An Unwanted Guest

by Shari Lapena

  He’s been still now for some moments and he knows they’re all watching. He grabs the porch handrail and looks down. There’s a thick coating of ice on the wooden stairs and he steps carefully, holding on firmly to the rail. It’s very slippery, but he makes it to the bottom of the three steps without incident and stands there. He’s beginning to wonder what he’s doing out here. He starts walking—not walking, walking is impossible—but sliding his feet along the ice, trying to keep his center of balance low. It’s like walking after Teddy on the ice rink at hockey when he was little, just after the rink was flooded, only the rink was flat, and this ice slopes all over the place.

  Without warning, Henry’s feet go right out from under him in spectacular fashion and he lands heavily on his back, winded, not twenty feet from the front porch. He lies there trying to get his breath back, wheezing loudly, looking up at the clouds, feeling like a fool. He hears the front door open behind him. That will be his wife, telling him to come back in.

  But before she can say anything there’s a frightful cracking sound overhead. He turns his head toward the tree. His heart jumps in his chest as he realizes what’s going to happen. He closes his eyes as part of a branch comes down and lands with a shudder no more than a few feet away. He slowly reopens his eyes.

  That branch could have killed him.

  Unable to get back up on his feet, Henry crawls and slides on all fours back to the front porch and then hauls himself to standing at the front steps using the handrail.

  The front door is wide open, and everyone is looking at him, alarmed. They practically pull him back inside the hotel.

  Once he’s regained his composure, his wife says, “If you want something to do, you can go help Bradley try to clear the walk out to the icehouse.” He looks back at her in annoyance and she adds, “He told me there aren’t any trees there. It should be relatively safe.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Candice feels rather sorry for Henry, who is clearly frustrated at being trapped here. Most of them seem to feel that way. Either longing to get out, like Henry, or hanging listlessly about, like Ian and Lauren.

  She’s got plenty to do—as long as her battery holds up—and plenty here to interest her. She wanders over to Dana’s body to have another look. She can feel the others’ eyes on her, disapproving, as she lifts the sheet. This time she looks more carefully at the head injury, and then at the blood on the stair, and her heart beats a little faster at what she sees. Then she wanders back to the fireplace and stands in front of it for a moment, lost in thought, warming her hands. She really can’t afford to let herself be distracted by this. But she suspects that someone murdered that poor girl.

  Lauren startles her out of her thoughts by asking, “What kind of book are you working on?”

  Candice smiles a little evasively. “Oh—I don’t like to talk about it. I never talk about what I’m working on until it’s finished,” she says apologetically. “I find it just sucks all the energy out of the project.”

  “Oh,” Lauren says. “I thought writers always liked to talk about what they were working on.”

  “Not me,” Candice replies.

  Gradually the guests begin to leave the lobby, scattering in different directions, subdued by the tragedy that has occurred in their midst. Bradley had brought a couple of oil lamps and some matches and left them on the coffee table, but most of them opt to use the flashlight app on their iPhones to help them find their way up the dark staircase and around the unlit corridors upstairs. It’s unnervingly dark once you leave the first floor, where the windows across the front of the hotel let in daylight.

  It’s time to get to work. Candice skirts the corpse and trudges up the staircase to her room on the third floor. The corridor is lit only by the rather small windows at each end, and it is dark and gloomy, made even more so by the dark carpet and dull wallpaper. Candice supposes that all the bedrooms have windows—hers certainly does—and that if the drapes are pulled back, there will be enough light for most purposes, but probably not enough to read easily.

  Upstairs, it’s colder. The large fire in the lobby makes it undoubtedly the most hospitable place to be, if you are able to ignore the presence of the dead body. But most of the guests seem to have gone back up to their rooms, badly spooked.

  Candice finds her room too cold, too gloomy, and too dark for her liking. She returns downstairs carrying her laptop and discovers the library. She searches out Bradley, finds him in the dining room clearing things away, and asks him to build a fire in the library for her. Bradley looks a bit harried and harassed. It must be difficult, Candice thinks, to keep a hotel going while short staffed during a power failure.

  “I thought I heard you were shoveling the path to the icehouse,” she says, as they walk to the library.

  He smiles at her briefly. “Yes, but I’ve got Henry helping with that now. It’s tough going but he’s having some luck with the snow blower.”

  She follows Bradley into the library. She longs to complain about the awful position the power failure has put her in, but she doesn’t want to burden him any further. And she is aware of how petty it would be, when there’s a young woman dead, and there may be people out there in real jeopardy from this storm.

  Still. There is no question the power outage is causing her great inconvenience. She came up here to work, and she can’t work without a functioning laptop. She has only a few hours of battery left at most. She may be reduced to writing with a ballpoint pen, wrapped in a blanket. It’s not what she imagined. She thinks of her mother trapped in her bed, and wonders if her sisters are taking care of her the way they should.

  She settles herself into a comfortable armchair by the crackling, spitting fire, thanks Bradley profusely, and asks him to bring her a hot cup of tea when he gets a chance. Then she opens her computer. But it’s a while before she can stop thinking about Dana, and get down to work.

