A thin face dominated by an overly large nose leaned into her swirling vision. His green, glassy eyes studied her face. “My dear lady, are you quite all right?” He turned his beaked nose away from her and called to someone over his shoulder. “Arnie, I do believe one of your characters has lost her way.”
Arnie?Stella’s vision tunneled, and then everything disappeared.
“Stella?” Arnie said as he lifted her into a sitting position. The faint glow from the lamp highlighted the creases of concern on his lined face. “Come on, kiddo. Don’t you know better than to scare an old man?”
Stella blinked. He lifted her slowly and propped her upright against a bookshelf. She touched the back of her head and winced.
“Probably gonna have a real goose egg back there. What were you doing down here? You left almost half an hour ago.”
“I forgot my purse. I found it under the front desk, but then I heard voices. Yours, I thought, and I noticed the archives door wasopen, so I came down here looking for you, but I saw...” A cold sensation on her leg distracted her for a moment. She bent her right leg toward her and patted the back of her capris. The fabric was wet from knee to cuff. “Why are my pants wet?”
“My chamomile tea,” Arnie said. “Let’s try to stand. Slowly, now. Slowly.”
Stella grabbed Arnie’s outstretched hand, and with his help, she eased to her feet, swaying for a few seconds before her equilibrium righted itself. The book spines in her line of vision undulated like underwater kelp until she blinked a few times and refocused. A throbbing ache pounded inside her skull. “Why is your tea on my pants?”
Arnie tugged on his earlobe, looking apologetic. “I spilled it when I tried to pull a book from the shelf, and when I returned to clean it up, you were sprawled on the floor. I’m assuming you slipped on it and fell.”
Stella noticed a mop propped against the study table. She didn’t remember slipping on the wet floor. What she remembered was seeing three strangers in the archives. She peered around Arnie’s shoulder.
He glanced behind him before turning back to her. “How’re you feeling?”
“I feel like Wile E. Coyote after an anvil has fallen on his head.”
“Let me drive you home,” Arnie said as he hooked his hand around her elbow. He slid her purse over her shoulder and led her up the aisle away from the study table.
Stella sighed but leaned into him. “I’m fine, Arnie. I have a headache, but I can drive.” In truth, her head throbbed so intensely that nausea surged. First the purple words and now this.
“Maybe I should take you to the ER to see if you have a concussion. Or keep you awake all night with coffee and lousy jokes.”
Stella stopped walking, forcing Arnie to stop. She inhaled a few slow breaths and peered behind them. “A few aspirin will help, but I thought I saw— There were people down here.”
Arnie frowned, causing his thick eyebrows to form an unruly bridge over his nose. “This morning? Do you mean the Wallaces? Weren’t they researching Libby’s genealogy?”
Stella shook her head, which caused her to feel like she’d been twirling round and round. She closed her eyes and swallowed another swell of nausea. When it was safe to open her mouth, she said, “No. Tonight. When I came looking for you, I saw—a boy dressed like Peter Pan. He was standing on the table, and then he jumped at me.”
Arnie’s laugh startled her. It burst out down the aisle, and the books shivered on their shelves. An antique bell in a display case vibrated, sending a low hum into the room. “You knocked yourself silly.”
She started to argue with him, but what if she’d actually fallen, knocked herself out, and created the entire scenario in her dreaming mind? Still, the brief interaction had seemed real. And what about the words she’d seen when she entered the archives?Apprehension. Fear. Anxiety.Were they meant to caution her regarding the people? But she and Arnie were very much alone in the archives now. If she pushed the issue about the people, she’d have to admit the words she’d seen, and that wasn’t a secret she wanted to share with Arnie.
He urged her forward out of the antiquities section and led her up the staircase to the main floor. They passed through the unlit spaces until Arnie stood at the back door and set the alarm.
He stepped onto the back stoop with her, pulled out his keys, and locked the door. “I’d feel better if you’d let me drive you home.”
The humid night air smelled of blooming magnolias and cut grass. “I’m not gonna risk barfing in your car, but thanks.” She dug her car keys out of her pocket and adjusted her purse on her shoulder.
“You call me if you need anything, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” She waved over her shoulder as she shuffled to her car. Arnie stood and watched her reverse out of the parking space and drive away. As she turned onto the main street and glanced into the rearview mirror, she saw him descend the stairs and cross the grassy lot toward his cottage.
Stella gripped the steering wheel with both hands and cranked the air-conditioning to help ease the queasiness from the pounding in her skull.Don’t barf. Don’t barf. Don’t barf, she repeated as a mantra in her mind.
A half hour later when she crawled into her bed in the quiet house, she closed her heavy eyelids. Crickets chirped outside her bedroom window. Her mind created an image of a man’s bulbous green eyes staring at her, calling her one of Arnie’s characters. That image was followed by a young boy leaping off a table, leaving a sparkling golden trail behind him. A woman whispered words in Greek, and Stella marveled at her own imagination before she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 4
Monday morning Stella awoke feeling hungover, reminiscent of someone who’d reveled all night at the Mad Hatter’s tea party where the tea had been spiked and the party was full of madness. She hadn’t had a legit hangover since the night before she left Memphis to come home because of her father’s heart attack, and that was almost four years ago now.
The scalding shower water soothed the pounding in her skull until she faced away from the spray and the water assaulted her bruised head like a hailstorm. She wrapped a towel around herself and wiped her feet on the flatter-than-a-johnnycake bathmat. Glancing up, she noticed the outdated jewel-toned wallpaper peeled away from one corner.
