“That’s what the doctors say,” said Mr. Partridge darkly.
The doctors say. He didn’t believe them. If Mr. Partridge was anything like my own grandfather, he would be a conspiracy theorist. “But she never had health problems before that, did she?”
He shook his head. “How do you know that?”
“I know that because she’s here with me now. She wants you to trust me.” I leaned across the table and gave Mr. Partridge my most intense look. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Okay,” he conceded. He wanted this to be true, so it was true for him.
I always had a niggle of guilt deep in my gut when I pulled scams on vulnerable people like Mr. Partridge, but at least this time, I wasn’t doing it for money.
No, this time I was doing it for a guy.
“She cares about you a lot,” I told him, watching his face carefully. He was starting to smile, eyes misty. Got him. “She worries about you being alone in a place like this.”
Anxiety crossed Mr. Partridge’s face. His hand twitched, almost clenching. He worried about being alone too. Why was a man as old as him living on his own in a place like this?
“You’ve lived here a long time. Longer than most people.” This was information I knew from Roman already.
“She must be glad about that.” He chuckled.
“She loved this hotel.”
“She did, didn’t she?” He was barely listening to me now, lost in his own reminiscence.
“She was always too stubborn to leave,” I ventured. It was an educated guess. Most people would have moved out of the Cressley after a string of murders on their floor. Judging from where Sandra ended up, she might have been better off if she had been more flexible.
Mr. Partridge’s pale, watery eyes were widening. “Is she- Does she-” He cut himself off before he finished his sentence, tightening his thin lips.
“She’s with you,” I assured him. “She’s always with you. And she loves you.”
The sincere smile that lit up his face was a punch to the gut. Was it right to make an old man so happy, if he was only happy because of a lie?
It was time to change the subject. Guilt was starting to gnaw its way through me, and no offense to Mr. Partridge, his tragic love story was unimportant. I had to find out what he’d seen on the fourteenth floor, not how much he loved his wife.
It was time for me to put my acting skills to the test. I grasped my head suddenly and gasped.
“Are you okay?” said Mr. Partridge, hobbling to his feet.
I shivered and cast my eyes up at him, trying to look vulnerable. “There was this cold wind… Did you feel it?”
His lips pinched. “No. I didn’t.”
“There’s a dark spirit here with us.” I made my voice hoarse, dramatic. I loved the thrill of performance. This was how I’d get my breakthrough. After this, I could return to Roman with ripe new clues.
The muscles under Mr. Partridge’s wrinkly jawline tensed. He plopped back into his seat, eyebrows lowering into a deep set frown. “My wife is not a dark spirit or a cold wind, young man.”
Shit. He was on the defensive again. I backpedalled. “No, it wasn’t your wife I felt,” I said slowly. “It was something darker. A negative energy-” I looked up at him. Time to go all or nothing with this act. “I hate to ask this, Mr. Partridge, but have you ever witnessed another death in this hotel? Because someone else wants to talk to you.”
His eyes darkened. “I’m not doing this.”
Not the reaction I was hoping for. “This spirit wants to hurt your wife. You need to-”
“No, I’m not doing this.” He glared at me and shook his head. “I should have known you were full of shit.”
“I-”
He drew in a deep breath. “I almost fell for your act, boy, but you’re not getting a penny out of me.”
What had I done wrong? I had taken a risk by pretending there was a dangerous spirit having breakfast with us, but I calculated that risk first. The last thing I expected was such a sharp change in attitude from Mr. Partridge. I tried to pull myself together. I still had a chance of getting the information I needed if I performed well enough. “I don’t want money, I want to help you and your wife-”
“My wife is dead. Everyone who died here is dead.” Mr. Partridge closed his eyes. Grief and fear were buried in every line on his face. I shouldn’t have been doing this to him, reminding him of all those horrible things he’d surely seen in the Cressley Hotel. But if Roman and I didn’t find out what he knew, how many more people would get hurt?
“This dark spirit wants to hurt Sandra.”
He scoffed. “Whoever heard of a male psychic, anyway? It’s mad.”
I’d lost his favor. I’d misstepped, applied too much pressure in the wrong place. I thought I’d been so careful, but there was no use censoring myself anymore. “Welcome to the 21st century. Girls can be doctors, men can be fortune tellers.”
“I’ll see you around, 1405,” said Mr. Partridge. He stood and glared. “Thank you for helping me when I fell.”
He turned sharply and hobbled away before I could say goodbye.
I had terrified poor Mr. Partridge. In a nutshell, I’d screwed up. It was my job to keep him and everybody else here safe — actually, that’s Roman’s job, I sharply reminded myself — but how were we supposed to do that if I couldn’t make him talk?
I buried my head in my hands and took a mournful bite of dry muffin. I had promised Roman he could trust me. How could I go back to him empty-handed?
Chapter Nineteen
Roman
Isaac returned to room 1405 with his tail between his legs. His face was one or two shades pinker than usual, and he kept scratching his ear and hiding behind his hair.
He collapsed on his back on the bed as soon as he got inside. Dread swelled in my stomach. He wasn’t coming home with the lead I had hoped for.
