The Opal Legacy Part 1

The Opal Legacy.

by Fortune Kent.

Is he saving her from her demons...or introducing her to his own?.

When the Inst.i.tute for Parapsychological Research answers Lesley Campbell's letters, at first she hopes there's a light at the end of her long, dark tunnel. A tunnel haunted by terrible premonitions and her grandmother's enigmatic words about a stone handed down through generations of her family.

"The opal has been our curse and our salvation."

But the IPR turns out to be just another dead end...and her hasty retreat sends her straight into the arms of Jon Hollister, a man whose gentle manner makes her feel something she hasn't felt in a long time. Alive. Uneasy, restless. But alive.

She hopes to find safety at Iron Ridge, Jon's remote estate. But something lurks in the desolate wilds of the Upper Peninsula. Something sinister. A scarred man walking the windswept sh.o.r.e. An ominous tower full of secrets. The tragic death of his first wife.

And Lesley begins to wonder if love compelled Jon to sweep her off her feet...or a desire as deadly and powerful as the stone she carries.

This Retro Romance reprint was originally published in 1975 by Ballantine.

Prologue.

"Oh my G.o.d."

Lesley Campbell sat up in bed, a man's voice echoing in her mind. The apartment window was a pale rectangle in the early morning light. Her eyes sought solace from the familiar room, searching from the carved rosewood desk to the antique rocker, across the paneled wall, past the oval mirror to the painting of an elderly Scot, walking stick in hand, his dog following, a painting brought from Glasgow many years before.

None of these familiar objects could expunge the memory of the unseen man's cry, could remove the awe and horror from his voice. Fearfully Lesley raised her head, but all she saw was the ceiling and the shadow of the light fixture.

Her fingers tightened on the fire opal still clasped in her hand from the night before. She threw the sheet aside, feeling perspiration on her face though the room was cool. The dial of the bedside clock showed ten before seven. She walked to the dresser, opened the jewel box, pausing to nestle the opal in her palm. The gem failed to soothe her; the dream, if dream it had been, crept back into her mind an image at a time. Returning the opal to its velvet-lined case, Lesley dressed hurriedly, brus.h.i.+ng her pale blonde hair with a few quick strokes. She glanced at the penciled calendar on the desk; she was off duty today and tomorrow.

There was no time for breakfast. Was she already too late? She hesitated beside her blue Pinto in the parking stall. She disliked driving, yet she had no choice. Fifteen minutes to get to downtown San Diego, she thought. And then? She didn't know. I must save him, she told herself. Did she have enough time? Her fingers gripped the wheel as, leaning forward, she maneuvered into the fast lane of the freeway, the speedometer hovering at sixty-five, then at seventy.

I must find him, she thought. Find George Wagner. She had met him the week before at Lucy's party, found he had recently moved to San Diego, as she had, and a few minutes after being introduced she was, to her surprise, telling him about growing up in New York with her grandmother, about nurses' training at the hospital in Schenectady, and her new job as an RN here at Copley Hospital.

"I'm a construction worker," he said. "On one of the downtown high-rises."

She had liked him at once.

George Wagner. She repeated his name now as she eased the car into the downtown turnoff. Then she slowed, searching among the tall buildings on the skyline, looking for rectangles of gray sky framed by open girders. No, that building was only five or six stories high. George had told her his was twenty. She drove down B Street past stores, office buildings, and banks.

There, a few blocks ahead on the right. She caught her breath. The floor levels were numbered-19, 20, 21. Yes, that must be the one! She accelerated, then had to brake, chafing at the delay of a red light. Where was a parking s.p.a.ce? There was none to be seen. She drove slowly past the wooden fence around the construction site. Still nowhere to park. At last, she pulled into a red no-parking zone, locked and left the car.

Two elderly men stood with their backs to her looking through slits cut into the fence. She glanced over her head. A crane hovered above the frame of the building, men walked on exposed girders, and from the uppermost floor she saw the blue-white flicker of a welding torch.

Use Sidewalk Across Street, read a sign. Lesley ignored it, and hurried to an opening in the fence. Another sign declared: Hardhat Area-Employees Only. Inside the fence a trailer stood with its door open. She ran up the steps and went inside. A man sat at a desk, plans spread before him. His hair was gray beneath his metal hat, his face tanned and lined.

"I have to find whoever's in charge," she said.

"I'm the superintendent."

"George Wagner. He works here, up there." She lifted her eyes.

"Wagner? Oh, the new man. What about him?"

"You've got to bring him down."

He pushed the chair back, walked over to her, and looked down into her face. "Why must I?"

"He's in danger. Every minute he's up there he's in danger."

"Of course he is. They all are."

"No, this is different. I know. I can't explain, but I know. You've got to help." She took his hand, and he followed her outside.

"I can't order a man down for no reason. Are you a relative of his?"

"No, not a relative. Please do something before it's too late."

