by Ann Charles
Taking a deep breath, I knocked on his hotel suite door. “Cornelius, we’re here,” I called through the door, trying to give him a heads up that he had company—the ones I’d called to remind him about last night. “We brought your protein shake.”
A few seconds passed and then the lock clicked and the door opened wide. Cornelius was dressed in his usual Abe Lincoln Jr. garb, which included the stovepipe hat and a cane along with a dark wool suit. For once, I was happy to see his eccentric clothing choice. Maybe today wouldn’t end with a ghost-inspired murder after all.
As we stepped inside of his suite, I sighed in relief. The place had been cleaned up and spit-shined, made ready for the camera. It even appeared that his paranormal gadgets and monitors had been dusted off.
In the morning light I studied Cornelius without being obvious, checking to see how he compared to his suite. He looked like Cornelius on the outside, but upon closer inspection, his cornflower blue eyes were slightly dilated and shifty, his skin more waxen than pale, and his movements were wooden. A life-sized Pinocchio minus the strings and telling nose. Prudence would have had fun playing with yet another puppet had she been here.
Dickie and Honey immediately kicked into high gear, scouting for good lighting locations, discussing the script, outlining where else in the hotel they wanted to shoot before the day was out. I stood back and watched, happy to have only to stand in front of the camera and talk. The sight of Ray Underhill breezing into the suite made me groan. Had it been too much to hope he’d skip his job of “coaching” me on the set today? Apparently so, because he was now eyeing my outfit with a disgusted frown on his face.
“Why are you wearing that?” he whispered when he joined me, glaring at my purple dress suit. “Jerry wanted you in pink today.”
Jerry wanted me in pink every damned day. That man’s obsession with pink should be analyzed one of these days. “Too bad. I got toothpaste on the pink dress.” The toothpaste had actually blended in with the white polka dots, but I was happy to have an excuse to wear a different color and not look like a made-up 1950’s housewife today.
“Honey is supposed to know about any wardrobe changes in advance.”
“Honey told me the purple would look great on camera, so quit your bitching about my outfit and find something else to nag me about already.”
When he couldn’t come up with anything other than a bluster or two, I rolled my eyes and walked to the other side of the suite, joining Cornelius. “How are you feeling?”
He glanced at the TV show’s host. “Ready to shine along with my haunted hotel.”
“I mean how are you really feeling?” I spoke quietly through the side of my mouth.
“She cut my arm,” he whispered back, pulling his sleeve up enough to show me the edge of the white bandage.
“I heard.”
“First she broke my horn, Violet, and now this.” His hand trembled as he sipped on his protein shake.
“We’ll find you another horn.”
“I’ve only ever read about ghosts who could cause actual injuries. I thought it was an exaggeration.”
“You’ve never witnessed one yourself?” I was a little surprised after what his cousin had experienced.
Cornelius shook his head. “We need to take care of this soon before she grows even stronger and cuts deeper.”
I agreed. “Do you think you can hold it together today?”
He didn’t answer for a few seconds, and then tugged on his goatee. “The question is, can she hold it together being around you all day?”
“You tell me. You’re the one she’s chatty with.”
He pushed his hat up, rubbing his forehead wearily. “I hope so. She’s been quiet since you arrived.”
“Is that a good thing or bad thing?”
“We’ll see.”
For the next hour, we tested lighting, sound, and lines. After that, Dickie started with his piece about the hotel. Next, Cornelius and I did another test run, and then we were on. I noticed a slight shake in Cornelius’s hands at one point, but he seemed to regain control and play his role as the eccentric hotel owner without a hiccup. I could tell he’d played before an audience in the past.
Around noon, Dickie decided he needed to change his outfit before moving down to the second floor for more filming. Cornelius had offered Honey and him the empty room across the hall for the day and they disappeared into it along with Ray, closing the door behind them.
While Rad and his camera headed downstairs to check out the location, Rosy moved into the kitchen to review some of the morning’s filming. The last time she’d filmed in town she’d lost footage while in the Carhart house and now made a habit of double-checking scenes before leaving a location.
Cornelius sat down heavily on one of his bar stools. I took the one next to him, careful not to crease or stain my outfit while chowing down a protein bar and some fruit.
“Violet,” he said, opening one of the protein bars I’d offered him. He looked out the window where clouds had darkened the November sky. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you like clowns?”
“Clowns? Not really, why?”
He finished off the bar before answering. “I keep having this dream about—”
“Uh, Violet,” Rosy said from the kitchen. Her high, fluttery tone made Cornelius and me both frown in her direction. “You might want to come take a look at this.”
I joined her with Cornelius following. “What’s wrong? Am I too purple today?” I tried to joke, but the wide-eyed look she shot me made it fall flat as soon as it left my lips.
She pushed a couple of buttons on her camera and then pointed down at a display. “Watch.”
I bent closer to get a good view of the screen. I was giving my lines about the role The Old Prospector Hotel had played in the past while Cornelius stood close by, adding a bit about the mirror exploding during a séance he’d had—one of his roundtable gatherings before I’d gotten into the game.
“It’s coming,” Rosy said from behind me.
