Restless Spirits Boxset: A Collection of Riveting Haunted House Mysteries

by Skylar Finn

  I chuckled. “You didn’t know me before I dropped out of college.”

  “This was different. Didn’t you feel it?”

  I propped myself up against the pillows, sensing that Riley wanted to tell me something. It was the first time she’d spoken to me in days without sounding like a petty teenager who spited her mother.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Did you feel something? Are you okay?”

  She stuck her pinky finger through the loop of a loose thread in the comforter and began to work it free. “Ever since we left King and Queens, I’ve been feeling really weird. Weak, you know?”

  “But you’ve been out on the slopes almost every day.”

  “Yeah, I can ski still,” Riley said. “But I mean my head is tired. Or my energy. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She pressed her lips together so tightly it looked like they might crack.

  I sighed and kicked the blankets off my legs. I was starting to overheat again, and that was the last thing I needed while I was running a fever. “Listen, Riley. I know you haven’t trusted me ever since you heard what Stella said about my father, and that’s completely valid.”

  She twirled the thread of the duvet round and round, concentrating on the purple embroidery rather than our conversation.

  “I want you to know that there’s more to the story,” I continued. “I was a kid. It was a difficult situation, but I didn’t—I couldn’t—”

  I trailed off with a frustrated groan and buried my head in my palms. Though my nausea had subsided, the throbbing headache remained, but every time I closed my eyes, the demon from my nightmare made its way into my head.

  “You didn’t what?” Riley asked quietly.

  If Stella was here, she’d probably tell me to stop being a wimp and come clean to Riley about what happened all those years ago with my father, but I couldn’t do it. Riley used to have such a high opinion of me. She used to trust me and confide in me. I couldn’t help but feel like she didn’t anymore. In addition, it didn’t feel like she ever would again, but telling her the truth about my past would only make it worse.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” I said. “Maybe one day, I’ll tell you the whole story, but I can’t right now. It’s too much. But just keep in mind that it’s not quite what it sounds like. You’re safe with me. I’m here to protect you.”

  She finally yanked the thread out of the duvet and flicked it onto the floor. The end of the seam threatened to unravel. “I know that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Now that’s out of the way. Do you think we’re having the same issue? Headaches, nausea, general fatigue. The medical staffer said it was probably a stomach virus. Highly contagious too. Maybe you caught it from me and it hasn’t ramped up yet.”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Riley said. “And if it were so contagious, Jazmin would have it too. That stuff spreads like wildfire. Half the resort would be barfing.”

  “So you think it’s just us?”

  She nodded. “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. You’re still seeing Stella and we both feel like crap. It can’t be a coincidence. It feels like someone or something is draining my energy.”

  “Me too,” I agreed. “Like something’s feeding on me.”

  “What could it be?”

  The demon from the basement flashed in front of my eyes again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’ll figure it out together.”

  In the afternoon, I felt decent enough to get out of bed, and since the boredom of lying around was starting to get to me, I got dressed and ready to head downstairs. Riley had left to ski again. She said it helped clear her head, but I was worried that she might wear herself out if she kept it up at this pace. At the very least, we were on better terms again. She wasn’t quite as open with me as she used to be, but at least we were speaking again. I hated the idea of losing touch with Riley, lest it become a repeat of what happened between me and my mother.

  That was another thing to deal with. My mother. Earlier, she’d knocked on the door to the suite, demanding that I open up, but I stayed quiet and pretended like no one was home. Sure, Stella had encouraged me to open up about my past, but it would take more than a few days to build the confidence to do so. Besides, I deserved some time to collect myself. Not only did the ordeal at King and Queens wipe me out, but this illness was really taking it out of me.

  Jazmin wasn’t around either despite her promise to watch over me for the rest of the day. I couldn’t remember hearing her leave the suite. I tried calling her cell, but when the call went straight to voicemail, I began to worry. Jazmin always answered her phone. She was practically glued to the damn thing. If she didn’t pick up, it usually meant something was wrong.

