Restless Spirits Boxset: A Collection of Riveting Haunted House Mysteries

by Skylar Finn

  I dozed off.

  I slept for far longer than two hours. By the time I woke up, the room was bright and sunny. I checked the clock. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. I rolled out of bed, pulled on the first pair of pants I could find, and shuffled down the hallway to my mother’s room.

  “Mom?” I called through the door. “Are you up?”

  I knocked, and the door popped open on its own. It was already unlocked and ajar. Slowly, I inched inside.

  “Mom? It’s me. Lucia.”

  No answer. It was the first time I’d been inside Mom’s suite. It was similar to mine but only one bedroom. Mom’s balcony was bigger though, and it faced the side of the mountain that had been preserved for wildlife. A weird humming sound came from the kitchen. The garbage disposal was on. I switched it off.

  “Mom?” I called again.

  A room service cart sat between the door of the bathroom and the bedroom. I uncovered the platter. Mom’s dinner from last night—a creamy chicken pasta—looked untouched. I covered up the cold food and pushed the cart out of the way. My stomach flipped over. Something wasn’t right.

  I found her in the bathroom, draped over the edge of the tub. She was completely unconscious. I rushed to her side and pressed two fingers to her neck. She had a pulse. Thank God.

  “Mom?” I pulled her away from the ceramic tub and laid her flat on the floor, tapping her cheeks. “Mom, please wake up.”

  I checked the tub again. There was a small bit of bile near the drain, as if she’d tried to make herself throw up. Then I spotted a bottle on the floor beneath the kitchen cabinet. Orange capsule pills were scattered across the floor. I checked the label. They were antidepressants, fatal if ingested all at once.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. “Why?”

  I scrambled up from the floor and retrieved the cordless phone from the living room. As I dialed, I returned to my mother in the bathroom.

  “White Oak front desk,” answered a cool voice.

  My mother wasn’t breathing. I pumped her chest, then puffed into her mouth.

  “This is Lucia Star on the twentieth floor,” I huffed in between rescue breaths. “I need the emergency medical team here as quickly as possible. My mother’s overdosing.”

  “Which room?”

  “Twenty-thirteen.”

  “Right away, ma’am. I’ve alerted them to the situation. Do you need to stay on the line with me?”

  “Nope. Just get them up here.”

  I hung up and tossed the phone aside to focus on my mother. It felt like hours as I continued pumping her heart for her. Once, I tried shoving my fingers down the back of her throat in the hopes she’d throw up whatever was left of the antidepressants, but it was no good. She’d been down and out for too long. If I’d checked on her yesterday like I was supposed to, this never would’ve happened.

  Less than five minutes later, the White Oak rescue team burst through the door and took over. I stood in the corner as they injected my mother with something to counteract the antidepressant. Each member of the team was calm and rational. They spoke in cool, professional tones, as if the half-dead middle-aged woman on the floor of the bathroom didn’t even faze them. I wasn’t sure if I should have been impressed or terrified, but it didn’t matter when my mother finally drew in a breath of her own accord.

  “Mom!”

  I threw myself to my knees beside her and grabbed her hand. She coughed and gagged as if trying to throw up the rest of the pills.

  “Relax, Mom,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Lucia. You’re safe. We got you.”

  Moisture leaked from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. For once, she looked like a real human being, rather than the fake plastic mannequin she usually resembled. Though I hated seeing her like this, I didn’t mind a glimpse at the real woman behind my mother. I held her hand to my heart.

  “Why would you do that?” I demanded. “Why would you take those pills? Especially after what happened to Dad. Didn’t you know what that would do to me?”

  “I didn’t,” she said, her voice hoarse from all the trauma her throat just witnessed. “I didn’t take anything.”

  “Half of your antidepressants are gone,” I said. “You swallowed them. The medical team had to give you another drug to reverse the effect.”

