by Skylar Finn
“Focus,” she urged.
Each time she spoke, it disrupted my concentration and zapped me with another jolt. “I’m doing my best. Be quiet.”
“But you don’t know how—”
“I’m figuring it out!”
Rooting around in my own subconscious was like swimming through a muddy swamp. It was a part of my mind I hadn’t accessed before, the part that controlled dreams and deja vu and, evidently, the ability to communicate with the dead. It was uncharted territory, and it scared me to wade through it. The deeper I dove, the more my mind opened up to let the little girl in. Her image solidified and the silvery glow subsided as I focused my concentration. I was able to look up at her without feeling like my arms and legs were going to fall off.
“How did you know what to tell me to do?” I asked her.
“I’ve been here a while,” she answered. “I’ve seen psychics come and go. Some of them knew about themselves and some of them didn’t, but none of them were as inclined as you. It’s a shame you’ve been wasting your talent for so long.”
I brushed dust and dirt from the knees of my jeans. The maids hadn’t vacuumed in a while. The resort had been deserted for several weeks—ever since Thelma Watson’s death—and there wasn’t a point in keeping it up to par.
“You said your name is Odette, right?” I asked. “A few days ago, I sat for an Odette, but she was a baby. She disappeared. Was that you?
“Yes, I believe you met my mother as well.”
“Stella,” I recalled. “God, you both seemed so real. How is this possible?”
“Stagnant energy.” Odette drew closer, neither floating nor walking. The nearer she was, the colder I felt. Her voice echoed. Could anyone else hear her? “When we died, we were trapped here in the resort. We can’t move on. That’s why I need you.”
“Who exactly is we?”
“All of us,” she said. “My mother and I want to leave this place, but the others are upset. They want revenge, whereas we want to make peace with what happened to us.”
A chill rippled up my spine. “You mean the fire? Is that why you’re like this?”
Odette’s image wavered, and I thought she might burst into flames again. She remained intact. “The fire, yes. It was horrible.”
“But it was an accident,” I said. “If you can accept that, you can move on.”
She grew with indignance, and flames reflected in her pretty blue eyes as if she were standing across from a bonfire. “It was not an accident, but the real story was lost when all of us perished.”
“Someone set the fire intentionally?”
Odette tried to reply, but when her lips parted, her scalp caught fire. She fell to her knees, keening as she clasped her burning hair in her hands.
“I can’t tell you,” she gasped. “They won’t let me.”
She was too young for this kind of torture. No one should suffer through their own death over and over again. My heart clenched at the thought of Riley, who I’d known for less than a week, in the same position. She too was haunted by the past, but at least she was still alive.
“Who won’t let you?” I reached out with the intention to comfort her, but there was no safe place to deliver the sentiment. The fire spread to her shoulders. In any case, I wasn’t sure if my psychic abilities extended to physical touch. Somehow, I doubted it.
“The others,” she forced out. The fire sparked and engulfed the top half of her torso. “I have to go. It hurts too much.”
“Odette, I need to know more.”
She braced herself against the wall as she stood up, coughing and hacking as if her lungs were full of smoke. “Figure it out yourself. Find the truth about King and Queens. Start with the fire. If all goes well, you’ll understand why people have died recently here too.”
She began to fade, the silvery glow growing to absorb her into the hotel.
“Do you mean Thelma and Tyler?” I said. “Wait, Odette!”
It was too late. She vanished, taking the inferno with her. I slumped against the wall to catch my breath, but the weight of the last week’s events sat in my lungs like thickening concrete. In less than seven days, I’d gone from a fake psychic medium to a real one, been pranked by faux spirits and stalked by actual ghosts, and dealt with the aftershocks of two murders from the same family. That last one was a doozy. Tyler’s body was discovered that morning, and it would take longer than an hour for everyone to recover. Connecting with Riley after her mother’s death was difficult enough. Now that her brother was dead too, I had no idea how to talk to her. Then there was the not-so-insignificant detail that we were the only two in the entire resort who could see the dead people walking around. While everyone else was concerned with the body count, Riley and I were trying to contain ectoplasm without a Proton Pack.
The problem was that neither one of us knew what the ghosts at King and Queens wanted. Riley lived here all her life, but it wasn’t until after her mother’s orchestrated fall from the ski lift that she started hearing the dead speak to her. I was blissfully oblivious of everything supernatural—unless you counted my ridiculous web show where my best friend and I performed parlor tricks for views on YouTube—until arriving at King and Queens. Riley’s father, Oliver, hired me to hack her ghostly abilities under the pretense that my shtick was real. He offered me ten thousand dollars to get the job done in under a week, and since I was down on my luck and in need of quick cash, I sucked it up to babysit the kid with the questionable coping mechanisms. Little did I know Riley would be the real deal, and that she’d invoke the same capabilities in me.
The two of us had a few things in common, which was probably why we related to each other and communicated so well. Riley lost her mom. I lost my dad when I was around her age. We both floated in a world in between those around us. While everyone else went on with their daily business, Riley and I fell behind with no one to catch us. Well, I had Jazmin, who was more supportive than I deserved, but it was brittle ground with most humans when your life was rooted in insanity.
