Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  Dust

  to

  Dust

  An Ivy Nichols Mystery

  AUDREY KEOWN

  For Michelle,

  whose fresh courage lifts us all.

  Sic itur ad astra.

  I am not willing you should go

  Into the earth, where Helen went;

  She is awake by now, I know.

  Where Cleopatra’s anklets rust

  You will not lie with my consent;

  And Sappho is a roving dust;

  Cressid could love again; Dido,

  Rotted in state, is restless still;

  You leave me much against my will.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay,

  “To S. M. If He Should Lie A-Dying”

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book in 2020, a year in which we all suffered collective and personal losses, wasn’t easy. I couldn’t have finished without dipping into a source I (nerdily) call my “second well,” which was fed all year by my family, good friendships, and the Author of life.

  I’m convinced that, through no fault of my own, I have the best literary agent in the world. Annie Bomke, thank you for your Mr. Fig–like commitment to doing your job with excellence. You go above and beyond, and because of that, this book is twice what it could have been.

  To my editor with the well-fitting given name, Faith Black Ross: thank you for seeing the heart of this story, for asking the right questions, and for your careful and patient work. I’ll forever be grateful that this series landed in your proficient hands.

  Shout-out to my Hotel 1911 Bellhops, the incredible street team who helped get the word out about Murder at Hotel 1911 and Dust to Dust and shared in the excitement of my launch.

  To my Chattarosa critique partners, who so often carry the burden of seeing the worst first version of everything, how could I do without you? (Add more detail here showing the author’s blushing and gushing, etc.)

  There are so many people who were a gift on a global level last year—essential workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic; truth-tellers in an era polluted with disinformation; justice-oriented pastors; and intrepid teachers who kept right on teaching kids—even mine!—to explore, persevere, and most of all, to read.

  Finally, I’m grateful to mental healthcare workers and those who keep talking about mental health in the public sphere. There was never a year we needed you more.

  I

  What Happened About the Statues

  My first reaction to the water gushing from below the men’s room door was the impulse to phone Mr. Fig and marvel with him over the reflection of our Narcissus statue in the puddle, a rare perfect moment of myth brought to life. But I was a plumber’s daughter to my core. I knew to shut off the water, and how, without calling our already overworked general manager in the dead of night.

  For a minute, I worried the current cold snap had broken a pipe and caused the leak, a situation I couldn’t begin to deal with on my own. But the hotel’s plumbing, although more than a hundred years old in places, ran down from here through the heated basement. It wasn’t likely to freeze in any kind of temperatures we got in Tennessee.

  I went for the mop bucket in the closet at the top of the old servant staircase, but as I wheeled it, squeaking, through the hall, the gold-filigreed front doors split open, and two couples burst through, shaking snow from their hatless heads. Guests arriving for check-in, if I knew my business, and I liked to think I did.

  Mr. Fig would not approve of them seeing housekeeping equipment during their first impression of the otherwise glamorous entry hall.

  Of course, he wouldn’t appreciate me letting the main floor flood either.

  While the guests busied themselves in the doorway, I shoved the bucket out of sight, dashed daintily across the hall, and sloshed through the puddle into the men’s room, realizing only then that I should’ve announced myself.

  Thankfully, the stalls were empty. I spotted the leak spurting from the supply line under one of the vintage sinks and closed the offending valve nice and tight.

  “Look at this, would you?” The voice of one of the freshly arrived women echoed in the hall.

  I hoped she was remarking on a classical painting or an early-twentieth-century piece of furniture rather than the deluge.

  “Watch out. Floor’s slippy,” said a man with a stronger version of the woman’s slightly mumbly northern accent.

  I swung myself out the door, lifted my heavy skirt, and waded back through the puddle.

  The four guests plodded across the room like a desert caravan, slowed by their shoulder bags and rolling suitcases.

  One of the men, massive and stiff in his bearing, paused in front of an oil painting to look around and reminded me of a graying moose as the leafless branches in the painted tree behind him seemed to extend from either side of his head. He maintained an unaffected expression, but the wide eyes and mouths of the other three told me they were having exactly the transporting experience that Mr. Fig and Clarista King, our exuberant and often eccentric boss, had curated for them.

  Pausing by one of the two naiad statues at the foot of the staircase, I folded my hands neatly at the tight waist of my dress, took a deep breath, and delivered my most devastating smile. “Welcome to Hotel 1911.”

  I gestured toward the bathroom. “I’m afraid we have experienced a leak. Please avoid the wet floor.”

  And to think, regular hotels had signs to do this work.

  One of the women, a pretty brunette of about fifty with a demure smile, let her eyes trail across my Titanic-era dress as if I were another period fixture. “It’s like we’ve stepped back in time, Autumn.”

  “Let’s not overromanticize things,” said the woman beside her, evidently called Autumn, who was near her age and had short red hair. She glanced at me. “This girl reminds me of the guide who gave us the Mount Calvary Cemetery tour in costume. Remember?”

  Cemetery tour? That was unusual.

  I returned to my station behind the antique reception desk and opened the booking book on the marble desktop.

