Down

by Kirsten Weiss

  Our gazes locked, and I tried to stamp down the dizzying current that rushed through my core.

  “Thanks,” I said roughly.

  He watched me slip into the jacket, still warm from his body heat, and my stomach fluttered.

  “So what’s it called?” he asked.

  “Tales of the Rose Rabbit,” I said promptly and blinked. The title had popped into my head as if I’d given it thought before, and I hadn’t.

  “Rose Rabbit? What are the poems about?”

  “They’re kind of surrealist,” I said, unsure how much he really wanted to hear. “I’m doing a mix of styles – from prose to sonnets.”

  “Makes sense,” he said. “You can match the rhythm and structure of the poem to its theme.”

  “Right,” I said, surprised.

  He grinned. “I’m more than just a beat cop, you know.”

  Delighted, I laughed. “I guess you are. Do you write?”

  His skin turned a shade darker. “Took creative writing in college. I never got a degree in it or anything, but I like to write when I travel, sometimes to just get ideas out of my head. Nothing worth publishing.” He lay back down.

  After a moment, I stretched out beside him.

  Unspeaking, he grasped my hand, and unspeaking, I let him. And even though our relationship could never go anywhere, in that moment, this was enough.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I shouldn’t have done it.

  Connor had told me he would talk to Van Oss. And yet, Saturday morning, when I should have been prepping to open the bookstore, I stood in front of the Historic Doyle Hotel. It looked like something out of New Orleans’s French Quarter. Opened in the 1850s as a stopover on the stagecoach road, the walls were square blocks of stone. People believed the stone walls and iron shutters had been designed to protect Doyle from forest fires. But no mountain fire had ever done more than scorch the edges of Doyle’s borders. I suspected we had a certain fairy to thank for that.

  I glanced down Main Street. Most of the old buildings had iron shutters, and iron was a protection against the fae. Had the early townsfolk suspected, even then, that an unseelie was at work?

  A wedding couple posed for photos on the hotel’s second-floor balcony, swagged with red-white-and-blue bunting. The bride wore a wedding dress, her bouquet in one hand. Her fiancée, in an untucked, loose white shirt and khaki slacks wrapped his arm around her waist. From the middle of the road, a photographer snapped pictures. Even the photographer looked happy.

  My heart clenched. If we failed, Jayce and I would raise Karin and Nick’s daughter. I didn’t want to think about losing either of them.

  And that was why I’d come on a hot morning to see the arrogant bookdealer. Van Oss was obviously connected to Mike’s murder. I didn’t care what the police said or what the coroner would say. Someone had pushed Mike off that ladder or laid his body beside it to make his death appear an accident. It was the only explanation for his tortured spirit. I couldn’t wait for the police. Not with my sister so close... My throat tightened, and I blinked rapidly.

  Squaring my shoulders, I walked through the high front doors. I paused, scanning the reception area, cobalt blue with white wainscoting.

  The receptionist, Erica, looked up from behind the reception window. She came into the bookstore often – historical romance was her game, and if it involved a vampire, so much the better.

  She smiled, her brown eyes crinkling. “Hi, Lenore. When’s your sister going to write a historical?” My age, she was tanned and slim, a whimsical pattern of freckles dotting her nose and cheeks.

  I laughed. “Probably never.”

  “So what brings you to the hotel?”

  “I’m here to see Heath Van Oss.”

  “Let me call up for you.” She picked up the desk phone’s receiver and dialed, smiled at me, frowned. “I’m sorry, he’s not answering. He might be in the breakfast room.”

  “Mind if I check?”

  “Go right ahead. Oh, Lenore?”

  I paused.

  “I’m sorry about Mike,” she said. “He was a great guy.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded to her and strolled into the breakfast room. The same color scheme dominated here – blue and white. Couples sat in antique, wooden chairs at tables covered in white cloths.

  I ignored the ghosts sitting beside them.

  Morning light streamed through the high, paned windows and was diffused by sheer curtains. The room smelled of sausage and eggs and pastry, and my stomach growled. I laid my hand across it and scanned the room again. No Heath Van Oss. He hadn’t checked out, or Erica would have told me.

