“Wha—?” Patrick cleared his throat, tried to blink away his suddenly watery eyes. “What happened?”
The activities coordinator shrugged. “Someone killed Victoria Shanley. And in a very messy and gruesome way, I might add.”
There was almost a pattern to the spattered blood, or at least that’s the way it seemed, and it took Patrick a moment to realize why he thought that, what it reminded him of. It was a children’s toy, one so old he didn’t even remember the name of it, where a kid placed a piece of paper in a machine with a recessed spinning disc and then dropped paint onto the paper. The paint then exploded outward in op art ecstacy, creating firecrackers of color.
This was almost like that, and the horrible thing was that there was so much blood, the gore was so completely overwhelming, that it was almost abstract. It was nowhere near as disgusting or abhorrent as it should have been because the overpowering extent of it robbed the scene of any sense of intimacy or connection with the victim.
The victim.
Vicki.
“We know you left the Grille with her last night.” The accusation hung in the air, unspoken but as clear as if it had been announced over a loudspeaker.
Patrick didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything in order not to accidentally incriminate himself. He’d been set up, framed.
He expected to be told that the police were on the way and that the resort’s security staff was going to hold him for them, but instead the activities coordinator said, “Can we count on you for the game today? The Coyotes are still one short.”
It came out of nowhere, and he stared dumbly at the man, stunned into silence.
“They could use your help this afternoon.”
The implication was obvious if insane: he would not be considered a murder suspect, the resort would suppress all knowledge of his connection to the dead woman—
Vicki
—if he agreed to participate in their stupid tournament.
“I thought those games were just on weekends,” he said stupidly.
The activities coordinator grinned. “Not any more.” There seemed to be a resonance to that remark that he did not get, an intended meaning too subtle for his numbed brain to comprehend.
He nodded, as if in a daze.
“Then I think we’re through here.” The activities coordinator put an arm around his shoulder, and while the gesture was more familial than the arm-pulling that had brought him here, the intent was the same: to force him to go where the man wanted.
Patrick hazarded a last look back at the room, saw the blood on the rug, the walls, the furniture, the bits of flesh on the bed. From this angle, he could see into the bathroom, and though he expected to see the shadow of something big and menacing in the frosted glass of the shower stall reflected in the mirror—
Alien
—the bathroom was clear and clean.
“Let’s go.” The activities coordinator led him outside, closing the door behind them.
And he allowed himself to be led.
Thirty-two
Rachel stood in front of the picture window, staring down at the manicured grass below. Behind her, the TV was on and working, a CNN entertainment report about advances in computer-generated animation issuing from the stereo speakers, and it was this symbol of normalcy from the outside world that made everything happening here at The Reata seem that much more strange and surreal. She recalled when she’d stood in this exact same spot the first night they were here, when she’d seen that horrible face in the monsoon cloud and the gardener doing his deranged dance on the lawn. If only she’d spoken up then, if only she’d said something to Lowell.
But would he have believed her? Would he have agreed to leave the hotel?
It was a moot point because, as they’d clearly established, something had kept her from speaking up, something had kept all of them from sharing their individual experiences, although that imposed restriction had now been lifted.
Somehow that worried her more than anything else.
Lowell had returned from a second trip out discouraged and disheartened. He’d hoped to talk to some of the other remaining guests or employees and find out what was going on, see if any of them had any plans or ideas. But the few brave enough to come out of their rooms when he knocked had all suggested with frightened desperation that they practice for the tournament.
The golf tournament.
She thought about what the boys had said about their friend David’s parents and shivered.
The kids were still trying to convince Lowell to go with them to the abandoned resort they’d found off one of the hiking trails. “It’s the key!” Ryan argued passionately. “I know it is!”
Curtis nodded. “You gotta come with us, Dad!”
“No!” he said angrily.
“I’ll go with you,” Rachel announced. They looked from one to the other, not quite sure how to respond.
Old stereotypes died hard.
“Mom can handle it,” Ryan said, defending her against unspoken doubts, and she smiled at him, her heart filled with pride. He was such a good boy, such a nice boy, and while he had always been kind and thoughtful, he had also proved to be much tougher, stronger and more resilient than she would have expected. Sometimes crises brought out the best in people.
All of her boys were special, and her eyes teared up as she looked at them.
“If anybody’s going, I’m going,” Lowell said. “But I don’t know what you think we’re going to find there or what good it’s going to do. Going farther out into the desert is not going to help us escape.”
“Neither is sitting here in our room,” Rachel said.
He glared at her. “At least it won’t get us killed!”
Killed.
The word had been spoken, and though it had been in the back of her mind, in back of all of their minds, probably, it sounded different when spoken aloud. More real. More immediate.
Even the kids were quiet.
“We’ll all go,” Rachel said firmly, and she shot Lowell a look, letting him know not to scare them again—although part of her thought it was probably good for them to be afraid. Scared is prepared, her father used to say, and those were words she still believed.
