by Tanya Huff
“Whatever. After we eat.”
Searching for a cup of coffee, if not the promised breakfast, Claire followed her nose down the hall to the back of the first floor. With any luck, that obnoxious little gnome doesn’t also do the cooking.
The dining room stretched across the end of the building and held a number of small tables surrounded by stainless steel and Naugahyde chairs—it had obviously been renovated at about the same time as her room. Outside curtainless windows, devoid of even a memory of moldings, a steady rain slanted down from a slate-gray sky, puddling beneath an ancient and immaculate white truck parked against the back fence.
Fortunately, before she could get really depressed about either the weather or the decor, the unmistakable scent of Colombian double roast drew her around a corner to a small open kitchen. The stainless steel, restaurant-style appliances were separated from the actual eating area by a Formica counter, its surface scrubbed and rescrubbed to a pale gray.
Standing at the refrigerator was a dark-haired young man in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a chefs apron over faded jeans and a T-shirt. Although he wore a pair of wire frame glasses, a certain breadth of shoulder and narrowness of hip suggested to Claire that he wasn’t the bookish type. The muscles of his back made interesting ripples in the brilliant white cotton of the T-shirt and when she lowered her gaze, she discovered, after a moment, that he ironed his jeans.
Austin leaped silently up onto the counter, glanced from the cook to Claire, and snorted, “You might want to breathe.”
Claire grabbed the cat and dropped him onto the floor as the object of the observation closed the refrigerator door and turned.
“Good morning,” he said. It sounded as though he actually meant it.
Distracted by teeth as white as his shirt and a pair of blue eyes surrounded by a thick fringe of dark lashes, not to mention the musical, near Irish lilt of a Newfoundland accent, Claire took a moment to respond. “Good grief. I mean, good morning.”
It wasn’t only his appearance that had thrown her. In spite of his age, or rather lack of it, this was the most grounded person she’d ever met. First impressions suggested he’d never push a door marked pull, he’d arrive on time for appointments, and, in case of fire, he’d actually remember the locations of the nearest exits. Glancing down at his feet, she half expected to see roots disappearing into the floor but saw only a pair of worn work boots approximately size twelve.
“Mr. Smythe left a note on the fridge explaining things.” He wiped his hand against his apron, couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what to do next, and finally let it fall back to his side. “I’m Dean McIssac. I’ve been cook and caretaker since last February. I hope you’ll consider keeping me on.”
“Keeping you on?”
Her total lack of comprehension appeared to confuse him. “Aren’t you the new owner, then?”
“The new what?”
He jerked a sheet of notepaper out from under a refrigerator magnet, and passed it over.
The woman spending the night in room one, Claire read, is Claire Hansen. As of this morning, she’s the new proprietor. Except for a small brown stain of indeterminate origins, the rest of the sheet was blank. “And that explains everything to you?” she asked incredulously.
“He’s been trying to sell the place since I got here,” Dean told her. “I just figured he had.”
“He hasn’t.” So far, everything young Mr. McIssac had said, had been the truth. Which didn’t explain a damned thing. Dropping the note onto the counter, she wondered just what game the old man thought he was playing. “I am Claire Hansen, but I haven’t bought this hotel and I have no intention of buying this hotel.”
“But Mr. Smythe…”
“Mr. Smythe is obviously senile. If you’ll tell me where I can find him, I’ll straighten everything out.” She tried to make it sound more like a promise than a threat.
Although two long, narrow windows lifted a few of the shadows, the office looked no more inviting in the gray light of a rainy day than it had at night.
“He lives here?” Claire asked sliding sideways through the narrow opening between the counter and the wall, the only access from the lobby.
“No, in here.” The door to the old man’s rooms had been designed to look like part of the office paneling. Dean reached out to knock and paused, his hand just above the wood. “It’s open.”
“Then we must be expected.” She pushed past him. “Oh, my.”