  Saturday, 9:15 a.m.

  Gwen had found breakfast in the dining room—which she couldn’t help comparing unfavorably to the delightful breakfast experience promised to her in the Mitchell’s Inn brochure—excruciating. She only managed to eat half a muffin, without tasting it.

  David hadn’t approached her, but Riley had been standing beside her oozing a fierce protectiveness. Or maybe it was because he was distracted by what had happened to Dana. Gwen knew he was concerned about Matthew. She didn’t really give a shit what Riley thought, but she hadn’t liked the idea of Riley grabbing her arm if she tried to walk over to David, and creating a scene. Riley was unpredictable. When David left the dining room, Gwen decided she would find him later, when she had the possibility of a little privacy.

  She couldn’t help thinking about him. Just a few hours earlier he’d been touching her, loving her.

  They’d wandered out to the lobby and watched Henry make a fool of himself on the icy lawn. Then Riley had suggested the two of them explore the hotel together. Gwen showed her the library, then they went into the sitting room next to the library. It was quite charming, with an array of plump chintz sofas and chairs and low tables and an oil portrait of a woman over the fireplace.

  “Shall we stay here?” Gwen suggested, rubbing her hands along her arms for warmth. But Riley was restless and wanted to keep looking around. They explored the little corridor off the lobby and came to the bar.

  “This is nice,” Riley says now, glancing around the bar approvingly. “I’ll make a fire for us here.”

  Of course she can start her own fire, Gwen thinks, watching her. She’s lived in Iraq, and Afghanistan, in the roughest of conditions. She wonders what else Riley can do that Gwen can’t. Drive a standard transmission. Treat a wound. Protect a source. Negotiate with terrorists. She realizes that Riley has never really shared any of these kinds of details with her; she probably thinks Gwen wouldn’t be able to handle it. Riley is the strangest collection of impressive
skills, fierce bravery, and now, a terrible, unpredictable fragility.

  Gwen is acutely aware of the bottles behind the bar and worries that Riley will want to get into them, even though it’s just past breakfast. She turns her back on the bar and wanders around the room, perusing the titles of the books shelved along the walls, studying the paintings.

  Suddenly Gwen finds herself thinking about the last year of journalism school, when everything changed for her. Riley knows what happened; she was there. She knows why Gwen thinks she doesn’t deserve to be happy. But Gwen knows that if she wants a chance with David, she must confront the past. She must face it and come to terms with it somehow.

  They were out one night at a party. There was a lot of drinking—it was the end of the year and everybody was tying one on because they would soon be graduating. Gwen witnessed a terrible crime. She watched three men rape a young woman. And she did nothing. Nothing at all.

  She remembers how she’d been up all the night before, finishing some assignment. She’d had a lot to drink, and needed to lie down. She found a bedroom—it was a house party—with a bed and a spare mattress on the floor. She crawled under some blankets on the mattress. Then a girl came crashing into the room, waking her up. It was dark, with only the light from the streetlight outside penetrating the room. Gwen recognized the girl—she was in some of her classes. She was trying to shrug some guy off, but he wasn’t having it. He started pulling off her clothes. Gwen was about to get up—she thought the two of them could make him stop—but then two more men came in and closed the door behind them. One of them propped a chair up under the doorknob so no one could open the door. Gwen was paralyzed with fear.

  The other girl screamed, but the music was so loud no one could have heard her. They held her down on the bed while they raped her. They were laughing. It all happened so fast. She hadn’t wanted them to know she was there. She was afraid they would do the same to her.

  They left the girl there, sobbing, on the bed. As soon as they were gone, Gwen threw up. She went over to see how the other girl was, but she’d passed out. Gwen turned her on her side so that she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit, and then she went to find Riley. And Riley told her she should have fought back.

  Riley has told her since then that she doesn’t think that anymore. When Gwen found Riley at the party and told her what had happened, they went up to see the girl together. Gwen told her she’d been in the room; the girl didn’t say anything, but Gwen could see the reproach in her eyes. She asked Gwen if she would be able to identify the men who raped her, and to corroborate her story. She’d told Riley that she thought she’d be able to recognize them, but the minute the girl put her on the spot, Gwen panicked. She didn’t want the responsibility. She told her that it was too dark, and that she couldn’t bear to watch, that she’d hid under the covers. That she wouldn’t be able to identify them. That she couldn’t help her.

  The girl wanted to press charges, but she didn’t want to do it without Gwen’s help. But Gwen didn’t help her, even though Riley urged her to. She told her that she couldn’t be a witness. She did nothing. She graduated and moved away and tried to forget about it. But she’s always been haunted by the thought that those college boys—whoever they were—are now grown men. And if they could behave that way once, they could do it again. She heard that the girl killed herself not long after. And Gwen’s been living with the guilt ever since.

  It has defined her, shaped her life. She’s a coward, someone who failed to do the right thing. She knows she no longer deserves any of the good things life has to offer.