“Okay,” Lowell agreed. He took a deep breath. “I don’t think we should go anywhere alone. Any of us.”
Curtis nodded sagely. “That’s what happens in horror movies. That’s when people start dying.”
It seemed strange to be putting on walking shoes, gathering water bottles and preparing for a hike. It seemed . . . frivolous. But they weren’t pretending everything was normal and going on with life as usual. They were going on what was essentially a fact-finding mission, hoping to discover something they could use.
For what?
She didn’t know. She doubted that any of them did. But at least they were trying to do something. At least they hadn’t given up and weren’t hiding here in the room waiting to die.
Waiting to die.
She tried to push the thought out of her mind, but it was there, front and center, and wasn’t about to go anywhere. Tears welled up in her eyes again as she looked at Lowell and the boys, but even as her outside was softening and fuzzing up, her insides were growing firm and steely. Maybe it was inevitable and maybe it wasn’t, but there was no way she was going down without a fight, and if something was going to go after her family, it would have to go through her first.
“I think it was the original Reata,” Ryan was saying excitedly, “and if we put our heads together, we might be able to figure out how the two of them are connected.”
“It won’t bring anyone back,” Curtis told him.
“No, but maybe it’ll help Dad figure something out.” He looked admiringly up at Lowell, and Rachel’s heart swelled.
“We should find David first,” Curtis suggested. “See if he’s all right.” He caught Lowell’s skeptical look, obviously remembering Brenda. “David’s real.”
“
And his parents are acting weird,” Owen said. “I think he might need us.”
“Do you know his room?” Rachel asked, walking over.
The boys nodded.
“We’ll go by and make sure he’s okay.”
David was in his room, alone, and oddly enough he didn’t know anything was wrong. Or that anything was any more wrong than usual. His parents had never come back to the room last night, and while he was worried about it, he wasn’t that worried. It wasn’t until Curtis and Owen filled him in on the fact that almost everyone who worked for The Reata had disappeared and the lobby looked like it had been abandoned for decades that he seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation. He turned off his television. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t leave me. I’m coming with you.”
“We won’t leave you,” Lowell promised, and Rachel took his hand and squeezed it.
It was a much longer walk to Antelope Canyon and that other, older resort than she’d thought. On the way, they passed close by the walkway that led to the driving range, and from that direction came the thwack of balls and cries of pain. They hurried on.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to go off the trail,” Lowell said when the boys stopped and explained that the old resort was just behind the rise off to their left.
“We just wanted to see what that was,” Curtis said, pointing at the buckboard wagon deteriorating into the sand.
Owen’s voice was small, nervous. “Brenda didn’t want us to go there. She tried to tell us to stay on the path.” He reddened as he mentioned her name, looked away from his father.
“I think they were trying to hide it,” Ryan said. “The old resort. I don’t think they want people to know where it is.”
“Then why would they have a trail out here at all?” Lowell wondered. “Why go so close to it?”
That was a good question, and it made Rachel nervous. She felt like a pawn in some unseen power’s unknown game. They walked over the rocks that bordered the trail and slogged through the shifting sand up the small rise to the wagon.
She nearly screamed when they reached it.
“Oh my God,” Lowell said.
David backed up, looking like he was going to be sick. Curtis, Owen and Ryan turned quickly away, looking up at the sky or down at the dirt, breathing heavily.
Bodies lay piled in the buckboard. Male or female, it was impossible to tell because the heads were missing and what was left was so hacked up as to be unidentifiable. Blood covered everything, like ketchup poured upon meat, and sand had blown into the blood, mixing with it, making red mud.
Rachel saw all this in the split second before averting her gaze, as she tried to ignore the combined smells of ground metal and excrement that assaulted her nostrils.
“Who are they?” Curtis asked, his voice hushed, still looking away.
“I can’t tell,” Lowell admitted. He swallowed hard. “I take it this wasn’t here yesterday.”
“There were skulls,” Owen said. “Old skulls.”
“We can’t even call the police,” Rachel said, but she was only stating the obvious. Whatever happened from here on in they were going to have to deal with it themselves; there would be no recourse to authority. She looked ahead at the buildings of the old resort. They weren’t nearly as rundown as the boys had led them to believe, and she had the feeling that was new. “Is that what it looked like yesterday?” she asked, pointing.
Curtis shook his head. “It’s . . . different,” he said. “It’s changing.”
“It’s fixing itself up,” Ryan offered, and at that David and his brothers nodded enthusiastically.
Rachel stared at the old hotel. Painted words across the blank wall of one building read THE REATA, and it bore more than a little resemblance to the existing resort. Except that the faux western theme was a little more cowboy than Indian, even down to the barn and corral at the north end, and the place was smaller, more compact, more primitive. Typical of its time, she assumed, and she estimated that time to be somewhere around 1900. This would have been one of those early dude ranches built to attract rich adventurers from the East, and while it seemed quaint in comparison to the present-day Reata, it would have been the height of luxury in this place during that era.
