by Skylar Finn
Riley typed something into the rental shop’s computer and hit the Enter key with a flourish. “I’m a better teacher than your mom or your friend. Put your boots on and get your skis.”
She didn’t wait for me to worm into the stiff ski boots, shouldering her equipment like a pro and leaving me behind in the shop. I snapped the buckles of the boots shut, put on my gloves, and hurried after her. She waited for me near the ski lift. Liam, who was in the controls booth, kept glancing over at her, as if checking to see if she was watching him work.
“Ready?” Riley asked, already strapped into her skis. “You have to put them on before we get on the lift.”
“I know.” I finagled the skis onto the ground and tried to maneuver my foot into the first one before Riley took pity on me and did it herself. As I used her shoulder for balance, I grinned sheepishly at Liam, but he was too busy eyeing Riley to notice my embarrassment. Once I was strapped in, we stepped into the path of the lift. I shuffled. Riley glided.
“It’s all about timing,” she said. “Don’t think about it too much. When the chair comes around, let it scoop you up. Here we go—”
The lift whirred, and our chair circled around at too quickly a pace. Riley hopped into it without issue despite her short stature, but it took me out at the knees, and I fell into it. Riley tugged on my jacket hood to keep me in the seat at we soared upward. I settled in, and the ground fell away. With a gulp, I wrapped an arm around the metal support. Riley lounged as if we were floating down a lazy river in an inner tube, kicking her skis over the open air.
“Why don’t these things have protective bars?” I said. “Or seatbelts.”
“They probably should.” Riley gazed across the mountain. The sun brought out the freckles across her nose and cheeks. “People are more likely to die on ski lifts because of human error than mechanical failure.”
I gripped the chair tighter. “Good to know.”
Riley rested her chin in her palm, quiet as we chugged upward. The higher we got, the more she relaxed, as if the ski lift carried her away from the problems at King and Queens. The tranquility spread. The coils of stress within me gradually unwound, and I stopped staring at the ground to get a look at the natural wonder around me. The mountain was beautiful, especially so early in the morning. The sun scattered pink and orange crystals across the snow. With every gust of wind, the trees released a waft of piney aroma. Whatever birds hadn’t migrated south chirped and whistled their morning songs. No one was out on the trails yet, not even on White Oak’s side of the mountain, so Riley and I appreciated the moment on our own. At the top of the lift, I surprised myself by gliding right out of the chair and stopping next to Riley without a wobble.
“See?” she said. “You’re doing better already.”
I peered down the different trails. Each one looked steeper than the next. “What are we doing all the way up here, Riley? I told you I can’t ski. I thought we’d check out the bunny slope.”
“This trail is for kids and beginners,” she said, pointing into the trees. “It’s really easy. You won’t have any trouble with it.”
“I meant we’re not supposed to be skiing at all,” I said. “We’re supposed to be figuring out what’s going on with you. How are we going to do that if we’re not at the resort?”
Riley used her teeth to adjust her gloves. “There’s nothing going on with me.”
“What about all the stuff you said last night?” I held up my injured hand. The bandage was hidden beneath the glove. “You know how I sliced my palm open? That vase you were staring at took a dive this morning all by itself. Wanna tell me about that?”
She zipped her jacket all the way up to her chin, sparing me no attention. “Not really. Should we go?”
I had no choice but to scuff after her, one ski then the other, as she navigated to the top of the beginner’s trail. “What you said about your brother—”
“I don’t remember half of what I told you last night.” She put on her ski goggles. The purple tint clashed horribly with her yellow jacket. “It was late. I was tired.”
“And the voices were speaking to you?”
Riley whipped her head around to stare at me. “How’d you know that?”
“You told me they were going to visit me,” I reminded her. “And you completely zoned out while you were saying it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m literally here to talk about it. Your dad—hey!”
The kid took off. One second she was standing at the top of the slope, and the next, she was flying through the trees. She gained twenty yards in a matter of seconds, and there was nothing I could do but try and follow her.
