by JL Bryan
“Oh.” Stacey blushed a little.
“Have you really seen ghosts?” I asked. “Or is that something you're supposed to tell the tourists?”
“That depends,” Steve said. “Are you a tourist?”
I laughed a little, and he was saved from having to give a real answer by the arrival of the hotel's general manager. I'd spoken with her on the phone the previous day, but only very briefly. She looked to be in her mid-forties, carefully styled platinum blond hair that just grazed the shoulders of her black blazer. She had a quick smile, but her eyes seemed cold and distant as she examined Stacey and me. They were a green hue that made me think of bottle glass. Sharp little chunks of bottle glass. Her accent was from somewhere deep in Texas.
“It's so nice to meet you! I'm Madeline. Which one's Ellie?” she asked, glancing between us.
“That's me,” I said, then quickly introduced Stacey Tolbert, my tech manager, protege, apprentice, and person who's in charge of making coffee at the office.
“Come along this way. Any trouble finding the place?” Madeline asked. We passed around the grand front stairs and into a broad hallway paneled with dark old wood and softly lit by sconces near the twelve-foot ceiling. Paintings of gardens and women in antebellum dresses adorned the walls, overlooking antique high-backed chairs, upholstered benches, and potted trees.
“No, ma'am. The Lathrop is famous,” I said.
“Oh, goodness, you don't have to call me 'ma'am.' Here we are.” Madeline touched the dark wood paneling, and a door-sized rectangle of the wall swung inward. She gave us a knowing smile as she led us through the hidden door into a narrow hallway. The marble tiles on the floor gave way to scuffed hardwood as we passed through, and the ceiling dropped a bit. Bland fluorescents lit the concealed passage, glowing dully on its plain white plaster walls.
“That's pretty cool,” Stacey said, while we passed closed doors and turned down another narrow, windowless hall.
“Jib doors are everywhere in the hotel,” Madeline said. “The design philosophy was for the staff to appear and vanish as quickly as possible. This inner cluster of rooms and stairways would keep guests and workers from rubbing too many elbows.” She opened what looked like a tall, narrow cabinet, but turned out to be the doorway to steep wooden stairs leading up to the next floor. “The staff can move invisibly through the hotel, even from floor to floor.”
“Like ghosts,” Stacey said, grinning.
“These inner rooms must have been dark in the days before electricity,” I said.
“I'm not sure how they handled that. The hotel's been remodeled a few times in its life. To be altogether honest, I'm just beginning to learn the history of this place. I've only been GM for three weeks—they transferred me from the Burlingame House in Asheville—have you ever been to Asheville? It's so pretty. Of course, Savannah’s pretty, too, in so many ways, and I couldn't be prouder that the partners chose me for this opportunity...”
As we passed through the narrow, dark inner passageways, I glanced through an ajar door and saw a man in a starched white chef's jacket loading a covered tray into a stainless steel dumbwaiter. A busy kitchen area lay behind him. The tantalizing smell of fresh-baked bread wafted out, reminding me that I'd only had a cup of yogurt for breakfast.
Madeline pulled open another door and waved us into a spacious office. Early-afternoon sunlight filled the office through a pair of tall windows. The décor was similar to the hotel lobby, with lots of antique furniture and bowls of flowers on the mantel above the old brick fireplace, which was spotless, and so probably hadn't been used in decades.
The panel of wall through which we'd entered, including chair rail and baseboard, silently closed behind Madeline as she stepped into the room. Another, more traditional door was built into another wall.
“Please have a seat.” Madeline indicated a few high-backed chairs facing an old ornate desk with sculpted, bowed legs, carved to look like stern women in Victorian dresses. “Sorry to take you through the shortcut, but otherwise it's a long way around.”
“It was fun!” Stacey said. “I've wanted to explore this hotel since I saw it on Haunted Places.”
“Can I get you ladies anything? Coffee, tea, sparkling water?”
“We're fine, thank you,” I told her. I brought out my notepad while she took her seat across from us. “Why don't you tell us a little bit about the problems you've been having?”