  Maybe he’d gone for breakfast somewhere on the street. Or maybe he’d gone to meet whomever had brought him to Doyle to collect the book.

  My plan had only been to find Heath at the hotel and confront him. Without any further ideas in mind, I wandered into the reception area. Erica had vanished from behind the desk.

  Behind me, something croaked.

  I turned, hair prickling the back of my neck.

  A blue-carpeted stairway led to the second floor. The turkey vulture perched on the top step.

  I froze, rooted to the carpet. “Oh, no,” I said beneath my breath.

  It hopped in an ungainly flutter of wings and disappeared around the upstairs corner.

  I cursed softly. So it wanted me to follow. I didn’t have to comply. There was no law against ignoring an animal spirit’s call. But when you started ignoring them, they started ignoring you.

  Legs wooden, I climbed the stairway. They creaked beneath my feet.

  An apparition of a maid, in a long, black dress and white apron, brushed past me on the stairwell, and my flesh pebbled from the chill.

  I turned to her. “Miss?”

  She turned on the steps, a stack of towels pressed against her chest.

  She was young, with black hair piled in a loose bun and serious brown eyes. I guessed she’d died in the late nineteenth century, perhaps the early twentieth.

  “Yes, Miss?”

  “I’ve come to see...” I stumbled to a halt, numb. Maybe Van Oss wasn’t dead. Maybe someone else had died. Maybe no one had died, and the vulture wanted me to see something else. But he only showed up when death had paid a visit.

  She nodded. “Yes, Miss. He told me you’d be coming.” She climbed the steps, passing me.

  “He?” I asked sharply.

  But she didn’t respond. At the top of the steps, she whipped around the same corner the vulture had vanished behind. I hurried up the stairs.

  She strode down the hallway, past a modern maid’s cart and a wedged-open door.

  Rubbing my arms, I forced myself not to look at the photos of old Doyle lining the walls. I’d met too many of their ghostly subjects.

  Lengthening my strides, I caught up with the maid’s ghost in front of a white, wooden door.

  She angled her head toward it. “In here, Miss.”

  “Who told you I’d be coming?”

  “The Rose Rabbit, Miss.”

  “The Rose...” I reached to grasp her arm, my movement quick and erratic, and realized at the last moment what a useless and rude gesture that would be. My hand dropped to my side. “You’ve seen the Rose Rabbit?” In my mind, the name deserved capital letters. “What is it?”

  “It’s a he, Miss. Very good looking, with shining blond hair. But I think he’s had a difficult time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a bit beaten up.”

  I stilled. He sounded like the blond man I’d been seeing, the one who’d watched while Mr. Pivens had the heart attack. The one who’d appeared on the highway before I’d blipped to the wellhouse. If the ghosts could see him, what was he? Because he wasn’t dead. I knew dead. I sensed it nearby now, an icy, empty presence on the other side of the door.

  The ghost motioned to the closed door. “Aren’t you going to see him then? Go inside?”

  “I don’t have a key.”

 
“Oh, that’s no problem.” She reached into her apron pocket and withdrew an old-fashioned skeleton key. It shouldn’t have fit into the modern lock, but it did, because the spirit believed it would. The lock clicked, and the door drifted open an inch.

  Dread twisted my stomach. I lifted my palm to the door and paused, hand raised. “What’s your name?” I asked, remembering myself. I had a duty to aid the dead, and she was here for a reason, and I really didn’t want to know what was on the other side of that door.

  “Miss O’Shea, Miss.”

  “Why are you here, Miss O’Shea?”

  “I work here, Miss. Will that be all?”

  “The Rose Rabbit, who is he?”

  “Oh, he’s something special, Miss.” She bobbed a curtsy and strode down the hall, her long skirts flapping.

  “But what? How is he special?”

  The ghost vanished through a wall.

  Shit.

  I stared at the door. I could smell the death now, fetid with a base note of overripe strawberries. “Mr. Van Oss?” I called and knocked on the cracked door. It swung open.

