by JL Bryan
“Ha. Madeline probably just sent us breakfast to keep us hidden away up here. She didn't like us going to the restaurant.”
“Suits me fine. If we make her mad again, do we get cake?”
“Let's not push it.”
Other hotel guests stepped out onto the veranda a few doors down, so we had to keep our conversation low-key.
“So what's the plan today?” she asked.
“I want to have a look at the fourth floor again before we go,” I said. “And I want Madeline to put me in touch with that last contractor, the one whose worker...you know. I want a firsthand account of what happened.”
“You think she'll arrange that for us?”
“She will if she wants this case solved quickly. Grant Patterson answered my text a minute ago. He says it'll take a couple of days to gather what he can about the Lathrop Grand's history. You should probably sift through audio and video data today. Find out what we picked up last night.”
“I can do that here!” Stacey said, beaming. “Hanging out on my awesome five-star bed. I don't care if this case lasts a month. Do you think we can attend their Halloween ball if we drag it out that long?”
“I'm sure the tickets are very pricey. Probably sold out.”
“Yeah, but we have the inside connection.”
“Not at the moment, we don't. Maybe after we get back on Madeline's good side.”
After breakfast, I called Madeline's office from the phone in Stacey's room.
“How's it going?” she asked, her voice all sunshine, practically glowing out of the telephone receiver. “Did you enjoy breakfast?”
“It was really the best thing ever. Seriously, I can never eat anywhere else ever again. Listen, I think you'll need to close down Room 208. I tried to tell your security guy, but he wasn't cooperative.”
“We charge a premium for that room,” she said. “Guests request it months in advance.”
“Right. Well, I checked it out when last night's guests ran off, and I came back with a pretty nasty cut across my shoulder blades. It looks like somebody got me with a scalpel.”
Madeline was silent on the other end of the line, clearly reluctant to close off such a highly overpriced room.
“The family that replaced them has a kid,” I said. “If it was just the ghost-tourist adults, I'd say let them proceed at their own risk, but once there's a child in danger, that changes things for me.”
Madeline sighed. “I'll see what I can do.”
She wasn't thrilled when I asked about meeting with the contractor, either. But finally she agreed. She would have to arrange the meeting herself, since he was also bound by a nondisclosure agreement and wasn't supposed to tell anyone about his experiences at the Lathrop Grand.
Then I went into my room, closing the connecting door behind me. It was a little smaller than Stacey's room but decorated in similar fashion, pastoral paintings on the walls, sunny French doors opening onto the veranda, fresh flowers and polished antique furniture.
My bathroom had a clawfoot tub like the one in Stacey's room, with little dragon-like feet. It was charming and cute, but I opted for the glass phone booth of a shower stall in the corner. The hotel seemed to have high standards of cleanliness—if you ignored the forbidden fourth floor—but I can't help getting a little icked out at the thought of lying in a tub where thousands of strangers have bathed before me.
The hot water hit me, and I hissed a little bit when I turned my back. I lathered a tiny complimentary glass bottle's worth of shampoo into my hair, and of course the phone in my room rang at just that moment, while the suds were just starting to run down over my closed eyes.
Normally I would have ignored it, but I didn't want to miss Madeline's call and possibly delay my chance to speak to the witness.
Wrapping a towel around my head, I dashed to the phone.
“His name is Javier Morales, Morales Construction,” she said. “He's agreed to meet you at five p.m. at La Comarca on Ogeechee Road.”
I jotted this down on the pad of official Lathrop Grand stationery by the phone. The paper felt like silk.
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
“My pleasure,” she said, her voice a flat monotone. “If there's nothing else...”
“The doors on the fourth floor have some very old locks on them,” I said. “Our staff keycards can't open them. Do you have the keys?”
“Oh...” She sighed. “I'll ask the custodian about it.”
That didn't sound promising. “Thanks for all your help,” I said.
“Are we much closer to getting rid of the ghost?” she asked.
