she'd never read. She piled the pillows high against her headboard, set the popcorn at just the right reaching distance on her bedside table, got under the quilt, and opened the book. She could hear Peaches downstairs, still snuffling and whining at the door, and she could hear the wind rustling the tops of the trees outside, but by the time she reached the bottom of the first page, she was hooked, and soon the only sound she was aware of was the beating of her own heart.

Chapter 6

Jenny woke with a jerk, her heart no longer thumping steadily but racing with fear. She'd slipped sideways in her sleep and so had the book, and one comer of it was poking her in the cheek. She pushed herself up onto her pillows and rubbed her face. It was sweaty, and her arms ached as if she'd been clenching her fists.

What a dream! The rimrocks and the wind and Manderley and the sea had gotten all jumbled up. And Jenny had turned into Diana, not unconscious, but wide awake and clinging to a rock that kept crumbling in her hands. And all the time, she kept, hearing someone shouting at her. She couldn't understand the words, but something about them terrified her.

Jenny rubbed her eyes and pushed back her hair. It was damp and tangled. Rebecca had been a mistake, she guessed. If she'd wanted to get Diana and the awful rimrocks out of her mind, she should have picked a joke book and saved weird, obsessed Mrs.

Danvers for another time. Daytime, not night.

She heard a shuffling sound from somewhere, and her heartbeat, which had ahnost returned to normal, suddenly speeded up again. The wind was still blowing outside, and something skittered across the roof of the house. Probably a twig, she thought, straining her ears for the shuffle again.

There it was. Not a shuffle, though. It was more like somebody panting, but trying to hide it by breathing through his nose. Somebody . . . Brad?

She'd kept telling herself that he hadn't meant to scare her, but what if he had? What if he'd just been acting? After all, before he'd gone on about what a rotten person Diana was, he'd asked Jenny about the shout. Had he known she was lying when she said she agreed with Dean? Had he come back again to try to force her into remembering?

Jenny shut off her reading lamp, slid out of bed, and moved soundlessly toward the door, the mood of the dream still clinging to her like a thick fog. The shuffling, or panting, kept on going, and it wasn't until she was almost at the head of the stairs that she realized what it was: a pudgy, aging dog who thought there was something outside and was doing her best to smell it through the solid wood thickness of the front door.

Jenny tightened the belt on her robe and hurried downstairs. She glanced into the kitchen; the clock over the stoVe said it was two-fifteen. Peaches was actually pawing at the door now. She turned her