Speed Dating With the Dead (17 page)

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Rhonda said. “Her car’s still in the lot and I can’t see her walking two miles to Black Rock. And where else is there to go?”

You got that right.

“I can’t believe she’d bail out of a big conference, especially with a freaky crowd like this,” Violet said. “I’m surprised she’s not counting the silverware and towels.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. She busted me for taking a roll of toilet paper.”

“Well, it’s hotel property. It’s her job.”

“Nobody should like their job that much.”

“This place is falling down around our ears. If anything else goes wrong, we’ll have to call in FEMA.”

 ”Life goes on,” Rhonda said, turning her attention back to
People
magazine, where Angelina Jolie was adopting another baby, this time from Madagascar. The clerk was slouched against the drawer that served as cash till, except most customers used credit cards these days. Violet eyed it, wondering how much loose change was in there. The best filching was done in the bar, but with Battle Axe away, then why not go for a few twenties?

Violet tried the phone again. It gave a sad bleat, the death of an electronic sheep. She banged the handset against the wall, and then checked the signal on her cell phone. It was hopeless, because cell phones never worked around the inn. Some said it was because of the inn’s location straddling the Eastern Continental Divide, while others called it a “dark zone” the wireless companies had not yet found lucrative enough to pursue. Whatever the reason, she had no bars.

Wally came huffing and puffing to the front desk, his ruddy face dotted with sweat. “Elevator’s gettin’ squirrelly,” he said.

“Squirrelly? Is that the engineering term for ‘out of service’?”

“It’s still working, it just don’t stop on the floor you push the button for.”

“We’ve only got three floors. How much of a problem can it be?”

“Normally, it wouldn’t be one, but these Christ-dang ghost hunters are crawling from floor to floor like piss ants in a sugar factory. The way the floors are divided, you got to walk a mile to get from 210 to 324. Down, around, and up.”

“And Janey didn’t answer?”

“I pounded on the door near hard enough to break it down. If she’s in there, she’s either dead or deaf.”

One of the guests approached the desk, a hawk-faced woman wearing an ill-fitting pants suit that spelled trouble. Wally stepped away, falling into invisible-worker mode. Violet was annoyed at being thrust into command, especially since she was due to clock out in half an hour and Phillippe Renaud, the new cook—”chef,” he had insisted, in that gorgeous French accent—had offered to buy her a Beck’s in the hotel bar.

“Excuse me,” the guest said, rapping on the counter with her room key. “My door’s messed up. I got locked inside my own room.”

The bony woman’s avian eyes darted past Violet as if expecting someone older and more mature to hear her complaint. An adult. Violet was annoyed. She had a community-college degree, for crying out loud. And one of these days, she’d own a pants suit, too. As soon as she paid back what she’d borrowed.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Violet said, giving her falsest, sweetest smile. “But our keys only work from the outside. All inside doors have privacy locks and deadbolts. Are you sure you didn’t turn the knob the wrong way?”

“I know how to work a door, Miss,” the Hawk said, with enough frost in her breath to lower the room temperature. Which Violet noticed had gotten colder in the last few minutes. A malfunctioning heater was all she needed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Violet said, her smile locked in place. “Wally, would you please look at the lock?”

Wally nodded, though his face curdled as if he’d swallowed a slug. “I’ll get J.C. on it right away.”

“And don’t disturb anything,” the Hawk said. “I have some very valuable equipment in there.”

As Wally hurried away, she added, “You people should do something about the heat. It’s freezing in here.”

Tell it to someone who cares.

A few guests were milling back and forth, as if the conference had hit a lull. Violet fished under the counter and came out with a couple of brass tokens. “Here, good for complimentary drinks at the bar.”

And you better not sit with Phillippe, or I will break a bottle over your head.

The woman took the tokens, scratching Violet’s thumb with her long, painted fingernails. “That’ll take the chill off. Thanks.”

Rhonda put down the
People
after the Hawk was gone. “No wonder Janey’s so crabby all the time.”

“She’s only crabby when we’re around,” Violet said. “Where’s the master key?”

“Master key? We don’t have any master key.”

“Figures. Do we have a copy for Janey’s suite?”