“We have to identify her before we can trap her. Yes, I think things will move quickly,” I added, mostly to make her feel better. I certainly hoped it was true, as long as “moving quickly” didn't involve me getting cut to pieces by Stabby Abby. That would be a less than satisfactory ending to the case.
After the call, I debated driving home to rest, then decided to stay in my hotel room instead. I'd left my cat plenty of food and water. Also, my room had a very attractive-looking sleigh bed made of beautiful blond wood, with a soft mattress. I was exhausted from a night of frights, and I couldn't see the point in driving anywhere at all. The hotel might have been haunted, but not our floor, in particular. I've slept in much worse places.
Just as I closed my eyes, my phone rang again—the cell this time, not my room phone. It was Michael.
“Just calling to say goodnight,” he greeted me when I answered.
“You know me so well.” I approached the curtain across the French doors and adjusted it slightly to cut off some unwelcome sunlight leaking into my room. “Aren't you just starting your day?”
“I've been on shift since six a.m. I guess I know you better than you know me.”
“Ugh. How do you handle those hours?” I lay down and pulled a pillow over my eyes.
“How was your first night? Did Stabby Abby grab you in your sleep?”
“I wasn't asleep when it happened.”
“Seriously? What did she look like?”
“Creepy. Like a woman-shaped fog.” I decided against telling him about the scalpel slash on my back. I didn't want to worry him. “This place is pretty ghost-infested. It's going to take a while to narrow it down to the dangerous ones.”
“How dangerous are we talking about?” The concern was clear in his voice. Michael had seen some of the worst nasties I've dealt with. One used to haunt his apartment building.
“It'll be fine.”
“You're still coming with me tomorrow?” he asked.
“Sure, as long as I can get back to work by sunset, and nothing urgent comes up...”
“You don't sound very excited for a girl whose boyfriend is taking her antique shopping.”
“It doesn't get more romantic than browsing for gears and springs from old clocks.”
“I'm sure they'll have plenty of lace and frills for you to squeal over,” he said.
“I squeal for nothing.”
“Maybe we'll find some haunted knickknacks for you to exorcise.”
“Let's hope not. Seriously, I can't wait to see you, Michael. Thanks for the call. Stay safe.” As a firefighter, Michael has to face all kinds of dangerous situations. I try not to worry about it—I'm not exactly a stranger to danger myself—but it creeps into my thoughts.
I slept deeply, but my dreams were rough and frightening, full of shadowy figures lying in the dark, moaning in a slow, endless agony. I saw children walking up a dim hallway. When they turned to look at me, their faces were yellow, and dark blood seeped from their eyes and nostrils. One scrawny girl of six or seven with ratty blond hair opened her mouth as if to speak to me. More blood drooled from her lips, but no sound came out. She mouthed words, possibly “Help me.”
When I awoke in my hotel bed, I was drenched in sweat and my skin was scalding hot, as if someone had cranked up the heat in my room. I felt achy and sick to my stomach, and the thin line of sunlight seeping around
the window curtain seemed like a painful, blinding glare.
I groaned as I pushed myself up and out of my damp bed. The thermostat was set to a perfectly pleasant seventy-six degrees. The burning heat was from my own skin, not the air in the room. I turned the thermostat down several notches anyway.
It wasn't quite noon, so I'd only had about four good hours of sleep. Well, not good hours, but complete ones, anyway. I wasn't in a rush to return to the land of nightmares.
A voice mail from Madeline told me the head custodian had been instructed to loan me the old keys for the fourth-floor rooms, but his shift ended at three-thirty and the night staff didn't have access to those keys.
I got dressed and pulled my bed-headed hair back into a ponytail so I'd look partly civilized. Stacey was still asleep in her room, her knees up to her chest like a little kid, and I decided not to wake her. At least one of us ought to be well-rested.
Ten minutes later, I was enjoying the gray-metal, rubber-floor ambience of the freight elevator as it chugged downward into the basement.
