There are also those who say it’s a bad thing if you don a false persona, if you deny your true self. I think they are mostly right. Not always, though, or at least not completely. For nearly two years, someone out there—or maybe multiple people, I didn’t know yet, but I would, soon enough—had benefited from my denial. They had lived and breathed and laughed and smiled because the real Markus Novak was not in their world.
The bad news for them? Markus was back.
I turned the music up loud and let the war drums thunder.
I was following the GPS to my destination, a restored inn from the late 1800s, when I saw the Cassadaga Hotel rise up to my right. I put on the brakes and pulled off the road.
The Cassadaga Hotel is where you go to make appointments with many of the area’s resident mediums. The Cassadaga Hotel was where Lauren went during a murder investigation just hours before she was murdered herself.
At one point, I’d considered staying there when I came to town. Then I decided it was the starting point of the crime scene and needed to be approached as such. Lauren hadn’t stayed there; she’d only dropped by to make an appointment. I would do the same.
I left the car in park for a while, though, rolled the windows down and turned on the Warrior’s Chant and rolled the volume up as the drums pounded and the war whoops shrilled. I stayed there until I saw a few people rise from the lobby and look out the windows with annoyance.
Fuck them if they couldn’t take a joke.
Or a warning.
Back in motion then, and on to the inn where I was registered to stay indefinitely. The beauty of online transactions was that you didn’t have to talk to anyone. The problem with small-town inns was that you did.
I backed the Infiniti in—I always reversed into parking spaces, because it made a fast exit easier—and in the backup camera’s display I saw the ghostly images of a man and woman. Considering the crushed-shell parking lot was empty of other vehicles, I had an idea of who they were. The innkeepers, out and about and eager to meet their guest.
“You’ll have the carriage house to yourself tonight, Markus,” the woman said as soon as I was out of the car. “Park where’d you like.”
“I did, thank you.”
The Infiniti was angled to face the street.
I followed them through the humid night and into the inn and tried to listen to the facts—originally built in 1895, difficult to restore, their passion project, et cetera. I attempted to smile in all the right places. The woman—Kim or Lynn or Em? I was trying to pay attention but I lost it—asked me to sign the guest book. I smiled again and turned to the massive, old-fashioned, leather-bound ledger. Wrote my name: Markus R. Novak.
“Please add your e-mail address and phone number,” she said.
I flipped back through the pages and saw that all the previous guests had done this.
“Why? You have my e-mail and phone on the reservation. Is this book just open to anyone who comes by?”
“Well, I suppose, but it’s really for our—”
“I’d rather not add that information.”
Her stare was discomfiting. “If you’re uncomfortable with it, then that is just fine.”
“Thanks.” I absolutely wasn’t comfortable with it, and I didn’t give a shit how many previous guests had been willing to share the information. How many of them had arrived intending to kill someone?
After some more nods and smiles all around, I was finally given a key to my room, which was in the carriage house behind the main property.
“You’ll be alone in there tonight,” Kim-Lynn-Em said. “We had a few bookings fall through. It’s just you tonight.”
I told her that was a good thing. I made no obvious show of tapping the Glock that was holstered near my spine.
She took me through the entrance of the carriage house and showed me the place. Beautiful rooms, beautiful restoration job. There was a bar on the ground floor with rows of liquor bottles and comfortable leather stools.
“What time does this open?” I asked.
She laughed. “I’m afraid it’s only open Thursday through Saturday. But it’s hopping then. We’re the only full-service bar in Cassadaga. If you need something sooner, you can help yourself, and we will work it out on your bill.”
My brain snagged on the word need. I smiled yet again. “I’ll look forward to Thursday.”
She didn’t return the smile. She said, “Enjoy yourself here, Mr. Novak. Also, please remember that Cassadaga is a place of healing. Embrace that.”
I thanked her and told her that I would certainly embrace the healing.
When she was gone, I locked the front door, then the door to my room, and unpacked. I removed my guns one at a time and rubbed their barrels down with oil, though none of them needed it, and replaced all but the Glock, which I left on the nightstand. Outside, a warm breeze shifted clumps of Spanish moss that glimmered in the moonlight. It was a beautiful night. I cracked the French doors that led to a screened-in balcony and let the wind come in, carrying smells of honeysuckle and jasmine. In another place, high in the Montana mountains, a different wind was blowing. It howled out of the north and smelled of nothing but ice. Inside a lantern-lit cabin, a man I’d not yet met was stapling photographs to a corkboard. Beneath the photographs, he wrote personal information, from addresses to favorite restaurants to the names of ex-lovers. He hung six photographs in all.
As I fell asleep in Cassadaga with the warm, sweet-smelling breeze swirling, I had no idea this was happening, and if you’d told me then, I wouldn’t have cared. The man was a stranger to me, and five of the six people he’d put on his board were strangers to me. The sixth, I certainly knew, but even if I’d known she was included in the collection, I wouldn’t have cared. Not then. We had parted ways long ago, and I’d had no contact with her in years. I was happy with that.
I’ve said one thing wrong about that night. I said that they were different breezes, the warm one in Cassadaga, the arctic one in Montana. I don’t believe that anymore. The wind blows in different places, that’s all.
It’s all the same wind.
About the Author
Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels, most recently Those Who Wish Me Dead. His previous novels—including The Prophet, The Ridge, and So Cold the River—were New York Times Notable Books and national bestsellers and have been nominated for numerous awards. A former private investigator and newspaper reporter, Koryta graduated from Indiana University with a degree in criminal justice. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
michaelkoryta.com
@mjkoryta
michaelkoryta
Books by Michael Koryta
Last Words
Those Who Wish Me Dead
The Prophet
The Ridge
The Cypress House
So Cold the River
The Silent Hour
Envy the Night
A Welcome Grave
Sorrow’s Anthem
Tonight I Said Goodbye
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One: Garrison 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part Two: The World Below 15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Part Three: Pressure Points 2
3
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Part Four: The Truth of Your Sins 36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Part Five: A Little Different in the Light 50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
Acknowledgments
A Preview of Echoes
About the Author
Books by Michael Koryta
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Koryta
Excerpt from Echoes copyright © 2015 by Michael Koryta
Cover design by Hsu and Associates
Cover photograph by Alizé Tran
Author photograph by Jonathan Mehring
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: August 2015
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Text here is from Blind Descent by James M. Tabor © 2011 (Random House, February 2011).
ISBN 978-0-316-33796-0
E3
Last Words Page 41