Restless Spirits Boxset: A Collection of Riveting Haunted House Mysteries

by Skylar Finn

  She gave the tea one last glare before tipping it back and swallowing the remaining portion with a grimace. She shuddered and threw the bottle across the room, where it hit the far wall and rolled to a stop, the sound silenced by the mats.

  “I’m gonna hurl,” Riley said. “What’s next?”

  “I wrote out the directions for a reason, slick.”

  She unfolded the piece of paper and squinted at it in the dark. As she swayed back and forth, I wondered if she was actually moving like that or if it was a side effect of the strange herbal tea we’d just thrown back.

  “Draw a chalk circle around the dreamcatcher,” she read off. “I assume you’re the dreamcatcher.”

  “That would be correct.”

  She fetched the chalk from the floor and made her way around me, scratching it across the blue mats in a rough circle. When she finished, she consulted the instructions again.

  “Connect the dreamcatcher to the guardian with a double line,” she recited. “Am I the guardian?”

  “You sure are,” I said. “Are you up for it?”

  The angle of her mouth set itself in a straight line of determination. “You know it. You’ve been protecting me ever since you got to Crimson Basin. It’s about time I returned the favor. What do I have to do?”

  “From what I could figure out, the guardian has the ability to rescue the dreamcatcher if things go too far,” I said. “Some of the people who have tried this ritual before don’t come out of it. They’re comatose because their minds get lost in their own consciousness. Obviously, we’d like to avoid that.”

  Riley looked nervous. “What happens if I can’t pull you out?”

  “Don’t think about that,” I told her. “I’m counting on you, okay? We have a tight bond. You should be able to sense if I’m in distress, but don’t pull me out too early. I need time to figure out the truth about who this demon ghost really is.”

  “You trust me to be able to tell the difference?” Riley asked as she drew a circle around herself and connected us with the double lines. As soon as the chalk from her circle reached the line of mine, a thrum of energy radiated from me to her and back again.

  “Feel that?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I squeezed her chalk-free hand. “I totally trust you. Let’s do this.”

  The incantation was the weirdest bit of the instructions. Riley had trouble reading my writing because my hand had been shaking earlier when I’d put it all on paper. It was a bizarre Latin phrase meant to invoke “the truth in dreams.” It all sounded a bit ridiculous to me, but I was desperate for a solution. If this worked, we would be one step closer to getting out from under Crimson Basin’s creepy thumb forever.

  Riley began to chant, getting a feel for the rhythm of the words. She stumbled over them at first then settled into a beat. She lit the candles one by one, placing them at each of the cardinal directions around me. My eyelids sagged. The steady cadence of Riley’s voice plus the sleep-inducing tea was beginning to take effect. As she lit the last candle and placed it on the double line connecting us, I sank into unconsciousness.

  For the second time, I found myself at the top of the bunny slope on King and Queens’ side of the mountain. I was no taller than the waist of the adult woman next to me, who had clearly never skied a day in her life. I glanced over my shoulder, to the east, where White Oak would have been if this were present day. There was nothing there but empty sky. King and Queens was the only resort in Crimson Basin.

  I checked out the hill. It wasn’t too steep, and the body I occupied was confident in our conjoined abilities to make it to the bottom without falling. I trusted its instincts and pushed off. We sped across the snow, the skis sliding effortlessly beneath me. Push, push, glide. Push, push, glide. Why did I think skiing was so hard in the first place? This body loved it.

  Everything was in crisp, clear focus. I was aware of both myself as Lucia and as the child whose eyes I currently experienced the world through. King and Queens looked the same as it did in my last dream like this. The old wing was still intact. This was before the fire in the eighties that burnt it down. I wondered what it looked like in its prime. I wanted to go inside, but this wasn’t my memory. I was at the mercy of someone else’s mind and body.

  Near the bottom of the hill, I spotted Noah—the skinny brown-haired boy—from the last time I’d had this dream. Just like before, I got as close to him as possible before turning my skis perpendicular to him and showering him with snow.

