by Cat Winters
“She doesn’t look like she’s having much fun,” said Michael, now beside me, sipping his toddy.
“Do you see it?” I asked him.
“What?”
The name seemed so obvious to me, the letters almost fatter and taller than the ones surrounding it. Annoyance entered my voice. “Don’t you see it, Michael?” I pointed to the center of the name Cornelia. “It’s sitting right there. Nel.”
He squinted and leaned forward.
“It says, ‘Nel,’” I said again. “I recognize this photograph. I’ve seen it before.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m absolutely positive. I’m linked to this woman—I can feel it. It would make all the sense in the world, wouldn’t it? A girl, calling herself ‘Nell,’ swearing she came from the Great Plains, from a place called Yesternight . . .”
Michael’s face remained still, but his eyes shifted toward me.
“She’s why I’m here,” I said. “I’m certain of it.”
He swallowed with so much force I could hear the ripple in his throat.
“What is it?” I asked, stepping back. “Does that idea frighten you? Or . . . or are you debating whether I’ve gone off my rocker?”
His eyes softened. “Alice, you’re a prim and proper school psychologist. A kind woman. This battle-ax, however”—he pointed to Mrs. Gunderson—“sounds to have been a killer.”
“I am not prim and—”
I stopped myself, for Mrs. Harkey had reentered the room not more than four feet to our left. She carried two pewter trays, one smelling of oysters and catsup; the other, of eggs.
“I have oyster cocktails and ham and egg balls for everyone,” she announced, and she set the delicacies on a lace-covered table butted up against one of the chair rails.
Her husband abandoned his musical accompaniment, and for a moment, ghosts and somber carols, unnerving photographs and savage killings were all but forgotten as we assailed the food and piled small plates with towering stacks of appetizers. My stomach growled, whether from hunger or anxiety, I did not know.
Michael and I took our plates and forks to a salmon-pink settee at the center of the room, where we sat down together, side-by-side.
“I’m not simply a prim and proper school psychologist,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. “Or have you already forgotten what we just did upstairs?”
“I’m not saying that you couldn’t have been Mrs. Gunderson. It’s just that you don’t strike me as the reincarnation of a madwoman from the prairie. But if you feel as though you might have been her . . .”
“I do.”
Not more than a minute after I’d uttered that proclamation, Mr. Harkey took a swig of his toddy and said, “Well, then, dear guests. Would you care to learn more about the bloody past of the Hotel Yesternight?”
Michael and I shared a hesitant glance.
“Yes.” I nodded and sat up straight. “Please tell us as much about the history as you can. And there’s no need to embellish with theatrics. Just the plain facts will do.”
Our host broke into a smile. “You’re so entertaining, Mrs. Lind.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the plain facts are far more theatrical than anything I could ever make up.”
Once again, I peeked at Mrs. Gunderson’s photograph, wondering if she agreed.
Mrs. Harkey took a seat in a whitewashed rocking chair and didn’t take a single bite of her oyster cocktail, which she held in her lap in its frosted glass.
Her husband strolled into the middle of the parlor with his toddy in hand, and the echoes of his black shoes volleyed across the ceiling. Something banged against the house outside—presumably from the wind—which elicited from the fellow a cunning smirk that emphasized the youthful playfulness of his dark eyes. He looked like a Boy Scout, poised to regale us with ghost stories over a blazing campfire.
“Let’s begin this blustery Christmas Eve night,” he said, “by discussing precisely what happened inside these walls thirty years ago. Please steel your nerves for a tale of madness, of murders grisly and abhorrent.”
“Oh, Al,” said Mrs. Harkey under her breath with a frown of disapproval.
I lowered my fork back to the plate, for my appetite had soured, and my nose now rejected the smells of oysters, horseradish, and Worcestershire sauce, all intermingling with the sharp vinegar of the catsup. Michael crossed his legs and scooted an inch closer to me.