“Are you acting?” I asked cautiously. “Or did things go poorly?”
“Poorly,” groaned Isaac. He scraped his hands down his pale face. “I scared him off.”
I breathed deeply. This was why I never trusted the phony-psychic angle. “Did you learn anything before you scared him off?”
He propped himself up on his elbow. I was standing somewhat awkwardly in the middle of the room. My knees threatened to buckle as we made eye contact.
“Why didn’t you tell me his wife was one of the victims?” His voice was accusatory. “I could have used that information.”
“His wife?” I shook my head. “No-one named Partridge died, Isaac.”
“She used her maiden name. Sandra Keene.”
“Sandra Keene,” I repeated. Yes, I knew that name. “Sandra Keene lived at the Cressley for twenty-one years before died of a reported heart attack in 1993. She was married to Mr. Partridge?”
“Apparently so.”
“That information will be easy to find if it’s true,” I muttered, already typing a furious message to Elliot on my phone.
“It is true.” Isaac sat up, defensive. “He was wearing her wedding ring around his neck. I screwed up today, but I’m good at this. I know a liar when I see one. Mr. Partridge was sincere when he talked about Sandra. He loved her.”
“We’ll know for sure when Elliot gets back to me.” I sighed and sat on the bed, careful I left a few feet of respectable feet between the pair of us. “Maiden name. Of all people, I should have checked for that.”
“Of all people?”
“I was born Roman Peaks. My father was white. I had my surname legally changed to my mother’s maiden name when I was nineteen.”
Isaac wet his lips, and I could see a question dancing in his eyes. I answered before he could ask why I’d changed my name.
“After I cut off contact with him, I didn’t want to carry any part of my father with me. Having his genetics is bad enough.” Whenever I remembered that half my chromosomes had been donated by him, it made my insides curdle.
Isaac’s fac
e was torn between sympathy and curiosity. I’d never been able to read anyone as well as I could read his expressions. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Did he ever hurt you?” Before I could answer, he started talking in his normal voice again. “That’s a big question, so if you don’t want to answer, that’s okay. I’m not trying to pry. I just care about you.”
He cared about me? My heart flipped.
“No, he never hurt me. Physically.” I sighed. Only one person other than Nana herself knew this story, but I was fast becoming even closer with Isaac than I was with Elliot. “But he hurt my mother.”
“Oh.”
I winced. Out with it, I supposed. “It was my fault.”
Isaac shuffled across the bed toward me. He rested his hand gently on my back. The heat of his palm through my t-shirt was a warm comfort. His touch pulled me back to reality, kept my thoughts from ripping me away into that dark place in my mind. The place that knew that however many people I protected, it wouldn’t change the past.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” Isaac said softly. “Everyone blames themselves for stuff as a kid, but-”
“I was a problem child,” I said. “I was a lot of work. My dad and I always clashed. I didn’t realize until after I left home that every time Nana couldn’t keep me under control…” I sighed. If I’d had Isaac’s deductive skills back then, none of it would ever have happened. “He liked the idea of marrying a exotic islander. He wasn’t so excited about having a troublesome brown son.”
“I doubt you were that troublesome.”
I shrugged and sighed. “He flipped out after I left school to hunt ghosts. That’s how I found out what he had been doing to Nana my whole life.” I chanced brief eye contact with Isaac. His eyes were brimming with compassion, but there was a flare of rage there too.
“What a dick,” he said.
What an understatement. “He was a dick.”
“If he was hurting people, that was his fault. You were a kid.”
“And a teenager-”
“A kid,” Isaac repeated. “It wasn’t up to you to stop him from hurting your nana.”
I shook my head. That was what everyone said, but no one could make me believe it. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said.
“Do you want me to move my hand away?” asked Isaac.
“No.” His touch comforted me. Even if my emotions had escaped the tidy box where I buried them, I was handling this a lot better with Isaac’s hand there to anchor me. Sometimes I found his touch impossibly erotic, but right now, it was the greatest comfort I could imagine.
I turned my head to look at him. Our eyes locked. I couldn’t shift my gaze away. His eyes were as green as a field of grass after spring rain. No one had ever looked at me the way Isaac was looking at me now.
“If you didn’t know that Sandra Keene was married to Mr. Partridge, how did you know she was married at all?” Isaac asked. It was a surprisingly basic question for such intimate proximity.
I was relieved that he had changed the subject. I knew how to talk about the case. “Her relationship was listed on the form I read. The name of the husband wasn’t.”
“Didn’t you think it might be important to find out?”
“Why would it be important if she was killed by a ghost? Her husband couldn’t have killed her with a heart attack.”
Isaac stayed silent, but his smug expression said volumes. He was taunting me. He was on the verge of saying ‘neither could ghosts’. The instinct to kiss that smirk off his lips overwhelmed me. I pulled away from him.
“You know who her husband was now,” I pointed out. “So is it important? Do you think Mr. Partridge killed his wife?”
Isaac lay back on his bed again, hands behind his head, Isaac style. “No. I don’t think he could have killed her.”
