Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “I’ve just missed you,” he said hoarsely, and brought his mouth to hers again and thrust on to his own completion.

  Her desire turned to dust. She couldn’t help it. She lay beneath him for a few moments, then said, “Listen, I need to get to work. Bean will have a fit if I’m late. I’m already treading on thin ice with him.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Can I hitch a ride with you?”

  His eyes looked as they always did, a pale, almost transparent blue, and she wondered what was wrong with her. Ever since that night in February, she’d been suspicious of everyone, even Rich. Maybe her son was right that she was overly paranoid. She resolved to be more trusting.

  * * *

  The two buses from Georgia pulled up to the hotel ten minutes after Kate and Rich arrived at work. The buses held several dozen tourists headed for Disney World tomorrow morning. Tourists meant business and business meant tips and tips meant she would be able to stash away more money toward Rocky’s car.

  The hotel courtyard overflowed with people, the dining room and bar were jammed. Bean took over the front desk and assigned Maddie to the courtyard with Kate and told Rich to cover the inside bar with one of the waitresses from the dining room. The place teemed with people, adults, kids of all ages, a madhouse.

  The younger kids ran wild through the courtyard until Maddie herded them into the lobby, turned on the DVD player, and popped in a Harry Potter movie. They were short on chairs in the courtyard and Kate headed for the old barracks with a flashlight to look for additional chairs. She caught sight of a black dog slinking along the fence, where the shadows were deepest, but it fled before she could approach it. It must’ve gotten in through the open courtyard gate. Or by digging under one of the fences. Cedar Key had a lot of stray cats and dogs, drawn here for many of the same reasons that humans were—the isolation, the live-and-let-live attitude, and the fact that the residents fed the strays.

  Kate opened the creaking door of the barracks and slipped inside. It was one of the creepiest spots, a kind of postscript tucked back at the edge of the property, shrouded on three sides by tall weeds. It supposedly had been a general store in the 1860s and had also housed both Confederate and Union soldiers. Now it just stank of mold and rotting wood, was infested with cockroaches and ants, and she wondered when Bean would get around to renovating it.

  She found more chairs in what had been the kitchen and noticed candles and dried wax on the old wooden table. Weird. Who would bother coming in here with candles to sit around the table? Maybe some of the hotel employees came in after the bar closed to tip a few.

  She carried two chairs out onto the porch, went back inside for more. This time, the beam of her flashlight caught a partially open cabinet door under the sink. She opened it all the way, expecting to see a trash bin filled with beer and wine bottles. Instead, she found rags that stank of lighter fluid or gasoline, a box of kitchen matches with spent matches inside, and a trash can jammed with all kinds of stuff—empty pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers, empty soda cans, water and beer bottles, more rags, and wadded paper. She plucked out one piece of paper, smoothed it open against the counter. Just four words were printed on it: “Yes, annihilation by fire.”

  “What the hell,” she murmured, and fished out the other wads of paper, six in all. As she smoothed open each one, she heard the door open.

  “Kate? You in here?”

  Maddie. Kate shoved the pieces of paper into her jacket pocket. “Yeah, back here, Maddie. I found another dozen chairs.”

  The pretty young woman hurried in with a dim flashlight, her wild red hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, strands curling at her temples. “It’s crazy out there. The dining room is, like, totally jammed, so more people are coming into the courtyard to eat. And the kids are bored with Harry Potter.”

  “There’re more movies in the storage room. Maybe Lady and the Tramp would suit them. Or Narnia. Or The Golden Compass.”

  “Wow. The Golden Compass. I mean, that movie blew me away, you know?”

  Kate nodded. “I know people who wouldn’t let their kids see that movie when they found out the author is an atheist.”

  “What?” Maddie squealed and wrinkled her nose. “Are you kidding me?” Then she rubbed her hands together and blew into them to warm them. “So what should I grab here?”

  Kate gestured at the chairs. “They’re dusty and rusted, but they’ll have to do.” She drew Maddie’s attention to the candles. “You guys coming in here after hours to drink?”

