Superstition by Karen Robards Page A

them this way.
    Leonora walked across the kitchen, her flat, gold slippers making shuffling sounds on the tile floor. It felt cooler in here, Nicky realized as she stepped into the room in her mother’s wake, probably because it was mostly white: white floor, white cabinets and appliances, long expanses of smooth, white counters. The only thing that wasn’t completely white was the wallpaper in the breakfast nook. It featured a tangled green vine covered with huge red cabbage roses that for some reason looked to Nicky at first glance like splashes of blood.
    She shivered, realized what she was doing, and glanced hopefully at the temperature sensor. It showed an unpromising 72 degrees.
    Damn.
    Leonora was almost to the back door when she stopped and clasped her hands in front of her waist. For a moment—one of the longest moments in Nicky’s life—Leonora stood perfectly still, an arrested expression on her face.
    Nicky held her breath.
    “I am getting a great sense of unease,” Leonora said at last. “Fear . . . pain . . . something terrible happened in this room.”
    Leonora went silent, staring unseeingly in front of her.
    Cue the ghosts. Please.
    “The emotions are still here,” Leonora said, her eyes glassy as they fixed on a point directly in front of her. “Surprise . . . disbelief . . . terror. Absolute terror. Waves of terror, swirling up all around me. Someone was afraid for their life.”
    Leonora shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. Then she moved. The camera followed her on soundless wheels as she walked seemingly at random around the kitchen. It was a large room, about fourteen by twenty-five feet, rectangular, with an island in the center and the octagon-shaped breakfast nook angling off it. Another set of the French doors that were a feature of the house opened onto a patio at the far end, opposite the swinging door through which they had entered. Once jaunty white curtains, now faintly yellowed with time, still hung from the windows, blocking out the night; Nicky wondered, fleetingly, if they were holdovers from the Schultzes’ time.
    Were they, like the house itself, silent witnesses to the tragedy that occurred here?
    Okay, so she was a veteran of encounters of the paranormal kind. The thought still gave Nicky the creeps.
    “Someone . . . someone else was here, too. Hiding,” Leonora said, her voice echoing hollowly off the walls as she walked toward the French doors. Her caftan swished around her legs as she moved. Her slippers whispered over the floor. Other than that, the room was absolutely silent, as everyone, including Nicky, focused on Leonora. Staying just enough behind her to be out of the shot, Marisa followed with the machine on which Leonora always recorded her sessions so that anything she said could later be checked and, hopefully, verified. Not that she didn’t trust other people’s recordings, as she had explained to Nicky countless times, but editing happened. She wanted her own, independent record of events.
    “I can feel that person waiting. Feel the heart pounding—fast, thump-thump, thump-thump . . .” Leonora pressed a hand to her heart, tapping out the rhythm with her fingers. “The person is nervous, excited almost, breathing hard. Listening.”
    One look at her mother’s rapt face told Nicky that Leonora had found her groove at last. She let out a silent breath of relief.
    “Who’s hiding?” Nicky asked softly. “Is it a man or a woman?”
    Leonora hesitated. Then she shook her head.
    “I can’t tell,” she murmured in a distracted tone. “I can’t see. What I’m getting is what I feel .”
    Nicky nodded her understanding. Leonora closed her eyes. The lights threw Leonora’s shadow against the wall and blanched her pale complexion until it appeared almost corpse-like. Had it not been for her flaming hair and vivid makeup, she would have looked like a ghost herself. The deep purple of her caftan and the glinting gold of her jewelry added