“Oh, honey, I will, but first I just need y'all to sign these little old non-disclosure agreements.” Madeline fished a couple of thick documents and pens from a drawer and slid them over to us. The logo at the top of each document read BLACK DIAMOND PROPERTIES. “The bigwigs don't want to risk any rumors leaking out.”
Stacey glanced over the document, then looked at me for guidance. I rifled through the pages for a minute.
“It looks pretty standard to me,” I said, as if I'd reviewed heaps of such agreements in the past. “If you're worried about people discovering this hotel is haunted, though, I don't think you'll ever get that horse back into the barn.” I thought a Texas lady might appreciate horse-related metaphors.
“Oh, I don't expect to, and we surely welcome all of our guests who want to come and try to see our resident ghosts. This is just something to make the partners feel a little more in control of the situation. You know how men are,” she said, tossing me a wink with her long, thick, very likely artificial eyelashes.
“I should probably have our boss check this over before we sign anything,” I said. I wasn't sure Calvin Eckhart, the retired homicide detective who employed Stacey and me, would be thrilled if I signed such a contract without a more careful review.
“Do what you need to, honey, but we can't proceed until those are signed.”
I nodded, wondering whether this was just standard procedure for her corporate masters or if there was something specific they wanted to keep secret. Naturally, I was eager to find out what she was trying to hide, if anything. My curiosity was stoked, but I tried to tell myself there was probably nothing more than overcautious lawyers behind this.
Madeline continued smiling at us, but again I had the impression of cold, sharp green glass when I looked at her eyes. She remained silent, waiting for me to make a decision.
“I'll just call the office, if that's okay,” I said, bringing out my phone.
“Oh, you just go right ahead. I would hate to waste your time coming all the way out here.” The way she said it, I got the impression she was really telling us not to waste her time. Her over-large smile seemed to confirm this.
I called the office, but Calvin didn't answer. I couldn't reach him on cell, either, but that's not surprising since he regards cell phones as the most irritating invention since the lava lamp.
That left me sitting there awkwardly, contract in front of us, Madeline's impatience growing with every second. I could tell by how her smile kept getting wider and wider as we regarded each other in silence.
I flipped through the NDA again. I told myself to stop worrying. Calvin was considering selling the detective agency to an out-of-state company called Paranormal Solutions, Inc., which I absolutely didn't want him to do. A nice infusion of cash from this high-end hotel might convince him to delay selling out a little longer.
“Okay,” I said. “We'll keep your secrets. Where do I sign?”
“Just here...and here...” Madeline flipped through the pages, pointing. “And right here, sugar, just your initials is fine for that one...”
Stacey and I signed here, here, and right here, and I assumed we weren't unknowingly buying a timeshare in Weeki Wachee or transferring our savings to some Nigerian prince.
“That's all settled, then.” With a quick sweep of her arm, Madeline made the contracts vanish into a drawer, then she hopped to her feet.
“We should probably get copies of those,” I mentioned, standing up with her.
“Oh, I'll just email them, sugar,” Madeline said, waving a dismissive hand at the closed
drawer. “Lawyers worried about covering their own backsides, is all that is. I suppose I'd better show you where it happened.” She pushed open the jib door in her office and stepped into the narrow service corridor behind it.
“I'm sorry?” I asked, as we followed after her. “Where what happened?”
“The...” Madeline began in a hushed voice, then spoke louder as a lady in a blue and white maid uniform passed by, pushing a custodial cart down an intersecting hallway, also narrow and windowless. “Black Diamond Properties invests in only the highest caliber of historic hotels. We bring the most advanced, modern comforts into the most beautiful antique buildings for a peak luxury guest experience.”
“Oh...how interesting,” I said, adjusting to her sudden change in tone. It sounded like she'd panicked at the sight of her employee and retreated into some memorized sales pitch.