  “Me?” Maddie pressed her thumb to her chest. “When I leave here, I go home and crash. Maybe it’s the kitchen help.” She stacked several chairs and pulled them through the kitchen and out the door, holding it open with her foot. “We’ve got a dozen of these tourists staying here tonight and a few dozen more staying over on Dock Street at the B and Bs. But they all want to eat breakfast here in the morning and Bean says we’re to be back here at six-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m a bartender,” Kate remarked, following Maddie through the open door. “I’m not sure that even double time would get me back here at that hour.”

  Maddie laughed. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  They got the chairs outside and two of the waiters dispersed them among the tables. Kate eyed the crowd—large and loud, but not boisterous and rowdy like the customers in the bar that night in February. The difference was subtle, but she knew it was important. Wisps of fog swirled into the courtyard, but stayed low to the ground, twisting like pale vines across the tiles.

  “Hey, Maddie, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you noticed anything weird about the locals lately?”

  The young woman looked at Kate, her expression a complete blank, her body utterly still, unmoving. It was as if she’d turned into a mannequin, eyes wide, unblinking, staring, limbs frozen. Kate couldn’t even say for sure if she was breathing. Seconds later, she became animated again, mouth twitching into a half smile, hands fiddling with her ponytail. “I haven’t really been here long enough to know what’s weird and what isn’t. Can you be more specific?”

  It was as if she’d had a ministroke during that moment of utter stillness; that was how strikingly different she was right now. “You heard about the incident in the bar in February, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” She laughed. “Who didn’t? That was plenty weird.” She tapped Kate’s arm with the back of her hand. “We’d better get moving here, huh?” And she hurried down the old balcony steps and into the courtyard.

  Kate stared after her, frowning, perplexed, uneasy.

  * * *

  Maddie knew she’d blanked out there for a moment and that Kate had noticed. It happened sometimes. Someone would say something that surprised or puzzled Dominica, and she would immobilize Maddie—freeze her limbs, vocal cords, eyes, mouth—until she could come up with the appropriate response. Worse, Kate was now front and center on the bruja’s radar.

  Maddie feared for her. Kate hadn’t been seized yet; Dominica already knew the woman was suspicious about what was going on here, and now she’d come to the bitch’s attention in a way that put her at risk. She might be able to warn Kate if Dominica were sufficiently distracted, but what the hell would she say? The island is filled with hungry ghosts. Get the hell out while you can.

  It mystified her that Kate hadn’t been seized yet. Nearly every other hotel employee had been. What protected Kate?

  Maddie allowed herself to slip into Dominica’s memories, a morass of nonsequential events, emotions, and relationships down through the centuries. As she sank into the sludge of Dominica’s past, she felt soiled, corrupted. It was so easy to get lost in here, inside Dominica’s alien psyche. Some memories dead-ended, others hopscotched around in no particular order for decades or centuries, and a few connected with her most ancient memories, when she was the only daughter of a Spanish nobleman.

&nbs
p; In those years, she’d been in love with Wayra, but her father had married her off to another nobleman who ditched her when she couldn’t have kids. Dominica had wandered through Spain, searching for Wayra, only to discover that her father had had him killed. She died at thirty-six from consumption and a broken heart and Wayra had been waiting for her when she crossed over.

  But in Dominica’s version of events, Wayra had swept her onto his horse and they had ridden off into the sunset. Unlikely. Wayra had never impressed Maddie as a hero in a romance novel. What seemed most probable was that Dominica selectively edited her memories, filtered them, chose this memory but not that one, and then spun it all to her satisfaction, creating a colorful fiction that suited her.

  Maddie swam quickly out of these deeper memories, searching for the more recent stuff. It could be anywhere—at the very surface of her memories, down some shadowed side street, on a mountaintop, in a hotel, a bar, no telling. Then she stumbled over it, tucked away in a culvert near the surface of Dominica’s memories.

  Kate had a fifteen-year-old son with a pet hawk. Maddie already knew that. Rocky had dropped by the hotel bar a few times, the hawk always nearby. Was Dominica afraid of the hawk? And if so, why?