“So much for lessons,” I grumbled, digging my poles into the snow.
Once I got moving, the basics came back to me. I concentrated on the back and forth rhythm, singing songs in my head to keep my zigzag pattern level. Every so often, I put a little too much force into one ski or the other. The snow cascaded over my boots, pulling me to an abrupt stop. Sometimes, the other ski swung around uncontrollably until I regained my balance. I was thankful for the empty paths. No one but Riley was around to watch as I carved a disastrous line down the mountain, and she was so far ahead that it didn’t matter anyway. We hadn’t gone far when Riley disappeared around a curve. When I rounded the bend, she was nowhere in sight.
“Riley!” My voice echoed through the trees, sending birds from their warm nests. “Hey, where’d you go?”
No reply. If I lost Oliver’s possessed kid on the mountain, I would never see that ten thousand dollars. I tucked my poles for a spurt of speed like I’d seen her do, hoping to catch up with her. It worked for three seconds before both skis wobbled out of control and crashed into each other. I went flying, rolling head over shoulders without any knowledge of which way was up. Finally, I crashed into a tree and came to a halt. Riley glided over and looked down at me.
“Wow,” she said. “You weren’t kidding when you said you couldn’t ski.”
I rolled over, groaning as the muscles in my back recovered from the fall. “You owe me so much, kid.”
“It’s okay.” She offered me a hand, pulling me out of the snow and to my feet with a shocking amount of strength. “We’re here.”
I dusted off my jacket and pants and stretched out my back. My shoulder twinged from where it hit the tree. It was going to need an ice pack when we got back to the resort. “Where’s here?”
Riley stepped out of her skis, picked them up, and walked through the trees. On the other side of the sky-high pines, the mountain path opened up. The ski lift chugged by right above us.
“This is where my mom died,” she said. “I found her right there.”
She pointed to a spot under the lift, near one of the support towers. There was no caution tape or blood or snapped machinery. Fresh snow had fallen since then, all evidence of the incident erased. It lay untouched, a smooth layer of perfection to hide the tragedy beneath.
Riley wandered toward the spot. She gazed at the lift, closed one eye, and held up her hand to pinch her fingers together. “Don’t you wish you could move things around like a god? Life would be a lot easier.”
“Not if everyone had the same power,” I said.
“I guess you’re right.” She dropped her hand and stared at the snow. “I thought I might hear her too, like the others, but she doesn’t talk to me the way they do.”
Though the statement sent a shiver through me, I didn’t get the same uneasy feeling about her as I did last night in the lodge. She stood and spoke like a scared little girl who’d lost her mother. If the words coming out of her mouth weren’t so horrifying, I wouldn’t have any trouble comforting her. As it was, my job was to keep her talking about this stuff.
“Does she talk to you at all?” I asked.
“No,” Riley said. “She’s not there.”
“Not where?”
“At the lodge,” she expanded. “She didn’t stay behind. The one
s I hear are stuck there. They can’t go.”
“To the spirit realm, you mean.”
“Whatever.”
I wished she would move out from under the ski lift. “Riley, how many ghosts are there in the lodge?”
She kicked a drift of snow, sending it flying like white fireworks. “A lot. And they’re all angry.”
“Riley, ghosts aren’t—” I stopped myself mid-sentence. Ghosts aren’t real. That was what I was about to say before I remembered I wasn’t just Lucia Star right now. I was Madame Lucia, infamous Internet psychic medium. It was my first instinct to comfort Riley with science. I was moments away from admitting Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed was a scam, that I’d never contacted a ghost a day in my life unless you counted the weird nightmares I used to have about my dad as a kid, and that the King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort, albeit creepy, was no more haunted than my crappy apartment. But I couldn’t do that. One, because it might break the kid’s heart if she knew I was a fraud, and two, because it was only my second day at King and Queens. If I wanted the payoff, I had to stick out this act for a week.
