Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  “Does she have any other stories about him?” Phineas asked.

  “Sure,” Caleb said. “And you’d best come back tomorrow and hear them straight from her. That way she can grill you directly.”

  He set us up with drinks—tea for me, coffee for Phineas—and cupcakes, and another bowl of water for Wulf, then went back into the office. When the bell over the door rang I thought it would be Nolan, but it was a man in a suit who had that impatient East Coast look about him, with two imperious teenage girls in tow. I wondered if he was a tourist.

  “Hello?” he called, even though Caleb was already on his way out front.

  “Mr. Warner,” said Caleb. “What can I get you?”

  “We’re off to the bonfire at the high school,” Mr. Warner said. Not a tourist then. “We’ll need some big warm drinks. Coffee for me.”

  “Me too,” said the older girl.

  “Cocoa for both of them,” Mr. Warner corrected.

  The girl who’d asked for coffee rolled her eyes and turned away. Her eyes found Wulf. “Is that a dog?”

  “Gosh, I think it is,” said Phineas, all faux wide-eyes and breathlessness. I tried not to laugh.

  The girl made a disgusted noise. Mr. Warner turned around to see what the fuss was about, and scowled at us. Caleb looked nervous.

  “He’s a service dog,” I said.

  “What do you need a service dog for?” asked the younger girl.

  I thought of Cassandra Mosley, the way Wulf had seemed to calm her after Megan was gone. I knew they trained assistance dogs for that sort of thing. “PTSD,” I said. It was a horrible thing to lie about, but then any disability was, and this was one they couldn’t detect—or detect the lack of—visually.

  “They do service dogs for that?” The younger girl, who was maybe the least objectionable of the lot, looked curious now. “What does he do for you?”

  The last question was partly drowned out by the older girl, talking over her sister. “What happened to you? Why do you have PTSD?”

  Even Mr. Warner, who did not strike me as a stickler for manners, seemed to get how rude that was. “Lorelei, that’s not your business.” He turned back to Caleb, offering him a credit card. We’d already been forgotten and dismissed. Phineas laughed at them behind their backs, and I sat quietly hoping they wouldn’t turn around and see it, until they got their drinks and left.

  “Nice guy,” Phineas said to Caleb.

  Caleb shrugged. “He’s new. They moved here maybe three or four years ago. Big house up the mountain. Rich.” It was hard to tell which he considered to be the worse crime: new or rich. But it was clear from the way he curled his lip over the words that both were bad.

  Nolan came in five minutes later. “Sorry, I got hung up.” He waved to Caleb, who brought him a coffee without asking, and sat down with us.

  “I assume Miss Underwood is gone for the day?” asked Phineas.

  “She’s never gone,” Nolan said. “She lives there. The whole back wing of the third floor is her combination office and apartment. Imagine that, going to bed every night right next to your work desk.”

  “That’s bad,” I said. It was going to be hard enough to sneak around, digging into places we shouldn’t be, with the spider-spies around. Doing it right under Madeline Underwood’s nose was an even less pleasant prospect.

  At the same time Phineas said, “That’s great.”

  Nolan looked from me to Phineas, then I guess settled on great as being preferable. “Why is it great?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Phineas, why is it great?” I asked.

  “I was going to ask you to get us a key to her office,” said Phineas. “But a key to her office and apartment would be even better.”

  “No,” Nolan said flatly.

  “Nolan, I need to get into some hotel records,” I said. “I can’t figure out what’s up with this boy until I at least have some idea of who he is.” That much was true.

  He bit his lip. “I think most of the records are on her computer,” he admitted. “But she’d fire me. Plus she might actually kill me. My dad is trying to get me a job at the Grand South Inn in Asheville this summer, but I have to last through the spring here.”

  “She won’t know,” Phineas said.

  “She always knows.” Nolan’s voice was an octave higher than when he’d come in. We were terrifying the poor kid.