  Maddie went back inside, into the kitchen, to pick up four more meals. Dominica was preoccupied with the brujo net, the ghost equivalent of the human grapevine. Even though she still controlled Maddie, still possessed her, even though Maddie’s lungs still breathed for Dominica and her heart still beat for her, Dominica wasn’t fully present. Even she couldn’t be fully aware in two places simultaneously. So as Maddie slipped her order pad from the back pocket of her jeans and read off the order to the nearest cook, she also tore a sheet out of the pad and scribbled on the back of it.

  The cook, a small Mexican man with beads of sweat rolling down the sides of his face, just snapped his fingers without looking up from the salad he was preparing. “Leave the order, okay? I can’t keep track otherwise.”

  Maddie tore the order from the pad, clipped it on the wire above his head, loaded her tray with meals, and headed for the courtyard again. The note she’d scribbled was in her shirt pocket, and she tucked that little secret into a sealed metal room identical to the room where the brujos imprisoned the essences of their hosts when they misbehaved. Maddie knew all about that metal room.

  As she passed Kate in the doorway, Maddie intentionally bumped into her, knocking a metal bowl that held packets of sugar to the floor. As they both murmured apologies and stooped over to pick up the packets, Maddie pressed the note into Kate’s hand. She picked up the metal bowl, set it on Kate’s tray, and kept on walking, her hands sweating, her heart slamming against her ribs, her mouth bone dry with fear.

  * * *

  Kate delivered the last of her meals and drinks in the courtyard, then went inside the hotel to use the restroom in the back room of the bar. She needed a few minutes alone to read the other notes she’d found in the barracks—and the slip of paper Maddie had pressed into her hand. But Rich motioned her over as soon as she entered the bar.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The waitress on duty is useless. Could you take this tray of drinks to table two?”

  “Not a problem. It’s on my way to the restroom.”

  He leaned forward, elbows resting against the edge of the bar. “Think we’ll get outta here by one?”

  “Fat chance.” She tilted her head toward Sam Dorset, the editor of the local newspaper, who was six sheets to the wind. “You’d better cut him off, Rich. He’s starting to act like Bean did back in February.”

  “Sam’s harmless.” He reached out, touched her chin, drew her face closer to his. “Hey,” he whispered. “We have to finish what we started, Katie-bird.”

  Kate stepped back, picked up the tray of drinks. “We did finish it, Richie-bird.”

  She made her way into the back room. This silly nickname was something new, too. The first time he’d used it was in early March, when they’d gone fishing one Saturday afternoon and made love while anchored by one of the islands. She’d thought it was strange then, knew it was strange now. Until that day on the boat, they had always been just “Kate” and “Rich” to each other, one-syllable names, sharp, definitive.

  Kate set down the tray of drinks at table two, just put them all in the middle, let them figure out what was what, and headed for the restroom. As soon as she was inside, she backed up to the sink and brought out all the slips of paper, puzzled over them. What did “annihilation by fire” mean? Why did one person vote no? What did “banishment” mean? What did “yes” mean? “Yes” to what?

  She brought out Maddie’s crumpled note. You’re in danger. Speak to no one, not even me. Move your houseboat to some other place on the island. Arm yourself. The hawk may be your greatest protection, but I don’t know why.

  Maddie’s note triggered a visceral urgency in Kate to—what? Run? Should she grab Rocky and the hawk and take off? But for where? Nothing good was happening on Cedar Key, of that much she felt certain. But she still couldn’t define the malaise, the infection, the source of her unease. She was paranoid, yes, she couldn’t deny it. She’d been paranoid when Jake was so often absent from home, paranoid that he was having affairs, and her paranoia had proven to be correct. But just because she was right back then didn’t mean she was right now. Yet, deep down, she knew that what she felt surpassed mere paranoia.

  Cedar Key was her home. She didn’t intend to let anything or anyone chase her away.