She looked over at Lowell. “What do we do?” The idea of walking into an abandoned resort that over two days had transformed itself from a pile of ruins to a reasonable facsimile of the place it had been over a hundred years ago did not sit well with her.
But it was why they’d come here, and they didn’t exactly have a host of options from which to choose. So when Lowell said, “We go in and look,” she simply nodded.
“I’ll show you the restaurant where I saw the mirror,” Ryan declared. “And that little lookout room by the pool.”
“But we stay together,” Lowell reminded them, and his voice served to temper the boy’s excitement.
Good, Rachel thought. Ryan was enjoying this a little too much. He needed to be careful out here. They all did.
The air seemed to grow colder as they walked through the desert to the old Reata, although Rachel thought that was probably just her imagination. They stopped first by the lobby. In front of it stood a totem pole nearly twice as tall as the building, an intricately carved post of lodgepole pine, and like the kids said, there were terrible faces carved into it, horrible demonic visages filled with rage and pain. But the figure at the top was missing, the old man, and in his place was a fierce-looking but very realistically rendered wolf, which made no sense to any of them and which none of them could understand.
They walked inside. Though it had no door and the glass in the windows was broken, the lobby seemed remarkably well-preserved. The front desk looked even more like a saloon bar than the one in their Reata, and there was a guest book on top of the counter, though the writing in it was faded and illegible. They spoke not a word but walked through in silence, pointing to items of interest, as though afraid that to speak would announce their presence to . . .
To whom?
Rachel did not even want to speculate.
They walked out of the lobby through the same broken doorway they’d come in, and she expected the oppressive feeling that had settled over them inside would dissipate outdoors, but it did not. Ryan led them over to the restaurant, which had the long tables and simple kitchen of a cowboy mess hall. The Reata’s setting-sun-and-stylized-cactus logo was painted onto the side of the counter, the paint fresh and bright, and it looked oddly anachronistic here in these primitive surroundings. It wasn’t supposed to be here, Rachel thought. Whoever—whatever—had put it here had made a mistake, and that gave her hope.
The mirror was on the wall to their left.
Rachel understood immediately what Ryan had meant when he said there was something wrong with it. At the moment, it reflected back only the scene before it: the dining room and themselves. But its silvery surface hinted at hidden depths, and even its shape seemed unsettling, the angles slightly off.
They stared at the mirror for several moments, all of them, as though waiting for it to change, waiting for a glimpse of that old man Ryan said he saw. But nothing happened.
“Maybe I should break it,” Ryan suggested. “It was broken when I saw him.”
“No,” Lowell said, shaking his head. “Leave it alone.”
From there they went to the pool. As they’d probably all known or suspected, it was filled with water, dirty brackish water that should have smelled like sulfur but had no odor whatsoever. On top of the water floated brown cottonwood leaves and a dead palm frond. On top of the palm frond, like a Viking being sent off to Valhalla, was a skinned rat. The crosses that the boys said had been placed around the pool were gone.
“The glass must be fixed!” Curtis said, pointing down a set of stairs that led into a trench next to the pool. “No water’s getting in.”
“The picture of him’s on the wall behind that bench,” Ryan said, letting his dad go down first.
But Lowell d
id not look at the wall, and as Rachel walked down the steps, bringing up the rear, and gazed out the observation window to the pool beyond, she saw why.
People were swimming in the pool. Five or six of them at least. Men with handlebar mustaches and full-body bathing suits, women in flapper swimwear. They splashed and played in water that was light blue and perfectly clear, and every so often one would swim up to the glass, tap on it and wave at them.
Curtis dashed behind her and ran up to the top of the steps. “It’s still the same up here!” he shouted. “All dirty and no one’s in it!” He rushed back down just as a plump woman planted her lips on the glass and then, smiling, swam for the surface.
“The graffiti’s gone,” Owen said, pointing at the wall.
Indeed it was, and in place of a crayon caricature of a spooky old man there was only The Reata’s logo, the same brightly colored modern version they’d seen in the restaurant.
“The smell’s gone, too,” Ryan said.
David grinned. “Maybe they’re connected,” he responded, and even that small joke was welcome, helped cut some of the tension in the air.
They remained in the viewing room for several more minutes, watching the swimmers, Lowell or one of the boys occasionally darting to the top of the stairs to verify that nothing had changed, bandying about ideas on how this could be happening, all of them instantly and unanimously rejecting the logical, hopeful theory that they were watching images on a large television screen.
Finally, they went back up.
“Where next?” Ryan asked. “The barn?”
“No,” Lowell said, walking.
“The throne’s there. We saw it.”
But Lowell had seen something else, a sight that meant something to him, and Rachel caught up to him, took his hand. “What is it?” she asked quietly. Then she saw it, too.
A gallows.
David had said he’d seen that last time, but none of them had noticed it on the way in, not even David, and she chose to believe that was because it had been hidden behind other restored buildings, though she doubted that was the reason.
The Resort Page 28