  “Mr. Van Oss?” I called more loudly, on behalf of any neighbors or maids who might hear. Pushing the door wider, I stepped into a short, narrow hallway. The bathroom door stood open, and Heath was not inside.

  Cautious, I crept further into the room. “Mr. Van Oss? Your door was open. Are you all right?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t.

  I edged around the corner. A king-sized bed with a rumpled white duvet. Beige pillows propped against the headboard. A rustic, barn-door wall behind metal art cutouts. A suitcase, open, lying upon a stand.

  He was here. The bookdealer hadn’t checked out, and death coiled around me, cold and cloying.

  “Mr. Van...” I trailed off. Two feet in coal-colored socks stuck out from behind the bed, and my breath caught. I know the body is just a shell. Van Oss was gone, and the man had been a rude jerk in life. But there was something achingly vulnerable about those socks.

  I went to the phone by the bed and called reception.

  “Hello, Mr. Van Oss, this is Erica at reception. How can I help you?”

  “Erica, this is Lenore.”

  “Lenore? So you found him after all.”

  “No. I came upstairs. His door was open. Something’s wrong. Please call nine-one-one.”

  “Wrong? What’s wrong?”

  He was dead, but how? Stretching the cord to its limit, I rounded the bed.

  He lay on his stomach, his arms a loose sprawl, and his head...

  I gasped. “Oh, God.”

  “Lenore, what’s wrong?”

  “He’s dead.” I had to force the words between my lips, remember to breathe. I dropped the receiver and backed, stumbling, from the room.

  I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have gone in. I shouldn’t have seen this, would never forget it.

  Heath Van Oss lay on his stomach, his arms outstretched. His corpse stared at the ceiling. His head had been twisted one hundred and eighty degrees.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “The receptionist told you he hadn’t answered his phone.” The sheriff’s gaze was arctic. She laid her hat on the hotel conference room’s small meeting table. It was wooden and round and as antique as the rose-print wallpaper. “Why were you in his room?”

  I glanced at the closed door. “I told you, the door was ajar.”

  “But you didn’t tell me why you went upstairs in the first place.”

  “I thought I’d put a note under his door.”

  She folded her arms, the cheap fabric of her uniform crinkling. “A note about what?”

  “He told me that he’d given Mike a book to value, but he didn’t have a receipt and I couldn’t find the book or any records of it in Mike’s files. It had to be important to Mr. Van Oss, or he wouldn’t have stayed so long in Doyle.”

  Her blue eyes narrowed, skeptical. “And so you were leaving him a note saying nothing?”

  “I overheard him talking to someone at the concert last night. It sounded like he might have been the one to break into Mike’s house, when Mr. Pivens had his heart attack.”

  “You didn’t believe him about the book he’d lent to Mike.”

  “No, I didn’t. Not after I discovered Mike has a different book worth over a million dollars.”

  Her lips thinned. “And so you decided to break into Van Oss’s room.”

  “No! I wasn’t... I told you, the door was open. How could I have broken in? How could I have done... that?” My voice cracked. I looked at the rose wallpaper and tried to blank out the image of his head twisted backwards.

  “All right, you can go.”

  I drew in a quick breath to argue, then realized I was being released. Leaping from my chair, I scuttled out the door.

  Connor stood in the reception area talking with a group of deputies. He looked at me, his expression hard and angry.

  I hurried from the hotel. A wave of heat off the macadam slammed into me, and I slowed. Sheriff’s vehicles lined the street outside. The sun glittered, blinding, off their chrome.

  Alba stood on the opposite side of the street in her sandwich board. “Justice! This is God’s will. The evil shall be punished!” She shook her sun-darkened fist at the hotel.

  Tourists paused, staring at the black-and-white SUVs. Noticing Alba, they hurried on, their heads bent, their voices low.

  Councilman Steve Woodley strolled past gnawing on a paperclip. He nodded and smiled, his blue-and-white striped shirt impeccably pressed. Woodley smoothed his hand over his tonsure of silver hair. “Lovely day, we’re having, Lenore.”

