Likewise, I thought. But what I said out loud was, “What exactly are you afraid we’re going to do?”
“It’s not what you’ll do so much as what you’ll say,” Madeline said. “The people in this town are already afraid. The last thing they need is for you to go filling their heads with supernatural nonsense, telling them some sort of ghost or demon killed those people.”
Or a devil, on behalf of a ghost, maybe? Afraid we’ll get too close to the truth, are you?
Phineas stepped forward slightly to give Madeline Underwood his open, cheerful smile. “We’re not intending on spreading any nonsense, I assure you. It’s beautiful here, and I noticed a sign that said you’ve got some lovely hiking trails into the woods.” He reached down to pet Wulf, who was sitting stiffly on one of my feet. “He’ll like that.”
Madeline glanced at Wulf with a look of distaste, then gave Phineas a hard stare. “As I said. You’re welcome at the hotel.” She nodded at him, then at me. “Enjoy.” I’d never heard someone say that word with less joy.
Phineas took my suitcase while I watched Madeline retreat. “Take a look by the fireplace before we go upstairs,” he said.
I welcomed that suggestion. Despite being so unpleasant herself, Madeline Underwood had a very nice fireplace. I stepped close enough to it to warm my hands and feet, which were still painfully cold from the walk outside. Above the mantle and on the wall on either side were what Phineas no doubt wanted to show me: four pictures, all with plaques underneath.
On the left were small portraits of a man and a woman. Neither was remarkable looking, although the woman’s round face reminded me a little of the boy I’d seen outside, and I wondered if they might be related. They shared a plaque that announced them as Colonel George Phearson, founder of Bristol, and his wife Mary.
I wanted to pull out my phone and start a list right away, but I was afraid it would look suspicious with Madeline watching us, so I made it mentally instead.
Colonel Phearson. Person who started town definitely suspect in bargaining with a devil for its good fortune.
Above the fireplace was a much larger portrait of a cranky, thin-faced man who no doubt was one of Madeline’s forbears. I looked at the plaque beneath and saw that I was right. Silas Underwood bought Colonel Phearson’s estate shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, and converted it to the hotel.
I added another item to the list in my head: Silas Underwood. No real reason to suspect, except seems to be patriarch of creepy family.
The fourth and last picture was a sketch of the Mount Phearson as it was when Silas took ownership. The big white building I now stood in was the same, but the surroundings were very different. The woods were cleared in a much wider radius around it, and there was no garden. Several smaller buildings were scattered around the main one, small houses, barns, various unidentifiable outbuildings. It was more of a compound than a mansion.
I didn’t realize Phineas was standing beside me until he spoke. “Interesting, huh?” He lowered his voice. “Looks like the Underwoods were always creepy.”
I nodded. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“Come on, I have your room key.”
Wulf and I followed him, up a grand staircase to the third floor. The carpet up there was burgundy, too, and looked both clean and expensive. Everything in the hotel looked clean and expensive. Instead of the usual ugly wallpaper you find in hotels, the walls were white, without a scuff or stain that I could see. But I did see a fat spider, crawling across the baseboard in the hall.
My room key wasn’t one of the usual hotel key cards, either, but an actual key, on a flat metal key chain engraved with my room number. Inside was a four poster bed and more dark furniture. A door on one wall led to Phineas’s room next door.
There was another spider, this time on the ceiling. I don’t mind spiders as a rule, but it was strange, to see two in such close succession in an otherwise pristine place.
“Nolan at the desk recommended a couple restaurants in town,” said Phineas. “Shall we eat, before we get down to business?”
Shall we eat were by far the most pleasant words I’d heard all day. I fed Beowulf, then turned on the TV for him, while Phineas and I debated the relative merits of burgers versus Mexican. Spiders, devils, and creepy Madeline Underwood were quickly pushed from my mind.
The next morning, I took Wulf for another walk around the hotel grounds, but there was no sign of the little ghost. The kid behind the counter—Nolan, Phineas had said his name was—looked at me intently when I came back into the lobby. I supposed he was the eyes Madeline Underwood had promised to keep on me.
But I was wrong about that. We were just about to leave in search of the local coffee shop, half an hour later, when Nolan knocked on my door.
“May I come in for a minute?” His voice was polite, his doughy face bland, but I wasn’t sure I should trust him.
Phineas had no such compunction. “Nolan!” he called from behind me. “Come on in.”
It’s my room, I thought grumpily as I swung the door open. Why don’t you invite him over to your side if you want to talk to him so much?
