The Bone Key (22 page)

“Mr. Booth!” said Carrie. “Will you join us?”

“Thank you,” I said and sat down. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Us?” said Doris.

“What about?” said Carrie.

“You’ve been here at the hotel longer than anyone else, haven’t you?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Doris.

“Probably,” said Carrie. She was smarter than Doris and more watchful.

“ . . . I wanted to ask you,” I said, “how many people have died here that you know about? Died . . . oddly.”

“Not like old Dr. Hastings and his heart attack, you mean,” Carrie said.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Well, let me see,” Carrie said.

“There was Mr. Ampleforth,” said Doris. “And Mr. Trask.”

“Yes, and Mrs. Quincey and Mrs. Sharpe and Mrs. Leland—”

“Although that
might
have been suicide, which isn’t that odd.”

“Oh, Doris, honestly! Face down in the lily pond?”

“She might have done it herself,” Doris said stubbornly.

“Mrs. Leland couldn’t drag herself from the dining room to the conservatory without suffering vertigo and palpitations. And if she’d wanted to kill herself, she had all the veronal she needed right in her room. That’s what Miss Elchester did when she committed suicide, although nobody ever did figure out why.”

I sat and listened for more than an hour, while Carrie and Doris delved back through the hotel’s dark history. After a while even Carrie forgot to be cautious, and they told me about the strange case of Mr. Sebastian Granger, who had hanged himself in the garden gazebo with a woman’s long scarf. At least, everyone assumed he had done it himself, but since the gazebo floor had been spotlessly clean, despite the bog that a week’s torrential rain had made of the path, there was no way to be sure. I knew, from my own researches, that Mr. Granger had died nearly a hundred years ago, but I did not say so, even when Doris gave me a vivid description of the gardeners bringing the body out—“Ooh, and the look on his face! It makes my blood run cold just thinking about it.” I did not want them to suspect that I had guessed their secret, that they had been living here nearly as long as there had been any hotel to live in. I had found their signatures in one of the very early registers: “Doris Milverley” in a round, unformed, schoolgirl hand; “Kerenhappuch Soames” in a neat, crabbed copperplate. I wondered how many deaths they had been responsible for, particularly among the women suffering from postpartum depression who littered their conversation, but I knew—I could see in their bright amoral eyes—that their tolerance for me would come to an end far more quickly than I could find answers. I did not wish to make another of the company of the Hotel Chrysalis’s unexplained deaths.

And then Carrie said, “Never mind the gazebo, Doris. What about the elevator?”

“The elevator?” I said, my voice squeaking a little.

“They should never have put it in,” Doris said. “Nothing but trouble right from the first.”

“It was a good idea,” Carrie said. “I mean, with all the people here who can’t manage the stairs. But Doris is right. They never could get it to run the way it ought, and then after the little girl died in it—what was her name, Doris?”

“Mary Anne Dennys.”

“She was a nasty piece of work.”

“Carrie!”

“She was, for all her poor mother thought the world of her. Spoiled rotten and
hard
. Supposed to be here to keep her mother company—what was it Mrs. Dennys was dying of?”

“Cancer.”

“Thank you, yes, poor lady. And there’s that awful little witch running away when Mrs. Dennys calls her and throwing tantrums in the dining room over a piece of burnt toast and being rude to everybody in sight. ‘High-spirited,’ her mama called her, but at ten that’s not high spirits, that’s willfulness. And I
still
think, Doris, that it was her killed those kittens.”

“Now, Carrie, there was never any proof.”

“Her hands were scratched, and a stone could have seen Mrs. Dennys was lying when she said Mary Anne had been with her all afternoon.”

“How did she die?” I said, feeling the skin of my arms and back marbling with gooseflesh—knowing I did not want to hear their answer but compelled to ask all the same.

“No one quite knows,” Carrie said. “It was odd, like you said you were asking after, Mr. Booth. She liked to break the elevator, did little Miss Dennys, and she was good at it, too.”

“It was August,” Doris said. “She and her mama had been here for nearly five months by then. She’d had lots of time to practice.”

“Yes, and she knew that if she got herself stuck in it between floors, then it would mean a full afternoon’s work for three or four men. She liked that, and they’d pull her out every time, her face wet with tears and promising she didn’t know how she’d done it and she’d never do it again.”