"Well-" He hesitated, looking up. Her eyes followed his. They were so close to the building that it seemed impossibly high. As they watched, a man lurched outward from the top. "George," she whispered. "No, no!" He lurched toward them and fell, arms and legs outflung like a skydiver.

She screamed, a long, hopeless scream. He was falling, falling, falling. Then the man beside her spoke, as she knew he would, and again she heard the awe and horror in his voice.

"Oh my G.o.d," he said.

Chapter One.

Lesley heard the repeated ring of the phone, insistent yet faint, as though coming from a great distance. She rocked slowly back and forth in her chair, back and forth, hypnotized by the rhythm, back and forth, lulled and comforted by the motion.

The ringing stopped. Good, she thought, all you have to do is wait long enough. Sometimes you have to wait a long time, nine or ten rings, but finally the ringing stops. The phone rang again. I should answer, Lesley thought. Was the hospital calling? I did report in this morning, didn't I? Yes, she remembered how curt Miss Christie, the director of nurses, had seemed.

Four, five, six-Lesley counted the rings. She rose from the rocker and walked to stand looking down at the phone on the nightstand. Nine, ten. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear, listening but saying nothing.

"h.e.l.lo?" A man's voice. "Miss Campbell? h.e.l.lo?"

Not the hospital. She didn't recognize him. She held the cream-colored phone in front of her as though to study it. The voice seemed metallic and far away, and she could no longer make out the words. She sighed and returned the phone to her ear.

"h.e.l.lo," she said.

"Miss Campbell?"

"This is Lesley Campbell."

"Oh, good, I thought I had a bad connection. I'm Craig Ritter from the university."

"Yes?" Craig Ritter. The name meant nothing to her.

"I'm with the IPR, the Inst.i.tute for Parapsychological Research. You wrote us a few months ago from New York and again last month from here in San Diego." Lesley's fingers tightened on the receiver as she felt a surge of hope. The university. Surely they could help her. "Are you there, Miss Campbell?"

"Yes, I did write you."

"In connection with the study we're doing here at the inst.i.tute. You submitted two predictions. I'd like to talk to you about them if I might. May I stop by?"

"You want to come here?" She glanced around the room at the unmade bed, the dust on the dresser, and the unvacuumed rug. Had she washed yesterday's dishes?

"Yes," he said. "You only live ten miles from my office. I'd stop in at your convenience, of course."

"Couldn't I come there instead?"

"Certainly. Could you possibly drive out today? I'm leaving for a conference in San Francisco in the morning."

"Today? Let me think." She knew she had nothing planned. This man, this Craig Ritter, must have spent years studying and researching to hold the job he did. If anyone could help her, he could.

"Two o'clock would be a good time," he said.

"Yes." Lesley's words came with a rush. "Fine, I'll be there at two." He gave directions and said good-bye.

Feeling better than she had in months, Lesley dressed and made the bed. She found she hadn't done the dishes. After was.h.i.+ng and stacking them she vacuumed, humming to herself. Then she scrambled eggs, fried bacon, and found herself hungrier than she had thought, so she put an english m.u.f.fin in the toaster. When she had finished, the clock over the sink said one. It was still early, but she decided to start anyway and drive slowly.

In her bedroom she opened the jewel box and held the opal in her palm. She shut her eyes and for a moment her mind closed; she heard the murmuring, and she was at peace. What had her grandmother told her?

"The opal has been our curse and our salvation."

"What do you mean?" Lesley had asked.

The old woman had shaken her head. "Each of us must find out for herself."

Opening her eyes again, Lesley returned the translucent red stone to its box, which she placed in the bottom drawer among her sweaters. Frowning, she pushed the drawer shut. But how? she wanted to ask. How shall I find out before it's too late?

She drove the Pinto north on the freeway to the university, a cl.u.s.ter of modern skysc.r.a.pers and temporary wooden structures on the hills above the Pacific. As she pa.s.sed through a shadowed grove of eucalyptus onto the campus, she glanced at the tall buildings on her left; without warning a chill swept over her and she shuddered. She shut her eyes, trying to shut the picture from her mind, but a car honked at her so she pulled to the side of the road. The taste of nausea rose bitter to her throat.

Oh my G.o.d, she heard the superintendent say again, and then George was falling, and she screamed. She folded her arms on the steering wheel and rested her head on them until at last the nausea subsided. Then she sat up, biting her lip, afraid. She saw her hold on reality as a tight, taut cord of which a strand unraveled every day. I must hold on, she told herself; I must. But the cord, she knew, could snap at any moment.

She made two wrong turns before she found the small one-story building. But it was still early, so she sat in the car until ten minutes before two. Then, looking in the rearview mirror, she ran a brush over her blonde hair. I'm so pale, she thought. I should have worn makeup. Students in jeans walked by on the sidewalk and seemed to pause and stare at her.

