Eliza points to the letter. “It says right here, ‘Keep up the good work.’ Luther is paying you a commission to haunt this hotel.”
“You’ve got it all wrong!”
“Oh?” I say. “He’s not paying you a commission?”
“He is,” she mumbles. “But not to haunt the place.” She sighs deeply. “Mr. Covington doesn’t have the time or patience to haunt this hotel for six weeks. He just asked me to refer guests to his hotel when they run out in the middle of the night. He’s giving me a cut of every room, like a finder’s fee.”
“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” Eliza says.
“Of course it is, but you have no idea how little they’re paying me here! I see how much money these rooms go for, and Mr. and Mrs. Winters pay me minimum wage!” Cricket cries. “I still have student loans to pay off, and I want to go to grad school without going bankrupt. And I wasn’t convincing people to leave the Sugarcrest. It was only after they were storming off in a huff that I even mentioned the Super Hotel Express, so when you think about it, what I was doing was only slightly immoral and not at all illegal, and please don’t get me fired!” She clasps her hands together. “Please—I really need to stay employed.”
Eliza and I look at each other.
* * *
TO TATTLE ON CRICKET, CLICK HERE.
TO LET CRICKET BE THE ONE TO TELL REESE THE TRUTH, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“SO YOU SAW the ghost two nights ago?” I ask Fernando di Cannoli. “What did it look like? What did it do?”
He shudders.
“From my room, I heard pots and pans clanging. So I came down to see. But all the lights were out. Suddenly I could hear it. Scratching and moaning, coming from . . . there.” He points to the dumbwaiter, which is like an elevator that kitchens use to send food up or down to different floors without someone having to carry it a whole flight of stairs. “Then I saw it in the dumbwaiter!”
“But if all the lights were out, how did you see the ghost?” Eliza asks skeptically.
“It was glowing!”
“What color?” Eliza demands.
“A ghostly color. I—I could sense it. It was here.”
Something about Fernando’s story isn’t adding up. I mean, the details aren’t great. But it’s something Mom warned us with a case like this: when people are frightened, their hearts pump faster and their adrenaline runs. That makes it harder for suspects to remember things accurately.
We have to figure out who’s misremembering something because they were scared . . . and who is lying.
I press Fernando di Cannoli for more details. “What did you do after you saw the ghost?”
“I ran! Certo!”
I groan. “You ran?”
“Well, I came back yesterday morning to find the kitchen in chaos. Everything—everything—was out of the drawers and on the floor. Pots, pans, spatulas, baking trays, serving utensils. Everything except . . .”
“Except?” Eliza whispers, her eyes wide.
“The knives.”
I gulp. “Where were the knives?”
“Stuck in the wall in an X. Like a warning.”
“A warning for who?” Eliza asks. “For you?”
“No, no. For . . . them.” He looks around again frantically.
“You think the ghost is after Reese, Harris, and January?”
“Shhhhh!” he says. “Don’t say their names.”
“What, are you afraid we’ll summon them?” I joke.
But Fernando isn’t joking. He seems truly afraid of Reese, Harris, and January. Like they’re haunting him. I have to find out what is going on between Fernando and the Winters family. I don’t know if it has to do with the ghosts in this lodge, but as a detective, any clue could be the key to the mystery, right?
Then again, maybe I should explore where the ghost was—in the dumbwaiter.
* * *
TO ASK FERNANDO ABOUT THE WINTERS FAMILY, CLICK HERE.
TO CLIMB INTO THE DUMBWAITER, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“OKAY, CRICKET,” I say. “We won’t tell Reese. But you have to tell her the truth about your arrangement with Luther.”
She nods. “I will. I promise.”
“So you have no idea who the ghost is?” Eliza says.
My best friend looks frustrated, and I bet I do too. If it isn’t Cricket, then what did we hit upon that made the ghost destroy our bathroom? Was that just a random act of haunting?