One moment I stood alone, smiling into the camera. The next, I wasn’t alone anymore.
I gasped, stepping back, bumping into Rosy.
She steadied me and then hit the pause button. She pointed at the screen. “Who’s that?”
Next to me stood a hazy figure, semi-visible from the waist up. She had blonde pigtails, a white dress, and came to my shoulders.
“Wilda Hessler,” Cornelius said without hesitation. When I glanced back at him, he added, “She’s the girl in my dreams.”
More like nightmares.
“Why is she staring up at Violet like that?” Rosy asked. “Is she trying to get her attention?”
More like kill me. Chills crept up my spine, spreading across my shoulder blades.
Cornelius held his finger over the play button. “Do you mind?” he asked Rosy.
“You think there’s more?”
“I fear there will be.”
I wished he wouldn’t use that haunted house voice when we were talking about real ghosts.
The three of us practically butted heads as we watched the playback. Wilda stood watching me as I repeated the scripted lines Mona had written for me.
“That’s sort of creepy,” Rosy whispered.
More than sort of. I had goosebumps running up and down and all over town. I glanced around us. Was Wilda still standing next to me now? Was she watching the show along with us or still glaring at me?
I was trying to get over the idea of her standing next to me on the screen when she turned toward the camera. Where her eyes and mouth should have been were dark fuzzy circles, making her face look like a skeleton in pigtails.
“Holy fuck!” Rosy whispered. “She’s looking at the camera.”
“Or you,” Cornelius said.
“That’s some creepy-ass shit.”
We all leaned closer, watching as one.
Wilda suddenly
rushed the camera and shoved something up in front of the lens.
Rosy screeched and jerked back. I choked on my breath. Cornelius covered his eyes.
And just as quickly as Wilda had appeared, she was gone. The scene returned to Cornelius and me talking about the hotel.
I pulled Cornelius’s hands away from his eyes.
Rosy hit the fast forward button and the show played on, twice as fast but still visible. Wilda didn’t reappear. When the recording was done, the screen went black.
She stopped the playback. “Wow,” she said, stepping back with her arms wrapped tight around her midsection like she was trying to hold something inside. “That was pretty warped. Have you two ever seen anything like that before?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Cornelius answered just as quickly.
“What was that she shoved in front of the camera?” I asked. It had been a blur at the time, but I remembered some red and white and yellow on whatever it was.
“Do you want me to play it back again?”
“No!” Once was too much.
“It’s a half-melted clown doll,” Cornelius said, knowingly. When I shot him a how-do-you-know look, he shrugged. “I’ve seen it in my dreams. The face is half-melted off and the hair is completely gone on that side. It looks like it was in a fire.”
As in the Hessler house fire? The very one I’d caused when I’d inadvertently knocked a candle over in a room filled with dead girls coated in lighter fluid? Had I burned up one of Wilda’s favorite dolls? Was this rage about a stupid, damned doll? No, it had to be bigger than that, didn’t it?
“I need to splash some water on my face.” Rosy fanned her red cheeks and glistening forehead. “For some reason, I’m overheating all of a sudden.”
I wondered if Wilda had something to do with that, too.
As soon as Rosy closed the bathroom door, I turned to Cornelius. “Is that why you asked me if I like clowns?”
“Yes. I keep seeing that clown doll in my dreams and wondered what it has to do with you.”
I was afraid I knew what it had to do with me. Wilda was sending me a message with that clown, and it wasn’t that she was happy to see me. I’d burned her clown and her house, and I’d killed her brother. She wanted revenge.
The urge to run out of the hotel had my feet tingling, but I owed it to Cornelius to stay the course today and as long as needed to free him from her monomaniacal fixation.
The rest of the day’s filming went as planned, no more creepy little girl ghost and her half-burned doll. But I did keep watching around me, wondering if she were there. Not even Ray’s nitpicking could distract me from worrying about Wilda and her macabre doll.
After we’d wrapped for the day, I bid Cornelius farewell after expressing my concern for him several times, which he waved off. He informed me he was going to sleep in the hotel across the street again tonight for a change of scenery and pushed me out of his suite with instructions to call him at precisely nine-twenty-eight tomorrow morning. I left on the comforting note that Cornelius was still his peculiar self under his tired mask.
I headed down the quiet hall, wondering if Rosy was going to show the footage with Wilda to Dickie and Honey tonight. She’d come out of the restroom earlier still pretty flushed and had seemed jumpy the rest of the afternoon, like me. As she’d packed up her equipment, I’d told her to call me if needed, giving her a look that made her nod in understanding.
I hit the elevator down-arrow, checking my phone for messages. Mona had called, so had Nat, but nothing from the cops or Doc. I was looking down at my phone when the elevator doors opened and I stepped inside, pulling up Mona’s message first. When the doors closed, the lights flickered. I frowned up at the fixture just as it blinked off.
My heart rocketed into outer space, where the darkness and silence were probably similar to where I stood at the moment. What happened to the light and why wasn’t the elevator moving? Were the elevator motor and the lights hooked up to the same electrical source? Then I remembered that I’d been so intent on pulling up Mona’s message that I’d forgotten to hit the button for the lobby.