“Our story begins in Kansas City, Missouri,” said Mr. Harkey, his voice deeper, more serious and a little less stagy than before. He stepped in front of the fire, where the flames outlined his figure in an otherworldly orange glow. “In 1888, a Swedish-born shopkeeper named Frans Gunderson set off for Nebraska with a dream of building a hotel that would attract the merchants and businessmen traveling westward. Accompanying Frans was his young bride, Cornelia, also born in Sweden, a woman of solid build and strong character. She detested the idea of leaving behind her family, as well as the civilization of the city. But she was Frans’s wife, so leave she did.” He gulped down another swig of the golden drink, as if to punctuate that last statement.
Beside me, Michael ate ham and cheese balls with tidy jabs of his fork. I myself couldn’t eat one bite. I couldn’t move.
Mr. Harkey swallowed and licked his lips. “Frans threw his entire life’s savings into paying to have lumber hauled out to the middle of the prairie. He built a lavish inn that he named the Hotel Yesternight, and he purchased livestock and seeds for sustenance. But very few customers arrived. Money diminished. Frans sought work elsewhere, picking crops, building railroads . . . whatever he could do to supplement what little income they gained from the hotel. Cornelia stayed here and fought to keep the dirt and the rattlesnakes out of the house, as well as the snow and the rain and the wind. She cleaned and cooked and tended the vegetable garden, and she hosted the occasional guest, completely on her own, without a man or a weapon to protect her. She lost several unborn infants because of her fatigue and malnourishment.”
I squirmed, as did Michael.
“She lost hope,” continued Mr. Harkey. “Folks say the barbarity of the conditions, the long absences of her husband, the months spent entirely on her own in the middle of these vast grasslands, turned her stark, raving mad.”
“‘Prairie madness,’” I murmured under my breath.
“Yes!” Mr. Harkey touched his nose. “Precisely. From the years 1890 to 1895, individuals who had last been seen traveling in this direction suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth. Even Frans Gunderson disappeared, around 1892 or ’93. He had made trips into town for supplies every few months, but those trips abruptly stopped. People grew suspicious about the goings-on in this establishment. Sheriffs poked around the place. Cornelia kept the inn spotless, so no one ever spied even the smallest droplet of blood. She collected no records of her lodgers, so no one could link the names of the missing to the guests who had entered her hotel. No one smelled the decay of bodies or noticed odd holes dug into the ground. And yet people continued to go missing.”
Mr. Harkey peered at Michael and me through the dimming light. Beyond him in the rocking chair, his wife’s eyes shone in the firelight, while the rest of her face slipped into blackness. Wind blew down the chimney and snapped the fire about, and drafts pestered the flames in the lamps.
Mr. Harkey wrestled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his brow. “Cornelia Gunderson’s downfall came in 1895 when she attempted to murder a young man by the name of Nathaniel Stone, the grown son of a former Civil War major living in Bern, Kansas. Nathaniel was the only person to ever survive one of Mrs. Gunderson’s attacks. He became the sole witness to recount what happened within these walls, and I shall tell you what he said.”
I leaned forward on the settee.
“According to Nathaniel,” continued Mr. Harkey, “he checked into this hotel when traveling as a land surveyor. He found himself the only guest here, but such wa
s the case in several other inns in which he’d lodged during his travels. He slept in a bed in one of the upstairs rooms and noted nothing out of the ordinary . . . until Mrs. Gunderson burst into his quarters with a hammer raised above her head, yelling, ‘Stop spying on me! Stop spying!’”
My eyes widened, and a cold and agonizing attack of paralysis solidified my every muscle.
“The hammer came down upon Nathaniel’s head, once, twice, three times. He hollered and fought to stop her, and she whacked him yet again. Somehow, by some sort of miracle, young Nat pushed the massive woman aside, hard enough to knock her head into a wall. He ran out of this house and into the night, his skull bruised and badly bleeding.”
Mr. Harkey swallowed and fixed his gaze upon me alone, which made the muscles stiffen all the more. My chest flared with a suffocating pain that stole the breath from my lungs. He knows, I thought. He knows, he knows, he knows.
