“Clytemnestra, this is a surprise,” she said. She didn’t open the door farther.
“Ms. Whittle, I’ve been thinking about what you said last time I was here. I need your help.” I looked over her head into the entryway. I thought I saw a shadow move on the opposite wall.
“Oh my. You’ve had a scare?” She stepped back from the doorway and motioned me inside.
I glanced around the hallway and the hair on my arms stood up. Something wasn’t right. I sensed we weren’t alone.
“Let’s head back to the kitchen for a cup of tea,” Neila said a bit loudly. She pointed toward the back of the house and I walked down the dark hallway again toward the relative light of the kitchen.
When I got there, I saw that the cauldron was steaming again and my stomach rumbled. I turned to ask what she was cooking but the hallway was empty.
“Ms. Whittle?” I took a step back toward the front door and she appeared in front of me.
“Let’s get settled and we can have a nice chat,” she said. “Do you want some stew? I still have some left from last time.”
I started to decline, when my stomach chimed in again. I felt my face get hot and nodded. She smiled and took a bowl out of the fridge. She bent down and placed it in a microwave I hadn’t noticed before. It seemed out of place in this rustic room.
“What are you cooking today?” I pointed at the cauldron.
“Oh, nothing much. Not something you can eat, anyway. Just mixing up a bit of this and that.” She waved her hand to deflect any further inquiry.
She placed the bowl of stew in front of me and when the tea was ready she sat down with her own thick brown mug and a delicate teacup for me.
“What’s got you spooked?” she asked.
I didn’t love her choice of words but I told her about the dream, the vertigo, and the anxious rush down the hall to check on Seth.
“Hmm. That is a tough one. You didn’t recognize the stairwell?”
I shook my head, and spooned up some stew.
“Have you always been afraid of heights?” she asked.
“For as long as I can remember,” I said. “I know I used to climb trees as a kid but somewhere along the line I developed this spinning sensation whenever I got too high.”
“What happens when you travel in an airplane?”
“I don’t like to take plane trips, but if I do, I sit on the aisle so I don’t have to look out the window.”
She nodded. “From what you’ve described, since it feels so real, like other premonitory dreams, I’d have to say this is a prediction.” She wrapped her hands around the mug. “You’ll likely recognize this place when you see it. I can’t tell if Seth is in danger or not. It sounds like you thought he was and were trying to save him even though you had to climb up high to do it.”
“What about the woman I heard laughing?”
“You’re trying to figure out who killed Rafe Godwin, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Maybe the dream is trying to tell you something about that.”
“Trying to tell me what? That a woman did it and Seth is in danger?” I pushed the bowl of stew aside, no longer hungry.
“It’s always difficult to tease out the warning or the message in a dream. It really depends on how you, the dreamer, interpret it.”
I pressed my lips together. Neila was giving me the party line. Focus more, jump to conclusions less. But I wanted to know now whether Seth was in danger and how to get Dylan out of jail.
“Did you know they’ve arrested Dylan Ward?”
She looked down at her tea and took a long sip. “I heard. I think they’re wrong and he’ll be out of jail soon. But from what I’ve heard, someone set up the situation so that Rafe would succumb to his allergy.”
“What have you heard?”
“Just that he was very careful about what he ate and that his medicine didn’t work.”
I wondered how a recluse could be so tapped into the town gossip, but after years of listening to Vi quote cats and horses, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know her sources.
Neila interrupted my thoughts. “Can you tell the police about your dream?”
I snorted. Her face fell and I apologized.
“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the thought that Mac would put any stock in what I tell him based on a dream.”
“Phillip McKenzie? Lucille’s boy?”
“That’s the one. He goes by Mac and he doesn’t believe in anything.”
“Everyone believes in something. What would be the point otherwise?”
I looked into her gentle gray eyes and knew why she had been my grandmother’s friend.
“You’re right. He believes in things that can be measured and quantified. Fingerprints, ballistics, tire tracks, autopsies . . .”