Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones

      “I don’t have a watch on. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought to check the time, anyway. Fire scares the bejesus out of me.”

      One corner of his mouth twitched a little, but he disciplined it. He had a nice, lived-in sort of face, a little droopy at the jowls, wrinkly around the eyes. “That’s okay. We can get the time from the security system. How long had you been with Mr. Raintree when the alarm sounded?”

      Now, there was a question. Lorna thought back to the episodes of panic she’d experienced in that office, to the confusing hallucinations, or whatever the disconcerting sexual fantasy was. Nothing in that room had been normal, and though she usually had a good grasp of time, she found herself unable to even estimate. “I don’t know. It was sunset when I went in. That’s all I can tell you.”

      He made a note of her answer. God only knew what he thought they’d been doing, she thought wearily, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

      “What did you do when the fire alarm sounded?”

      “We ran for the stairs.”

      “What floor were you on?”

      Now, that, she knew, because she’d watched the numbers on the ride up in the elevator. “The nineteenth.”

      He made a note of that, too. Lorna thought to herself that if she intended to burn a building down she wouldn’t go to the nineteenth floor to wait for the alarm. Raintree hadn’t had anything to do with whatever had caused the fire, but the cops had to check out everything or they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. Though…did detectives normally go to the scene of a fire? A fire inspector or fire marshal, whichever Reno had, would have to determine that a fire was caused by arson before they treated it as a crime.

      “What happened then?”

      “There were a lot of people in the stairwell,” she said slowly, trying to get the memory to form. “I remember…a lot of people. We could go only a couple of floors before everyone got jammed up, because some of the people from the lower floors were trying to go up.” The smoke had been heavy, too, because visibility had been terrible, people passing by like ghosts…No. That had been later. There hadn’t been a lot of smoke in the stairs right then. Later—She wasn’t certain about later. The sequence of events was all jumbled up, and she couldn’t seem to sort everything out.

      “Go on,” Detective Harvey prompted when she was silent for several moments.

      “Mr. Raintree told them—the people coming up the stairs—they’d have to go back, there was no way out if they kept going up.”

      “Did they argue?”

      “No, they all turned around. No one panicked.” Except her. She’d barely been able to breathe, and it hadn’t been because of the smoke. The memory was becoming clearer, and she was amazed at how orderly the evacuation had been. No one had pushed; no one had been running. People had been hurrying, of course, but not being so reckless that they risked a nasty fall. In retrospect, their behavior had been damned unnatural. How could everyone have been so calm? Didn’t they know what fire did?

      But she hadn’t run, either, she realized. She hadn’t pushed. She had gone at a steady pace, held to Raintree’s side by his arm.

      Wait. Had he been holding her then? She didn’t think he had been. He’d touched her waist, sort of guiding her along, but she’d been free to run. So…why hadn’t she?

      She had trooped along like everyone else, in an orderly line. Inside she’d been screaming, but outwardly she’d been controlled.

      Controlled…Not self-controlled, but controlled like a puppet, as if she hadn’t had a will of her own. Her mind had been screaming at her to run, but her body simply hadn’t obeyed.

      “Ms. Clay?”

      Lorna felt her breath start coming faster as she relived those moments. Fire! Coming closer and closer, she didn’t want to go, she wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She was caught in one of those nightmares when you try to run but can’t, when you try to scream but can’t make a sound—

      “Ms. Clay?”

      “I—What?” Dazed, she stared up at him. From the mixture of impatience and concern on his face, she thought he must have called her name several times.

      “What did you do when you got out?”

      Shuddering, she gathered herself. “We didn’t. I mean, we got to the ground floor and Mr. Raintree sent the others to the right, toward the parking deck. Then he…we…” Her voice faltered. She had been fighting him, trying to follow the others; she remembered that. Then he’d said, “Stay with me,” and she had, with no will to do otherwise, even though she’d been half mad with terror.

      Stay with me.

      When he’d sat, she’d sat. When he’d stood, she’d stood. When he’d moved, that was when she had moved. Until then, she had been incapable of taking a single step away from him.

      Just moments ago he’d said, “Don’t go far,” and she’d been able to leave his side then—but she hadn’t gone far before she’d stopped as if she’d hit a brick wall.

      A horrible suspicion began to grow. He was controlling her somehow, maybe with some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, though when and how he’d hypnotized her, she had no idea. All sorts of weird things had been happening in his office. Maybe those damn candles had actually given off some kind of gas that had drugged her.

      “Go on,” said Detective Harvey, breaking into her thoughts.

      “We went to the left,” she said, beginning to shake. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the blanket close in an effort to control her wayward muscles, but in seconds, she was trembling from head to foot. “Into the lobby. The fire—” The fire had leaped at them like a maddened beast, roaring with delight. The heat had been searing for the tiniest fraction of a second. She’d been choking on the smoke. Then…no smoke, no heat. Both had just gone away. She and Raintree should have been overcome in seconds, but they hadn’t been. She’d been able to breathe. She hadn’t felt the heat, even though she’d watched the tongues of fire hungrily lapping across the carpet toward her. “The fire sort of w-whooshed across the ceiling and got behind us, and we were trapped.”

      “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, interrupting his line of questioning, but considering how violently she was shaking, he probably thought sitting her down before she fell down was a good idea.

      She might have thought so, too, if sitting down hadn’t meant sitting on asphalt littered with the debris of a fire and running with streams of sooty water. He probably meant sit down somewhere else, which she would have liked, if she’d felt capable of moving a single step beyond where she was right now. She shook her head. “I’m okay, just wet and cold and shaken up some.” If there was an award given out for massive understatement, she’d just won it.

      He eyed her for a moment, then evidently decided she knew whether or not she needed to sit down. He’d tried, anyway, which relieved him of any obligation. “What did you do?”

      Better not to tell him she’d felt surrounded by some sort of force field; this wasn’t StarWars, so he might not understand. Better not to tell him she’d felt a cool breeze in her hair. She must have been drugged; there was no other explanation.

      “There wasn’t anything we could do. We were trapped. I remember Mr. Raintree swearing a blue streak. I remember choking and being on the floor. Then the firefighters got to us and brought us out.” In the interest of believability, she had heavily condensed the night’s events as she remembered them, but, surely, they couldn’t have been in the lobby for very long, no more than thirty seconds. An imaginary force field couldn’t have held off real heat and smoke. The firefighters must have been close to them all along, but she’d been too panic-stricken to notice.

      There was something else, probably that worrisome