“Lucia!” Jazmin’s panicked voice echoed up the stairs. Panting, she came up from the floor below. “There you are. Thank God. I was worried.”
She pulled me to my feet, my clammy hands slipping in hers.
“Why?” I asked. “Did something else happen?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “The elevators stopped working without any warning. I thought something might have—”
“Odette.”
“The ghost?”
“She was in the elevator,” I said. “She must have done something to it. Is Riley okay? Where is she?”
“Riley’s fine,” Jazmin said, searching my face for answers to questions she hadn’t asked yet. “She’s downstairs with everyone else. What do you mean Odette was in the elevator?”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. “I don’t want to leave her alone for too long. You’re the only person I trust beside myself to keep watch on her.”
“Detective Hawkins is there too.”
“Yeah, trying to pin down a murderer,” I reminded her. “The Watsons are two for two. First Thelma. Now Tyler. I don’t want Riley to be next.”
“We won’t let that happen.” She felt my damp forehead. “Lucia, you’re burning up. What happened? You haven’t been gone for more than twenty minutes.”
“It’s all linked,” I said. “The Watsons’ deaths and the lodge fire in eighty-eight. Somehow, it’s all connected. Odette wants me to find out how. She’s not the only ghost at King and Queens. There are others who died in the fire, and they’re pissed. Riley told me as much before, but I wasn’t listening. Not really.”
Jazmin forced me to look at her. “Slow down. Take a deep breath. I’ve never seen you freak out this much.”
“You’ve seen me freak out plenty of times.”
“Not like this,” she said, holding me steady. “I’ve seen you binge eat and commiserate for days, but this is different. Lucia, you seem—I hate to say it—a little
crazed.”
Her skin was too hot against my face. “Get off me.”
“Lucia, wait,” she said, following me as I stomped down the stairs. “You know that’s not what I meant. Let’s be real. If I thought you were insane, I would have had you committed a long time ago.”
I stopped on the next landing. Jazmin, not expecting my abrupt halt, ran into me. She grabbed my waist, either to steady herself or to keep me from running again.
“I need you more than anyone else,” I told her. “If you don’t believe me—if you let what you already know about me become a problem—”
She clapped a hand over my mouth to shut me up. “How many times do I have to reiterate that I will never judge you for something that happened so long ago? For something that wasn’t your fault? What happened between you and your dad is none of my business. That’s why I never pressed you to tell me more about it.”
“Do you think I did it?” I asked. “Do you think I murdered Tyler?”
Her mouth popped open in shock. “Lucia, no! How could you think that?”
“It feels like you came up here to accuse me of something.”
“I did not!” Her indignance faded as quickly as it had arisen. Jazmin was never one to harbor her temper. “Can we start over? I came to look for you because I was worried something happened to you, not because I thought you might be off killing someone else. We can’t let anything come between us, do you understand? There’s a murderer in this hotel, and all I want is to make it out of here alive with my best friend by my side. Do you think we can do that?”
I leaned my forehead against her shoulder, letting the crazy drain out of me. It was a good thing Jazmin was so used to my ups and downs, even if this was a different ball game than my usual worries. If she wasn’t here, I would have let Odette drag me into the fiery depths of King and Queens’ lost spiritual world.
“Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”
She rubbed my back. “You smell like smoke.”
“Odette was on fire.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it was her fault,” I said. “From what I gathered, the other ghosts don’t want her passing information to me, so they make her relive her death until she shuts up.”
“That’s awful.”
“But effective. I’ll give them that.”
Jazmin combed her fingers through my hair as if to air out the smoke-scented strands. “Let’s get back downstairs. Detective Hawkins wants to talk to you.”
Downstairs, Detective Hawkins—Daniel—had corralled anyone and everyone in the Eagle’s View lounge and restaurant area. Present company included me and Jazmin; Oliver and Riley; Nick Porter from the White Oak Spa and Resort; Daniel himself; and five King and Queens employees for a grand total of eleven suspects in the resort’s most recent murder case. That wasn’t counting the dead people who lurked unseen to everyone but me and Riley.
When we arrived, Daniel was busy with his phone. He dialed a number, swore under his breath, hung up, and did a visual sweep of the lounge to make sure no one had moved. Then he dialed again and repeated the whole process. The sleeves of his navy thermal were rolled up to reveal wiry forearms. The neck of the garment was damp with sweat, as was Daniel’s swoopy black and gray hair. He swept it away from his forehead with aggravated fingers. The set of his dark eyebrows intensified his lightning-blue eyes.
