The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  “You should go,” I said. “Your dad won’t be long.”

  She didn’t say anything, just got up and left.

  King and Queens was so massive that there were parts of it I had yet to explore, so I armed myself with my camera and headed into the reaches of the resort farthest from the lobby and main entrance. Everything was dark. None of the sconces or overhead lights were lit. With no guests to occupy any of the rooms, there was no point in wasting energy. I filmed the long, empty hallways. They were ghostly enough on their own, but as I progressed, the quality of the resort’s interior gradually diminished. The carpet was worn bare along the main paths, paint and wallpaper peeled from the top and bottom of the chair rail, and the musty scent of disuse pervaded my nostrils to make camp there. It was as if the front of King and Queens was regularly restored and renovated to keep its regal image aglow, but no money was left to rehabilitate the remainder of the resort. I arrived at the other restaurant Oliver had mentioned the first day. Chairs were stacked upside down on the tables. A layer of dust decorated the table linens and the wine glasses hung above the bar. The copper pots and pans in the kitchen were lined with green oxidation tarnish. No one had dined here for a very long time. Through a double egress door off the other side of the kitchen was a huge, ornate ballroom with a filigree ceiling, gold columns akin to the Parthenon, and chandeliers draped with crimson banners. My footsteps echoed as I crossed the dance floor, panning the camera from one side of the massive room to the other. Then I turned the lens on myself.

  “I’ve never seen this part of the resort,” I said to my future audience. “The way Oliver talked about it made it sound like it was still in use before his wife died, but this place looks like no one’s set foot here in about forty years. And this style” —I swung the camera around to showcase the antique vibe— “is so outdated. King and Queens was built in the late 1930s. Other parts of the resort were renovated to keep it relevant, but the ballroom hasn’t been touched. Look at these lightbulbs.” I clambered onto a dusty chair to unscrew a dead bulb from one of the sconces. “It’s made of heavy-duty glass. Check out the filament.” I held the bulb closer to the lens so the viewers could see the tangle of metal inside. It looked right out of Thomas Edison’s laboratory. “These haven’t been replaced in years. They don’t even make bulbs like this anymore.” I hopped off the chair, adding the lightbulb to the bag with the fishing wire. “I can’t figure out why Oliver would lie about this part of the resort. The logical guess is that the Watsons ran out of money to maintain it, and he was too embarrassed to admit that. But what if there’s a supernatural reason for it instead? It feels different in here than the rest of the lodge. Colder. Maybe the heater isn’t on in here, maybe not.”

  It was much colder in the old ballroom, but I doubted it was due to supernatural forces. I walked as I pandered to the camera, making sure the shot included the backdrop of the resort behind me. Across the room, three pairs of double doors lined the ballroom’s front walls. They were meant to open all at once to display the ballroom’s decadence to whoever waited for entry on the other side. I pushed on the first set. It opened about three inches before a chain on the other side rattled tight, preventing me from getting through. I tried the next door. It too was chained off from the opposite side.

  “Check this out,” I said to my viewers, zooming in on the rusted chains. “This part of the hotel is blocked off. Definitely creepy.”

  I checked the last set of doors. With a good heave of my shoulder, the chains gave way, allowing the door to open a foot and a half. I knelt, slipped the camera through first with the lens pointing toward me, and squeezed through the gap. The chain jangled as I forced myself through the tiny opening. The lock caught on the collar of my sweater, tearing a hole in it as I pulled free. Once on the other side, the door drifted shut with an echoing bang.

  “Whoa,” I said, for once not for the camera at all.

  I stood in a second lobby, one that matched the ballroom’s antique style rather than the refurbished cleanliness of King and Queen’s main entrance except for one thing. It was demolished. The walls were charred and black. The front desk lay in broken, burnt pieces as if an explosion had launched it across the room. Ash coated the floor and the walls, painting everything gray and black. Debris—plaster, fallen pillars, scorched beams—was piled up in the corners, as if the fire department had come through as an afterthought to clear the main paths of rubble. A stone archway framed a single corridor leading away from the lobby. Though the stones were chipped and seared, it was the only piece of construction that had survived the destruction. Something was etched into the stone, but the words were unreadable through the ash. Once I remembered it was there, I picked the camera off the floor and filmed the blackened lobby.