  “Yes,” I choked out.

  He shook his head, “Oh, that Alba. I’d better speak with her.” He crossed the street. “Alba!”

  A look of black terror crossed her face, and she scuttled down the road.

  On the other side of the street, he paused, his hands on his hips, staring after her.

  I walked on. When I reached the bookstore, I was shaking so badly I dropped the keys. But I managed to unlock the door and hurry inside. Locking it behind me, I turned on the ceiling fan, walked to the window behind the register and flung it open. I called Jayce.

  She answered on the fourth ring. “Lenore?” Her voice was indistinct, fuzzy, and I guessed I’d woken her up. “What’s going on?”

  “Heath Van Oss was murdered.”

  “Who?”

  “The bookdealer, the one who claimed he’d given Mike a book of folklore to value. He’s dead. Someone killed him. Someone...” My breath hitched. Who could have had the strength to break his neck like that?

  “Are you all right?” Her tone sharpened.

  “I’m fine. I’m at the bookstore. I found him, Jayce, at his hotel.”

  “The police didn’t arrest you, did they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Call Karin. I’ll be right there.” She hung up.

  I called Karin, and we repeated the conversation.

  “Did Van Oss have any connections in Doyle, aside from you and Mike?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I turned and my hip struck the counter. “Last night, I overheard him talking to someone on the phone. He said he nearly gave the old man a heart attack. It sounded like he was the one who’d broken into Mike’s house, and he was working with someone nearby.”

  “Have you found any evidence of this book of folklore he claimed he lent Mike?”

  “No, none. I think he made the whole thing up and was after the million-dollar book.” But he had sold Mike a book like the one he’d described. The folklore book wasn’t a fiction. So where was it?

  “More than a million,” Karin corrected. “But how would he have heard about it? Could he work for the auction house Mike had contacted about the book?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. Van Oss had been working with someone, and if that someone had killed him, then it was someone from Doyle. Peter or Gretel? Sweat dampened my forehead, and I wiped it away with the back of my
hand. I couldn’t imagine Gretel twisting a man’s neck like that. But Peter might be able to manage it.

  Karin agreed to come to the bookstore, and we hung up.

  I checked the clock over the door. Ten o’clock, time to open. I paced, restless. I didn’t want to open the store, but I had bills to pay and didn’t like the idea of being alone with my thoughts. Finally, I flung open the door, hooking the top so it wouldn’t drift shut.

  The temperature dropped. Something shifted in the corner of my eye, and my head whipped toward the closed storage room.

  Nothing was there, but I walked to it anyway and opened the door.

  The storage room was as I’d left it, boxes restacked, the computer with its cracked monitor on its desk, books on metal shelves. A breeze stirred my hair.

  Voices murmured behind me, and I turned, jumping a little.

  A middle-aged couple browsed the shelves.

  I pasted on a smile. Live people – tourists – not ghosts. “Hi! Let me know if I can help you find anything.”

  I moved to the counter and turned on the cash register. An elderly man I knew walked in and headed straight for the history section. And then the floodgates opened, and people strolled into the bookstore in ones and twos. The desk phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  It clicked, went to a dial tone.

  Faintly, a second phone rang in the storage room. One ring, and it stopped.

  The desk phone rang. Eyeing it warily, I picked it up. “Hel—”

  Dialtone.

  The storage room rang, hollow and echoing. Once. Done.

  The desk phone rang. A teenager stepped up to the desk with a graphic novel.

  I ignored the phone. It stopped after one ring.

  My hands fumbled the teenager’s change, ripping the receipt too high on the register. A line formed behind the teen.

  The phones kept ringing, disconnecting.

  My movements were clumsy. Paper bags stuck together. The register refused to open. And still the customers came. They asked questions, bought books, kept me running from the counter to the storeroom to the bookshelves. I clambered down the ladder and handed a young mother a book on the terrible twos.

  “I can’t believe you have it,” she said, smiling. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere. I’ll take it.”