Two additional pairs of blue eyes surveyed the room. The first, dark like the deepest part of the sea, belonged to Nick Porter. He was everything you expected of a man who spent so much time in the spotlight for charity work, tall and dark-haired like Daniel, minus the slouch and rough-around-the-edges vibe. There was nothing rough about Nick, aside from the fact that he wore the same outfit—a perfectly tailored satin blue suit that would look quite at home on a red carpet—from yesterday. Given we were all trapped at King and Queens by the biggest snowstorm Crimson Basin, Vermont had seen in years, I couldn’t blame him for the walk-of-shame ensemble. He was a handsome man, polite and suave, and he spoke in a cadence reflective of an earlier time. Though I’d only met him yesterday, watching him work the room—taking care to check in on each of the employees—put me at ease. His limp was more pronounced today, and he leaned on his black walking cane with more necessity than yesterday, but he moved from group to group in an ongoing attempt to help.
The third pair of blue eyes belonged to Riley, but hers were so light in color it was difficult to call them blue at all. She sat with her father, Oliver, in the far corner of the lounge. The duo sat back to back. Riley faced the massive floor-to-ceiling window that took up the entire wall of the lodge, staring up into the white heavens with a blank look on her face. Oliver sported an equally vacant expression, but his was based in shock and Riley’s in dissociation. He looked like utter crap. What was left of his thin hair was sweaty and askew, revealing the bald spot on the top of his head. His face was red and wet from sobbing at the sight of his son’s body. His shirt was stained with tears and Tyler’s blood. No one wanted to go near him. When Riley saw us come up the double staircase into the lounge, she abandoned her father for me.
“Where did you go?” she asked, mumbling the question into my torso as she threw her arms around my waist and pressed her face against me. “Don’t leave me again.”
“I went up to my room for a minute,” I said as Jazmin moved off to give us time alone. “Are you okay?”
Riley sniffled. “I don’t know. My brother died, so I should be upset, right? I’m not though. I don’t care, but Dad is in bad shape. He won’t look at me.”
Over Riley’s head, I saw Jazmin attempt to coax Oliver into sipping from a glass of water, but he dodged her at every turn. “He’s going to be like that for a while, Riley. He’s lost two of the most important people in his life.”
“Why waste breath on Tyler though?” she grumbled. She watched Jazmin dodge out of the way as Oliver dissolved into a fresh wave of sobs. Riley’s lip curled up in disgust. “I don’t want to look at him either. He’s embarrassing.”
“That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?”
She looked up at me, her crystalline eyes set in steel. “I’m twelve, and I’m managing to keep it together.”
I gathered her bedhead hair in a ponytail and secured it with a band from my wrist. “I think we can agree you’re not a normal twelve-year-old.”
Daniel, having walked up behind us, cleared his throat to catch my attention. “Lucia, can I have a word? In private, if you don’t mind.”
Riley rolled her eyes. “I get it. I’ll be with Jazmin.”
As she walked off, I asked Daniel, “What is it? Jazmin said you needed me for something.”
“Yeah, your photography skills,” he said. He jammed the touchscreen of his phone one last time before tucking it into his pocket. “Hunk of junk. I can’t get in touch with any of my superiors. That’s why I need you. It’s a gross job, but someone’s gotta do it—”
“Get to the point, Daniel. I’m on a short fuse.”
“The storm knocked out all cell service,” he said. “I’m betting emergency services has a long list of accidents to tend to before they make it through the snow to King and Queens. That being said, no one else in law enforcement knows there’s been a murder here, which is kind of a problem.”
“Kind of?”
“There’s no protocol for this sort of situation,” he went on. “Usually, we’d have CSI out here stat, but seeing as that’s not an option, I have to take care of everything myself. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“You’ve already seen the body,” he said. “And you have a professional camera. First, I need you to take pictures of everything. I mean everything. Floor to ceiling. You ever seen a procedural TV show?”
“It’s pretty unavoidable at this point considering how many are on the air.”
“They’re all crap anyway,” Daniel said, “but you get the gist. As many photos as possib
le. Are you up for that? Do you think you can handle it?”
My stomach tipped at the thought of returning to the blood-soaked room in the first floor hallway where Tyler’s dead body lay across the carpet, his torso full of stab wounds. I thought about declining, but if I was going to get a head start on Odette’s mission, examining the scene of Tyler’s death wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“Great,” Daniel said. “One more thing. I need you to help me move the body to a secure location.”
“Excuse me?”
Daniel shushed me and led me to the far edge of the lounge so no one could eavesdrop. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I can’t leave the body in that room to rot. It could be days before an ambulance makes it here. You’re the only person in this hotel who knows what’s waiting on the other side of that door except for Oliver and Riley, and I can’t ask either one of them to do it, can I?”
Across the room, Riley chewed a hangnail off her thumb while Oliver sobbed into his thighs. Jazmin had given up trying to soothe him.
“I don’t think Riley would mind.”
“I’m going to forget you said that and remind you she’s twelve,” Daniel said. “I doubt she has the strength to tote around her brother’s dead body.”
“Don’t underestimate her. She skis a lot.”
Daniel huffed. “Can you help me or not? I won’t make you do it if you don’t want to. Hell, I shouldn’t be asking a civilian to do this at all, especially with what’s happened in this hotel, but I have to improvise.”
“Do I have to touch it?”