“Historic hotels in historic cities, all over the Southeast,” she said, while leading us to a pair of steel elevator doors. These were no-nonsense industrial doors, nothing like the embossed golden-brass doors to the guest elevator in the lobby.
“So you go from hotel to hotel, then?” I asked. “Flipping them?”
She winced a little. “Not 'flipping,' sugar, but updating, rehabbing, and beautifying. And I personally consider it an honor to help bring these historic properties back from the dead.”
“The Lathrop Grand wasn't out of business, though,” Stacey said. “It wasn't dead.”
“Not out of business, but certainly out of date. And the fourth floor...” She shook her head as the elevator doors opened, revealing an equally unadorned gray freight elevator car big enough to carry heavy furniture between floors.
The doors closed, and the elevator ascended to the fourth floor. I noticed that this elevator, accessible to staff only, had a basement button. The polished mechanical indicator above the guest elevator hadn't included a B.
“I promise I'm not trying to smuggle you two around by using this freight elevator,” she said. “The fourth-floor button on the guest elevator has been disabled for safety. The fourth floor is not open to guests until we get it nice and fixed up.”
“Is it open to us? I notice the doors are still closed,” I said.
“Oh, goodness. I'm sorry.” Madeline inserted a keycard into the elevator's control panel, and the doors finally opened, giving us our first view of the forbidden fourth floor.
Already it looked in disarray. Empty dark doorways in the service corridor offered glimpses of sawhorses and sheet plastic. Lumber, wood chunks, and sawdust littered the floor. A hanging strip of fluorescent stuttered reluctantly to life after Madeline jiggered the light switch a few times.
My strongest first impression was the cold, clammy air as we entered the room. The light above continued flickering, lending a strobe-like quality to our movements.
The area looked like an abandoned construction site, wires hanging from the ceiling, loose nails and screws strewn across the warped old hardwood floors. Portions of paneling had been removed from the walls.
I glanced at Stacey. She was shivering, and she nodded back at me, letting me know she felt the unnatural cold, too. I drew my flashlight from my purse in case the spotty fluorescent lighting decided to die on us altogether. My tactical flashlight is my sidearm, my first defense against unpleasant specters. A good ghost hunter never goes anywhere without one
“It happened through here,” Madeline said, her voice barely above a whisper as she led us down the corridor.
“What happened, exactly?” I asked, matching her hushed tone.
Instead of answering, she pushed open a section of wall, leading us through another of those nearly invisible jib doors meant to keep the hotel staff out of the sight of wealthy guests.
It opened onto an expansive dark space, just as cold as the first room. Madeline worked at the light switch panel and managed to bring a pair of hanging bulbs sputtering to life, though most of the bulbs in the room remained dark.
Here, the floor was tiled with dark marble, and two rows of thick columns ran the length of the room, one on either side, casting deep shadows along the walls. There were no windows. My flashlight found intricate little figures carved into the walls—men with goat horns and goat legs, women with tails, and people who looked as if they were part tree, with branches for arms or a tree trunk in place of a leg. I considered that a tree-trunk leg would be fairly inconvenient, rooting you into place. At best, all you could do was walk in a hopeless circle. More friezes depicted a hodgepodge of Egyptian-style hieroglyphs and assorted occult symbols.
I couldn't say right off whether the elaborate wall carvings were meant to be ancient and pagan or a bit more demonic than that, but clearly some skilled artist had spent a great deal of time and effort to create them, and so someone else had probably paid a lot of money for them.
Likewise, they'd paid a great deal for the marble, including the big, dusty raised dais or altar at the western end of the room.
“Here,” Madeline said, then sighed.
“I feel like there's something you're not telling us,” Stacey said.
“I'm sorry. This was the upper ballroom. There's a bigger, nicer ballroom on the ground floor, of course, where we have weddings and such, and our annual Halloween ball. I can't see why anyone would want to make such a dark and dreary room up here, or anywhere.” Madeline shook her head, frowning as if disappointed. “Someone went to great expense to make an ugly place.”
