The Accidental Bodyguard. Ann Major

minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.

      “I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.

      “Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.

      Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.

      “What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.

      Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.

      “I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”

      How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening to send them to military school.

      She began to understand that maybe the reason they doted on her was that she was the first adult who ever enjoyed them and made them feel needed.

      She encouraged them to go to their father and talk to him. Foolishly she had caused one quarrel between the father and sons by giving some of Lucas’s and the boys’ clothes to their yardman and his family. After Lucas had caught the poor man in a pair of slacks from one of his custom-made suits from London, he had yelled at the boys for an hour. She had wept for causing all three of them so much pain. But the incident had blown over, and Lucas had bought the slacks back from the man.

      She had taken two pictures of Lucas from his albums to keep when she was in the boys’ room alone. One was a photograph of him as a man, the other of him as a boy unhappily perched on top of a huge elephant in India.

      Lucas kept a box full of articles about himself in the den. She read them all. Apparently Lucas had a professional reputation for toughness and greed. She read that he never made a move unless it was to his financial advantage, that even the women he dated were always rich—as Joan, his first wife, had been. One reporter had likened his predatory nature to that of a barracuda.

      The nights when Lucas was at home were difficult because she felt lonely and isolated in the boys’ closet, clutching the photographs of Lucas. But the worst hours were those when all the lights in the house were off and she fell asleep, only to have nightmares.

      Most nights she would slip into an old chambray shirt of Lucas’s. After Peppin shut the louvered closet door for her, she would lie there while either Peppin or Montague read aloud. This week they had been reading a book called Psychic Voyages because she had found Psychic Vampires, their favorite, too terrifying. She would lie half-listening to the weird and yet compelling stories of people who believed they had lived other lives.

      Eventually she would fall asleep, and it was never long before the dreams came—vivid, full-color visions that seemed so real and loomed larger than life.

      Tonight was worse, maybe because it had stormed.

      She was a little girl again, playing in a sun-splashed rose garden beside a vast white mansion with a dark-haired girl. At first they carefully gathered the roses, filling huge baskets with them. Then her dream changed. The sky filled with dark clouds, and the house was a blackened ruin. There was nothing in the baskets but stems and thorns. She was older, and her companion was gone. Suddenly a fanged monster with olive-black eyes sprang into the ruined rose garden and began chasing her. She knew if he caught her, he would lock her in a box and bury her alive. But as she ran, her speed slowed, and his accelerated, until she felt his hot breath on her neck and his hands clawing into her waist and dragging her into a dark cave. At first she was afraid she’d been buried alive. Then suddenly fire was all around her and she was struggling through the thick suffocating smoke, trying to find her way out. The last thing she saw was a dead man’s gray face.

      She screamed, a piercing, ear-shattering cry that dragged her back to the lumpy pallet. The louvered door was thrown open instantly, and Peppin’s small compact body crouched over hers. His fingers, which smelled of peanut butter and grape jelly and of other flavors best not identified, pressed her lips.