“That child couldn’t keep a promise for love or money.”

“She liked breaking things.”

“Anyway, she got it stuck between the second and third floors on a Saturday afternoon. Screaming and carrying on she was, and her mother standing at the elevator doors on the third floor, calling down to her to be brave.”

“Mrs. Dennys was white as a sheet. But, see, the only one who really understood how to make the elevator work was a young man named Colin Ricks. He was the hotel handyman—nice young man and clever with his hands. Collie Ricks loved that elevator like a baby, and he’d got to the point where he could get Mary Anne out of it in maybe an hour, although it’d take him another three to get it running again.”

“He didn’t like Mary Anne Dennys one little bit,” Doris said.

“And who can blame him? But anyway, what Mary Anne didn’t know, when she did whatever it was that she did to the elevator, was that it was Collie’s afternoon off.”

“He’d gone into Herrenmouth to play pool. So they had to send somebody into town after him, and they couldn’t find him right away—”

“You’ve got it backwards again, Doris,” Carrie said patiently, as if she had to correct Doris at this point every time they told the story. Possibly she did. “The trouble was that Collie
said
he was going to play pool, but he was really going to see Katy Dempsey, one of the local Jezebels. So they couldn’t get ahold of Collie until he showed up at the pool hall, and by then Mary Anne had already been in that elevator for two hours.”

“She’d quit screaming after the first three-quarters of an hour, although she was still shouting rude things up at her mama from time to time. It was about the time that Collie was getting back to the hotel that she called up and said she was frightened.”

“Nobody believed her. By that time everyone in the hotel knew Mary Anne wasn’t frightened of anything from a spanking to eternal damnation. But she said she was frightened, and she
sounded
frightened.”

“Her mama asked her what she was frightened of, and she said she didn’t know.”

“Collie came up then, mad as a hornet, and he started in yelling at Mrs. Dennys about why couldn’t she keep an eye on her hellborn brat and more of the same, with poor Mrs. Dennys getting paler and paler and shakier and shakier. And then Mary Anne started screaming.”

“Really screaming.”

“She wasn’t faking. You can tell the difference, and nobody screams like that if they don’t mean it. Collie took off like a rocket, racing up to the attic where all the machinery is, and he got that elevator unstuck in maybe half an hour.”

“Mary Anne stopped screaming after ten minutes.”

“She was dead when they opened the doors.”

“No sign of what killed her.”

“Just some scratches on her hands and face, and she might have got those trying to get out.”

“They had an autopsy, and they didn’t find a thing.”

“One of the maids told me her brother worked for the county morgue, and he said the coroner said the little girl just plain died of fright.”

“And me and Carrie, we’ve been wondering ever since what could have scared Mary Anne Dennys that bad.”

“Hard as nails, that girl.”

Carrie cocked her head. “Doris, I think we’re frightening Mr. Booth.”

“No, no,” I said feebly.

“Just don’t go in the elevator, and you’re fine,” Doris said. I could tell she meant to be comforting.

“How many others . . . ”

“Oh, nobody like Mary Anne,” Carrie said. “There have been a couple of heart attacks, I think, but nobody’s died.”

“Not since Mr. Nelson,” Doris said.

“You’re right, Doris. I was forgetting Mr. Nelson.”

“He was here with his wife. He screamed, too, like Mary Anne.”

“Stay out of the elevator,” Carrie said.

“Thank you, I will,” I said. And since they were frightening me and I was feeling shaky, I thanked them for their patience and crawled up to bed. I stood in front of my door for some minutes, looking down the hall toward the elevator, but nothing in the world could have made me go near it.

Wednesday morning in the garden, Mr. Ormont approached me. “Good morning, Mr. Booth.”

“Good morning, Mr. Ormont,” I said. He was fiftyish and stout, with exophthalmic blue eyes and white wispy hair. I had read his volumes of poetry—
The Velvet Phoenix
,
The Ambassador of Night
,
Roses for Horatio
—and admired them very deeply. The second or third time I had been placed next to him at dinner, I had worked up all my courage and told him so. He had seemed pleased, but that had been the extent of our conversation. I hoped he knew that I listened when he spoke about books with Mrs. Whittaker, but no matter how much I wanted to, I could not find the nerve to join in.