  She raised a hand to cup my cheek. Her fingers were pale and freezing. “I promise, Lucia. I didn’t take anything. The last thing I remember is room service coming to deliver my dinner.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, two White Oak medical team members exchanged a loaded glance. They didn’t believe Mom’s story either.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “For everything. I’m sorry I ruined your marriage and your life. I’m sorry Dad’s dead because of me. I’m sorry I pushed you to do this.”

  “Lucia.” She grasped the back of my neck and pulled me closer, like she used to do when I was a child and in trouble. “Listen to me. I did not do this to myself.”

  She was serious. I could tell from the hard look in her eye. It was the same one she gave me whenever she was trying to get something through my head.

  “Then how did you get like this?”

  Mom glanced around at the White Oak staff. “Someone else—”

  The lead member of the medical team tapped me on the shoulder. “Ma’am? We should really get your mother to the clinic. She probably needs to rehydrate.”

  The team moved in, setting up a stretcher next to my mother, but she grabbed my wrist before they could start transporting her.

  “Lucia,” she rasped. “I never blamed you for your father’s death. I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at myself for letting him have his way. I couldn’t look at you without being reminded of my mistake. That’s why I’ve treated you so poorly. You deserved more from your own mother. You deserved better.”

  Tears burned my eyes. “You don’t hate me?”

  “No,” she promised, grasping my face in both of her hands. “I could never hate you. I love you. I hope you’ll let me make up for the time we’ve lost.”

  When I nodded, a rush of energy pulled from my mother to me. She couldn’t feel the transfer, but I definitely did. The nausea that had plagued me for weeks vanished. Something shifted in my head, as if the scales I imagined earlier were evening themselves out. The emergency staff transferred my mother onto the stretcher, but she refused to let go of my hand. It was cumbersome, but we stayed connected all the way from the suite, down the hall to the elevator, and through the lobby to the clinic. Once inside, Doctor Tanner came out of her office.

  “You again?” she said, spotting me. She checked over my mother. “Another one down, huh? You must be a magnet for trouble.”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Can you help her?”

  Tanner checked the chart one of her subordinates had filled out while we were upstairs. “Overdose, huh? Yeah, we’ll get her back into shape. By the way, I just received a call from CB General. Your friend Jazmin finally woke up. That’s a good sign.”

  I remembered what Stella said about me and Jazmin’s connection. It was no coincidence that she had woken up around the same time my energy started to balance out. The game was changing. I was finally starting to wriggle my way toward the upper hand.

  “What about Riley?” I asked Tanner. “How’s she doing today?”

  “The Watson kid?” Tanner asked. “I thought you already checked her out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was discharged this morning,” Tanner said as she put on her stethoscope and listened to my mother’s heart. “I would’ve kept her a bit longer for observation, but your signature was on the papers.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I ignored it. “Are you telling me Riley isn’t here?”

  Tanner looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah. You literally gave the clinic permission to release her. Do I need to check your head for injuries too?”

  “No,” I said. “But if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”

>   Thankfully, my mother had already fallen asleep, so there were no heartfelt goodbyes to be had. I kissed her forehead, thanked the medical staff for responding so promptly, and left the clinic. As soon as I did, my phone rang again. It was Lourdes Calvo.

  “What the hell could you possibly want?” I muttered. I rejected the call and dialed Riley’s number instead. It rang and rang before eventually dumping me to voicemail.

  “This is Riley Watson,” she said in her message. “Don’t leave a message. I won’t listen to it. If you really want to get a hold of me, text me instead.”

  I hung up and shot her a text message. Riley! Where are you? Call me as soon as you get this.

  As soon as I pressed send, another call from Lourdes came in. I finally answered.

  “What is it?” I said. “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, so you better make it fast. No one else tried to murder you, right?”

  “No, I’m safe,” Lourdes replied, her voice tight and strained. “But you’ll never believe what I just found out. Meet me in my room. It’s on the sixth floor in the second wing. Six-oh-nine. Get here now.”