“Aren’t what?” Riley asked.
“Aren’t always feeling what you think they might be,” I finished hastily. “Everything’s different for them. They’re stuck in a world they no longer belong to.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she said. “Ask them how they really feel?”
“Yes, actually.” Cold sweat dripped from my brow. I wiped it off with my glove and sighed. It was a long way to the bottom of the mountain. “Spirits linger for a reason, usually because they feel something about their death was unfair. If you can embrace that, if you can listen to what they need from you, they’re more likely to leave you be. Does that make sense?”
Riley finally moved away from the support tower her mother died next to. “I think so. You mean they’re not bad? They don’t want to hurt me?”
I ruffled her hair. “Some spirits can be violent. I won’t lie to you about that. But it’s because they think they’ve been wronged. They react just like living people, but they have to resort to other methods of expressing their anger because no one else can see them.”
“So tonight when they come visit, I should let them.”
I suppressed another shudder. Who exactly came to visit Riley in her room when the sun went down? “Just try it,” I suggested. “See what happens.”
Riley went easy on me the rest of the way down, slowing her pace to make up for my clumsiness. By the time we reached the café at the bottom of the mountain, my legs felt like jelly. Liam took pity on me and returned my equipment to the rental shop so I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Riley disappeared again, claiming she had to catch up on her homework. Why she would have homework over the winter break, I had no idea. As I limped through the lobby, soaked to the bone with melted snow and sweat, Oliver came out of his office.
“Lucia!” He smiled and waved. “I see you got out on the slopes after all. How was it?”
I unstuck my hair from where it was matted against my forehead and swept it over my shoulder. “Challenging. Riley is one hell of a professional.”
“She is?” Oliver scratched the balding spot on his head. “That’s funny. The ski instructors are always talking about how difficult she is on the hill. Hmm. Anyway, I’m glad the two of you finally met. Did she mention anything about the, uh, voices?”
“We talked a little.” I leaned against one of the marble pillars in the lobby as my legs shook beneath me. “I don’t have much to tell you right now other than we’re making some progress.”
Oliver freed another five hundred dollars from his billfold and handed it over. “The fact that she told you anything is a good sign. Did she talk about her mother at all?”
I opted out of the truth. Who knew what Oliver would think if he knew the reason Riley took me skiing in the first place was to check out the exact spot where her mother bit the dust? “She mentioned her, but I don’t think she’s ready to get into the details yet.” I shivered as a draft chilled my already cool skin. “Oliver, do you think we could catch up later? I’m desperate for a hot bath.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, leading me to the elevators. “Thank you so much again, Lucia. You don’t know what it means to me to have you here.”
“No problem.”
As soon as the elevator doors separated me from Oliver’s view, I slumped against the glass windows and hammered the button for the twentieth floor. It was only lunchtime, and I was completely exhausted from the morning’s ski run. Hopefully Riley wouldn’t make this a habit. Halfway up, my phone rang. I patted down my jacket’s many pockets to locate it. By the time I did, I had a missed call from Jazmin. I called her back.
“Hola, mi amor,” she said. “You didn’t call me last night. How’s King and Queens?”
“Friggin’ nuts.” I stepped out on the twentieth floor, staggered into my suite, and stripped out of my many layers. “This place is weird, Jazmin. I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”
“Why? What happened?”
As I filled the Jacuzzi tub with hot water and enough bubbles to turn the bathroom into a car wash, I told Jazmin everything that had happened between the time she left yesterday and now, including Riley’s weird freakout the night before and the broken vase.
“I’m sure the vase was a fluke,” she assured me. “Anything could have made it fall. And you don’t know for sure Riley was looking at it the night before. You said she was just looking into the kitchen. She could have been staring at anything.”
“Yeah, but there’s this vibe up here.” I set my phone on the side of the tub so I wouldn’t drop it and sank beneath the bubbles, sighing as the warm water soothed my aching bones and made my cold skin tingle. “I could barely sleep last night.”