  I pulled on an oversized sweater to keep the chill out and left the room. The top floor was quiet, but when the elevator took me down to the first floor, the lobby was far from silent. It was another perfect day at White Oak. Excited guests hurried to and fro, getting ready to ski or make use of the resort’s additional facilities. I scanned the lobby for Jazmin, but she was nowhere to be found. Where would my best friend go in the middle of the afternoon? My gut said she’d want coffee and a scone. That meant the Slopes Café at the bottom of the mountain. I hovered by the front door, shivering every time someone came in or went out. It hadn’t snowed since the storm, and the ice on the ground had been crushed into dirty, half-melted slush. I had no desire to walk through the cold to the café, but letting Jazmin out of my sight for too long felt like a mistake. With a deep breath, I joined a crowd of skiers and took the plunge.

  The afternoon sun warmed my pink cheeks, but it wasn’t enough to take the chill out of the air. The wind bit at my skin right through my sweater, so I hurried down to Slopes as quickly as I could without slipping in the ice. The café was a little slower today. It was the middle of the week, and a lot of guests had finished up their vacations and gone back to work. I liked the sleepy version of White Oak better than the busy version. It was more relaxed and laid back, and Slopes was warm at least. At first glance, I didn’t spot Jazmin at any of the tables. To ease my aching head, I ordered a spearmint tea and waited at the counter for the barista to brew it. When I accepted the steaming cup and turned toward the door, I finally spotted Jazmin’s bright copper hair. She sat at a table in the dimmest corner of the café, farthest from the window, deep in conversation with none other than the rude journalist, Lourdes Calvo.

  The mug of tea threatened to spill as I strolled over to their table. Jazmin’s eyes widened in panic when she saw me, and she hurriedly leaned away from Lourdes as if to make it look like they hadn’t been immersed in dialogue with each other this whole time. Lourdes, on the other hand, didn’t bother to hide her agitation at the interruption

  “Lucia,” Jazmin said. “Why aren’t you upstairs? You should be in bed. You’re going to make yourself worse.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” I demanded.

  Lourdes hooked an elbow over the back of her chair and assumed a lazy posture that opened up the front of her body, like she wanted me to take a swing at her. “Relax, Lucia. We ran into each other in the lobby and decided to talk. That’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all?” I said. “Journalists never just talk. They record everything. Jazmin, what are you doing? I thought you were on my side.”

  Jazmin tried to take my hand. “I’m always on your side.”

  “Then explain to me what you’re doing down here with the cub reporter,” I said, jerking my thumb at Lourdes. “Last time we met her, you were pretty adamant about laying low.”

  “It’s just coffee,” Jazmin insisted. “We’re not planning anything.”

  Beneath the table, Lourdes nudged her overstuffed bag—most likely full of camera, laptop, and other journalistic equipment—into the shadows. The movement was discreet, but I still noticed it. She was definitely up to something.

 
“If it’s just coffee, what were you talking about?” I challenged.

  “You know, you sound like a jealous girlfriend,” Lourdes commented airily. “Is Jazmin allowed to have her own life or are you constantly dogging her like this?”

  “Lourdes, don’t,” Jazmin warned. “She’s had a rough couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks that I’d like to know all about,” Lourdes said as she fixed me with a penetrating stare. “What’s wrong, Madame Lucia? Ghosts got you down?”

  My hands curled into fists. “You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you? The best journalists don’t make adversaries out of their stories. Shouldn’t you be trying to buddy up to me? Getting me to trust you so I’ll tell you everything?”

  “That’s not really my style,” she said. “But you’re not a journalist, so you really wouldn’t know the best way to get a clean story, would you? Unfortunately, the stories you embellish for your YouTube channel don’t exactly count.”

  “It’s performance art,” I growled. “It’s not meant to be factual.”