  “We can make it look like we broke in,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you just break in for real and not involve me at all?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how to break in. But I can unlock a window or something, make it look like we got in without a key.”

  “Better yet,” said Phineas, “you don’t have to actually give us the key. Just tell me where it is and we’ll steal it. That way even if we’re caught with it, there’s no reason to blame you.”

  I nodded, although I was liking this less and less. We were asking for it and no mistake. And if we did get caught, I supposed Phineas could just teleport off home and leave me to go to jail alone.

  Eventually, we convinced Nolan to tell us that the spare key to Madeline’s office was in the giant desk in the lobby, in the third drawer in the middle row of drawers. And that the key to that drawer was taped to the bottom of the desk chair.

  “That doesn’t seem all that secure,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have much to worry about, security-wise,” said Nolan. “Nobody’s going to cross her. She and her brother Mark pretty much own this town.” I noticed he didn’t mention our new friend Penny as being one of Bristol’s co-owners.

  “We’ll take the key tonight,” Phineas said. “That way you won’t even be in the hotel to get blamed.”

  Nolan bit his lip, a gesture he seemed fond of—I could see parts that had been chewed bloody—and finally seemed to make up his mind to put himself out further. “You could do it all tonight.” The rest came out in a rush, as if he wanted to get being an accomplice over with as quickly as possible: “I’ve worked some night shifts on Tuesdays and she has her garden club meeting and she’s always out late.”

  Well, wasn’t that just a lovely coincidence? We left Nolan to go up to his apartment with our thanks and assurances that the whole thing would never be traced back to him, and said our goodbyes to Caleb. On our way back to the hotel, Phineas asked me if I could make Wulf bark on command. I said I could get him worked up pretty well.

  Once we got to the lobby, I walked Wulf over to the window, then when nobody was looking (except, I worried, maybe some spiders I couldn’t see), I bent and whispered in his ear in my most excited voice. “Wulf? You want to go hunting? Should we go hunting, buddy?”

  He let out a short, abrupt howl, then when I asked him about hunting one more time, switched to flat-out baying.

  It wasn’t long before the lady behind the desk (Rosalie, her name tag said) came to tell me I’d have to quiet him down. I made the commotion last until I saw Phineas over her shoulder, signaling his success.

  The key to Madeline’s apartment was on the same kind of metal key chain our room keys were attached to, engraved with the words OWNER’S SUITE. And it wasn’t the only key Phineas had taken from the drawer. There were two more: one whose engraved label announced it as BASEMENT, and the other, ATTIC.

  “Figured we might as well look around everywhere,” he said.

  “Sure, as long as we’re breaking and entering, why not go all in?”

  “Well, just entering, really.”

  “Now how do we avoid getting caught by spiders?” I asked.

  Phineas shrugged, his signature one-shoulder move. “We squash every one we see? But even if they do see us and report back, what’s she going to do? Go to the police and tell them she caught us breaking into her room on spider-cam?” He looked up at the ceiling, turning to look all around the room. “She doesn’t seem to have any real security cameras.”

  “Probably because she sees no need to involve the police,” I said. “She’ll hex us and we’ll
fall down dead and that’ll be the end of it.”

  Phineas looked unconcerned. “I know a few protections against hexes. We’ll be okay. The worst that can happen, if it’s only spiders that catch us, is that she’ll know we were digging around, and think we’re awful people who she should be suspicious of. Which she already thinks.”

  “Maybe that would be true if it was just the basement and the attic. But if she finds out we were in her room?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Well at the very least, we probably shouldn’t stay here after,” I said.

  “You might be right about that.”

  All well and good for him to be calm and dismissive. But now that it came to it, I wasn’t so into the whole thing. Despite the fact that I had yet to actually see her do anything, I did not want to risk Madeline Underwood’s retaliation. When I found someone scary as hell, I tended to trust my instincts.