  She hung up before I could reply, giving me no choice but to obey her order. As I jogged across the bridge to White Oak’s other wing of rooms, I tried calling Riley again. Nothing but crickets and that dumb voicemail message over and over again. In the hallway outside Lourdes’s room, I gave up. Lourdes answered the door after one knock.

  “Get in here,” she said, yanking me inside by the collar of my shirt.

  “Ouch,” I growled as I rubbed my collarbone where her pointy knuckles had knocked against it. “What’s your damage, Heather?”

  Her room was tiny, no larger than the master bathroom in my suite. One queen-sized bed was squished against the wall along with a small desk and a chest of drawers that doubled as a TV stand. It seemed impossible that White Oak had even bothered to build rooms this small, but I supposed they wanted to cater to every brand of tourist, even blue-collared ones.

  Lourdes beckoned me over to the desk and opened her laptop. “I have to show you something.”

  “This better be good,” I said. “Riley somehow managed to check herself out of the clinic this morning, and now she’s missing. You haven’t seen her around, have you? I can’t get a hold of her.”

  “No,” Lourdes said, fiddling with a familiar video clip on her screen. “Forget about Riley for a second. Check this out.”

  She turned the laptop toward me. My eyes widened.

  “That’s my footage!” I shoved her aside and scrolled through the contents in her media files. “And these are pictures from my personal camera. You stole these?”

  “Jazmin let me copy your hard drive,” Lourdes said. “I told you. We were working on something big, not trying to screw you over. And we were right. If you look closer—”

  My stomach flipped as she clicked on one of the still images. It showed Tyler Watson’s room on the morning after his death. There was blood everywhere. Tyler’s body was still splayed out on the floor, his eyes wide and unseeing. I never wanted to see these photos again.

  “Ugh,” I said, turning away. “What’s your point?”

  “Look at the carpet,” she said. “What do you see?”

  I squinted at the picture as she zoomed in. “Not much beneath the blood.”

  “Look closer.”

  I leaned toward the laptop. “Are you talking about those little triangular divots?”

  “Yup,” she said, zooming back out and switching to a media player app. “Now watch this video that you took of the detective and Nick Porter.”

  She pressed play. The audio was muted, but Lourdes didn’t seem to be concerned with whatever the two men were saying. The video had been taken at the bar in the Eagle’s View at King and Queens, when Daniel was conducting interviews with everyone who had been at the resort the night Tyler was murdered. Riley had hidden the camera behind a napkin holder on the bar. Half of the frame was blacked out, but I could still see Nick approach his stool and sit down. He set his cane near the camera lens.

  “There!” Lourdes said. “Did you see it?”

  “Did I see what?” I asked, exasperated.

  She rewound the footage and froze it right as Nick raised his cane to put it on the bar top. She pointed at the very end of it.

  “Right there,” she said.

  My jaw dropped. “Oh my God.”

  The end of Nick’s cane was shaped like a triangle, the perfect match to the divots in the carpet of Tyler’s room.

  “You know what this means, right?” Lourdes asked. “Oliver Watson didn’t kill his son. Nick Porter did.”

  Was it enough proof? I couldn’t decide. Nick had definitely been in Tyler’s room that night, and he had lied straight to my face about it. But why would Nick have wanted Tyler dead? Sure, Nick wanted to buy out King and Queens in order to turn it into another version of White Oak, but Tyler wasn’t in the way of that. If he was so determined, Nick could have buried Oliver in legal fees and bought out King and Queens anyway. Tyler was nothing but a pawn. Did that mean Nick had killed him accidentally?

  I left Lourdes’s room without discussing it with her, much to her chagrin. I wasn’t like Jazmin. I couldn’t instantly process information like this. I needed time, but time wasn’t exactly on my side. Riley was still missing, and no matter how much I tried her phone, she didn’t answer.

  “Riley,” I hissed into her voicemail. “I really need you to call me back. White Oak isn’t safe. We need to get out of here—”

  The message recording software cut me off with a harsh beep. I called Riley back yet again, but it went straight to voicemail.

