by Harper Lin
Aunt Astrid stood awkwardly at the door, fading in and out of view.
“Quickly! Out and onto the elevator.”
I froze.
“Can’t we take the stairs?” My body began to shudder.
“If you take the stairs, you’ll have to go past the lobby, and those men will be heading back any second. Quick! To the elevator!”
Bea grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the room toward the elevator. It was standing there open. Had Aunt Astrid left it open for us? Or was it like a baby with its mouth open, waiting for more food?
With one good yank, Bea had me inside. She pressed the number three button and started the doors sliding closed. I held onto her like a drowning woman would hold a life preserver. My eyes were squeezed shut. I heard her saying encouraging words and petting my hand like I was a child getting a shot. Within seconds, we were on the third floor, doors wide open, standing in the hallway, and I could breathe again.
“You poor thing,” Bea said as she pulled her key card from her pocket. “Want to stay in my room tonight?”
“Oh, like a four-year-old scared of the dark? You bet your bippy I do.” I had surrendered my pride over an hour ago.
“Good, because I didn’t want to sleep alone either.”
Minutes later, Aunt Astrid appeared at the top of the stairs.
Her body was back to normal except for her feet, which were the red, orange, and gold pattern of the rug, giving her the appearance of floating.
Bea held the door open, and I quickly made my way inside. Aunt Astrid followed and Bea brought up the rear, shutting the door, snapping the deadbolt, and flipping the safety lock like her mom had done in room 116.
“That was too close. Jake would have skinned me alive if he knew we were in there. Did you get away okay, Mom? That was you that made that crash, right?”
“Yes, it was me, and you aren’t going to believe what I heard those two officers talking about when they came back.”
Aunt Astrid stretched out on the closest bed, her feet finally turning back to their own fleshy color.
“This double suicide—at least that is what they are calling it—was not the first suicide of siblings in this place.” She began to yawn. We had been up all day, and the sun would be rising in a couple hours. “According to Kowalski, when he first started in the state police department about fifteen years ago, two sisters died here.”
“Let me guess. Did they stay in room 116?” I was sure I knew the answer.
“No. They went out into the grounds and shot themselves. I don’t mean one killed the other and then herself. They both had pistols and both killed themselves. No word of an argument, of any dispute. They had no parents and no next of kin. Strange, right?”
I couldn’t help but think that Bea and I had escaped something by the skin of our teeth. When I looked at her, I wanted to cry.
“I know what you’re thinking, Cath,” she said, looking back at me. “We are so much like sisters that maybe it could have just as easily been us. Right?”
Slowly I nodded.
Bea rushed over to me, and we sat on the other bed, holding hands. She tried to smooth my hair, but suddenly I felt very angry.
“What kind of a thing preys on the bond between two kids? That is really just plain sick.”
“It is very disturbing,” Aunt Astrid said, her eyes heavy but still clear. “We need to rest now. Tomorrow, I say we venture into town for an early breakfast and see what the locals can tell us.”
Bea patted my leg to stand up, and we pulled the blankets back, climbing in and sharing the bed like we had so many nights growing up. Aunt Astrid took the other bed for herself. None of us wanted to be alone. I looked at the digital clock. It read 2:45 a.m.
If we slept until seven, that would be enough. We could sleep under our facials and in the mud bath and hot spring soaks, too. We’d probably need it after going into town.
As I let my shoulders sink into the mattress and my head became snuggled into the pillow, I realized that I hadn’t felt this safe or this comfortable since we had gotten here. Family was what did it. It wasn’t the smell of lavender and sage everywhere. It wasn’t the down pillows or perfectly monitored room temperatures. It was having my family here. I fell into a deep sleep within seconds.
When I awoke, I had an idea. I couldn’t remember a dream leading me to it or a visit from some paranormal good Samaritan. But it was there, and like Blake Samberg always said, you go with a hunch.
Green Aura
Mo’s Grill was a rustic-looking place set dead in the center of the little area of unincorporated Wonder Falls. When we walked in I was almost knocked over by the captivating smell of crackling, crispy bacon.
“Thank goodness we decided to come here,” I said to my aunt as we all moseyed up to the counter. The dining room was bustling with early risers, coffee cups were steaming, silverware was clanking, and the constant tune of conversations all mixed together topped it off.
We took our seats, and I wasted no time grabbing a tiny menu. Within two seconds of glancing down the list of items, I had made my decision.
“I am so hungry.” I rubbed my stomach as I spoke.
“Me too,” Bea said.
A broad-shouldered, baggy-eyed waitress with stringy brown hair pulled into a ponytail stood behind the counter, wiping her hands on her apron. She yelled to the cook.
“You got those two dots and a dash for me yet?” She looked at the three of us, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be right with you, ladies. Coffee?”
We all nodded enthusiastically.
From behind the counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the diner popped a shiny head with a few short remnants of black hair around the ears and a thick black mustache. He delivered a steaming white plate that the waitress quickly scooped up and hustled to another table.
She came back to us, straightening her Harley-Davidson T-shirt, wiping her hands on her apron again then pulling out her order pad.
