Which reminded her.
“Did you lock the basement?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I think. I’m pretty sure. I’ll check.”
Chapter 18
Katie wondered if she would ever have a decent night’s sleep in the Heritage Inn. Ever.
She was exhausted. The day had grown longer and longer and she still wasn’t sure how much actual sleep she had gotten last night. Somehow she doubted that, all told, it hadn’t been any longer than two hours before the ghost of Boris Vykroft had woken her up with his banging.
She was having the same problem tonight. Even after working herself to the bone today to keep her mind off the ghosts, and even with Riley’s strong arms around her, and the nice soft comforter tucked up to her chin, and her eyelids constantly drooping closed, she couldn’t sleep. Her brain was running a mile a minute and splitting off into a thousand different directions all at once.
Boris Vykroft’s ghost had been digging into that wall on purpose. In fact, his ghost had been making enough noise to wake her and Riley from a dead sleep. It struck her as strange that a ghost would draw that much attention to itself. It was almost like Boris wanted them in that basement, to find Anna’s body.
Why? Guilt, maybe. After all, he’d killed his wife. Maybe he wanted to make up for it by giving her a proper burial.
Katie gently slid herself out from under Riley’s arm so she could turn over onto her back. The pillow had gone flat under her head and she turned it around, shifted positions again, and then lay there with her eyes open as the minutes slid by.
The biggest question in all of this was the one that scared her the most. How did Anna’s body end up buried under her Inn? She had watched as the woman burned to death. It had been the most grotesque thing she had ever seen and she wanted nothing more than to rip the image from her brain but she knew for a fact that Anna had died on the other side of town, decades ago, in a fire that had destroyed a large part of Twilight Ridge.
Why was her corpse buried here?
Katie snuggled up against Riley’s side again. She was suddenly cold despite the warm night outside, and she wanted his body heat. She wanted to feel safe and protected. Not for the first time, she was so very glad that he had decided to stay with her and make a go of this place.
What would she do without him?
Pulling herself in closer, she kissed his bare shoulder. He murmured in his sleep. She kissed him again, longer and wetter, playfully licking at his skin. When his arm moved sleepily around her waist to pull her closer, she smiled. Yes. This was exactly what she needed. She needed the comfort that her man could give her.
Who needed sleep, when they were in bed with a man like this?
They had both been exhausted when they came to bed. Riley was in his pajama pants but Katie had dropped into bed in just her panties and bra, too tired to find a nightgown. Now she was glad she had because she could feel the tingle of his tight abs against her belly as she slid over him, legs straddling his waist, her hands playfully caressing his strong arms and shoulders and chest.
And...other things.
He smiled in his sleep, and his hands came to rest on her hips, right at the line of her undies, and she gasped in a breath as heat poured through her from his touch.
Leaning in, she dragged her tongue across his chest, tasting him and letting it drive her insane. She rocked her hips over his, pressing in, feeling his reaction to what she was doing even though he wasn’t fully awake yet.
Katie kissed his neck, and the rim of his ear, and she finally felt him waking up when she--
CLANG.
She slumped against Riley, just holding onto him while he started snoring softly again and she strained her ears to listen, hoping the noise would just go away.
“Please, God,” she whispered, “make it stop so I can go back to blowing my boyfriend’s mind.”
Either God wasn’t listening, or Katie was becoming the butt of some cosmic joke, because the tapping sound came again, and again. Just like it had last night when she and Riley had gone downstairs to find a ghost breaking through their wall to expose a dead woman’s grave.
Angrily, she pushed herself out of bed and went to her dresser to pull on jeans and an oversized sweater. She stuffed her feet into her shoes and grabbed both flashlights off the side table where they’d left them for easy access.
Before she left the room she turned back to Riley. She really should wake him up. Just the thought of going down into the basement again was making her heart race, and not in the good way like it had been a minute ago.
Finally she pressed her lips together tightly and decided to let him stay in bed. At least one of them should get some sleep tonight. Besides. Anna’s body was gone. There was no reason for Boris to be here anymore. This time, it had to actually be the pipes.
It was a convincing lie she told herself. At the back of her mind Katie kept telling herself that she couldn’t be scared of every sound the Inn made a noise. This place belonged to her. She had to be able to take control of it, and not let it control her.
Before she left she remembered to grab the ring of keys so she could unlock the basement door.
The Inn was always so silent at night. She was quiet as she could be on the way downstairs. Maybe she’d just lucked out with her first guests. Maybe the next time she’d be playing host to a bunch of rowdy tourists who wanted to stay up all night and party and trash their rooms. Until that happened, she was going to count her blessings.
As she came around the check-in desk Katie shifted one flashlight to the crook of her arm and fumbled through the keys on the ring until she found the small silver-colored one that would open the deadbolt.
Only, the deadbolt was already unlocked, and the door was already open.