“You’re not going in there, are you? You might not come out of alive. I’ve never even seen inside it.”

“Come on, you think she has pentagrams drawn on the floor and a bunch of mutilated cats nailed to the walls?”

“Maybe she’s got J.C. in there.”

“Yuck. Don’t want to think about it.”

Rhonda sorted through the extra keys, reading their tags, until she found a skeleton key that bore Janey’s suite number. The ring also held a key that Violet supposed went to the office. “Here you go. Looks like it hasn’t been used since Ricky Martin was still hetero and hot.”

“Okay, if I’m not back in ten minutes, call in the National Guard,” Violet said.

“If the phone’s working.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Violet headed for the stairs, determined to bypass the squirrelly elevator. All she needed was to get trapped and spend the night in a rusty metal box while Phillippe sipped Merlot and talked French to all the drunken girls. The sooner Janey Mays was back in charge, the better.

She bounced up the stairs, calves sore from a long day in high heels. A man in a black jumpsuit met her at the first landing, heading down. One of the SSI guys, not the young hottie, but a middle-aged, chunky man.

“How’s the conference going?” She almost regretted asking , because she could think of a hundred things that could go wrong and her shit list was about full at the moment. But he just shook his head and said, “We’re getting some pretty good results.”

“Are results good or bad? Assuming you actually want to find a ghost.”

“Oh, you don’t have to find them. They’ll find you.”

“Great.”
Fucking sadist.

She continued to the second floor, feeling his oily gaze on her ass. It gave her no pleasure. She had her mind set on Phillippe—not her heart, she wasn’t
that
stupid—but a girl could always dream. Dreams were all you had in this world, but never enough money to make them come true. Why should a couple of sweet boys like Chad and Stevie have all the—

She found herself in front of 226. The idea of opening the door had seemed as simple as the mechanical insertion of the key, the triggering of the tumblers, and the turning of the handle. But now a hundred scenarios howled for attention.

What if she really IS boning J.C.? Or worse, what if she’s settled in for a date with the old battery-operated boyfriend? Or if she’s drunk and grouchy? Snorting coke? Or even something innocent, like reading Agatha Christie? Is this worth it?

In the end, Violet decided the only way she’d make that date—
not a date, just hanging out
—with Phillippe was to rouse Janey and let her know the White Horse was coming apart at the seams. She steeled herself and rapped on the door, but it lacked any thunder.

Chicken dooty pants patootie.

Surely Janey wouldn’t kill the messenger? Violet had tried hard to solve the problems, right? And this was the last resort?

She hammered with the bottoms of her fists this time, bruising a bone in her wrist. She should have brought Wally with her, but there were too many holes in the dike and not enough thumbs to go around.

She was fidgeting for the key when she instinctively tried the door handle. It turned easily, the clack of the catch like a gunshot in the quiet hallway.

Whatever Janey’s up to, it wasn’t worth locking the door over.

Violet pushed the door open a couple of feet. “Miss Mays?” she called into the darkness.

No radio or television, no sound of a shower, no snores, no moans of passion or grunts of surprise. Only a hush to match that of the hallway.

Jany pushed the door open wider, calling again. She squinted and tried the light switch. Nothing. Darkness crowded the room and Violet had the distinct feeling of being watched, as if nocturnal predators lay in wait. She stood in the doorway, letting the weak light from the hall spill into the room, hoping Janey would wake up and not be too crabby.

“Sorry to bother you,” Violet said, wishing somebody, even one of the fat-assed SSI perverts, would come along. Because the room smelled like a possum had died in the walls and something fluttered against the ceiling—either bats or the world’s largest mutant moths. Violet decided she’d done her duty and was about to back out of the room when the hall light caught a metallic glint.

She squinted at the short tube and the bulk behind it.

A gun? On the floor?

There were only a couple of reasons why a gun would be out in plain sight, and neither were the stuff of flowers and sunshine. Violet took another step forward, peering into the gloom, half expecting to see Janey sprawled in a pool of her own blood and brains. Janey didn’t seem the suicidal type and was the kind of crotchety old bag who’d probably live to be 120 just to piss off the nurses in the old folks’ home.