“Major Stone did not take kindly to the near-murder of his son,” said Mr. Harkey, still seeming to stare me down, although the light had grown so fragile, I couldn’t be sure who was looking at whom. “Nathaniel spent days in bed with a concussion, and when his father heard what happened, he loaded up his shotgun, mounted his horse, and came galloping over from Kansas. He stormed inside this house and shot Cornelia dead.”
I didn’t gasp. Or flinch. Or whimper. I took great pride in my composed reaction, as a matter of fact.
“Where did he shoot her?” I asked with the same tone of professionalism I employed whenever quizzing children in schoolhouses.
“Where in the house?” asked Mr. Harkey with a smile. “Or where on her body?”
“Both,” I said.
Our host took another drink before answering. “That’s hard to say.” He smacked his lips. “Some people claim a sheriff found her on the staircase. Others say she was killed in her bed, or out on the front porch, or even out by her line of laundry. Most people say that Major Stone shot her in the heart, but others insist that he blasted her straight through her head and her belly.”
“Oh, Al, really,” said his wife, sucking in her breath. “We still need to maintain appetites for dinner.”
“Sorry, Mabel.” He pulled at his collar. “Whatever the specifics, Major Stone ensured that the she-devil no longer breathed. He rode away and left her lying in a sea of her own blood. No one knows if she ever used more than just a hammer to kill her guests. To this day, no one even knows what she did with all of the bodies, but thirty-eight deaths have been attributed to the woman, including her husband’s.”
“No one ever found the bodies?” asked Michael.
Mr. Harkey shook his head. “After the woman’s death, authorities dredged the nearby lake, to no avail. They dug up the basement and excavated various other sites around the house, but, still, no one was ever found.” He squeaked his finger around the rim of his glass. “Mabel probably doesn’t want me mentioning this either, but cannibalism was suspected. Mrs. Gunderson lacked for food, after all. The darker legends suggest that she burned the bones and dined on her guests when she had trouble maintaining the livestock.”
I felt the pressure of Mrs. Gunderson’s eyes, watching us speak of her savagery from her photograph across the room.
“Did . . . did she have a nickname?” I asked, clasping a hand to my stomach.
“A nickname?” asked Mr. Harkey with a lift of his chin.
“Yes. You told me in the car that your grandmother went to school with her in Kansas City. Did she ever go by any pet versions of Cornelia?”
Mr. Harkey shrugged. “I’m not sure. Corn, maybe? Corny?” He chuckled. “I don’t know what a nickname for Cornelia would be.”
“Nell?” I asked.
“Maybe.” He smiled. “Yes, Nell sounds about right.”
Michael’s leg tensed next to mine.
Mrs. Harkey scooted forward in her chair with a swish of her satin skirt. “Why do you ask, Mrs. Lind? Do you possess information concerning Mrs. Gunderson?”
“No.” I laid my plate of food aside on the settee. “It’s just that—” I drew a breath that tasted rotten, like boiled vegetables. Like decay.
“Alice?” asked Michael, folding his right hand over the back of my left one. “Do you think . . . ? Is that what you meant by showing me the bullet hole mark? Did . . . did you know she’d been shot?”
“No, I didn’t know a thing about her before coming here today. I didn’t even know her name. Or . . . at least . . . I don’t believe that I did.” I strained my eyes to see Mrs. Gunderson’s photograph through the barriers of darkness and smoke. Candlelight reflected off the glass of the frame, but the face within hid in shadow.
Michael squeezed my hand “Do you truly think . . . ?”
“Do you think?” I asked, turning his way again.
“You said you experienced those nightmares . . . that you spoke often of this hotel . . .”
“Do you feel a connection to Cornelia Gunderson?” asked Mr. Harkey, stepping closer. “Are you Spiritualists, after all?”
“Should we tell them?” asked Michael.
“I don’t know.” I cradled my forehead in my free hand. “They might not understand . . . n-n-not without knowing what we’ve learned through Janie.”
“We’re reincarnationists, not Spiritualists,” said Michael without any further ado, to my shock. “We’ve come here to trace Alice’s connection to the hotel.”
“You have a connection?” asked Mr. Harkey, eyes shimmering. “Is that what you meant by taking an interest in this place since childhood?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to discuss such a thing if past lives seem ridiculous to you.”