Katie stared at it. Did she lock it before they went to bed? Well, no, she supposed she hadn’t locked it last night but they’d locked it up after the State Police were finished down there yesterday. It was locked. She knew it was locked.
At least, she thought it had been locked.
Putting the keys back in her pocket, she turned on both flashlights, one in each hand, holding them gangster style. The lights were on down there, and it was bright in the basement, but she remembered what had happened last time. She wasn’t going to take any chances.
Ka-chank.
It was the same sort of sound from before. The same noise of something metal banging on stone. It couldn’t be. Damn it, this couldn’t be happening a second time.
She took a single step down the stairs.
The sound of whispering came to her, echoing around the basement. She could only hear fragments, broken words that had no meaning but kept repeating over themselves.
She took another step.
When she was low enough on the stairs, she took a deep breath, and held it, and forced herself to find the courage to duck under the ceiling and look around the basement, her flashlights spearing everywhere.
There was motion over by the wall, where stone and dirt were still piled from the excavation of Anna’s grave.
Someone--something--stood there, talking in a low, hushed voice.
Katie took another step...
She stumbled as her foot hit the edge of a riser the wrong way and then she was dropping down the last few stairs to the bottom and barely catching her balance on a set of shelves before she fell flat on her face. Both of her flashlights dropped. She heard the sound of glass breaking and one of them went dark.
The figure she had seen over at the wall moved. It whirled toward her, and then it was racing across the space between, around the empty shelves, heading right for her.
Katie tensed, ready to spring up the stairs again.
Then it was on her. It was a man. Someone she recognized.
“Katie, are you all right?”
Jason Maldeeves. Her guest looked sheepish about being caught here in the basement.
With a heavy sigh, Katie sat down on the bottom steps, a
nd let herself breathe. Not a ghost. Just a man obsessed with them.
There, she told herself. You were worried about nothing.
Still, her heart didn’t stop hammering in her chest until several minutes later.
Chapter 19
Katie spent the next fifteen minutes reading Jason the riot act for being down here, when he knew this part of the Inn was off limits.
He apologized over and over, explaining that he had only wanted to see where the body had been buried, and hopefully catch a glimpse of a ghost, and he hadn’t meant to be so noisy but he’d accidentally knocked over some things and he might have broken something and if she just wanted to add that to his bill he’d be happy to pay for it.
Finally, she had to hold up a hand to tell him to be quiet because she just couldn’t take it anymore. “How did you even get down here?” she asked.
“Um. The door was unlocked.”
Katie shook her head. Of all the luck.
“Yeah, well anyway,” Jason continued, “there was all that excitement yesterday. I mean, a real dead body in the Inn! This is exactly what I was hoping for and I just wanted to see where it all happened. I told you people would pay for just a glimpse of this place down here.”
“And I told you to stay out.”
“I know, but I couldn’t sleep, and I was taking a walk around the Inn and I just tried the door for the fun of it and it opened so...well. You know the rest.”
So that was it, then. Even with Riley promising to make sure the deadbolt was in place they must have forgotten to lock the door after all. Katie was going to have to put little sticky notes on the front desk to remind her to check it every night. “Jason, I don’t want the guests down here. I don’t want anyone down here. I don’t care if you’re looking for ghosts, or if you’re willing to pay. It’s a safety issue for the Inn, okay? I don’t need my insurance rates going up.”
He looked around the basement, scratching at the back of his head. “There’s not much of anything down here. It’s not like it’s a safety hazard or anything.”
“Jason, there’s a giant hole in the wall! Now, Riley and I have a contractor coming tomorrow to look at it and give us a second opinion, but Riley does this for a living. It’s fine for now but he’s pretty sure that section could get worse if it isn’t repaired properly. And you’re down here poking around in it? Damn it. We’re just lucky the code enforcement officer hasn’t condemned the building yet.”
“Oh,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I guess I didn’t look at it that way.”
“That’s because you’re the guest, and I’m the one who runs the Inn. So. Here’s what we’re going to do. If I find you down here again, your stay with us is going to be over and you won’t be welcome back here ever again. Okay?”
His face screwed up into a frown. “You don’t have to be mean about it. I said I was sorry.”
He stomped up the stairs without looking back. Katie sighed when he was gone, leaning back on her elbows against the stairs where she sat. Flipping houses had never been this hard. You hired someone else to fix up the building, maybe pay a landscaper to tidy up the lawn, and then you listed the house for sale. You didn’t have to deal with people actually living in the houses. You just collected the check.
Here you had to deal with people who needed to be fed, and given clean sheets every other day, and who ignored you when you said hey, don’t go down into that basement where the ghosts of all those dead people are just waiting to eat your face off.
Katie laughed at herself over that last one. In all of her experience with haunted houses she had never once had a ghost eat her face. Or any part of her, for that matter. Then again, that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t ever happen.