“May I walk with you?” he asked.

“Er . . . if you wish,” I said.

We walked maybe thirty yards in silence before he said, “Mr. Marten tells me you’ve been archiving his records for him.”

“I . . . I suppose so,” I said. “I’ve been trying.”

“Have you found anything of interest?”

“I . . . well, it depends on what you mean by ‘interest.’ ”

“I have stayed here three times, and on each occasion, something odd has happened.”

“Odd?” I said, thinking of Doris and Carrie’s inexhaustible well of “oddness.”

“Odd,” said Mr. Ormont. He was looking at a topiary rabbit. “The first time, when I was a boy, I came here with my mother, who had been advised to see if the waters would do anything for her liver. They would not, and she died the next year. That was before Mr. Marten’s time, of course. The place was run by a married couple. I have forgotten their names . . . ”

“Victor and Selena Thackeray.”

“Thank you, yes. I knew it was something like that, but I wanted to say Wordsworth. In any event, near the end of the month which we stayed, one of the chambermaids killed herself. Her name was Jemima Kell. She hanged herself in the conservatory and left a letter, which I heard about by hiding under one of the sofas in the parlor. In the letter she confessed that she had been, ahem, submitting to the virile affections of Mr. Thackeray for several months. She was afraid to leave the hotel, knowing that they wouldn’t give her a character, but, she said, she couldn’t bear Mrs. Thackeray coming to her bedroom at night to revile her. She’d been waiting and waiting to be turned off, and it wasn’t happening, and she couldn’t stand the waiting any longer, so she chose suicide instead. The odd part,” and he turned his head to look at me, “is that Mrs. Thackeray had not the slightest idea that her husband was disporting himself with the maids. Not so much as an inkling. She left him that same night—or, rather, she was carried out the front door by her brother, herself being in strong hysterics.”

He was waiting for a response. I said, “But if she didn’t know . . . ”

“Exactly. Who was whispering poison in Jemima Kell’s ears? No one ever came forward, although of course I don’t imagine that the culprit would.”

“No,” I said faintly, “I imagine not.”

“The second time was only five years ago.”

“What happened five years ago?” I had not found anything, except for a consumptive girl who seemed to have succumbed to her disease rather more swiftly than anyone had expected.

“Nothing too alarming—at least, no one died. It was just that I kept seeing a young man in the garden. I walked a great deal, as you do. And I would see a man, young, dark, always on a different path than mine, always heading off at an angle from where I was going. I never saw him near to, and I never got a good look at his face.”

“And there were no dark young men staying at the hotel.”

“Exactly. I have been looking for him this time, but I have not seen him.”

“ . . . Perhaps he found who he was looking for.”

“Perhaps.” He gave me a look like an owl’s, the round eye under the steep, tufted eyebrow. “But you see, I am not the sort of man around whom supernatural events occur. Those two things, and now our poltergeist, are the only paranormal activity—if I have the phrase correct—that I have ever witnessed. And so the question has crossed my mind, is it perhaps something about the hotel?”

“Perhaps,” I said unhappily.

“What have you found, Mr. Booth?”

“Odd things, Mr. Ormont.” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “People tend to die here—I suppose, in a way, that isn’t surprising, as this is a convalescent hotel. I almost . . . that is, I could easily have died here myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, and . . . and the people who do die here often aren’t the people you’d expect. Carrie and Doris told me . . . there was a man named Ampleforth who died last year. I found his name in the register, and it said . . . that is, he was here for ‘nerves.’ ”

“A convenient umbrella. I am here for ‘nerves’ myself.”

“Yes, but it’s not the sort of thing one dies of . . . generally.”

“Not without some forethought, no.”

It was a grim way of putting it. I said, “And that’s what’s odd. Mr. Ampleforth didn’t commit suicide. He simply died.”

“How simply?”

“They . . . they found him dead one morning when he didn’t come down to breakfast. Mr. Marten kept the clippings of the inquest, and no apparent cause of death was found. They put ‘heart failure.’ ”

“Which we all die of, yes, I see.”