“Well, it’s not like there are actual ghosts hanging out in the resort, Lucia,” Jazmin said. “It probably feels that way because no one’s around.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” I said, flicking bubbles from the tips of my fingers. “But I think most of it is because of Riley. I feel bad for her, but that kid is creepy. She could make anyone think this place is haunted.”
“Hang in there,” Jazmin said. “In six days, Madame Lucia will be free of creepy children and have ten thousand dollars to her name.”
“Six days,” I mused. “I can’t wait.”
5
Two days later, I had made no further progress with Riley. After our trip up the mountain, she avoided me as much as possible. If she saw me in the lobby or at the Eagle’s View, she veered in the opposite direction. The time we spent together was sanctioned by her father. We sat in the chairs by the fireplace or wasted the afternoon reading books in the café, but Riley never brought up the voices unless I asked her to, and then she ducked and dived to avoid my questions, bombarding me with philosophy theories or psychological facts to divert my attention. On the morning of my fourth day at King and Queens, I woke up to a cheerful sun and a hot plate of pancakes from room service. As I dunked them in maple syrup and rented the latest movie from the hotel’s direct TV service, I decided on a new plan of action regarding Riley. If she wanted to tell me something, that was great. If not, I would treat her like any other twelve-year-old I’d been asked to babysit. No talk of ghosts or voices. Just two people keeping each other company. The wad of cash from Oliver piled up behind the coffee machine. I had two thousand dollars already, just from living at the hotel for a couple of days. The more bills I added to the pile, the less I noticed the resort’s eerie vibes. It was no use to worry or buy into Riley’s shenanigans. This was practically a paid vacation. Why shouldn’t I treat it as such?
Since Riley was often as evasive as a garden snake, I spent my spare time at the resort rebooting Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed. The channel itself had taken a nosedive after the last video’s supposed hilarity petered off. Though it had been less than a week since my last upload, subscrib
ers were already complaining about the lack of content. I filmed a short vlog, sans Madame Lucia’s usual garb, and announced that the channel would be undergoing a reconstruction. New content was to return at some point in the near future. My appearance in the video—normal Lucia with normal hair and makeup dressed in normal jeans and a King and Queens sweater from the gift shop downstairs—sent my followers into a frenzy. Some of them mourned Madame Lucia’s old look. Some of them asked if I was okay, wondering if the events of the Parlour’s last episode had depressive effects on me. Others complimented the new look, claiming they never cared for Madame Lucia’s overdramatic costume. They preferred the new, natural look. Apparently, it made me more relatable.
Satisfied with that for now, I turned my attention to what I wanted for the channel in the future. Between Riley’s confession from the other night and the footage I’d taken around the resort during the last two days, I had enough content for a new vlog about King and Queens. But my viewers didn’t just want Riley’s ghost stories. They wanted action. That was why the previous videos were so popular. They stood in as evidence that ghosts and spirits existed in this world. Other than the mystery of the broken vase, which I hadn’t gotten on film, there was nothing else indicative of a haunting in the resort. If I wanted the new vlog to hit, it had to include corroboration of King and Queen's otherworldly occupants, so I went into town and bought several reels of fishing wire.
When I returned, I sat down to edit what I already had of my first official King and Queen’s vlog. The bartender, whose name was Karli, worked as the lounge’s barista in the morning. She brought me a piping hot Americano and joined me at my table. Karli was one of the quieter employees at King and Queens. She didn’t ski or snowboard, so she didn’t fall in with Liam, Ari, Imani, and the others. She did, however, admit to mistakenly falling for Tyler Watson. According to her, he had a sweet side before his mother died. She wouldn’t talk about him unless in passing. It became our routine to work together in the Eagle’s View. Since no one else was around for her to serve—except Detective Daniel Hawkins on the rare occasion—she sat at my table and studied for her undergraduate degree in biology.