Where were all the ghosts, anyway? There had been all of these people murdered here in this Inn, and for a few days their ghosts were popping up everywhere, crying in the hallways or just floating through the bathroom wall when she was trying to take a shower, oblivious to anything except their own death. Since then, they’d all disappeared. Except for Boris.
And Boris didn’t even die here.
He shouldn’t be haunting the Heritage Inn.
His wife, on the other hand, had burned to death after having an argument with Boris, and sometime after that her body had been brought here to be buried. If there was a ghost in all of creation who deserve to be haunting this Inn, it was the ghost of Anna Vykroft.
Katie shook her head, and stood up, going to retrieve her two flashlights. One of them had definitely broken. She clicked the switch on it over and over with nothing happening. The other one worked fine, thank God. Not that she needed it now. No ghosts.
She switched it off.
Around her, the basement went dark.
In a panic she flicked the flashlight back on.
The door at the top of the stairs closed. The basement was plunged into complete darkness. The cone of light from the Maglite in her hand was the only light.
She turned the flashlight over to where the fuse box hung on the wall. She should go check it. She should go throw the switch to get the lights back on.
Her feet wouldn’t move in that direction. It was dark, and in the dark she knew there would be things waiting for her.
“Stop it,” she told herself, although her words had no force behind them. “You’re being ridiculous. The ghosts are gone again. There’s nothing here.”
She turned the flashlight away from the fuse box. No matter what she told herself, resetting the fuse was going to wait until morning.
Her light played a slow arc around the room.
It panned across a woman in a puffy black dress, walking slowly across the basement floor. Katie froze, and turned the light back. The woman was still there. She had a hawkish nose, and mousy brown hair pulled back tight from her scalp.
Anna Vykroft.
She turned, and looked at Katie with eyes that were empty, hollow pits in her skull.
“Dead,” the ghost said. “I am dead. Boris left me to die in that fire. He wouldn’t let me rest, oh no, there was no rest for Anna Vykroft! He stole my body from where it had been taken, ready for burial, and he brought me here to this place where five dollar whores turned their tricks.”
She lifted a hand, eerily translucent in the Maglite’s glow. “He buried me behind those cold stones one night. He always came here. He never came to our marriage bed anymore. Always here, where women let him do whatever he wanted to them. This was where all our money went.”
Katie’s blood went cold. Anna knew about her husband coming here to sleep with prostitutes. In an odd sort of way, it explained why Boris would bury her here. In his grief over letting her die, he would want to keep her close. So while he was upstairs screwing whatever woman caught his fancy, his dead wife would be down here, listening and watching.
“I hate him!” Anna shouted. “I’ve always hated him!”
Fire burst from the holes where her eyes should be. It licked at her creamy white face, streaming through her hair, until all of her was on fire.
“He did this to me, and I will never forgive him! He will burn like I did! Everyone will burn! Burn, burn, BURN!”
She turned to the wall where she’d been buried. In a ghostly, quiet fireball she moved toward that spot, closer and closer.
“I can’t rest. I can never rest. I hate him...I hate him!”
With a scream that set Katie’s teeth on edge she whooshed into the wall, the flames and her ruined body disappearing like they had never been there.
Katie kept the flashlight pointed at that spot, terrified that she would come back.
Chapter 20
That was where Riley found her the next morning.
She was in tears when she fell into his arms, so tired that her muscles were cramping and so scared that she couldn’t form a complete sentence even though all the words tried to rush out of her at once.
He held her, and calmed her with his soft voice, and told her not
to worry about saying anything until she was ready. She clung to his shirt, and breathed in his scent, and tried to let him convince her that it was going to be all right.
She knew better.
With a long breath, she finally put together a single thought. “I saw Anna’s ghost.”
She felt him stiffen around her. “You saw...Anna’s ghost? Boris’s wife? The woman we dug out of the wall?”
Katie nodded. “She was right here. She’s been here this whole time, I think, and digging up her body has disturbed her grave and now she won’t ever go away again. She’s stuck here, Riley, just like all those other ghosts are stuck here and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Other ghosts?”
“Yes, other ghosts!” Panic was starting to overwhelm her again. “Don’t you get it? All those ghosts we saw when we first moved in are still here. I don’t know what happened but something stirred them up. Yesterday, it was Boris Vykroft. Today it’s Anna. God alone knows who it will be tomorrow but they’re all still here. Right here!”
“Shh. Hey, it’s okay.” He was trying to sound soothing again, but she could hear the worry in his voice, too. “We’ll figure this out. One ghost at a time, if we have to.”
“Oh really? Really? What are we going to do, Riley? Huh? We need to get rid of them. Somehow. They need to go, or we do. It’s as simple as that.”
Riley held her tight. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
She felt him looking around the room, like he might see the ghosts popping out of the corner. Katie just wanted to be out of here. There was no telling what Anna’s ghost might do next, or when.
“I think I might have an idea,” Riley told her.
She leaned back far enough to look up into his eyes. “What idea?”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 56