“Then it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know who Keene’s husband was,” I said. “It’s not like Partridge would ever have talked to me, anyway.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Isaac. “The important trend is that she was married, like all the other victims. Although a heart attack doesn’t count a suspicious death.”
“It’s unusual for women who are only thirty-three. Sandra Keene was born in 1960, and she died in 1993.”
“Unusual, not impossible,” said Isaac. “How the hell can you know everything about her off the top of your head without knowing she was married to a guest here?”
“It was irrelevant.” Sandra had been one of the least interesting victims, the one who left the least evidence behind. I had to look over my data on her again.
Isaac sighed. “Do we still think that Barbara Hennessey was the first victim? After that, all the victims were all married, which is a trend, although it could be a coincidence…”
“Everything could be a coincidence,” I said. “All we have are theories. If a newlywed bride was the first victim, her spirit might have come to resent people with happy marriages. Do you think Keene and Partridge were happy together?”
“I can’t be positive,” said Isaac. “They were together over twenty years ago. He might not remember well. But I’d say yes. They were happy.”
“That fits the theory,” I said.
“Be careful of confirmation bias,” Isaac warned.
I rolled my eyes. “Did you learn anything else from Mr. Partridge about the other victims? Anything at all?”
Isaac grimaced and pinched his eyes closed. “No. I said the wrong thing, and he clammed up. All I know is that he misses his dead wife, and he’s scared of the ghosts here. I didn’t learn anything that wouldn’t be obvious about a widower in a haunted hotel without meeting him.”
“What did you say that was so bad?”
Isaac mumbled something.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I pretended I felt a dark spirit,” he said a little louder.
“You scared him.”
“A little. He got offended and thought I was implying Sandra was evil.”
“She will be by now if she’s haunting this place.”
“I’m not going to tell an old man that his wife’s soul has been corrupted by death and now she murders people, Roman.”
“You’re right. That would be inappropriate.”
“I told him it wasn’t Sandra and that I’d been visited by a different dark spirit that wanted to hurt her. After that, he told me I was a con artist and stormed off.”
“He’s scared for her soul,” I said. Mr. Partridge had the right instinct. Too bad it was too late to save her.
I pulled up my phone to scan through the information about Sandra Keene. She had been the fifth to die in the Cressley, the fourth if you didn’t count the axe murder Isaac and I were ignoring. There was nothing in the autopsy report that caught my attention, and there had been no criminal investigation into her heart attack. I flipped to a page of my own notes.
“Sandra Keene was a witness at Barbara’s crime scene.”
“Shit.” Isaac whacked himself in the head. “I shouldn’t have screwed up so bad. I could get so much out of Mr. Partridge-”
“You did your best.”
“So what now?” said Isaac.
I was the leader of this investigation. I was supposed to have the answers. But I didn’t know what now. “Maybe we check the basement, look at those old guest records, and search for evidence. If we can’t talk to Mr. Partridge, we could find other potential witnesses and suspects in there.”
Isaac sat up. “Does this mean you’re letting me pick the lock?”
I bit my lip. I wished there was another way, but our other leads were dead ends. We couldn’t fake a relationship and stay here forever. The longer we did this, the more confusing my feelings got.
“Yes, Isaac,” I said. “You can pick the lock. But we need to be careful. If we get caught, we’ll both be in trouble.”
Isaac grinned. “We won’t get caught.”
Chapter Twenty
Isaac
If
you had asked five-year-old Isaac or thirteen-year-old Isaac what he expected to be doing when he was twenty-six, he would not have answered ‘exploring the basement of a haunted hotel’. When I was five, the only ghost I was allowed to mention was the holy kind, and by the time I was thirteen, I’d stopped believing in ghosts.
And yet, here I was. With a sturdy click, the door to the Cressley Hotel’s basement swung open. I straightened and grinned at Roman.
“Damn,” he said. “You are good at that.”
I put my lock picking kit away in one of my deep pockets. “I’m surprised you don’t know how to do it yourself.”
“I don’t break into places. Compared to you, I have no useful skills.”
I looked him up and down. I didn’t like hearing him talk badly about himself like that. He had plenty of useful skills. His memory, his dedication, his drive… “I might be able to break into this place, but I could never work here.”
Roman scoffed. “You’d be great with the guests.”
“I couldn’t tolerate Ben for three years to achieve a goal,” I said. “I don’t have that kind of willpower.”
Hence the self-employment. It was for the best that I stayed away from authority figures. Plus, the reason I made such a good con artist was my ability to cut corners. I heard bosses frowned upon that.
We slipped into the basement before anyone could spot us. Like most basements, it was dark and gloomy. Roman wouldn’t let me flick a light switch, in case someone realized there were intruders down here. He held out his heavy-duty flashlight instead.
A bright beam illuminated the concrete walls around us. The roof was damp, and as he shone the light on the wall, a flurry of spiders skittered away to a more private corner.
“Where do you think storage is?” I asked. The basement, unlike most of the house basements I’d been in, was not one large room but a series of corridors full of metal scaffolding.
“I don’t know,” said Roman. “I wish I’d been down here before.”
“You can’t change the past,” I said. “Let’s explore.”
The New Paranormal Page 20