“I’m super sorry, detectives, but I don’t know anything about the hauntings. I’m petrified of ghosts. I try to stay as far away as possible. But if I were you, I’d talk to Mr. Winters.”
“Why?”
“Just a hunch. He’s always stomping around at three in the morning. It’s, like, extremely bizarre. Or maybe Sunny. She has the attitude for it. She’s always gloomier than a cloudy day. Although, now that she’s lost her master key, she probably won’t be sticking around here too much longer. I can say with certainty that the ghost isn’t Mrs. Winters, though.”
“How do you know that?” Eliza asks.
“Yeah! How!” Frank demands.
“Haven’t you seen her reaction to the ghosts? She is seriously rattled.”
“Thanks for the tips,” I say. “And if you think of anything else . . .”
“I will find you, yes. Now I’m off to talk to Mrs. Winters. Thank you for letting me do it.” She gets up from the chair and heads toward Reese’s office.
From the concierge desk, I can see that Harris isn’t in his office. And Sunny doesn’t have an office. So where they are right now is beyond me. But they have to be somewhere in the lodge, now that we’re snowed in, right?
“Who do we interview, Carlos?” Eliza asks.
“Whoever we find first.”
I head back upstairs to the staff hallway, with every intention of knocking on Sunny’s door and Harris’s door—and maybe even Fernando di Cannoli’s door. Any door that’s going to give me answers and, more importantly, give me back my mom.
But I don’t even have to knock. Because coming out of his suite is Harris himself.
“Mr. Winters!” I say. “Can we talk to you?”
“A little busy,” he says.
“But we have important investigative questions to ask you.”
Harris frowns. “I thought I was hiring your mother. She is still on the case, isn’t she?”
Is she? I don’t know—but I have a really squirmy feeling about it. Maybe she’s fine . . . maybe she’s in trouble . . . but we won’t know unless we keep digging.
“Yes, she’s on the case. But with Las Pistas Detective Agency, you get four brains for the price of one.”
“Braaaaaaaiiiiiinnnnns!” Frank says like he’s in a zombie movie, drooling a little.
Okay, three brains for the price of one.
“Don’t worry,” I say at the sight of Harris’s skeptical glance. “He’s very skilled.”
“At what?”
“Uh . . .” I pause.
“Um . . .” Eliza hesitates.
“I can burp the alphabet! Wanna hear?” Frank says. “A—urp!”
“Okay, that’s enough skills,” I say loudly, over the sounds of his B-urp and C-urp.
“While I’d love to stay for the whole alphabet,” Harris says, “I’ve got a lot of chores from Reese to complete. She needs all the help she can get right now.”
* * *
TO ASK WHY HARRIS CONSTANTLY WANDERS THE HALLS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, CLICK HERE.
TO ASK WHY REESE IS SO STRESSED, CLICK HERE.
* * *
WE HAVE TO get back into the attic while the ghost is on the roof.
“This way, Frank,” I whisper, and we walk closer to the edge. Which is really dangerous when I think about it, because it’s Frank we’re talking about. But he seems to be taking this seriously.
“The name’s Bond. Frank Bond!” he says in a deep voice.
Okay, he’s taking it semi-seriously.
“Look, Carlos!” he says, pointing over the edge. The grounds of the Sugarcrest Park Lodge are barely visible, but in the lamplight of the front entrance I do see this:
A spot on the grounds where the snow is piled up higher than everywhere else. It’s nearly halfway up the side of the building—almost like a ramp from the second story to the ground. But we’re on the third story.
“Come on,” I say, pulling him back to the attic. We’ve looped around the chimney, so now the ghost is farther away from the attic window than we are. All we have to do is reach out, and—
There’s a face in the window!
I jump back. The window opens, and the creepy girl ghost climbs onto the roof, blocking our only exit. We’re surrounded.
“Don’t move,” she says. The mask on her face is peeling off, and I can see her shrewd dark eyes.