  The freak snowstorm that had powdered our guests on their way in had coincided this year with a semiregular March freeze that longtime Southerners called redbud winter. The intersection of the two meant some of the white fluff might remain with us a day or so.

  I was overjoyed.

  Like many in these parts, I nursed a starving hope that this year might finally bring snow worthy of making men and angels. I blamed Hollywood for this fantasy of charming white winters. Christmas movies were nearly always set somewhere up north.

  The moose-ish man opened a bag of pretzels from his pocket, sat down in the nearest armchair, and began to slowly munch his noisy snack.

  “A real charmer, isn’t it, hon?” The other man in the foursome clamped his arm around the waist of the brunette woman, who had started to wander away. He was blondish and sixty-something with a slight paunch but good posture, the physique of someone who had a casual relationship with the gym. “Not too different from how I remember it.”

  “Just like you said.” She nodded politely.

  He reached up and untucked her hair from behind her ear, then fastened one more button on her blouse.

  She frowned, twisted out of his embrace, and joined the redhead at the wall mural beyond the wide staircase, as if to inspect its classical garden scene more closely.

  Dissatisfaction spread over the blondish man’s face, but as he turned to meet me at the desk and eyed my poofy suffragette hair, a smile replaced it. “You’re part of the scenery too, aren’t you?”

  Here for your entertainment, I thought. The most aggravating drawback of this or any customer service job had to be constantly biting one’s tongue.

  His ey
es didn’t stray below my face, though, so maybe he hadn’t meant anything objectifying by the comment. Then again, the men who best hid their ogling were often the most dangerous, in my experience.

  “Yes, sir.” I smiled back at him. “All of the staff uniforms sport a contemporary design, the latest 1911 fashion.”

  Buttoned up from my waist to my throat, I wore the same style gown as the housekeeper who had worked for my great-great-grandparents when they’d built this house near the turn of the twentieth century.

  The guest stuck out a hand and chuckled. “Dr. Clyde Borough.”

  He certainly wasn’t treating me like a prop. Most guests didn’t bother shaking my hand.

  I was charmed. “Ivy Nichols. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. Borough.”

  I usually maintained this pseudo-period language through check-in with a guest and dropped it sometime after, despite Clarista’s expectation of consistency. “Did I hear you say you’ve been a guest of the house before, sir?”

  “Great question. I was, but that was well before you got here. Before this mansion was a hotel, it was actually a private residence.”

  Did he think he needed to explain that to me? I disguised my frown with a mock cough and focused on the intriguing part of what he’d said. In the nine months or so that I’d been working at Hotel 1911, no guest had mentioned visiting my family here. “You were a guest of the Morrows, sir?”

  “That’s right. Back in my college days.” He lifted a finger toward the desk. “Our group booking is under my name.”

  “Yes, sir.” I flipped open the book where we had such things recorded by hand. Our period theme meant any anachronistic office equipment was hidden behind a curtain in a tiny room behind me.

  It was just as well he’d changed the subject. Having never known the Morrows, I still struggled with impostor syndrome and wasn’t ready to be telling outsiders I was a descendant of the original owners.

  “I see we have you and Ms. Gallagher in the Achilles suite, sir—a fine choice, our grandest room,” I said.

  One of Clarista’s odd regulations was that each guest’s name appear on the booking. She thought it made for a more personalized check-in experience when we greeted them by name, which I aimed for half the time. Doyle (the day clerk and my nemesis) almost never did.

  “Achilles? I’m honored. Although I probably have more than one fatal flaw.” He lifted one eyebrow.

  “Well, let us hope we don’t find that out while you’re here.” I handed him paperwork to sign, pushing away thoughts of another guest of the Achilles whose singular weakness had been the end of her. I glanced at a note scribbled next to Dr. Borough’s booking. Shoot. “Sir, you were probably informed when you made your reservation, but I should remind you that because our staircase from the conservatory to the second floor is under construction, one of your balconies in the suite will be off-limits during your stay.”

  “That won’t be a problem for us. We’ll hardly be in the room, what with the conference during the day and visits with my daughter. She’s going to school here—at Covenant?”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Covenant College was the answer to the question, Is that a castle up there? frequently heard when driving past Lookout Mountain on the way out of the city.

  He lifted his chest. “My alma mater, actually.”

  “How nice. And what conference are you in town for?”

  “Great question. It’s the annual meetup of the Association for Gravestone Studies at your little convention center off MLK. Our whole group is here for it, actually, the four of us and the five who arrived earlier today. We’re all members of the Gravestone Friends of Greater Pittsburgh. I’m the club president.”

  What the Dickens? I had checked in the five he’d mentioned—a pair of women in their eighties, a father and son, and a quiet man on his own. I’d been too busy to ask what had brought them to town, but I wouldn’t have thought of them sharing this same weird interest. You just couldn’t peg people on sight.

  I feigned a smile. “How fascinating.”

  “I know it seems a little odd at first.” He smoothed the lapels of his sport coat. “I guess I’ve become used to the macabre, spending so much time with the nineteenth-century poets. The Victorians were obsessed with death.”