  “I think I figured out why Oliver lied,” I said. “Looks like King and Queens had a huge fire. It’s dark in here, so I’m not sure if you can see everything, but this place is absolutely wrecked. Also, this is a second lobby. There are the main doors, the front desk—or what’s left of it—and an old-school elevator shaft. God bless whoever tried to ride that down to get out. Wow. It’s not too safe in here, but I’m going to go a little farther in for you guys. I definitely feel something spiritually.”

  It might not have been spirits, but there was an explicit charge to the air of the resort’s old wing, most likely due to the abandonment of this section of the building. I picked across the lobby and crossed beneath the stone archway to peek into the rooms off the main corridor.

  “Looks like a gentleman’s club in here,” I said. “Lots of broken whiskey bottles, leather chairs, cigar boxes—” I picked up a surviving cigar and put it between my teeth for the camera. “What a waste. Let’s keep going. Oh, here’s a library or an office of some sort.” Mountains of burned pages and fallen bookshelves filled the edges of this room. A single desk in the direct center of the destruction had pulled through, though the green felt on its surface was burned off. As I focused the camera on it, a tickle crept across the back of my neck. “Rest in peace, little desk.”

  Most of the other doorways in the corridors led to guest rooms, each in more disarray than the last. There were signs of hurried exits, like shoes scattered near the doors and scuff marks along the carpet. Blackened handprints patterned parts of the wallpaper that hadn’t been completely destroyed in the fire. At the end of the corridor, an emergency staircase led to the upper levels. I set my foot on the bottom step, and my boot crashed clean through the scorched wood.

  “Not going up there.” I angled the camera up the staircase for dramatic effect. The gloomy level above was hardly visible, but I loved the mysterious effect of the dust flecks floating across the dark screen. “I would if I could though. Let’s see what else we can find.”

  After checking out the rest of the rooms, I decided it wouldn’t be an episode of Madame Lucia’s Parlour without some good old-fashioned ghost shenanigans, so I paused the camera and went back to the library to set up a few tricks. I rigged a couple lines of fishing wire to a tattered book, a half-melted globe, and the remnants of a desk chair. Then I arranged a few candles on the desk in a semi-circle, set up the camera, and pressed record.

  “I got the most vibes in this room, especially around this desk,” I announced. Madame Lucia’s accent tried to creep in automatically, but I beat it down. This was the time to try something new. The show was still a sham, but maybe the new setting would encourage viewers to return to my channel. “So I figured we might as well try to call some spirits in here to see if they can explain what happened to this section of the resort. We’re going to cleanse the room first though. Here we go.”

  I lit a bushel of sage—one Riley hadn’t gotten her hands on yet—and smudged the room.

  “Sage or sandalwood helps to clear bad energy from a room,” I explained. Previously, Madame Lucia was all theatrics and no explanation, but I wasn’t ignorant of mediumship as an art form. I’d actually done a lot of research to make Madame Lucia as
believable as possible. “Candles act as a magnet for earthbound spirits,” I went on, lighting the pillars one by one. “White or pink, for love, is best. Don’t stray from those colors. Doing so could result in calling upon something demonic.”

  I took more items from my bag and placed them on the desk. “Amethyst for protection, salt and olive oil to charge the candles, and a bell” —I shook the small bell to produce a high peal— “for the spirits to use should they care to join us. All of these things help to produce vibrations for our séance. The more vibrations, the more likely we are to be visited by a spirit. Now that we’re ready, we can start with a chant or prayer to open a pathway to communications.”

  I cleared my throat. “North, south, east, and west. I call upon thee who does not rest. Earth, air, wind, and fire. I call to hear the final choir—”

  The door to the library slammed shut.