“There are two ghosts,” I say with a groan. “Two culprits.”
“And you call yourselves detectives,” says the ghost in front of us, the one whose hands Frank slammed in the window.
One of them is Sunny. It has to be. I look at the one next to us . . . the creepy little girl ghost. I was right: the blond hair is a wig, for sure. But Frank was right too: you can’t pretend to be smaller than you are, and the one next to us is definitely small. Smaller than an adult.
“Hi, January,” I say quietly to the ghost next to us. “So . . . you’re working for your aunt, are you?”
She pulls off her mask.
“Why?”
“You know why,” she says.
I try to remember all the things we were told about January: she wants to go to public school and not live on this mountain, Harris said. And Byron told us that Reese and January were fighting. And I overheard the conversation where Reese wanted January to take over the hotel, but January saw her future in . . .
“Video editing and sound mixing,” I say aloud. “So that’s how you were able to fake so many hauntings.”
“How?” Frank says, pulling on my sleeve.
“And of course Sunny wanted Reese gone, so she could run the hotel that was rightfully hers. You two had different but overlapping goals, so you worked together.”
Sunny walks closer to us. And if we don’t want to be caught by them, Frank and I have two seconds to act. My eyes dart to the chimney. There’s no smoke, so there’s no fire burning. But I can’t forget there’s also the edge of the roof, where the snow was piled high. . . .
“GET OFF ME!” Frank screams as January wraps her fingers in his hair.
* * *
TO CRAWL DOWN THE CHIMNEY, CLICK HERE.
TO JUMP OFF THE ROOF, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“CAN YOU TELL us about the recent hauntings?” I ask. “As many details as you remember.”
“It’s every night, a new thing,” Reese says. “The windows rattle and break. There’s ooze on the floor sometimes. There are . . . there are threatening messages.”
“Messages?” I ask.
“Terrifying symbols on the walls—in blood. I wash it off, but it always comes back.”
“And howling?” Mom asks, checking her precase notes.
Reese nods. “There is always howling. But I can never find the source of it.”
Eliza scrunches her eyebrows together. “Is there a pattern to when you hear the sounds and see . . . well, what do you see?”
“We see a ghost,” January says. She chips off some of the black polish on her nails. “The pattern is that it happens every night, and only at night, after the sun goes down.”
“The recent hauntings have been getting progressively scarier,” Reese adds. “The last one—two nights ago—took place in the kitchen. The noise woke the remaining six guests in the lodge, and they all fled like I had let loose a bucket of bedbugs. I’d rather have bedbugs, to be honest. At least I know how to eradicate bedbugs!” Reese rubs her brow like she’s got a headache. “These hauntings are ruining my business. The reviews online have been awful since this started. I used to be sold out. Now people are canceling their reservations. I’ve never had more vacancies.”
“How many guests do you have left?”
“Just Byron Bookbinder,” January answers.
“Thorn in my side,” Reese mumbles. “He keeps asking to go into the Dead Room.”
The Dead Room? My insides feel like lead. “Um . . . what’s a Dead Room?”
The Winters exchange a dark glance. After a long pause, January says, “There’s a room in the hotel that is locked. We can’t get in.”
“Try a key,” Frank says. “Duhhhh.”
“There is no key,” January says, glaring at him. “We’ve tried to break down the door, we’ve tried to take it off its hinges. Mom even brought in a locksmith to make a custom key for it. It won’t open.”
Eliza looks at me eagerly. Her expression says, “We have to get into that room!” It’s the exact opposite of what I’m thinking.
“Why call it the Dead Room?” I ask.
“Because it’s a room we can’t use. It’s dead to us. What else would you like us to call it?” Harris asks.
“The empty room?” I say. “The extra room?”
“The vacant room, the hollow room, the unoccupied room,” Eliza says.
“The unoccupied room. Because that rolls off the tongue,” January says sarcastically.
“This is all making me ill,” Reese says.
