she stopped frequently to check out her buddy. The dog’s glossy, bulbous black eyes managed to look worried again.

  Marley paused by the fountain in the center of the cobbled courtyard. The sound of water tipping from a shell held by the statue of a young angel calmed her a little. Each breath she took felt like thick, perfumed steam, but her hands were cold and she looked at the pads of her fingers. They were white and ridged and tingled slightly as if circulation were slowly returning.

  Why would the coldness in that mystical place follow her when sh
e left? Her own body hadn’t been there, but on her return she had obviously brought the alien sensations back with her. Again, something that had never happened before.

  She chafed her arms and sat on an upturned stone pot. On each of three sides of the courtyard, one of the oldest in New Orleans and known as the Court of Angels, four stories of red brick walls with random-set windows hemmed her in. Green-painted metal staircases crisscrossed the walls. The back of the shop made up the fourth side of the courtyard.

  Granite cherubs reclined on door and window lintels, peeked from alcoves beneath rain gutters. Statues of angels, worn smooth by the years, stood where they had for well more than a hundred years in corners and among lush old flowering shrubs. Here and there a gargoyle seemed out of place. The gate between the side of the shop and one wing of flats showcased a griffon.

  This was where Marley had been born and had lived ever since.

  The fourth of four uniquely gifted siblings, a brother followed by two sisters—then Marley—there was a fifth Millet offspring, another sister who celebrated “her limitations.” Marley shared a telepathic connection with the first three. Independently, each of them had his or her own otherworldly talent. Except for Willow, of course. The youngest of the brood, Willow, did her best to dispel any notions that her family was unnatural.

  “You are all perfectly ordinary. Got that?” was Willow’s often repeated reminder. “People won’t hire me if you go around talking about being psychic.”

  Marley rolled her eyes at the thought. Willow’s interference was a waste of time. They never discussed the fact outside the family, but the Millets were unnatural, thank goodness…or whatever.

  They were psychic.

  Hallelujah!

  Sykes had the gift of invisibility, a rare and priceless gift. He was also psychic and read minds with ease. Like Marley, he was an energy sentient, picking up unusual disturbances in the atmosphere. And Sykes had mastered the art of paranormal martial ability—a discipline used for both attack and defense. This was so potentially dangerous that it must not be used unless there was no other alternative. Marley was quite adept at PMA, but had so far used it only as a means to cause a diversion so that she could retreat into peace and control. She feared hurting another.

  Alex, also psychic, could commune with those on the other side more or less at will. Of all of them, she was the least sociable and seemed to consider herself above the rest.

  The next sister up the line from Marley, Riley, was, again, psychic and she saw the future with often alarming clarity—if she chose to. Riley read auras with disturbing accuracy.

  After Marley, with her penchant for out-of-body experience, her paranormal martial art ability, energy sentience and effortless mind reading, came Willow, supposedly the only “normal” one. Marley didn’t believe she was without power and neither did the rest of the family. Too often she had shown quickly masked signs of hearing her siblings’ thoughts and they all discussed the mystery of what other secrets Willow was hiding.

  They answered, supposedly, to the Mentor, an entity about which or whom they knew little other than this was the guardian of family rules and the one authority they must never cross. Not that any of them had ever seen this oracle or had any proof of his or its existence. She had guiltily admitted to herself many times that she suspected this Mentor had been invented to keep them all in line.

  Today she would welcome the appearance of the Mentor with a brilliant answer that would solve her problems.

  Winnie plopped her front paws on Marley’s knee and panted, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.

  Marley scratched the dog’s head. “You’re the best. You’ve got the prettiest ugly face I know.”

  Her stomach turned over and over. Now there were two faces glued in her mind, two faces, two women, both of whom she was convinced had unwittingly called her forth because they needed her to get them help. They needed her to save them.

  That meant the dollhouse had come to her not only to be kept safe, but because it held a cipher, a key to a code that could unravel a mystery. If the signals were aligned, then when she touched the toy she became the path between two places, the possible guide to someone’s escape.

  Marley knew how these things were supposed to work, but one element had been removed from the equation and without it, she was useless. She needed to know the location of each victim.

  The sky darkened, kept darkening until it turned to the color of wet ashes. White lightning crackled overhead. These electrical storms had come with semiregularity in the past week or so.

  Winnie leaped into Marley’s arms just as thunder rumbled and crashed.

  Marley pushed to her feet and Winnie jumped to the ground again and snatched up her bone. Large drops of rain fell hard enough to sting the skin.