The doors clanked open, and I stepped out into a dusty, brick-walled underground space. Brick archways helped support the heavy, marble-trimmed four-story structure above. Chain-link gates blocked some of these archways, which stored heavy equipment like a floor polisher and pressure washer. Others store large unidentifiable objects draped in white sheets that looked like the ghosts of old furniture.
The door to the head custodian's office stood open. An elderly man sat at a fire-scarred desk in one corner, filling out paperwork. The wall immediately above his desk featured thumbtacked pictures of sun-drenched tropical islands and rickety sailing ships, like some kind of shrine to Jimmy Buffett. The rest of the office was cluttered with a rusty file cabinet, a couple of broken chairs, and shelves of cleaning fluids and supplies all the way to the ceiling.
I knocked on the open door. “Excuse me. Are you Earl Brinkman?”
The man's rolling office chair creaked as he turned to face me. He was tall and rail-thin, his gray hair sparse, his eyes rheumy and watery. He was wiping at his eyes and nose with a handkerchief, as though they wouldn't stop leaking, something he would continue to do throughout our conversation. He wore starched, ironed khaki coveralls with the Lathrop Grand's curlicue logo, probably meant to imitate the swirling wrought-iron railings of the trademark veranda.
“What can I do for you?” he finally asked.
“I'm Ellie Jordan. Madeline said you had some keys for me.” I offered the best smile I could manage, but the dark basement was creeping me out a little.
Earl looked me over like he was trying to assess me somehow. He seemed to be in his middle or late sixties. He finally gave his tooth a long suck and looked me in the eyes.
“You want to go up to four?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You shouldn't. Nothing good comes from up there.”
“I know it's haunted.”
“Haunted?” He leaned back in his chair. “My granny's house was haunted. Ghost of my great-gramps used to smoke his pipe out back by the woodpile. You could see the red glow some nights. That's haunted. But this here?” He pointed up to the dusty ceiling joists. “They don't have words for it. It's more'n just haunted. Bad things could happen to a little girl like you up there.”
Resisting the urge to get defensive, I widened my smile and tried to butter him up for information. “You sound like you know a lot about it. Have you worked here long?”
“Seventeen years,” he said, with a shake of his head. He glanced longingly at one of the Caribbean posters on the wall. We had some nice beaches of our own nearby—Tybee Island, for example—but clearly he dreamed of getting a little farther away from home.
“Have you ever encountered anything strange in that time?” I asked.
He snorted, then let out a barking laugh. He opened a drawer in his desk. “I've seen it all, heard it all. The soldiers missing their arms or their heads. The children with yellow fever. The whispers, all the whispers...they're really bad on the fourth floor.”
“Then why do you keep working here?”
“It's a job, ain't it? Besides, they just about can't fire me.” He brought out a bottle of Caribbean rum from his desk and poured it into a mug featuring the cartoon-insect logo of the Savannah Sand Gnats, which was our local minor-league baseball team until they moved across the border to Columbia, South Carolina. He took a long sip of rum and closed his eyes. “Dang near everybody quits after a year or two. There just aren't many of us willing to hang in there. Without me, they'd have to hire a new head custodian every three or four months, and they know it.”
I nodded. I could see why that might appeal to a man who drank hard liquor for lunch.
“Did you ever encounter the ghost of Abigail Bowen?” I asked.
“All the time. Usually she's kind of a cloudy mist, sometimes she's clearer. Sometimes she touches your wrist or your neck, like she's looking for a pulse. I tell you, I might work here, but I wouldn't sleep here.” He glanced at a folded-up cot against the wall. “Not in her room, anyway.”
“Has she ever attacked you?”
“Not me personally, cause I know to steer clear, but I've heard of her scratching people just lately. Especially up on four. She's still got that scalpel. People come all over hoping to see her, but they better hope they don't get too close. She might be a pretty one, but she killed all them soldiers. Cut their throats in their sleep. It's best to remember that before you go banging around upstairs. It's best you stay away from four altogether.”