“Ah, the nervous poops,” Frank says sagely. “Eliza gets them before every test.”
“Frank!” Eliza says. Her face turns lobster red.
But thankfully, the Winters aren’t listening.
“Sweets,” Harris says, turning to his wife, “these hauntings are causing too much stress. You haven’t been sleeping. You’ve had migraines. These ghosts are scaring you to death! You need to step away from the lodge—”
“I can’t step away, Harris. This place is my life.”
January sighs heavily, like this is a fight she’s heard many, many times.
“Reese, sweets, this place is unhealthy. A danger, even! Tell them about the hair incident, Reese! Tell them!”
“I’d rather tell them about the mice. That was much more terrifying.”
“You must be joking,” Harris says. “Nothing could be scarier than the hair.”
* * *
TO ASK ABOUT THE MICE, CLICK HERE.
TO ASK ABOUT THE HAIR INCIDENT, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“FRANK,” I WHISPER. “Slowly . . . grab the fire extinguisher by your right foot.”
He bends over quickly, ignoring my advice to go slow. The second he lunges, the ghost runs toward us. With a wide, devilish grin, Frank pulls the pin and squeezes the handle. Thick white foam covers the ghost, and it starts coughing.
Ghosts don’t breathe, so they don’t cough, right?
We dart past the choking ghost, toward the window.
“Frank! Cover me!” I say.
“Got it,” he says, waving the extinguisher around. “Want another taste of fire foam?” he taunts. “COME AT ME, GHOST.”
“Don’t egg it on!” I groan.
The window opens just as the ghost comes at Frank again. He lets the fire extinguisher loose, but it’s clearly running out of foam.
“Come on!” I say, giving him a leg up through the window. There’s a ledge just below—which would put us on the roof. I don’t know where we’re going to go from there, but we have to get out of here.
Frank crawls through, then reaches back for me. “Your turn, Carlos!” Somehow Frank is smiling as he holds out his hand. I wish I had even a tenth of Frank’s bravery. I’m sure the expression on my face is one of complete terror.
I scramble headfirst toward the window. I’m halfway outside, then I’m mostly out! Almost there! I can make it—
The ghost grabs my ankle. Cold hands, solid hands.
“HEY!” Frank says. “KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF!” And he closes the window right on the ghost’s wrists.
There’s a
howl of pain from the other side of the glass. But the hands let go of my ankles. Frank and I wobble across the roof, careful not to get too close to the edge. We have to get away from the attic’s only window. But it’s slippery up here, and with the snow and wind raging, it feels even more dangerous.
“It was Sunny, right?” I shiver. It had to be.
Frank shrugs.
“What, you don’t think so?”
“BLOND,” Frank says. “Ghost girl was blond. Sunny has black hair. How do you explain that, Mr. Explanations?”
“It was probably a wig,” I say. “We never did see her face.”
“But . . . ,” Frank says thoughtfully. “She was SMALL. People can’t just shrink.”
“So who do you think it was?”
He pauses. “A ghost.”
I gulp. “Yeah . . . that’s what I’m afraid of.”
For a second, I wish Eliza was here. I want someone to convince me ghosts aren’t real. “Think,” I whisper. “How do we get down from here?”
“There’s a window in an attic!” Frank says, like I didn’t know about the window we just crawled through.
“Great idea, buddy, but let’s keep brainstorming.”
Across the roof, someone is crawling out of the attic window—the one we just came through. With the weather and the darkness, I can’t see who it is from this distance. I hate to say it, but I think I’m going to have to get closer if I’m going to figure out this mystery.
Unless . . . maybe we can go back through the attic window while the ghost is out on the roof. It might be our only way to escape.
* * *
TO MOVE CLOSER TO THE GHOST, CLICK HERE.
TO ESCAPE THROUGH THE ATTIC WINDOW, CLICK HERE.
* * *
I LOOK AT January. “You’re the ghost,” I accuse her.
Haunting at the Hotel Page 28