Overdone was an understatement when applied to the room on the other side of the door, just as overstuffed wasn’t really sufficient to describe the furniture. Even the old console television wore three overlapping doilies, a pair of resin candlesticks carved with cherubs, and a basket of fake fruit.
Tucked into the gilded, baroque frame of a slightly pitted mirror was a large manila envelope. Even from across the room Claire could see it was addressed to her. Suddenly, inexplicably, convinced that things were about to get dramatically out of hand, she walked slowly forward, picking a path through the clutter. It took a remarkably long time to cover a short distance; then, all at once, she had the envelope in her hand.
Inside the envelope were half a dozen documents and another note, slightly shorter than the first.
“Senile but concise,” Claire muttered. “Congratulations, you’re the new owner of the Elysian Fields Guest House.” She glanced up at Dean. “The Elysian Fields Guest House?” When he nodded, she shook her head in disbelief. “Why didn’t he just call it the Vestibule of Hell?”
Dean shrugged. “Because that would be bad for business?”
“Do you get much business?”
“Well, no.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.” She bent her attention back to the note. “Stay out of room six. What’s in room six?”
“There was a fire, years ago. Mr. Smythe didn’t need the room, so he saved money on repairs by keeping it locked up.”
“Sounds charming. That’s all there is.” She turned the paper over but it was blank on the other side. “Maybe these will give us some ans…” Her voice trailed off as, mouth open, she fanned the other papers. Her signature had been carefully placed where it needed to be on each of the legal documents. And it was her signature, not a forgery. Smythe had lifted it out of the registration book.
Which could only mean one thing.
“Mr. McIssac, could you please go and get me a cup of coffee.”
Dean found himself out in the office, the door to Mr. Smythe’s rooms closed behind him, before he’d made a conscious decision to move. He remembered being asked to go for coffee and then he was in the office. Coffee. Office. Nothing in between.
“Okay, so your memory’s going.” He ducked under the counter flap. “Look at the bright side, boy, you’re still employed.”
Jobs were scarce, and he hoped he could hang on to this one. The pay wasn’t great, but it included a basement apartment and he’d discovered that he liked taking care of people. He’d begun to think about taking some kind of part-time hotel management course; when there were no guests, and there were seldom guests, he had a lot of free time.
All that could change now that Mr. Smythe had gotten tired of waiting for a buyer and given the place away to a total stranger. Who didn’t seem to want it.
Claire Hansen was not what he’d expected. First off, she was a lot younger. Although he’d had minimal experience judging the ages of women and the makeup just muddled it up all the more, he’d be willing to swear she was under thirty. He might even go as low as twenty-five.
And it was weird that she traveled with a cat.
“I can’t feel the summons anymore, because I’m where I’m needed.”
Austin blinked. “Say what?”
“Augustus Smythe is a Cousin.”
“Augustus?”
“It’s on the documents.” Claire fanned them out so the cat could see all six pages. “Printed. He knew better than to sign his name. He’s been here for a
while, so obviously he was monitoring an accident site—a site he’s buggered off from and made my responsibility.” She dropped down onto a sofa upholstered in pink cabbage roses and continued dropping, sinking through billowing cushions to an alarming depth.
“Are you okay?” Austin asked a few moments later when she emerged, breathing heavily and clutching a handful of loose change.
“Fine.” Knees still considerably higher than her hips, Claire hooked an elbow over the reinforced structure of the sofa’s arm in case she started to sink again, dropping the change into a bowl of dubious looking mints. It might have made more sense to find another place to sit, but none of the other furniture looked any safer. “The summons wasn’t coming from the site, or I’d still be able to feel it. It had to have been coming from Augustus Smythe.”
The cat leaped up onto the coffee table. “He needed to leave so badly he drew you here?”
“Since he left last night, which is when the summons stopped, that’s the only logical explanation.”
“But why?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Why?”
Austin put a paw on her knee. “Why are you looking so happy about this?”