“I appreciate your concern, but I have to do my job.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“I'm a private investigator, here as a security consultant. I have to check the fourth floor, there's no way around it.”
“It's secure enough up there, if it's burglars you're worried about,” he said. “Unless you know how to get rid of ghosts.”
“I'll see what I can do,” I said. “Mr. Brinkman—”
“Call me Earl, honey.” He dropped a wink, his voice beginning to slur.
“Okay. Do you believe the ghost of Abigail Bowen killed that workman on the fourth floor?”
“Oh, I believe it. It was one of them, anyway. One of them...” He gestured with his hand, as if to indicate that he couldn't quite remember the word ghosts. He took another sip. I could see the conversation going south from here. When his gaze dropped from my face to my shirt and lingered there for an uncomfortable amount of time, I held out my hand and gave him my coldest look.
“I need those keys,” I said. “Now.”
“Just trying to look out for you.” He sighed, put down his mug, and eased himself to his feet. He unlocked a drawer in the file cabinet and took his time rummaging through some loud, clanking objects in there. He finally fished out a fat ring of long metal keys and held them out to me.
I reached for them, but he held tight, almost as if trying to tug me toward him. I tensed, ready to give him a hard kick if he tried anything inappropriate.
“You gotta be careful,” he said, the rum strong on his breath now. I couldn't have been less comfortable being alone in the basement with this man. “I mean it. And I'll tell you what I told the others. If something happens to you up there, if something gets you, don't go blaming Earl for it. It ain't Earl's fault. I done told you stay away now. Right?”
“I got you,” I said. “It ain't Earl's fault.”
“But you going anyway, ain't you?” His voice was even more slurred now, his eyes unfocused. “I can tell.”
“I'll be fine.” I gave the keys a tug, trying to pull them away. “Thank you.”
“Uh-huh.” He released the keys, then stumbled back and dropped into his office chair. “You think I'm crazy. That's how the other lady looked at me, too. Crazy stupid Earl. But I guess they figured it out when they saw for themselves.”
I nodded. I was very interested to hear what Javier Morales had to say about what he and his workers had seen.
Keys in hand, I backed up to the door, thanking him again. He nodded and waved me away.
“It ain't Earl's fault,” I heard him mutter as I dashed away to the nearest staircase, since I didn't particularly feel like waiting around for the elevator. “It ain't Earl's fault...”
I took Earl's advice seriously. I wanted to get in and out of the fourth floor before sunset, which meant we had to do it this afternoon. I hurried up the stairs.
Chapter Six
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” I said, nudging Stacey's shoulder where she lay curled in bed. “Your prince has arrived. He's a custodian named Earl. You'll love him.”
“Huh?” Stacey lifted her head from the pillow, short blond hair puffed out on one side. “Who's Earl?”
“I've got the keys to upstairs,” I said, jingling them in front of her. “Want to go look for dead people? Set up the rest of our gear?” I'd loaded a luggage cart with equipment to carry up to the fourth floor.
“Want to hit the spa first? Get a massage?”
“There's no time. I have to meet with Javier this afternoon.”
“Who's Javier?” Stacey pulled on a pair of jeans. “A friend of Earl's?”
“Javier's the contractor who lost a man up on the fourth floor.”
“Sheesh. Makes it sound like a war zone. We're putting the REM pods up there?” she asked, lifting one of the black hockey-puck-sized devices from the cart. These are radiating electromagnetic sensors that create a little electric field that, if you're lucky, can be interfered with by ghosts. Then the little thing lets off a kind of spooky digital “woo” tone and the lights on top flash. Occasionally people manage to have yes-or-no conversations with spirits using the pods.
“There seem to be a number of entities up there,” I said. “I want to scatter those like tripwires so nothing can sneak up on us.”
“Sounds good to me. Then we hit the spa, get that massage—”
“Then you start sifting video and audio. Professional massages are overrated, anyway.”
“Wow. Is there, like, any room for joy in your life, Ellie?”