IPR was lettered on a wooden plaque beside the door of the building. When Lesley entered, a young woman looked up from her typewriter. Behind the typist Lesley saw two chairs, a row of file cabinets, and a metal bookcase.

"Oh, you must be Miss Campbell. Mr. Ritter's here. Why don't you just go in?" The young woman nodded toward a partially closed door.

As Lesley hesitated in the doorway the typing resumed behind her. In the small inner office a man sat with his feet up on a drawer of his desk, his face hidden behind the Los Angeles Times. There was a stained coffee cup on the desk amid a clutter of papers and magazines. The room was in disarray-books had been left piled on the floor, sheaves of paper overflowed a credenza, and on the walls, photographs of sailboats tilted slightly off center. On the wall directly in front of the desk three darts angled from a black-and-white dartboard. Through the clouded window she saw bark hanging from eucalyptus trees the way strips of wallpaper hang from the walls of an abandoned house.

Lesley coughed. The newspaper jerked down, the legs swung to the floor, and Craig Ritter stood up so quickly that Lesley backed away. He was tall. She hadn't expected him to be so tall. And young, too-not more than thirty. Why had she thought he'd be an older man?

He smiled, a quick and friendly smile. She thought she noticed a warm glint in his hazel eyes. He had a black moustache and thick black hair. Even if he's young, she told herself, he'll be able to help.

"I'm Lesley Campbell."

"Sit down, sit down." He gathered books and papers from a chair and added them to a pile on the window sill. "So you're Lesley Campbell!" She s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably under his stare, feeling that he was examining her as he would a specimen collected on a field trip.

"Coffee?" he asked. She shook her head. She had enough trouble sleeping nights as it was. "No? Do you mind if we start by getting some information for our records? Good." He removed a card from a file box on his desk. "I have your name and address, of course. Now, where were you born?"

"In Paisley, Scotland."

"When?"

"October 22, twenty-two years ago this coming October."

"And your parents. Are they living?"

"No, they were killed in an accident when I was three."

"I'm sorry. Education?"

"I graduated from Catskill High School and from St. Luke's School of Nursing in Schenectady, New York."

"Good, that's all I'll need for now. We'll get a complete history later if we decide to do the full series of tests. Why don't you come and let me show you our facilities?" He led her into the outer office. "I'll be over at the lab, Dolores," he said to the typist.

They followed a dirt path through a eucalyptus grove. "I'm afraid the university treats the inst.i.tute like a stepchild. As you probably know, we're funded by a grant from the Nierenberg Foundation. After Alonzo Nierenberg's son committed suicide, the old man became convinced he was able to talk to the boy with the help of a psychic. The university didn't want to go along with his idea of setting up the inst.i.tute. But Nierenberg told them, 'No inst.i.tute, no money for the library.' So we have the inst.i.tute. And the library. I've been princ.i.p.al investigator here for five years now."

"Your work must be fascinating."

"Well, it's a living. And there's a variety of activities going on here. I'll even admit it was interesting, at first. I set up our computer programs and supervised the experiments with the animals. But now I mostly investigate reports of parapsychological phenomena. Poltergeists, haunted houses, ESP, mediums, dowsing, astrology, precognition, what have you. I've completed twenty-six full-scale investigations since I came to the university. In how many of those do you think I found genuine psychic phenomena?"

"I don't know. Five? Six?"

"No-none. Not one." He stopped in front of a ma.s.sive gray building. "This is our lab and computer center." She looked up, shading her eyes from the warm sun. The windows were tall, narrow slits, like the punched holes on a data card. "We aren't the only department that uses the computers, of course." He stopped to show his badge to a uniformed guard. Inside, men and women were walking quietly among the cl.u.s.ters of humming blue and gray machines. Craig led Lesley to a television-like screen where cryptic messages formed and disappeared as though typed and obliterated by invisible hands.

"The study you're partic.i.p.ating in is being processed on our small computer over here. All of the predictions, and there are thousands of them, are matched against subsequent actual events. When someone makes a correct or nearly correct prediction there's a printout. We call correct predictions. .h.i.ts. After two hits by the same person I'm notified at once. You made two hits, you know."

"I didn't know. I haven't read the papers lately."

"You must have heard about the earthquake." She shook her head. Craig raised his eyebrows. "The center of the quake was along the San Andreas Fault. Of course most of them are. Near San Jose. I think you guessed a magnitude of between five and six on the Richter scale. The actual reading was 5.4."

"I didn't know." Lesley suddenly realized he didn't believe her.

"And of course the airliner did crash on the day you said it would."

Lesley remained silent for a time. Then she said, "I read about your study in one of the psychic journals. I thought if I submitted an entry you might be able to help me."

"Help you? I think you've gotten the wrong idea of what we do here. We don't do individual counseling." He led her into an elevator where he pushed the b.u.t.ton labeled B. In the bas.e.m.e.nt, he unlocked a door to a room filled with shelf upon shelf of cages. She wrinkled her nose at the strong, heavy odor.