  On the other hand, we were here to solve a mystery, and that usually meant poking around where one shouldn’t. Plus there didn’t seem to be much else to do in Bristol on a Tuesday night.

  We put Wulf back in my room yet again. This operation would require some degree of stealth, and while Wulf had many talents, silence was not one of them.

  We decided to try the basement first, and work our way up. That way I’d have kind of a warm-up before tackling Madeline’s lair. Getting down there meant sneaking through a back hallway that was supposed to be for employees only, but without a restaurant, the hotel seemed to run on minimal staff at night.

  We managed to avoid human detection, but there was a spider on the basement door. Phineas killed it with one casual swipe of his hand.

  “Gross!” I whispered. Plus I felt a pang of guilt. I don’t like killing bugs, and what if I was wrong and the spiders were just an unfortunate side effect of being so close to the woods, and nothing more?

  The basement seemed to contain typical basement sorts of things—patio furniture, a coiled hose, a neat row of industrial-sized washers and dryers, laundry carts—and was relatively clean, clearly used often. There was a door at one end that appeared to be made of metal, with a keypad beside it. I’d heard of a hotel safe before, but a hotel vault?

  “What do you suppose they keep in there?” I whispered.

  Phineas frowned at the door, took a few steps closer to it, then stepped quickly away. “It’s iron,” he said.

  “I would think it would be steel, no?”

  “Normally, maybe. But not this one.”

  “Why?”

  “Phantasms can’t cross iron barriers, unless we have a specific invitation,” he said. “Whatever they’re keeping in there, they want to keep it a secret from my kind.”

  “Madeline Underwood has a secret from the devil?”

  “Or the devil’s keeping his secrets safe in case someone like me comes around.”

  “That would confirm your theory that she’s buddies with the devil.”

  Phineas, who rarely looked nervous, looked nervous. I wondered what he wasn’t telling me.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I walked over to the vault door. “Well if he’s keeping secrets in there, we should have a look. I don’t need an invitation to walk in.” I looked over the keypad, just in case there were sticky fingerprints or some other clue on it. There weren’t. “I do need a combination, though.”

  We agreed to ask Nolan about it later. The basement revealed nothing else of interest, and we headed up to the third floor.

  “Why does it smell like an old sandwich up here?” I whispered as soon as we walked into Madeline Underwood’s wing.

  “It’s black mustard,” whispered Phineas.

  “Well, Nolan said she was into gardening, right?”

  “Right.” But he looked uneasy again.

  “What?”

  “Well, it can be used for healing, in some mixtures.”

  Madeline Underwood didn’t seem like the nurturing type. “Or?” I asked.

  “Or for curses and hexes.”

  “Lovely.”

  “What time is it?”

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket and glanced at it. “8:20. We should get in and out of here as fast as possible, in case she comes back early.”

  “We should be quiet, in case she didn’t go at all,” Phineas countered.

  A single door at the end of the hall seemed to be Madeline’s only entrance. Phineas unlocked it slowly, so that the click of the lock was barely audible, then closed it softly behind us.

  The mustard smell was stronger when I walked in, mixed with the woodsy, slightly unpleasant smell of bay leaves. Maybe she was making soup to go with her sandwiches.

  I was staring at a wall; the entryway was a narrow corridor that turned on either side of us, like an inverted U. And on that wall, directly where you’d see it when you came in, was a painting of three naked women, dancing in a forest. All three had hair down to their waists, flowing over parts of their faces, but the bright yellow eyes of all three were exposed. One was staring directly at the door. Or at me. I didn’t like the way she was smiling.

  The painting left me feeling even uneasier than I already was. I had the crazy idea that it would warn Madeline of intruders. I gestured at Phineas to keep moving.

  The right half of the suite turned out to be the office, the left, the apartment. We took one walk through the whole thing first, as quietly as we could, to make sure we were alone. We couldn’t see much, using my phone flashlight rather than turning on the lights, but we could make out enough to know there was nobody there. (Or so we thought.)