“Janey?”

Her vision adjusting, Violet saw the bathroom door was open, and the kitchenette was bare. That left only the bed….

It was partitioned off from the main room but enough showed so that the rumpled, dangling blankets were visible. Janey went three steps deeper, looking for a pallid foot.

Murder...yeah, plenty of people got motives
.

Violet stopped.

Including me.

Janey wouldn’t keep suspected embezzlement a secret. She pretended to loathe gossip but those creased, cracked, reptilian lips loved to spit poison. When Rhonda had been busted with the toilet paper, her name had blared out in bold letters from the staff memo. And Janey’s glee was evident in every sentence, right down to the reminder that “Employees who don’t put the White Horse Inn first will not be employees for long.”

Violet was innocent. She couldn’t hurt a fly, unless it was landing on her pancake syrup. Then she could mash it good, mash it, mash it, mash it--

She glanced back toward the hallway and the low murmur of approaching voices. She couldn’t be seen in this room. “Motive, means, and opportunity,” as the cop shows put it. Sure, forensics tests might eventually prove she’d not fired the weapon, but in the meantime she’d be out of a job, broke from legal fees, and sleeping on a cold iron cot surrounded by lonely, desperate convicts instead of snuggling next to Phillippe.

Plus, Janey’s office was waiting, and Violet held the all-access pass in her hand, skin sweaty around the metal. With luck, she could search the bottom cabinets before anyone found Janey’s body.

She backed to the hall, hearing distant laughter. She looked both ways to make sure no one was watching and closed the door. She banged on it until the approaching group of ghosthunters rounded the corner, then gave one more emphatic, “Miss Mays?” before shrugging and heading back downstairs. She glanced at her watch.

Ten minutes of prowling for loose cash, then a date at the bar.

Chapter 24

“You’re freaking me out, Dad.”

Not that Wayne Wilson’s tears were as scarce and sacred as Buddha bones or anything, but Kendra hadn’t seen him cry since—well, probably five years ago, when he’d quit drinking for the last time.

He’d cried when Mom died, choking and wailing and occasionally letting slip with “Why, God?” But sometimes he’d be sitting in front of the television and silent tears would slide down his cheeks, his eyes as dull as whatever baseball game he happened to be watching. Tears that reflected the colors of the screen, made somehow more disturbing by the sparkles of green and blue. They were the kind of tears that had no cause or reason, and she’d wondered if they would ever end.

These tears had that quality, of having leaked from cracks on a parched cliffside after seeping, crawling, and trickling for miles to find their way to the surface.

He turned his head, as slowly as a ventriloquist’s dummy. He was smiling, and that was even creepier.

“She’s here, honey,” he whispered.

Kendra looked around the room, expecting that fat lady in the lime-colored blouse. But the room was empty except for the Ouija board on the coffee table.

“Some of the hunters are getting antsy,” she said. “You might want to check in at the control room.”

“We’re done,” he said, in that same spaced-out voice. “Now I know.”

“Know what?”

Dad stood up, so wobbly that Kendra’s breath caught and she glanced around his feet for a bottle. Her nursing days were done. She was Emily Dee, not Florence Nightingale.

“Your mother’s okay,” Dad said.

“I barely had a mother, remember? Pictures and stories, that’s all I got, and I don’t have much more of a father.”

Ouch
. The words hurt to say them, but they felt good in a way, because they were honest. Digger was more of a fictional character these days than a human being. If only she could erase him like she could Mom.

The verbal slap seemed to pull Wayne back to Planet Earth. “I saw your mother.”

A quiet “Wacaroni” was all she could manage.

His face was earnest, eyes shifting from dull gray to a bright green. “She was standing right there in the corner and she...and she….”

His pointing finger lowered. “She said your name.”

“Mine? Like, she’s dead, she jumped the shark on me when I was barely out of kindergarten, and now she cares?”

She’d said the words louder than she’d meant to, and they rattled off the flat walls of the room and gave an echo among the bathroom tiles. The force behind them was driven by fear as much as anger, because she’d found ways to push Dad’s buttons over the years, through careful trial and error. But now he appeared beyond control, ready for a shrink and a rubber room.