  Moving as fast as she could, she climbed green-painted iron steps to her second-floor flat. A ringing sound echoed from her footsteps. As she went she checked windows in the other flats, but there was no sign of anyone at home, not that they were likely to be since Sykes rarely showed up here and both Alex and Riley were in London with the parents. Willow would almost certainly be working. Uncle Pascal lived in an opulent flat over the shop, but that had been closed when she left and there was no sign of Pascal. Marley took out her keys, but she needn’t have bothered. Her door stood open an inch.

  Before she could react, other than with a big thump in her chest, Winnie barged onto the stone-tiled floor of the hallway and disappeared into Marley’s sitting room. The television was on and the volume too high.

  Sister Willow’s own set must be “on the fritz again” so she’d come to borrow Marley’s. This was a regular event. The whole family knew that in all probability Willow’s TV was fine, but she was often lonely if she wasn’t working and made the excuse to hang out with one of them.

  “Oh, there’s my baby, Winnie,” Willow cried out in the voice she used only for the dog. “Come to Auntie Willow and have a cuddle. Marley?”

  “Hey, Willow,” Marley said. “Give me a few minutes. I’m wet.”

  She passed the sitting room and went directly into her bedroom where she shut the door and opened one of the built-in cupboards that flanked her bed. Her curly hair was barely damp and she wasn’t at all wet enough to matter.

  She had to eat.

  The DeBrand of Indiana Connoisseur Chocolates, or chocolate pralines from Aunt Sally’s on Decatur in the French Market?

  They weren’t big boxes. She took them both, crawled into her bed and sat against her pillows. With the goodies open on her legs, she inhaled. The mouthwatering scents alone were enough to start the trickle of new strength into her weakened muscles.

  Willow would think she was changing clothes.

  A chocolate praline melted rapidly away in Marley’s mouth, followed by another, and then one of the exquisite little DeBrand chocolates, this one white chocolate passion fruit ganache dipped in milk chocolate with a piece of candied ginger on top.

  Marley ate the entire contents of both boxes too fast and considered returning to her well-stocked cupboard for more.

  There wasn’t time. She’d already dithered for too long. Where could she find some help in tracing two women who must be missing?

  Her first step would be to track down Uncle Pascal and ask if he could suggest a way to locate someone without knowing their name—or anything else about them. How would she do that without making him even more suspicious about her activities?

  “I saw someone and I’d like to talk to them.” She needed to practice a more conversational tone. Marley cleared her throat and tried again. “How d’you think I’d find a person without knowing their name or where they live?”

  She groaned at the thought of risking what he might say after outrageous questions like those. And she must make sure he didn’t find out about the dollhouse. He would want to take it away if he discovered the danger it had got Marley into.

  When she tried to call him, his phone rang and rang. “
If I can help you, I will. Leave a message.” He might not be out, but his voice on the answering machine meant he was unavailable.

  Could be lifting weights.

  “Marley?” Willow called.

  She gave her stash cupboard a longing glance, but got resolutely out of bed, quickly changing her clothes, and went to the sitting room.

  All she could see of Willow were coppery-red curls as unruly as Marley’s own dark red ones, sticking out over one arm of the rust suede couch. “I was just feeding the toads,” Marley said loudly to be heard over the television. “I like ’em fat when I pop them in a spell.”

  “Hah-hah,” Willow responded. She sounded distracted.

  “Have you seen Uncle Pascal this afternoon?” Marley asked.

  “Mmm, he and Anthony went out.”

  Anthony was Uncle Pascal’s trainer. Frustrated, Marley hurried around the couch and sat on the edge at Willow’s feet. “I really need to find him.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Willow said, her voice sharp and rising. “Shh. I can’t hear with you talking.”

  Television was Willow’s addiction.

  Winnie-the-traitor sat in the curve of Willow’s diminutive body, eyes closed, pretending to be deeply asleep.

  “Didn’t they say where they were going?”

  “Nope.” Willow hauled a turquoise-and-gold cushion onto her hip and stood it up to form a screen between them.

  “Uncle loves to chatter about his outings.” Marley wrestled the cushion away. “Are you sure—”

  “Shh!” Willow hugged Winnie close. “The police conference is starting.”

  Frustrated, Marley gripped one of Willow’s ankles and gave it a shake.

  “Stop it,” Willow said, waving her aside. “This is important. It’s horrible…and scary. We all need to know about it. Haven’t you heard what’s happened?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They found a woman dead in the river. They think she was thrown there. And she got mauled by a gator.”

  “In the river?”

  “I don’t know if she was mauled there or somewhere else, then put there,” Willow said. “And don’t tell me there aren’t any gators in the river ’cause I already know. They’re pretty sure it’s murder.”