  Adrenaline rushed through my veins. The fishing wire lay unmoving on the floor. Not one line was hooked up to the door.

  “Hello?” I called. “Is someone there?”

  Silence. Then:

  “Get out!”

  The words were delivered via a gut-wrenching, ear-splitting scream, each syllable elongated into a wail of indescribable pain. Worse still, the order repeated itself, one hoarse yell after the other, until the entire library shook with the voices of the dead.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  I blew out the candles, scooped up the camera, and raced for the closed door, unconcerned with the props I’d left on the desk. When I yanked the door open and stumbled into the hallway, I screamed. Figures cloaked in black waited at the end of the hallway near the emergency staircase. I ran from them, toward the old lobby, but as I reached the archway, old stones cascaded from above and a burnt wooden beam fell into my path. Covering my head with my arms, I vaulted over the beam, but my boot got caught on the lip of it. As I went sprawling, the cloaked figures advanced from behind. With another yell, I scrambled across the floor of the lobby, slipped through the chained door to the ballroom, and ran smack into Tyler Watson’s chest.

  “What’s the matter, Madame Lucia?” He held me by the shoulders as if to support me, but his grasp was too tight for comfort. “Did you see a ghost?”

  Laughter burst out behind me, echoing through the old lobby, and two boys—the same age as Tyler—unchained the door to reveal themselves. Both of them were wearing a black sheet across their shoulders. They were the figures chasing me in the hallway.

  The taller boy, whose buzzed black hair connected to his sideburns and chin strap like one cohesive unit, doubled over. “You should have seen your face. ‘Ghosts, oh no!’” He smacked his shorter friend’s chest, who was too overcome with laughter to join in on the fun. Tyler grinned.

  “It was you?” I heaved for breath and shoved Tyler away from me. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you pull a prank like that? God, the screaming alone—”

  “Get out,” Tyler hissed in a voice I recognized from the library. “Get out, Lucia. Get out.”

  The other boys began chanting too. “Get out, Lucia. Get out, Lucia.”

  “Stop it,” I ordered.

  Tyler held up a fist, and his friends ceased automatically. He backed me up against the doors to the old lobby the same way he cornered Karli against the bar during my first night at the resort. “The old wing is closed off to guests,” he said, towering over me. “You shouldn’t be in there.”

  “From what I gathered, neither should you. Get away from me.”

  Tyler sneered and moved closer instead. “Make me.”

  His friends flanked his either side. There wasn’t much room to maneuver. If I slipped by Tyler, one of the other boys would catch me instead, but when Tyler slid his hand around my waist, I instinctively nailed him in the torso. He clenched his stomach, the muscles absorbing the impact, and grinned.

  “Oh, you’re going to pay for that,” he said, pressing forward.

  “Mr. Watson!”

  All three boys scattered as Detective Hawkins—Daniel—strolled through the double egress doors with his hand resting on his gun. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and Tyler’s friends immediately took their leave, but when Tyler tried to pass him, Daniel stepped into his path.

  “This is the second time I’ve found you in the condemned section of the hotel,” Daniel said. “And now you’re aggravating a guest of the resort. If it happens again, I will take you down to the station regardless of what your father has to say about the matter. Do you understand?”

  Tyler saluted Daniel and goose-stepped out of the ballroom. Once he was gone, Daniel motioned for me to join him. When I crossed to him, he squeezed my shoulder reassuringly.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Tyler and his friends played a dumb prank on me, but I’m fine.”

  “Your camera’s on.”

  “Oh.” I switched it off. I’d review the footage later. No doubt most of it was too embarrassing to post online. “What are you doing here anyway? You’re not still investigating Thelma’s death, are you?”

  He guided me through the old kitchen and restaurant until we returned to the regular hallways of King and Queens. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “But I thought the case was closed.”

  “Remember I told you I had a feeling something was wrong?” he said. “I was right. I went up the mountain this morning and cleared a path underneath the lift with a snow blower. Guess what I found?”