  The door to the restroom suddenly slammed open, banged into the wall, and the editor of the paper stumbled in. Sam Dorset stood for a drunken moment in the doorway, a large bear of a man, and peered at her as though she were a curious piece of furniture that had appeared out of nowhere.

  “You’ve got the wrong restroom, Sam.”

  “Nope.”

  He hit the dead bolt, lurched toward her, threw his arms around her, and they fell back against the wall. Kate tried to shove him back, but Sam outweighed her by at least seventy-five pounds. He trapped her against the wall with his body, his hands groping at her breasts. When she struggled to knee him in the groin, he stepped on top of her feet, pinning them to the floor. She screamed and clawed at his face and skull, beat her fists against his shoulders, his temples. He slapped his hand over her mouth, his face so close to hers she nearly gagged on the reek of alcohol. “Don’t scream, you can’t scream, I can smell him on you, it excites me, it—”

  Kate bit his hand hard, drawing blood. He jerked his arm away, his feet slipped off hers, and she kneed him in the groin. Sam fell back, gasping, clutching himself, and Kate lunged for the door.

  Her hands shook so terribly she fumbled with the dead bolt, and before it clicked open, he slammed into her from behind, pinning her against the door. One hand gripped her hair, forcing her head back, and the other hand groped between her thighs. She kept shrieking, shouts erupted on the other side of the door, then someone crashed against it and the old wood splintered and the door flew open.

  She and Sam fell back into one of the wooden stall doors; it flew open and they crashed into the toilet. Rich and Bean rushed in, but Sam was oblivious. He kept jerking on her hair, clutching the back of her sweater. Kate jabbed her elbow into his stomach, slammed it into his chin. Rich and Bean, shouting and dancing around like boxers in the ring, kicked Sam in the side, and he finally released her. Rich grabbed Kate’s forearms and heaved her to her feet.

  She tore away from Rich and stumbled out of the stall, pushed her way through a clutch of men and women gathered around the outside of the restroom, and ran out of the bar. Adrenaline coursed through her, and she felt the lingering sensations of Sam’s hands and mouth. Great heaving shudders of horror gripped her. She ducked behind the front desk, snatched her bag off a shelf, grabbed the receiver, and punched out 911.

  It rang and rang and rang. She hit the disconnect button and called Chief Frank Cole’s home phone.

  As it rang, Rich hurried ove
r to the desk. “Are you okay?”

  “I … I think so … I…”

  He pressed his finger over the disconnect button. “No need to call the cops, Kate. Bean and I will take care of it.”

  She dropped the receiver, so infuriated by what he’d just said that she could barely speak. “He nearly raped me. Don’t tell me what the fuck I can or can’t do, Rich. I’m filing assault charges against him.”

  He touched the back of her hand. “I’m trying to … protect you,” he whispered. “Please don’t make waves.”

  Kate jerked her hand away, slung her purse over her shoulder. “Don’t make waves?” she hissed. “What the hell is wrong with you, Rich?” She spun around and dashed for the door, nearly barreling into Bean and another man as they hauled Sam between them, toward a back room employees used.

  Some of the Georgia tourists had heard the commotion and stepped out of the dining room to see what was going on. Kate just kept on moving, fast, eyes on the front door, anxiety gnawing through her. All she wanted to do was get out of here.

  “Kate!” Bean shouted at her from across the lobby.

  She swung her arm into the air and shot him the bird. She never hesitated or stopped, but barreled on through the front door.

  Six

  The moment Wayra saw Maddie march toward the hotel, he knew Dominica had full control of her. He didn’t need to stick around. Maddie was here, Dominica had a new tribe of misfits—it was all he needed to know.

  He slipped under a back fence where he’d dug a sizable hole, and trotted through an alley and then under another fence on the eastern side of the courtyard. He moved swiftly through the overgrown yard of a house that smelled abandoned and came out at the front of the hotel. The tantalizing aroma of food nearly drew him back onto the property through the open courtyard gate. But he wanted to peer into the front windows of the hotel to find out what had happened inside. Wayra had heard a woman shrieking—not a drunken shriek, but one of terror.