  “I thought you might do that,” he said again. “So I came prepared.”

  Though I knew the snowball was coming, my host didn’t. She didn’t duck early enough, and the snowball smashed us right in the nose. My awareness couldn’t alter the events of the dream. I had to go with the flow. Noah and I went through our usual banter. It felt comfortable to my host. She was familiar with this boy. They seemed to like each other despite the clear differences in their social status. Noah was all hand-me-down clothes and overgrown hair, whereas when I looked down at my host’s outfit, she was decked out in the newest gear the mountain had to offer.

  “Is your mom working today?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she’s—”

  The hand came down on Noah’s jacket. The jacket tore. The man in the designer suit hauled Noah away from me and shook him. This was my host’s father. He looked familiar. I’d seen him somewhere before, but I couldn’t put a name to his face.

  I studied each person through the eyes of my host as the three of us fought about Noah’s presence on the mountain. Noah was scared yet defiant, his eyes wide but his teeth set in a bared grin. The well-dressed man reeked of rage, but there was something else beneath the surface that I couldn’t put my finger on. Though he handled Noah roughly, he seemed to be holding back. Was it for the sake of keeping up appearances for the other guests of King and Queens or was it because of something else? When he tossed Noah aside, he made sure to aim for the deepest snow bank in the area. He didn’t really want to hurt Noah, but when he rounded on me, his grip on my upper arm was painful enough to make me wince.

  “Just wait until your mother hears about this,” he growled, tugging me toward the resort.

  Last time, I hadn’t made it this far into my host’s memory. I could feel the fear coursing through me as the father figure switched his grip from my arm to my earlobe. If I stalled, the skin burned and threatened to separate from the rest of my head. The man dragged me through a back door of the resort, flashing a badge at his waist to get in. We entered a deserted hallway, no less ornate than the rest of King and Queens, but clearly off limits to the guests. This was the owners’ quarters, the area sectioned off for the Watsons’ use only. The man rounded a corner and pushed me into a small library. Sitting in the book nook, wearing a creamy cashmere sweater dress that outlined her impressive figure, was none other than Stella Watson. She glanced up as the man dragged me in and deposited me at her feet.

  “What’s happened now?” she asked in a tone drier than gin.

  “She was with that boy again,” the man said. “Noah.”

  Stella stood up and cast her book aside. My host scrambled away from her, and I felt a shiver of fear myself. This version of Stella was colder and even more strict than the one that I knew. If I were truly a child, I’d be scared of her too.

  “Odette, how many times do I have to tell you to stay away from that boy?”

  With the name, everything clicked into place. It was a wonder I hadn’t figured it out before. My host was Odette Watson, the first ghost I’d ever seen at King and Queens. She was Stella’s daughter, and before she and her family were killed in the fire, she was the princess of King and Queens. That meant the man who separated me from Noah was—

  “Richard,” Stella snapped. “Why is he still allowed on the property? Haven’t I asked you to take care of that fifty times already? It’s been eight years.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Richard argued back. “His mother works here, and t
here’s no one to watch him.”

  “That isn’t our problem,” Stella said. “You might as well fire her and be done with both of them.”

  “You know I can’t do that without casting suspicion.”

  Stella pushed aside her daughter—me—to approach Richard. She smacked him across the face. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for you. Figure something out. I don’t care if you have to plant something on her. I want her and her son out of this resort.”

  “Yes, dear,” Richard sneered.

  Stella turned her back on both of us. “Get Odette out of here. I was enjoying my afternoon before the two of you ruined it.”

  Before Richard could touch me, I rushed for the door. I didn’t want to be in the library any more than Stella did. Richard, however, needed to vent his frustrations. He aimed a kick at my waist line, forcing my back to curve in at a terrible angle. I yelped as a sharp wave of pain rocked through me. My heavy snow boots caught the edge of the carpet, and I went down hard. My nose hit the floor first, causing bright flashes of light to impede my vision.