Was she? She supposed she was. “I’m not drifting any more.” Starting the day with neither a summons nor a site had been disconcerting. “I have a purpose again.”
“How nice for you.” He sat back. “We’re not going to get our vacation, are we?”
“Doesn’t look like it.” Her smile faded as she tapped the papers against her thigh. “Why didn’t Smythe identify himself when I didn’t recognize him?”
“Better question, why didn’t you recognize him?”
“I was tired, I was wet, and I had a headache,” she pointed out defensively. “All I could think of was getting out of that storm.”
“You think he fuzzed you?”
“Where would he get the power? I was distracted, all right? Let’s just leave it at that.” After another short struggle with the sofa, Claire managed to heave herself back up onto her feet. “Since the site’s in the hotel—or Smythe wouldn’t have bothered deeding it to me—and since I can’t sense it, I’m guessing that it’s so small it never became enough of a priority to need a Keeper and Smythe finally got tired of waiting. I’ll close it, and we’ll move on.”
“And the hotel?” Austin reminded her.
“After I seal the site, I’ll give it to young Mr. McIssac.”
“You think it’s going to be that easy?”
“Isn’t it always?” She picked up a squat figurine of a wide-eyed child in lederhosen playing a tuba, shuddered, and put it back down. “Come on.”
“Come on?” Trotting to the end of the table, he jumped over a plaster bust of Elvis, went under a set of nesting Chinese tables, and beat her to the door. “Where are we going?”
“To get some answers.”
“Where?”
“Where else? Where we were told not to go.”
Austin snorted. “Typical.”
Room six was on the third floor. As well as the standard lock, the door also boasted a large steel padlock on an industrial strength flange. Both locks had been made unopenable by the simple process of snapping the keys off in the mechanism.
“Seems like a lot of fuss over a small site,” Austin muttered, dropping down from his inspection.
“Well, he could hardly have guests wandering in on it regardless of size.” Releasing the padlock, Claire straightened. There were a number of ways she could gain access to the room, but most of them were labeled “emergency use only” as they involved the kind of pyrotechnics more likely to be deployed during small Middle Eastern wars. “I wonder if young Mr. McIssac has a hacksaw.”
“Ms. Hansen?” Dean put the tray down on the desk and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. She wasn’t in Mr. Smythe’s suite—her suite now, he supposed—and she wasn’t in the office. He hoped she wasn’t upstairs packing. Am I fired if she leaves?
Footsteps descending the stairs seemed to confirm his worst fears, but when she came into view, she wasn’t carrying her bags. She hadn’t even put her coat on.
“Oh, there you are, Dean.”
There he was? He hadn’t gone anywhere except to get her the coffee she’d asked for. “I brought cream and sugar,” he told her as she squeezed under the counter flap. “You didn’t say how you took it.”
“Definitely cream.” She poured some into the mug and frowned at the sugar bowl. “Do you have any packets of artificial sweetener?”
“Sure.” As far as he could tell, she didn’t need to watch her weight. While not quite a woman a man could see to shoot gulls through, she was on the skinny side and that much cream would pack on more pounds than a bit of sugar. “I’ll go get you some.”
“Dean?”
He straightened in the lobby and turned to face her over the counter.
“Bring your toolbox, too.”
Cradling the coffee mug in both hands, Claire leaned against the wall and watched Dean work. He’d had no trouble cutting the padlock off, but the original lock was proving to be more difficult.
“I think you should call a locksmith, Ms. Hansen. I can’t get in there without damaging the door some.”
“How much?”
He shrugged. “If I get my crowbar from the van, I could probably force it open. Just stick it in here…” He ran a finger down the crack between the door and the jam where the tongue of the lock ran into the wall. “…and shove. It’ll crack the wood for sure, but I can’t say how much.”