“Got a fresh pot brewing. What can I get you ladies?”
I ordered a bacon burger with everything on it and french fries. My aunt got a cheese omelet, and Bea ordered herself a full stack of blueberry pancakes.
Our waitress nodded, tore off the receipt, tucked it into the carousel on the counter, and spun it toward the cook before banging the little bell.
“Order!”
She hurried off and returned within seconds with hot coffees and water. With the pot still in her hand, she swung around the counter to offer refills to everyone else in the place.
“I think we ought to bend this waitress’s ear when we get a chance. She looks like she’s been around for a while and might have some information. I’ll bet over the years, other guests from the spa have come here,” Bea said.
We sipped our coffee for a few minutes until my aunt dropped a comment that stopped my blood cold and almost made me lose my appetite. Almost.
“So, you never did say anything about Officer Tom Warner. How did you meet that tall drink of water?”
Bea leaned on her elbow and batted her eyes in my direction.
Stuttering like Porky Pig, I just blurted out the truth.
“Well, there are stranger ways to meet a fellow than that. He made a special trip all the way to the spa to make sure you were okay. That was very sweet,” Bea added.
“And from what I could see, he had never been married and also had an exciting green aura.”
“A green aura?”
“A green aura? Oh, that is rare. You might want to take a longer look at this guy, Cath.” Bea took a sip of her coffee and batted her eyelashes again over the cup.
“You know, you may think this is all fun and games, but we’ve got a serious issue on our hands at the spa. There is no time for romance.”
“There is always time for romance,” Bea insisted. “Especially if you are going to be married to a cop.”
“Married? The guy just asked me to dinner.”
“He did? Well, that’s
wonderful. When are you going?” Aunt Astrid patted my arm.
“I’ll help you pick out an outfit,” Bea added.
“Heads up, ladies,” the waitress said just in time.
Finally, with good, old-fashioned comfort food in front of us, the next fifteen minutes went by in almost complete silence, with the exception of a few hm-hms and yums.
That bacon burger went down as if I were a woman on death row enjoying her final meal. We were all quite full. We patted our bellies, ordered another round of coffee, and waited for things to die down so we could interrogate the waitress about the spa.
“The Muskox? Oh yeah.” She rolled her tongue like she had a piece of food stuck in one of her back teeth. Her eyes narrowed a little. “Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. Just about everyone in town has. Most everyone here steers clear of the place.”
“Why is that?” Aunt Astrid asked. This waitress was not as old as she looked. Years of getting by on a waitress’s salary can be hard on a lady sometimes. Add a biker lifestyle, which I was pretty sure this woman lived based on the tattoo on her arm that peeked out from the short sleeve (“Born to Ride, Oddie and Maureen 1987 Daytona”), and I believed it was safe to assume she had been around the block a few times.
“Well, there are a couple reasons. One, the SOBs who run the place deliberately instruct people to come in via the long route, avoiding I-80 and the town. We got nice businesses here and decent folks and could use the business the spa brings in.” She leaned on the counter in front of all three of us, and we instinctively leaned in closer to her. “Personally, I think it’s that greedy disposition that brings so much bad luck to the place.”
“Bad luck?” Bea prodded.
“Just last night, another suicide occurred.”
“News travels fast,” I said, nodding.
“Yeah. When it comes to the Muskox, it does. About six years ago, there was another double suicide. Two women. We heard they had gone crazy or something and went running outside, stark naked and raving mad, and they shot themselves.”
It was only natural that some of the details would change, bend, or stretch just a little in any town when being relayed from neighbor to neighbor. But the gist was still the same.
“And before that, two children disappeared. Hey, Bob?” She turned around to the cook in the kitchen, who popped up, his balding head sweating. “How old were those kids who went missing up at Spooky Spa?”
He scratched his dome.
“Had to be about fifteen, sixteen years old if I remember right,” he said then lowered his head. Steam rose from where he was and a thick, hairy hand reached up, grabbed an empty plate, and pulled it out of view to the other side of the counter.
“Yeah. They found those kids about four days later. Said they wandered off the trail and got lost. Died from the elements. So they say.” She patted my aunt’s hand for a second and gave us all a wink. “One second. Duty calls.”
Maureen turned, grabbed the coffee pot and the plate from under the red heating lamp, and made the rounds to the handful of remaining patrons. When she came back, she had more to say.
“Now you tell me how two kids that age, healthy and normal by all accounts, can get lost and die in four days? I happen to know for a fact, too, that they had strange markings on them. Like they had died of choking or something.”
It had to be the blue lips she was referring to. I didn’t look at my family, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing.
“Has anyone ever spoken to the owners, the mayor, the people of the town to try and find out what is going on?” Bea asked.
“Nope.”
“Why don’t they?” Sipping my coffee, I barely noticed how hot it was as I followed Maureen’s story.
“I can’t say for sure. There are only rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?” Aunt Astrid was watching the woman closely.
“Now, I can’t say this is fact for sure. But there are a lot of people who claim to believe that the place is somehow cursed.”
“Cursed?” I rolled my eyes as if that was the most outlandish, far-fetched theory ever concocted and second only to the Kennedy assassination magic bullet and the hoax of the moon landing.