  “Get up,” Richard growled, but he grasped the back of my jacket and hauled me to my feet before I could get my feet under me. He shoved me out of the room and closed the door behind us. “See what you’ve done, Odette? Mommy’s mad, and it’s all your fault.”

  “She said it was your fault.”

  The comeback dropped from Odette’s mouth before she had fully considered the consequences of it, and she regretted it instantaneously. Richard turned to face me, and I felt the full force of the fear Odette had of both her parents. He bore down on me, his hand raised at the level of his eyes. As he swung through, aiming for Odette’s face, the hellfire took over his eyes.

  “Lucia. Lucia! Wake up!”

  Riley smacked one of my cheeks then the other, turning my head from side to side in the effort to pull me from the memory. Her figure was blurry above me. Something dripped onto my cheeks. I tasted salt. Riley was crying.

  “I’m awake,” I muttered, pushing myself up from the floor. My brain felt as though it had been sucked right out of my head. Maybe, for the time I’d been in another person’s body, it had been. Riley threw her arms around my neck and hugged me so tightly that her sharp little collarbone pressed against my windpipe and my hair got caught in the purple plaster cast.

  “Thank God,” she said. “You were asleep for an hour, talking to yourself and writhing around. When your eyes rolled back in your head, I got really worried. What did you find out?”

  I pulled away from her to look her in the eye. She was pale and sweating. The ritual had taken a lot out of her too, but at least we were both alive.

  “It’s Odette’s father,” I told her. “The demon ghost of King and Queens is Richard Watson.”

  9

  After taking Riley back to the clinic, I tracked down the one person who might have more information on Richard Watson. I hadn’t seen Gina James since she’d run away from me in the lobby when I was talking to Nick, but that didn’t stop me from tracing my footsteps to her room on the first floor and knocking on her door. She didn’t answer at first, but it was almost four in the morning. She had to be in there. I knocked again. The door opened. Gina, clad in a White Oak courtesy robe, peered at me with bleary eyes.

  “Lucia,” she said. Sleep weighed down her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  I stepped past her, forgoing an invitation inside. “I need your help. You’re the only one I can think of to ask.”

  She shuffled into the kitchen. For the first time since I’d met her, she showed symptoms of her age. She favored one hip over the other and her hands trembled as she filled a kettle with water.

  “What is this about?” she asked, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes.

  “It’s about King and Queens,” I said. “You told me you stayed there before it burned down. Do you remember much about it? About the Watsons?”

  She set the kettle on the stove to boil. “Yes, I remember quite a bit. Why?”

  “I need you to tell me everything you know,” I said.

  “You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” she replied. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about this in the morning?”

  “Please. It has to be now.”

  Gina tightened the belt to her robe and sat down on the arm of the couch. “Just calm down. Is everything okay?”

  “I’m trying to make it okay,” I told her, “but I need your help.”

  “All right, all right.” She squinted into the distance as if trying to look forty years into the past. “You know the basics. King and Queens was one of the most popular ski resorts in the United States. Even international skiers would come to Crimson Basin, but it wasn’t just the mountain that attracted tourists here.”

  “It was the Watsons,” I finished for her.

  She nodded. “The Watsons were like royalty. They were high society blue bloods. Richard was a philanthropist and his wife was a fashionista. They were constantly giving millions to this charity or that one. They hosted huge parties and events. Everyone wanted to be a part of their elite club.”

  “Were you?”

  Gina’s expression darkened. “Never. I didn’t want to be. What you have to understand about people like the Watsons is that their charitable likeability is almost always a front.”

  “So then what were the Watsons hiding?”

  The kettle whistled, and Gina heaved herself to stand with a long sigh. “The Watson men were infamous for one thing: their affairs. Just look at the name of the resort. King and Queens, as in one king and multiple queens. Since the very beginning, the Watson men had side pieces. In my time, Richard was no different. Women threw themselves at him. They all wanted to be his next flavor of the week. They all thought they would be the one he would fall in love with.”