  “I’m sorry,” said a computerized voice. “But the voicemail box you are currently trying to reach is full. Please try again later.”

  I groaned in frustration and hurled the phone across the room. It hit the kitchen backsplash and shattered.

  “No, no, no,” I said, rushing over to pick it up. The screen was black. I tapped the home button to no avail. It was dead. Even if Riley wanted to call me back, she couldn’t now. “Shit!”

  Someone knocked on the door. Without thinking, I pulled it open. I instantly regretted my lack of vigilance. I should’ve looked through the peephole first. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had to stand face to face with Nick Porter and his deceitfully warm smile.

  “Hi, Lucia,” he said, one hand on his cane, the other behind his back. “I thought you could use a nice dinner out, what with all the stress going on in your life right now. Would you like to go to Porter’s again? We never got around to the lobster. Or if you feel more like having a burger, we can arrange that too. I’m afraid I don’t often frequent the bars downstairs, but I assure you the service is just as stellar—”

  “Sorry, Nick,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “I can’t tonight. I have a lot going on right now.”

  “Oh?” One of his eyebrows—the one with the scar through it—lifted higher than the other. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “No,” I replied. “It’s not. See you tomorrow.” I started to close the door, but the toe of his expensive leather loafer was in the way. “Nick? Your shoe is in the way.”

  A grin crept across his face. “It is indeed.”

  “Can you move it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He lunged forward with too much grace for a man who spent most of his days limping around on a cane. I screamed and dodged to the side, but he was too quick. He tackled me to the floor of the suite and slammed the door shut with his foot, locking us inside. His body weight pinned me to the floor as he revealed what he held in his other hand. It was a syringe, which he uncapped with his teeth. As he pinched my arm with his free hand, I bit as hard as I could into his shoulder. He shouted and spat the cap out.

  “You stupid bitch,” he snapped, all of his handsome grace gone as his face twisted with rage. “I almost let you live.”

  He thrust the needle into my skin a
nd depressed the plunger, dispensing whatever chemical resided inside. Almost immediately, my world faded to black.

  10

  The drug was like sludge in my system, weighing down everything from my toes to my eyelids. I struggled through the stupor, finally waking up in a wood-paneled room. If it weren’t so cold, the red-and-black flannel sofas and quaint decorations would have been cozy. The hearth was dark and ashy. No fire had been lit there for several years. A fine layer of dust coated the hand-carved wood furniture. The one room had everything, including a queen-sized bed with a dusty duvet, a kitchenette with a rusty tea kettle, and Gina James, unconscious and tied to a chair near the stove.

  “Gina,” I hissed.

  She didn’t move. I couldn’t either. Like Gina, I was bound to a chair with mountaineering rope. It had been tied so tightly that my skin was patterned with red welts. I wriggled to and fro, testing the rope, but I only succeeded in aggravating my skin more.

  “That won’t help,” said a cold voice. Nick emerged from the adjoining bathroom, drying his hands. His cane leaned against the wall, but his usual limp was gone as he crossed toward me.

  “Nick.” Whatever he’d injected me with made my tongue heavy too. “What are you doing? Where are we?”

  “We’re at King and Queens,” Nick replied. He struck a match and lit a gas burner on the stove top. He turned up the flame and warmed his hands over it, but the heat didn’t reach across the room to me. “The main building may have burned down, but not many people know about these cabins. They were built for guests who wanted a more rustic type of vacation. They were my favorite place to stay, but that idiot running my resort deemed them too annoying to repair. I’m actually glad he left them be. He ruined everything else with his filthy touch.” He leaned against the counter and gazed around the petite cabin. “This particular cabin was reserved for the Watsons’ personal use. Look.”

  He crossed to the bed and picked up a frame from the nearby table. I shook as he neared me, but he didn’t touch me. He just shoved the picture under my nose.