“Right?” she agreed with me. “This is what I’ve heard. The land used to belong to the Wyandot Indian tribe. They have since become extinct, but way back when, a gentleman by the name of Chief Big Running Fox was in charge of a good piece of land they had occupied. Well, he had his eye on some young woman from a neighboring tribe. She had a sister or a twin or something. So, the chiefs spoke and the girl’s father said if Chief Big Running Fox gave his land to the other tribe, he could have his daughter.”
We were all enthralled. I sipped my coffee, waiting for the rest of the local history lesson.
“So Chief Big Running Fox took the deal. He got the daughter and handed over his land. Well, he didn’t know that the other tribe had made a deal with some white folks to buy that land. The other tribe was given actual silver, and Chief Big Running Fox’s tribe began to slowly starve, including the daughter of the other chief.”
“Well for pete’s sake,” Aunt Astrid mumbled.
“When Chief Big Running Fox found this out, he cursed his land. Said it would be the most soothing, beautiful, bountiful land under the stars but that anyone settling on it would suffer immeasurable losses. Just to add insult to injury, the young lady killed herself along with her sister because they were both so ashamed of their menfolk. And since I’ve been here, which is over forty years now, every couple of years, that story surfaces with another tragedy at that place.”
A customer from afar dropped a fork, causing all of us to jump.
“You can bet no one from town goes there. Not anyone who has roots in this town. Not anyone with a family,” she added and folded her arms over her saggy bosom. “From what we’ve heard here in town, the family that started the place died out, and now it is run by some kind of board or trust or some other anonymous Mr. Moneybags. And it has been years, maybe even over a decade, since someone from the estate came to check on the place. The whole thing is weird.”
“Has anyone from around here ever worked at the place?” Aunt Astrid asked.
“No one that I know of,” Maureen huffed. “But from what I’ve seen and heard, the place must pay the staff pretty well, because they rarely ever come into town, and if they do, mum’s the word. For all I know, they are cursed, too.”
Woogie-Boogie Hullaballoo
“Cursed land doesn’t make sense with the victims. Not with the suicides and the siblings and all that,” I squawked as we drove back toward the Muskox.
“No. It doesn’t. What about the relatively calm years in between? The business isn’t struggling. It is thriving. That doesn’t sound cursed to me either,” Bea said as she maneuvered the car through the narrow streets of unincorporated Wonder Falls.
“Well, if it is cursed land, yet it isn’t doing anything but claiming a couple of victims every few years, then that sounds like…”
“A sacrifice!” It was like I’d answered the Final Jeopardy question.
“A sacrifice.” Aunt Astrid nodded. “Now that finally makes some sense. But now we have to find out the who, what, and when of all that in order to tell us what we can do to stop it. If only I had my books.”
“Right. Next time we take a vacation for a few days, we’ll just rent a U-Haul for at least half of your library in case we stumble into a random woogie-boogie hullaballoo,” I teased.
“Wait. If we are dealing with a Native American jinx, then we have to remember how they would have looked at things. The days, the seasons, the time were all calculated using the stars and the sun and moon,” Bea said, blinking wildly. “I’ll bet if we trace back the dates of the last couple of suicides, we’ll find a correlation with the stars.”
“And how are we going to do that?” The last thing I wanted to do was spend the whole day in a library.
“First, I am going to search the Internet in t
he hospitality room. It shouldn’t be hard to get the history of deaths at the spa or the lunar schedule for those days. Then we are going to go for our facials, mud baths, and hot spring soaks,” Bea said.
“But then what?” I thought about the elevator the previous night and wondered if that was part of the Indian curse as well. It had to be. I didn’t want to imagine that the Prestwick house had found me.
“Then we find a pattern and see what we can do to put an end to this curse.”
When we got back to the hotel, my stomach was happy to have something other than leafy green stuff in it, and I was feeling quite good.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Aunt Astrid said as we piled out of the car.
“Do you want me to go with you?” I wasn’t scared now that the sun was up. I was nervous but not scared. There was a difference.
“No, honey. Why don’t you go get yourself a smoothie or something and relax. This really was supposed to be a trip for you.”
“I am right as rain.” I flexed my biceps.
The smile that spread across my aunt’s face made me feel twenty pounds of guilt.
“I was so hard on you, Aunt Astrid. I’m sorry for the trouble. I still can’t believe I had that thing on me. You and Bea have no idea how much better I am feeling and how much, well, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.” She hugged me tightly and kissed my cheek. “Now, I’m going for a walk. If I’m not back in my room within an hour, ninety minutes tops, tell Jake and Blake and get the cavalry searching.”
“Are you afraid you’re going to see something? Something dangerous?”
“Forewarned is forearmed, Cath. Always be prepared.”
“Just like the Boy Scouts.” I gave my aunt a wink and headed into the spa.
Bea had already made a mad dash to the hospitality room to get on the computer and begin her research. She was always so good at that kind of stuff. In high school, the good grades came easily for her. She absorbed even the worst subjects like math and social studies, and the information just stuck in her head.