I turned on the flashlight feature on my phone and shined it on the buttons, tapping the one for the lobby two floors below. The button lit and the elevator started descending slowly, the motor droning in the darkness.
I shined the flashlight overhead at the dark light fixture, remembering how it had flickered earlier when I’d ridden up with Dickie and Honey. I’d have to let the front desk clerk know about it before I left.
“Violet,” someone whispered in my ear, so close I could feel the poof of hot breath.
I gasped in surprise, fumbling with my phone before dropping it. The flashlight went out, leaving me in a darkness lit only by the faint glow of the first floor button.
Shit. I held my right hand over my pounding heart as my eyes tried to adjust to the dark. Had I really heard my name, or was my mind playing tricks on me?
Something bit into my forearm.
I screeched and whirled around, searching the shadow-filled corners as I clutched my arm. What in the hell was that?
The corners were too shadow-filled for me to see, so I moved closer to the dim light from the lobby button. Where was my phone? I tried to scan the floor for it, but it was too dark to see anything below my knees.
The elevator slowed to a stop. A rush of relief filled my legs, making them wobbly and weak. A ding sounded outside the doors. I backed up against them, keeping my eyes on the shadow-thick corners, wishing the damned doors would hurry up and open.
The lights overhead flickered on, the sudden brightness making me recoil.
Then I saw my phone. It rested on the handrail that lined the opposite wall. Next to it, with its legs splayed over the rail, was the half-burned clown doll I’d seen earlier in the video playback.
It took a second for me to remember to breathe.
Why weren’t the doors opening?
I had a feeling it had something to do with that clown and the little girl who’d been holding it earlier.
Stepping forward, I reached as far toward my phone as I could without one foot leaving the doors. My hand trembled as it neared the phone. My gaze moved to that damned clown in case it decided to come to life and go all Chucky the killer doll on me. As soon as I grasped my phone, a cackle of clown laughter filled the elevator. I cried out and plastered myself back against the doors, which were now opening, thank God.
“Wilda,” I said over the cackling while backing out of the elevator, “leave Cornelius alone.”
The cackling stopped as suddenly as it had started.
As the elevator doors started to close, the light flickered out again. From out of the darkness I heard two words spoken in a high, scratchy voice: Kill her.
Chapter Thirteen
After joy-riding in an elevator with a bitter ghost and her freaky-ass clown doll, I drove straight home. I wasn’t even going to try to keep from giggling hysterically in front of my coworkers for the last hour of the day and called in to say that I had a stress headache and would be in tomorrow morning.
I checked my arm every other minute on the ride home, looking for teeth marks, but nothing ever showed up—no indentations, no bruises, not even a single red mark. Maybe I was starting to crack up.
When I pulled into Aunt Zoe’s drive, I groaned at the sight of Jeff Wymonds’s pickup and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. “Oh, hell. Not this. Not tonight.”
Before I’d even opened the door of my SUV, Harvey stepped down from the porch, followed by Jeff. The two approached, waiting for me to join them. Judging from Harvey’s smartass grin, there’d be no skirting Jeff and the subject of counter-top sex.
I grabbed my purse and braced myself for the late afternoon cold breeze and Jeff’s crass mouth.
“Looking good, Violet Parker,” Jeff spoke before my feet touched the ground.
“Is Kelly here?” I asked, my fingers crossed that Jeff’s reasoning f
or hanging out on my doorstep had nothing to do with his sexual escapades.
“Nope. I came to talk about what happened the other day.”
So much for finger-crossing. I wrinkled my nose. “I’d rather not go there.”
Harvey snorted.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked the old goat.
“Listenin’ over yer back fence ‘bout what happened the other day.”
“I told him how you stopped by and watched me getting busy with my girlfriend.” Jeff made a crude gesture with his index finger and closed fist, as if reliving it in my head wasn’t enough torture. “And now you won’t take my phone calls.”
I wrinkled my upper lip along with my nose. “I wasn’t watching you, Jeff.”
“Sure you weren’t.” He winked exaggeratedly at me.
I resisted the urge to pop him in the eye and started walking up the sidewalk toward the house. I needed something to take the edges off of this day—fast.
Jeff caught up with me. “There’s nothing wrong with liking to watch, Violet.”
I whirled on him, glaring holes through his thick skull. “I was not staring at you and your girlfriend because I was getting my rocks off, Jeff. I was in shock. You weren’t supposed to be home. Your truck wasn’t in the drive.”
Harvey joined us, his grin now bridging his earlobes.
“My truck was hidden in the garage. We like to sneak in a nooner every now and then for a little excitement.” He moved in close enough for me to see a line of blond stubble he’d missed on his neck. “Speaking of making it more exciting,” the glint in his eyes made my defenses raise their shields, spears at the ready. “My girlfriend said it made her really horny to have you watching us.” He held up three fingers and wiggled his eyebrows.
Harvey whistled. “That’s a hat trick.”
“Blech!” was all I could think to say.
“We were wondering if you wouldn’t mind stopping by again tomorrow say around twelve-thirty-ish for another ‘surprise’ visit? Maybe leave your hair down and look all wild and sexy this time.”