  “Oh, so you’re a teacher?” I filed his paperwork away to transfer to the office computer later.

  “Yes, professor actually. Anyway, there’s a lot to know about gravestones—from the symbols engraved on them to the material they’re made of and how it disintegrates over centuries. In fact, we’re jazzed about exploring the historic grave markers you have here. They’re remarkable.”

  Jazzed.

  “Mm-hmm. There are some cool cemeteries in the area,” I said. “Some of them date back to before the Civil War, like the one where the early missionaries to the Cherokees are buried.”

  “Yes, I believe that’s on one of the tours the conference is leading,” he said. “But I was referring to the graves here on the hotel property.”

  “Oh.” My fingers froze, pen in hand, and my eyes flicked toward the garden doors and back to his face. There were no graves here.

  Sure, we had classical statues, elaborate formal gardens, and even secret passages, but no graves.

  I hated making people unhappy, so I wasn’t about to tell him they’d booked the hotel on false pretenses. As general manager, or “butler” as far as guests were concerned, Mr. Fig would want to handle the misunderstanding himself, but he’d gone home hours ago, and I wouldn’t disturb him for something that could wait till morning.

  As I handed Clyde the skeleton keys for the Achilles Room, Renee Gallagher followed Autumn out of the theater. (According to their booking, Autumn’s last name was Truman, and the imposing man with the pretzels was her husband Tom.)

  At my offer to help with the group’s luggage, the two men protested and began throwing bags over their shoulders.

  Renee glanced around the room again with a gleam of amusement behind her benign expression, reaching up to touch each ear in turn, as if checking that her pearl studs were still in place.

  “What is it?” Autumn asked her, without joining in her fun.

  “It’s a little overdone, isn’t it?” Renee said under her breath, more like she was unsure of her own opinion than trying to keep me from overhearing.

  “What, the decor?” Autumn said.

  Renee’s smile opened up and her face lifted. “I mean, all these reproduction Greek sculptures and the faux marble and fake gold frames and—” She broke into a musical laugh, bending forward and catching a hand on her collarbone.

  I bristled inwardly—and probably outwardly, if anyone was paying attention. Her comment would have offended Mr. Fig too, on behalf of the Morrows and this place that represented their legacy. But he would have found an assertive yet respectful way to set her straight. I needed to learn exactly how he did that.

  “You must be delirious from traveling,” Autumn said to Renee, her face drawing downward in disapproval. She grabbed the brunette’s arm to direct her toward the elevator. “All this stuff is real and historical, by the way. I read about it on their website.”

  Well, that wasn’t as good as what Mr. Fig would have said, but I was thankful for it.

  “I’m tired too,” Tom said flatly.

  “What’s going on with you?” Autumn, the apparent manager of everyone in the group, squinted at him. “You know, you’ve been tired ever since you gave up drinking—not that I’m not glad you did.”

  Their conversation trailed off as the four of them got on the elevator.

  I, meanwhile, turned to the soggy disaster at hand.

  I began by mopping up the bathroom floor, propping open the door with the yellow bucket and working my way out to the hall. Wrapping up, I admired the gleam of my handiwork on the pale marble, shiny enough to reflect the gold chandelier over my head. I turned around to get the bucket out of the doorway, only to see that a new puddle
had formed on the bathroom floor.

  I knelt and checked the valve. It was still nice and tight, but the leak continued dripping down from the supply line onto the floor. Darn.

  Mr. Fig would insist on being notified of such a thing, even during his off hours.

  Our esteemed butler arrived pressed and combed to his usual standard, but instead of the period three-piece suit I was used to seeing him in, he wore a nut-colored cardigan over a linen button-down. Most men I knew would have considered the outfit up to par for Thanksgiving dinner. For Mr. Fig, it was evidently just something to throw on in the middle of the night.

  Although I worried that inconveniences like this made him think twice about retiring, he didn’t seem bothered to be called here after ten o’clock. Only a cast of silver aged his red hair, but he was in his midseventies now, so it had to be a sense of purpose, and maybe pleasure too, that kept him on the hotel’s payroll.

  Still, if packing it in after all these years was best for him, I could support that. But if we didn’t work together, would I ever see him?

  Mr. Fig knelt and peered under the sink to check the handle of the valve himself. “You’re well suited for taking care of the hotel while I’m away, Miss Nichols. I’m glad you’re on the night shift.”

  I wanted him to follow up with, Although it means I don’t see as much of you, but outright displays of affection weren’t his style. I’d met him the day I started this job, and it hadn’t taken me long to latch on to his peculiar blend of warmth and rigidness.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I know the pipes couldn’t have frozen, but it’s weird that I shut off the valve and there’s still a drip.”

  “I agree, yet it may be as simple as worn parts. These supply lines aren’t original to the house, but they aren’t new either.” Mr. Fig stood, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, and dusted his knees and hands with it. He wasn’t afraid to get dirty if he had to. He just didn’t like staying that way.

  Not that the hotel floors were ever less than clean. None of us would stand for such a thing.