But that wasn’t even what bothered her most. Guessing the questions to the Jeopardy! answers before she knew anything more than the categories was a little annoying, but not alarming. Anyone who had watched the show for years, as she had, was familiar with the categories and possible answers, and could guess right occasionally. Her success rate was a lot higher than that, like one hundred percent, but at least she could rationalize that.
She couldn’t rationalize painting in her sleep, especially not the death scene of a man she hadn’t known had died. That wasn’t just chance, that was ... weird. Strange. Spooky.
Who was she kidding? She knew the word that applied, having come across it a lot in her research on ghosts.
Clairvoyant.
She kept fighting down a sense of panic. This frightened her more than anything else that had ever happened to her. She had thought her situation was static, but instead it seemed to be intensifying, with new situations being thrown at her just as she thought she had a handle on the old ones. She had even adjusted to seeing ghosts, though that was neither amusing nor enjoyable, like her effect on traffic signals and the growth of plants. The constant cold wasn’t enjoyable either, but she had decided that came with the ghosts.
Jeopardy! she realized, had probably just signaled the beginning of clairvoyance. She was terrified that the ugly death-scene painting was just the next step in a progression that would have her foreseeing massacres, plane crashes, famines, and plagues. What did it matter that her plants were beautiful, when mentally she would live with constant death and suffering? The part of painting she loved most was the creation of beauty, and this development threatened to take that away from her.
She had always enjoyed her solitude, but now for the first time she wished she didn’t live alone. Even a cat or a dog would be better than this sense of being completely on her own, with no one to turn to for help.
She could always call Richard.
The temptation was almost overpowering. He would hold her as he had before, and she could sleep, warm and safe, in his arms. She had never before felt that way with anyone, certainly not her parents. She had grown up knowing she had to handle things herself, that there was no soft, comforting lap in which she could rest. Not that Richard’s lap had been soft; she had a very clear memory of exactly how hard he had been. Nor had his lap been particularly comforting. But she had felt secure, and . . . and cherished. Or at least desired.
She couldn’t call him. She had been right to send him away, and her reasons for doing so still existed. She knew her views on morality were much more stringent than was generally held to be normal, but after seeing the harm done by her parents’ indiscriminate infidelities, the wonder was she hadn’t entered a convent. She was more than a little startled by Richard’s desire for her, but she was absolutely astounded by her own desire for him. That had never happened before, and she wasn’t certain of her ability to resist it. The urge to lie down with him was so potent she could feel her insides tighten now, just thinking about him. With Richard around, she thought, she would never be cold again. Every time she felt a chill, she could crawl into his lap and let him warm her, maybe from the inside out.
Whoa! She had to stop that line of thinking right now, or she’d be on the phone before she knew it. But she had a very clear vision of herself astride him, his mouth spreading kisses over her breasts and his big hands gripping her hips as he moved her up and down—
Oh, damn. Stop it, she admonished herself. There were serious problems in her life, and she was letting herself get distracted into thinking about Richard. Mother Nature had rigged the game in her favor, making sexual attraction so damn fascinating that once you felt it, you couldn’t tune it out. On the other hand, thinking about Richard, picturing him naked, was a lot more pleasant than thinking about death and clairvoyance.
She admitted to herself that she had half-expected him to call or stop by that day. If she read him correctly, and she thought she did, his middle name was persistence. Even though he had agreed to lay off, he had also promised that this thing between them, whatever it was, wasn’t over. I’ll be back, he’d said, and she knew he meant it. The question was, how long would he lay off and when would he be back? To her shame, she had hoped to see him today.
But no one had rung her doorbell all day long, and bedtime was fast approaching. She hadn’t slept well the night before—she’d been edgy after the morning’s encounter with Richard and the afternoon’s encounter with the vendor’s ghost—but even though she was tired, she didn’t want to go to bed. She was afraid to sleep, she realized, afraid she would sleepwalk or go into a trance, or whatever had happened, and paint another death scene. She had always loved sleeping, and now that pleasure was being stolen from her. That thought made her mad as hell, and it scared her. Most of all, it scared her.
Fear was something she had seldom known in her life, at least as an adult. Once as a child she had spent two days alone, because her father had taken her brother with him on some shoot and her mother had gone to a party and forgotten to come home, and she had been very scared then. She had been only nine years old and afraid they had all left her behind and were never coming home. And once, when she was fourteen, one of her mother’s many lovers—his name was Raz, she would never forget that name—had agreed with her mother that Sweeney was old enough to learn about sex.
Fortunately they had both been so drunk that Sweeney was able to pull away and run, her heart pounding so hard in her chest that she had been afraid she would pass out and then they would have her. She had run down to the basement of the apartment building and hidden in the laundry, knowing her mother would never think of looking there, having never set foot in the place. She huddled between a washing machine and the wall for what seemed like hours, afraid to go back go the apartment in case Raz was waiting for her. Finally, growing more disgusted than afraid, she had loosed the handle from a mop and, armed with the handle, returned to the apartment. She didn’t like hiding in the laundry; she was going back to her room and the comfort of her books and paints, and if anyone bothered her, she would hit them on the head as hard as she could.