“They don’t,” said his wife from the rocking chair. “We entertain guests who believe in just about everything. And when a person spends every single night of her life in the cold and miserable darkness of this house, surrounded by walls that have witnessed unfathomable horrors and violence . . .”
“Do you believe you were one of her victims?” asked Mr. Harkey, pressing his mug against his stomach.
“No.” I averted my eyes. “I’m embarrassed to admit this, but in my heart I feel . . .” I clenched my fingers around Michael’s sweating palm.
“You’re her,” said Mr. Harkey. “Aren’t you? Is that what you’re feeling?”
The fire sputtered with a suddenness that made my heart skip a beat.
“It . . . it would explain so much about me,” I said, and tears soon stung my eyes.
Mr. Harkey trod closer still, his visage a barely visible slip of white. “Do you know where she hid the bodies?”
At that, I gave a short laugh. Somehow, we’d jumped straight from testing the waters for the acceptance of reincarnation to rummaging around in my head for Mrs. Gunderson’s secrets. My eyes watered all the more. My temples ached. How desperately I wanted to answer his question, though—how I longed to solve my lifelong riddles and spring back into the car with a sense of completion, just as Janie did at the Rooks’ house.
I’m ready, she had said.
I’m ready.
I swallowed down a bitter taste. “Has anyone ever dug up the vegetable garden?”
Mr. Harkey straightened his neck. “No, not that I know of. Should we?”
“Perhaps. I’ve loathed the taste and smell of vegetables all of my life. I . . .”
Just eat them, Alice, Margery had said through her teeth at the Thanksgiving table, and, my, how those green and finger-like pods had reeked of rotted flesh.
My children are watching. They’ll wonder why they need to eat their vegetables and not you.
What’s wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you?
Should she die?
Should she live?
How many beatings did she give?
“Yes, perhaps you should check the garden.” I drew my fingers away from Michael’s, and a tear leaked out of my inner right eye. “They’re in there; they simply must be. As sure as I’m sitting in this r
oom, that’s where the bodies are buried. That . . . that . . .” I struggled to catch my breath; Michael pressed a supportive hand against my back. “Yes—that would explain absolutely everything.”
CHAPTER 30
Just as the Rooks had led Janie to Violet and Nelson’s log cabin, the Harkeys guided me to a back sitting room, where they excavated a collection of fine china from the velveteen depths of an old steamer trunk with dirt caked in the seams of leather straps.
“People say that Mrs. Gunderson feared getting robbed by her guests,” said Mrs. Harkey in a small voice. Upon a table, next to a stack of saucers, she rested a teacup painted in a pattern of rich blue ribbons. “Investigators found this trunk of her belongings buried behind the hotel in one of their searches for . . .” She gulped. “For skeletons.”
Both of the Harkeys added several more heirlooms to the table, and with utmost care, my fingertips caressed each looped handle of the fragile cups, each gilded edge of the white plates. Everyone watched as my hands explored those cold and beautiful portals to the past.
What a relief, I thought, to understand that it wasn’t I who wreaked havoc upon my own life. These flares of violence that awaken now and then are no more than residual traces of a personality long gone—ashes sprinkled across my memories. Only occasionally do they smolder with the heat of that old, lethal fire, but it has nothing to do with me as Alice Lind.
What an astronomical relief.
“Thank you,” I said to the Harkeys, with Michael at my side. “This collection helps immensely.”
“Do you feel certain?” asked Michael.
“Yes.” I picked up a pale-pink sugar bowl so fragile, I feared it might crack to pieces in my hands. “I believe I do.”
NO ONE TOUCHED the vegetables at dinner. Boiled cauliflowers, pickled beetroots, and mashed turnips—all harvested from the local soil—lay on the far edges of pearl-colored dishes. We all concentrated instead on the breaded mutton chops and roasted venison and brushed aside anything that had risen out of the earth.
“Never in my life,” said Mr. Harkey, with brisk slices of his knife through his mutton, “have I wanted to dig in a vegetable garden so desperately.”