  Riley has always judged her for it. Even now, years later, Riley’s generally holier-than-thou attitude infuriates her. She sometimes wonders if Riley did everything she should have done in all those war zones, whether she’d always done everything absolutely fucking morally perfectly. She wonders if Riley ever made a mistake, if she’d ever been afraid, all that time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Lost in her thoughts, she suddenly hears Riley suck in her breath with a loud gasp. She turns, startled, and sees Riley in the chair in front of the fire, her face drained of color.

  “Oh, no,” Riley says.

  “What?” Gwen’s alarmed at the visible change in Riley. “Are you all right?”

  “I knew I’d heard his name before.”

  Gwen turns away uneasily.

  “Come over here. Listen to me.”

  Gwen looks at her warily, and reluctantly goes and sits across from her.

  “I’ve just remembered who he is.” She leans forward and looks at Gwen intensely, genuine concern on her face.

  Now Gwen is starting to worry. Surely there’s nothing wrong with David. There can’t be.

  Riley says, “He’s the attorney who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife.”

  TWELVE

  Saturday, 10:00 a.m.

  James scrubs the frying pan in the big kitchen sink and ponders how to rejig things so that he can feed his guests adequately without any electricity. The refrigerator isn’t working. At least he can cook with the gas oven. But he’s without a dishwasher. Breakfast was easy enough—eggs and pastries, and nobody much felt like eating anyway, from what he could see, after that poor girl fell down the stairs.

  He’s lost his appetite too. He feels terrible for that man’s loss. And the whole thing makes him sick with anxiety. It’s the kind of situation every hotel owner loses sleep over—an accident in his hotel, a fatal accident at that. He has insurance, but Christ. What a thing to happen. He knows he’s not to blame. His carpets aren’t loose—he’d gone up to the landing and checked over that carpet himself the first chance he got. It was fine. She must have stumbled for no reason. There’s absolutely no way anyone can blame him or his hotel.

  He thinks again about how much she might have had to drink the night before. He’d asked Bradley, in the kitchen earlier when they were preparing breakfast.

  “Do you think she was drunk?” he asked him in a low voice. “Do you think that’s why she fell?”

  Bradley shook his head. “Don’t worry, Dad. She wasn’t drunk. I was serving, remember?”

  “But I had you put that bottle of champagne in their room, remember? Do you know if they drank it?”

  Bradley shook his head again. “I don’t know. I haven’t been in there this morning, David didn’t want me in there.”

  James chewed his lip, something he does when he’s worried, a habit he’s been trying to break. He hadn’t looked for the champagne bottle when he was in the room, hadn’t thought of it.

  “Dad, don’t worry,” Bradley repeated firmly. “You have nothing to worry about. She didn’t fall because she’d been drinking.”

  But James couldn’t help noticing that Bradley also seemed shaken by what had happened. He looked tired; there were rings under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept.

  “Were you up late last night?” James asked.

  “No,” Bradley said, picking up the trays. “I need to take these out.” Then he’d taken the muffins and croissants out to the dining room.

  James finishes with his frying pan and puts it on the drying rack. He wishes the power would come back on. He misses his bloody dishwasher. He wishes the police would get here and take the body away. He can’t believe he’s got to take care of almost a dozen people without electricity and that there’s a dead body at the foot of the grand staircase in his beloved hotel and he can’t do anything about it.

  Saturday, noon

  Lauren descends the staircase into the lobby, stepping with distaste around Dana’s body, Ian right behind her. It’s a rather horrible choice they all have to make—whether to use the creepy back staircase or the main one with the body at the bottom. When she looks up, the lobby is empty except for Candice, who hurriedly puts a book down on a side table and turns to face her. It’s Lauren’s book.

  “That’s mine,” Lauren sa
ys. “I thought I’d left that book down here.”

  Candice asks, “Do you know where Bradley is? I came out to ask him to bring me some hot tea.”

  “I can tell him if I see him, if you like,” Lauren says.

  “Oh, would you? And tell him to bring my lunch to the library. Thanks. I didn’t really want to bother his father in the kitchen.” Candice hurries away.

  Lauren watches her go.

  She sits down on the hearth of the lobby’s big stone fireplace and pulls Ian down beside her, trying to warm up while they wait for the others to appear and for lunch to be served. Lauren stares across the room at the front windows. She can’t stop thinking about it. Dana is dead, at the foot of the stairs. She avoids looking in that direction as best she can. “This is so terrible,” she whispers to Ian.

  “I know,” he agrees, beside her. He takes her hand, clasps it in his own. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

  She lightly kisses his cheek. Then she whispers, “I don’t see why she can’t be moved. Why do we have to wait for the coroner?”

  “It’s awful to leave her lying there,” Ian agrees.

  “Do you think someone might have pushed her?” Lauren whispers.

  “No, of course not. It must have been an accident. David’s an attorney—he’s just following procedure.” He adds, pushing a strand of her hair behind her ear, “Lawyers always think they know everything.” He glances over his shoulder at the body and says, “But if the police don’t get here soon, surely we can’t just leave her there. It’s too creepy.”