  “I thought you said no one knew about the Watsons’s seedy secret,” I reminded her.

  “We all pretended not to know,” Gina said. “The Watsons gave so much to charity and to the Crimson Basin community that no one bothered to highlight Richard’s infidelity. He paid people off or made his past trysts disappear.”

  “Sounds sketchy. What did Stella think of that?”

  Gina’s face contorted. “His wife? She knew all about it. She was a horrible woman too. She walked around that place with her nose so high in the air that I was always surprised when she didn’t run into anything. She let Richard have his affairs, and then she punished him afterward. Rumor was that she enjoyed it.”

  This was not information about Stella that I ever wanted to know, but Gina’s description matched the Stella I’d seen in Odette’s memory. Maybe she’d changed in life after death, but the haughty disposition and “holier than thou” attitude had remained. Dead Stella certainly cared more about her daughter. I couldn’t judge the version of Stella that I never knew, but Gina certainly did.

  “So did you hear all of this through the rumor mill while you were staying at King and Queens?” I asked. “Or did you have an inside source? One of your friends maybe?”

  “I didn’t have many friends at the resort,” Gina said as she dropped a tea bag into a mug of hot water. “I couldn’t be bothered to join in on the gossip. I was there to ski and watch birds and take in the other wildlife. I could’ve cared less about the Watsons.”

  “It doesn’t seem that way.”

  Gina knocked the cup over, swore, and dumped the whole thing into the sink. “Damn it. Fine, I would have cared less until Richard Watson saw me in the rental shop one morning. He decided he had to have me.”

  “You and Richard?”

  “No,” she snapped. “I never gave in. I refused to be like the rest of the women who passed through his bed. Unfortunately, Richard didn’t give up so easily, and when Stella got wind of the situation, she tried to make my life a living hell.”

  “What did she do?”

  Gina poured the kettle into the sink. “Forget about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”<
br />
  “Okay.”

  I cradled my head in my hands and sank into the couch with a groan. Gina glanced over the kitchen counter.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Headache. I don’t suppose you have any ibuprofen on you?”

  “Sure.” She gave up on the tea and dried her hands. “I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as she disappeared into the other room, I shot to my feet and began rooting around the suite. I opened the drawers of the side tables, lifted the couch cushions, and rooted through the closet until I found what I was looking for. The gold locket was tucked in the pocket of a vintage overcoat I’d never seen Gina wear. I shook it into the palm of my hand. The metal was as cold as the snow outside. When I pried apart the sides and opened it, a folded-up picture fell out. I picked it up, unfurled it, and let out a gasp. The picture was of Noah, the boy from Odette’s memory.

  “Get out!”

  I jumped at Gina’s sharp command. The bottle of ibuprofen dropped from her grasp as she pointed one trembling finger at the door. I flipped around the photo.

  “Noah is your son?” I asked. “He was friends with the Watsons’ daughter, Odette. What happened to him?”

  Gina rushed me, snatched both the locket and photo out of my hands, then shoved me toward the door. All of that hiking she did paid off. I stumbled as she pushed me into the hallway.

  “Wait, Gina!”

  Slam! The door rocked shut.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around Gina’s freak out, but she obviously knew more about the Watsons than she was letting on. If Noah was her son, Gina was the woman in Odette’s memory that Stella had so adamantly ordered Richard to get rid of. Something didn’t quite line up, but I was too exhausted to make sense of it all. It was nearly five a.m., and all I could think about was crawling into bed and staying there for the next several hours. But just as I was about to peel back the covers, I remembered my promise to Jazmin. She’d wanted me to check in on my mother, and I hadn’t done so all day.

  “Two hours,” I said to myself, collapsing under the sheets. “I’ll take a nap then check on her at seven. She’ll be up by then.”