  “But what happened at King and Queens was fact, was it not?” Lourdes probed. “Jazmin told me you were sick. Did something happen to your psychic energy?”

  Jazmin sheepishly diverted her gaze from mine.

  “You told her?” I asked quietly. “Jazmin, what is going on with you? Why are you talking to some random college student about me? This stuff is none of her business or anyone else’s.”

  “You talked to Nick,” she pointed out.

  “I didn’t tell him about any of this,” I said. “And the only reason I went to Porter’s with him was because we need to keep him in the loop if we’re going to work all of this out. Riley might very well end up in some stranger’s home if we don’t play our cards correctly. Nick has an influence on these people. He can help us take her home.”

  Jazmin swept her bangs out of her face. “Lucia, you can’t be serious.”

  “What?”

  “Do you really think you’re capable of taking care of Riley?” she asked. “You’re broke, unemployed, and essentially homeless. What makes you think a social worker is going to appoint you as her legal guardian?”

  The words hit me like a punch in the throat. Of all the people to doubt me, the last one I expected to do so was Jazmin. It seemed more like something my mother would say than my best friend.

  “So that’s what you think of me,” I said. “Okay, then.”

  As I turned on my heel, Lourdes tensed up, as if expecting me to do something other than walk away. This time around, I didn’t have the strength to tell her to where to put it. There was no point without Jazmin to back me up. My stomach felt heavy, as if I’d swallowed a jagged piece of concrete. Every step away from their table made me feel even more lonely. Behind me, a chair scraped.

  “Lucia, wait,” Jazmin called across the café.

  I sped up instead, slipping through the door and into the cold. Jazmin wasn’t letting me get away that easily though. She picked up her pace and followed me out.

  “Come on,” she said, hopping down the Slopes steps. “Lucia, we don’t do this to each other. We communicate. I’m sorry about what I said in there. I was just trying to be realistic—ow!”

  The sharpness of her cry forced me to spin around. As I watched, her ankle buckled beneath her and she went down hard on one knee, kneeling in the black slush. With a moan of pain, she rolled to her hip, clutching the injured leg.

  “Jazmin!”

  I rushed to her side. The half-melted ice had already soaked through her jeans and there was a rip in the knee where she’d fallen. A big scrape marred her pale skin, but she ignored that in favor of holding her ankle steady.

  “Did you break it?” I asked, trying to pull her hands away to check the joint. “Jazmin, let me see.”

  She rolled to her opposite side, out of my reach. “It hurts.”

  “Honey, you have to get up,” I coaxed. “You’re going to freeze. Let’s get you inside, and I’ll call for someone to take us to the hospital. I think you need that ankle X-rayed.”

  “No, no.” She took a steadying breath and got to her knees. Gingerly, she rested her weight on her good foot. “I’m fine.”

  I took her under the arm and helped her up. She wouldn’t put any weight on the bad ankle. “You’re not fine. We should have that looked at. You probably need it casted.”

  She tentatively rested her foot on the ground, winced, and lifted it up again. “I’m not going to the hospital. It’s a waste of time. Besides, it’s not broken.”

  “No offense, but you don’t exactly have the medical knowledge to ascertain that or not,” I pointed out as I drew her arm over my shoulder and supported her around the waist. “Let’s go.”

  But she stubbornly dug her good foot into the snow to keep us from moving. “Lucia, I mean it. I’m not going.”

  She shivered violently. If I didn’t get her inside soon, I wouldn’t be the only one with a fever.

  “Fine,” I said. “We don’t have to go to the hospital. What has gotten into you lately? I thought I was supposed to be the one who was devoid of common sense?”

  She finally let me walk her toward the door of the main lobby. “I guess you’re rubbing off on me.”

  “Seriously, though,” I said. “What were you doing with Lourdes? You can’t possibly think she just wanted to chat and have coffee with you.”

  “I know that.” She grimaced as she accidentally set too much weight on her bad ankle. “But I need you to trust me, okay? Have I ever let you down before?”