  Phineas stepped on two spiders as we went, but there was one on the ceiling that we couldn’t reach.

  We were on the apartment side, finishing our preliminary walk and ready to get down to the real business of searching, when we heard the door open.

  Fuck! I mouthed it instead of saying it out loud, while I grabbed Phineas by the elbow and ducked into Madeline’s walk-in closet. We crouched down and listened. There was a shuffling noise: grocery bags, I thought. Then the sounds of cupboards and the refrigerator, opening and closing. It was too dark to see Phineas’s face, but I was still clinging to his elbow.

  After what seemed like an age there came, blessedly, the sound of the door closing again.

  “Just a delivery, I guess,” I whispered. I stood up to open the closet door again.

  But all our careful quiet was shattered a second later, when I yelped.

  I yelped because a child-like, disappointed voice came from the pitch dark behind us.

  “You killed three of my spiders.”

  I flung the door open and stumbled out into the bedroom to flick the switch. To hell with anyone who saw lights in the windows; I needed to see what kind of monster was hiding in Madeline Underwood’s closet. Phineas came out with me, and stood between me and the closet door, fists raised.

  “You didn’t have to kill them. That was mean.” The monster came out.

  He was tall and gaunt, like the rest of his family, and wearing blue flannel pajamas speckled with red sailboats. Despite his childish voice he was grown, maybe older than Penny. His expression was frightened and angry. Surely this was not Mark Underwood. I couldn’t remember the voice of the man who’d spoken to me over the phone when I called the mayor’s office, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t this guy’s.

  “I’m sorry we killed your spiders,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  He looked from me to Phineas and back again. “I don’t have to tell you.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Of course you don’t.”

  “It’s Max.”

  “Nice to meet you, Max.” I was about to say I’m Lydia, then thought better of it. “Do you live here?”

  “Why are you in here?” he asked. “You aren’t Sandra.”

  “No,” I said again. I was flailing around for what else to say to this cadaverous, creepy, but somehow pathetic man, when Phineas put a hand gently on his
shoulder.

  Max flinched away from him, stepping halfway back into the closet again. “I saw someone like you once. With yellow eyes. I wasn’t supposed to look at him. He punished me.”

  “I’m not going to punish you.” Phineas seemed relaxed, almost his usual chipper self. Max looked at him, then smiled.

  “No. I think you’re nicer than the other one.”

  “I hope so,” said Phineas. “And I didn’t know they were your spiders. I really am sorry. I thought they were Madeline’s.”

  “She hates spiders,” Max said. “But they don’t let me out. So I have to use spiders to see. We can’t talk to each other, but they can show me. I’ve always been able to do it. With birds too, sometimes. ”

  “They keep you here?” Phineas nodded into the closet. I took a step closer and saw what he must have seen all along: a baby blue sleeping bag, the same color as Max’s pajamas, and a red pillow, the same color as the sailboats. A bowl of water. A bowl, not a glass. As if he was a dog, except I suspected my dog was treated better than this poor man. There was a bruise, I saw, healing on his cheek, barely visible even now that I was up close. His fingernails were bloody, but that may have been from biting them himself. His hair was thin, the whites of his eyes almost yellow.

  “We can get you out,” I said.

  Max started to scream.

  There was no stopping him, no calming him. It was pure, blind panic. He curled into a ball on his sleeping bag and shrieked and shrieked, no matter what we tried, until we knew we’d already stayed too long, that his screams were going to bring someone down on us, and we hurried out of Madeline’s suite.

  We took off down the hall, the screams still loud behind us even though the door was closed and locked again. We rushed back toward the main staircase, then sideways into the east wing as we heard a voice and fast footsteps coming upstairs. Two or three people had popped out of their rooms to see what all the commotion was, and we did our best to blend in, although our own rooms were down the opposite hall, on the west side. From that end, just below Max’s shrieks, I could hear Wulf starting to howl.