Claire took another swallow and considered her options. As long as Dean stayed out of the actual room, there should be no problem; only the largest of sites were visible to the untrained eye. “Go get your crowbar.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When the sound of Dean’s work boots clumping against bare wood suggested he’d reached the lobby, Austin stretched and glared up at Claire. “Couldn’t this have waited until after breakfast? I’m starved.”
“Could you have actually eaten not knowing what we were in for? Never mind. Stupid question.”
“You’ve got your coffee, the least you could’ve done was given me the cream.”
“The vet said you’re not supposed to have cream.” She squatted and rubbed him behind the ears. “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon. Waiting out on this side of the door has me so edgy, I’m positive the site’s in there.”
“In a just world,” the cat growled, “it would’ve been in the kitchen.”
His boots wet from the run out to the van, Dean slipped them off at the back door and started upstairs in his socks. Making the turn on the second floor landing, he heard voices. I guess she’s talking to the cat.
Voices. Plural, prodded his subconscious.
You’re losing it, boy. The cat’s not talking back.
She had her back to him when he stepped out into the third-floor hall. “Ms. Hansen?”
Claire managed to bite off most of the shriek, but her heart slammed against her ribs as she whirled around. “Don’t ever do that!”
Jerking back a step, Dean brought the crowbar up between them. “Do what?”
“Don’t ever sneak up on me like that!” She pressed her right hand between her breasts. “You’re just lucky I realized who you were!”
Although she was a good six or seven inches shorter than he was and there was nothing to her besides, somehow, that didn’t sound as ridiculous as it should have. “I’m sorry!”
Austin banged his head against her shins and she looked down. “You took your boots off.”
“They got wet.”
“Right. Of course.” Bringing her breathing under control, Claire waved him toward the locked door. “Break the lock, then step away. If there was a fire in there, you won’t want the mess tracked into the hall.”
Dean flashed her a grateful smile as he jammed the crowbar into the crack. Since coming west, he’d found few people who appreciated the kind of problems in
volved in keeping carpets clean. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And stop calling me ma’am. You make me feel like I’m a hundred years old.” When she saw him fighting a grin, Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m twenty-seven.”
“Okay.” A confidence given required one in exchange. “I’m twenty-one.” As he pulled back on the bar, he glanced over at her expression and wondered how she knew he was lying. “That is, I’ll be twenty-one in a few months.”
“So you’re twenty?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The shriek of tortured wood and steel cut off further conversation. Hands over her ears, Claire watched muscles stretch the sleeves of his T-shirt as the lock began to give. When it popped suddenly, it took her a moment to gather her wandering thoughts—although, she assured the world at large, it was purely an aesthetic interest. In that moment, the door swung open, Dean looked into the room, and froze on the threshold.
“Lord thunderin’ Jesus! Mr. Smythe’s been hiding a body up here!”
“Calm down.” Claire put her palm in the center of Dean’s back and shoved. She’d have had more luck shifting the building. “And move!” Over the years she’d seen bodies in every condition imaginable—and frequently the imagination had belonged to fairly warped individuals. If this body had merely been left lying around, she’d consider herself lucky.
Dean stayed in the doorway, the breadth of his shoulders blocking her way and her view.
“I don’t think,” he said, grasping both edges of the doorframe, “that this is something a lady ought to see.”
“Well, you got part of it right, you don’t think!” Choosing guile over force, she slammed her knees into the back of his at the spot where the crease crossed the hollow. As he collapsed, she pushed past him, one hand reaching out to the old-fashioned, circular light switch.
The room was a little larger than the room Claire had slept in and the decorating hadn’t been changed since the early part of the century. An oversized armchair sat covered in hand-crocheted doilies, a Victorian plant stand complete with a very dead fern stood between the two curtained windows, and a woman lay fully clothed on top of the bed, a sausage-shaped bolster under her head and a folded quilt under her feet. Everything, including the woman, wore a fuzzy patina of dust. The air smelled stale and, faintly, of perfume.