  “No,” I said. “You certainly haven’t.”

  5

  The waiting room at White Oak’s onsite clinic was full of skiers and snowboarders who had accumulated all sorts of bumps and bruises. Most of them were surface injuries. A scrape here or a bruise there. One poor kid wailed over a jammed finger as his mother tried to distract him with a grape lollipop. I helped Jazmin into a chair and brought her a clipboard to fill out all the necessary information.

  “Seriously, Lucia,” she said. “I’d rather just go up to the room. Look, it feels better already.” She tentatively set her weight on her foot. Surprisingly, it held. “See? Let’s get out of here.”

  I tried to pull up the damp leg of her jeans to check if her ankle was swollen or not, but she drew away from me. “I’d still feel better if you got it checked out. Especially under the circumstances.”

  The circumstances worried me more than anything else. Jazmin had sprained her ankle during the escape from King and Queens, when the nightmare demon in the basement had grabbed her leg and tried to drag her into the depths of the hotel. It wasn’t like we could tell that to the White Oak medical team either. I assumed that was one of the reasons why Jazmin was so hesitant to get the injury looked at.

  “Give me that,” I said, taking the clipboard from her and filling out her information myself. “You’re slow.”

  “I find it slightly hilarious that you forced me to go to the clinic when just this morning, you refused to do the same thing,” Jazmin said as she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “At least I haven’t been puking up black bile.”

  On my other side, the mother with the broken-fingered son scooted away from us.

  “I feel fine now,” I assured Jazmin, loudly enough to reassure the eavesdroppers. It wasn’t entirely true. My headache, it seemed, would never truly subside, but the intense nausea from this morning was almost entirely gone. I felt weirdly smug about that. Maybe Stella was wrong about all this confronting my past crap.

  I finished the forms and returned them to the tired woman working the front desk. She perked up at the sight of me.

  “Aren’t you Lucia Star?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered wearily. “Can you take a look at this and make sure I filled out all of the information correctly? I’d like to get my friend in to see the doctor as soon as possible.”

  “There’s a wait,” said the mother near Jazmin, cradling her son’s
broken finger.

  “Actually,” the front desk secretary said, scanning the paperwork. “Your friend can go on back. Mr. Porter gave all the employees explicit instructions to accommodate your party in whatever way possible.”

  The mother threw us the dirtiest stare as I got Jazmin from her chair and began to lead her to the door to the offices. Halfway there, my head throbbed, sending a jolt of pain all the way down my spine. I stumbled and Jazmin caught me.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” she asked. “Is it the nausea again?”

  “Headache.”

  “Why don’t you go back upstairs,” she suggested. “I got it from here.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She urged me to the exit door. “Go.”

  Were it not for the blinding pain, I wouldn’t have left her, but the staff at White Oak was competent enough to take care of Jazmin for me. I staggered toward the elevators, massaging my temples.

  “Really, Stella?” I grumbled under my breath as I jabbed the call button with my thumb and leaned against the wall to wait for the elevator. “Enough with the headaches already. I know it’s your fault.”

  “Who are you speaking to?”

  I whirled around, my palm pressed to my chest to still my racing heart. My mother’s voice, in any capacity, always gave me palpitations. She strolled up from the lobby, sporting several shopping bags from the White Oak spa. The contents of the bags—no doubt several age-defying products that wouldn’t work half as well as my mother hoped they would on the lines around her mouth—clinked together with her every step like the annoying chirp of a persistent cricket.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Who was it?”

  “No one, Mom,” I said hastily. “Just reminding myself of my to-do list. Super busy today. Got a lot on my plate. How was the spa?”

  “Don’t try to divert,” Mom said. “I know you had Nick Porter change my room. He wouldn’t say it was you, but I’m not stupid.”

  “The three of us are already cramped in that suite,” I replied, pressing the elevator button again in the desperate hope that it might arrive faster. “Nick was doing me a favor.”