  “What?”

  “Bolts.”

  “Bolts? So what?”

  “Big bolts,” he added. “Like the kind used to secure a chair to a ski lift.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So the bolts on Thelma’s chair came unscrewed?”

  Daniel held open the door to the lobby for me. “No, I don’t think so. These are heavy-duty pieces of metal. They wouldn’t fall out on their own. I think someone tampered with them. They were stripped of tread.”

  “What are the odds Thelma gets on the one chair that’s been toyed with though?” I questioned. “There’s gotta be at least a hundred on that lift.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Daniel said. “One thing’s for sure. This wasn’t an accident. Thelma Watson’s death is officially a homicide.”

  We climbed the stairs to the Eagle’s View and sat down at the bar. I picked rubble from the palms of my ashy hands, which were scraped up from my fall in the old lobby. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked Daniel.

  He signaled Karli for two glasses of water. “Because I think you can help me. The bolts weren’t the only things I found.” He pulled something shiny out of the pocket of his leather jacket and set it on the bar. It was a small silver bracelet with a skier pendant. “Look familiar?”

  “No. Shouldn’t that be in a little plastic evidence baggie or have I been watching too many crimes shows?”

  He flipped the pendant around to show me the name etched into the plain side.

  “Riley,” I read out loud. “Makes sense. She was there, remember? She put the call in to 911.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if Riley’s more troubled than we originally thought,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she was fine at the scene of the crime,” Daniel replied. “She didn’t react to her mother’s death at all. Didn’t panic or cry. I saw a picture in the paper of the family at the funeral. Riley looked bored.”

  “She’s a strange kid,” I said. “And we all have different ways of coping.”

  “Strange.” He rolled the adjective around in his mouth like a piece of chocolate. “Haven’t you noticed that’s how everyone describes her? King and Queens employees, her dad, you.”

  “I’ll admit she’s precocious for a twelve-year-old, but I don’t think she set up her mother’s death,” I said. “That is what you’re insinuating, isn’t it?”

  Karli returned with the waters. Daniel freed a straw from its wrapper and p
oked the ice cubes to the bottom of the glass. When one resurfaced, he hammered it down again.

  “I have to look at this from every angle,” he said. “If Riley was always a troubled kid—”

  “If you’re trying to blame this on one of the Watson kids, I think you’re going after the wrong one,” I said. “Tyler’s the one that just tried to accost me.”

  “I’m keeping an eye on him too, but I need you to do something for me.”

  “Does it have to do with Riley?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I need you to ask her what really happened when she found her mother underneath the chair lift.”

  I groaned and kicked my toes against the footrail. “No, come on. Don’t ask me to that. She’s sick of me already. Besides, you’re the cop. You do it.”

  Daniel set aside his straw and drained his glass like a college student at a tailgate with free beer then asked Karli for another. “What makes you think she’s going to tell any part of the truth to a burly detective she doesn’t know? You already have an in with her. Get her to open up to you.”

  “Have you met Riley? She’s about as open as the rest of this resort.”

  “Just try,” Daniel said. “You have a better chance of getting her to tell the truth than I do. If she had a motive—”

  “Once again, I’d like to remind you that she’s twelve.”

  “And twelve-year-olds sometimes kill their parents,” he replied. “It’s not unheard of.”

  I shuddered and drank from my cup to soothe my nerves, but the icy water only chilled me further. I pushed the glass away, drawing a line of dewy condensation across the bar top. “What were you doing in that part of the lodge anyway? It’s not like it’s open to the public.”

  “After finding the bolts and Riley’s bracelet this morning, I put in a request for a warrant to search the entire lodge,” he explained. “Not that I needed it—Mr. Watson has been relatively accommodating these past few days—but I thought it might be wise in case things get dicey. Besides, the younger Mr. Watson and his friends like to frequent places they don’t belong. I could ask you the same question though. What were you doing in there?”