I nodded, waiting for more. Madeline struck me as the type who would plunge right ahead and keep talking to avoid any moments of quiet in the conversation.
“From what they tell me, this whole entire floor has been closed up for decades,” Madeline said. “The hotel itself was in and out of business through the twentieth century, of course, and this area's just never been restored. The last owner never even fiddled with it, as far as we can tell. Just kept it closed. Restoring the fourth floor was part of the big value-add I'm supposed to be bringing here. That was the idea...” Her lip trembled. Her eyes were shiny, too, as if she were about to cry. Either she got very emotional about renovations or there was something bigger going on. “Do y'all know much about the history of this place?”
“Everybody knows at least a little bit,” I said. Of course, I'd Googled it before coming to meet with the client, so the major details were fresh in my mind. “It was built in 1851 by Dr. and Mrs. Uriah and Mabel Lathrop, who wanted it to be the finest hotel in the city. And it was, or pretty close to it. Society balls and wealthy travelers. During the Civil War, it became a hospital for Confederate soldiers, then for Union soldiers after they took control of the city. Dr. Lathrop was a Confederate sympathizer but treated all the wounded equally. I guess he was more devoted to medicine than politics. The hotel was used as a hospital during the yellow fever epidemic about a decade later, but the most famous ghost comes from the Civil War period.”
“Abigail Bowen,” Stacey whispered, glancing into a dark corner of the bizarre temple room, as if she expected the long-dead nurse to come charging out with a scalpel at the sound of her name. I've seen stranger things happen.
“Stabby Abby,” I said. “We used to have a playground jump-rope rhyme about her when I was a kid. Nurse Stabby Abby, made the boys cry. If you ever see her, you're the next to die.”
“Cute,” Stacey commented.
“But there are other ghosts, too,” Madeline said.
“Sure,” I said. “Soldiers. Children who died in the epidemic. A number of ghosts have been seen or heard walking late at night. Sometimes whispering.”
“I've heard them.” Madeline gave a tight nod, looking pale, her bottle-green eyes wide. “More than once, when I was working late, usually in one of the upstairs hallways. I hear heavy footsteps, like someone's right behind me, but there's no one there. It gets real cold all of a sudden. I tell you, it makes my hair stand right up on end every time.” She shook her head. “I heard this place was haunted before I took it over, but you never th
ink much of stories like that. People will say just about any big old place has a ghost.”
“Ghosts are more common than most people realize,” I said. “If you ask around, almost everybody has a story or knows somebody who has one. Maybe seeing an apparition, or just hearing a voice or a footstep where there shouldn't be one. Maybe feeling a cold hand touch you, or a cold breath on the back of your neck, when you're alone in a room.”
“Oh, honey, I know it,” she said. “There was a little graveyard back home in Abilene, an overgrown place where the graves were all from the eighteen-hundreds. It was abandoned, nobody kept it up. They said if you went and sat on this big cracked slab over one of those graves, you'd feel something reach up and grab you from behind.”
“Did you ever go there?” Stacey asked.
“It sounded too scary for me, but my friend Ginny went one night with some boys. Full moon and everything. She said she felt it. I never knew whether to believe her or not, and to tell the truth, I always figured it was one of those boys that grabbed her in the dark. After working here, I'm more inclined to think she was telling the truth.”
“Have you had any other experiences here at the hotel?” I asked.
“Well, the voices, the occasional footstep...I always try to tell myself it must be guests or staff. We do have a lot of hidden passageways, as y'all have seen. But I can't always bring myself to believe it.”
“What about this room?” I gestured around at the dark, temple-like ballroom.
“Y'all did sign the nondisclosure agreements, so I'll go ahead and get to the meat of it, but you have to promise this information stays with you.”
“Of course,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “All right now. You see, I've had the toughest time keeping contractors at work up here. The first company just flat quit, saying the workers refused to come up here anymore. They said they felt like they were being watched and harassed, all their tools getting rearranged or disappearing, and they'd come in the morning to find their past day's work all wrecked. Then that second company I hired to replace the first...”