Nolan looked nervous, though, which put me at ease. If someone approaches you anxiously, you rarely have a reason to be anxious yourself. Once the door was closed behind us, Nolan said, “You won’t tell my boss I came to see you, will you?”
“You can rest assured I will not talk to your boss a bit more than I have to, for any reason,” I said.
Nolan smiled at that. He was fidgeting with the hem of his jacket. “But you handle hauntings, haunted places, right? So I came to see you because the hotel is haunted.”
“A little boy, lost his dog?” I asked.
Nolan looked relieved. “Exactly. I don’t know his name. Or his story or who he is or anything.”
“But you want us to help him,” Phineas said before I could.
Nolan nodded. “It’s just, I see him all the time, all frantic and stuff, and it’s so sad, you know? And I figured since you were here…” He shrugged.
“We’ll see what we can do,” I said. Then even though I’d been thinking about that boy since I saw him, and had every intention of looking into it anyway, I added, “But you have to do me a favor, too.”
Nolan nodded, although the nervous look came back.
“Just a few questions,” I said. “Nothing that would get you in trouble. Did you know the people who died of this mystery cause?”
“No. I’m not from here,” Nolan said. “I just graduated from college last spring, hotel management. I’ve been here since July. But the locals don’t come into the hotel much, unless it’s to see Ms. Underwood, and then they don’t talk to me.” He looked from me to Phineas, frowning. “I’m not very helpful, am I?”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“But I can tell you who might be,” Nolan said. “I live above the coffee shop down the street, The Witch’s Brew. The owners are a couple who’ve lived here their whole lives, high school sweethearts and everything, and they know everybody. The whole town hangs out in the shop.”
“What are their names?” Phineas asked.
“Mr. and Mrs. Thaggard,” Nolan said. “Wendy and Caleb.”
“Thank you, Nolan.” This time my smile at him was genuine. It was a place to start, and there would even be coffee there. Plus he was worried about my ghost, which was a mark in his favor.
The Mount Phearson was within easy walking distance of The Witch’s Brew and, indeed, the rest of Bristol, since the town appeared to go no more than a dozen blocks in any direction. Between my little visit from Helen Turner, the ghost boy I’d seen the day before, and Madeline Underwood, I felt an overarching sense of dread, but as far as I could tell, there was nothing around me to support it. Bristol seemed like a quaint, fun kind of town to get away to. The streets and sidewalks were well maintained, the storefronts a uniform red brick, the Victorianish lamp posts devoid of advertisements taped to them. But it was too cold
for someone who wasn’t used to mountain winters to note a lot of specific details beyond that. We walked quickly, chins tucked into our collars.
The Witch’s Brew looked like it had been decorated by a pastry chef, in shades of chocolate and buttercream, with little purple accents scattered around like icing flowers. It smelled of coffee and cinnamon and yeast, and Wendy Thaggard herself was behind the counter.
Her features were relentlessly average—normal height, brown eyes—but you could tell right away she was one of those women who fills any room she’s in. Which was exactly what she was doing at the moment, because despite Nolan’s claim that the whole town loved it there, the place was empty except for her. But then it was almost ten on a Tuesday morning. I supposed even those in thrall to a devil had to have jobs.
The first thing Wendy said to us was, “It’s too cold to be tying that dog outside, bring him in.”
“Isn’t that against code or something?” I asked.
She waved this away. “Anyone asks, he’s an assistance dog.”
I liked her right away.
While she made our coffees, a handsome but baby-faced man came out of the back and put croissants on a plate for us. We introduced ourselves (Phineas as “Phineas Murdoch,” another stolen name, I supposed), and confirmed that they were indeed the Thaggards. I told them their tenant had suggested we talk to them.
Wendy rolled her eyes at this. “If that boy sends one more reporter to talk to us…” But she didn’t look mad for real. And her assumption was a handy one. It saved us the trouble of making up a reason to question her.
Caleb set a bowl of water down in front of Wulf and scratched him vigorously behind the ears, winning himself a tail thump. “We don’t see enough dogs here.”
Wendy sighed and said, “No,” in a voice that struck me as oddly regretful. I didn’t know what to make of it. But she brightened up when she put our coffees on the counter and gestured at the bar stools. “Please, sit. What do you want to know?”
“We’re interested in the small town angle,” Phineas said. “You know, everyone knows everyone, a tragedy for one is a tragedy for all. Were any of the victims related?”
“Probably,” said Caleb. “At some point in their family trees, anyway. They were lifers.”
“No, not the tourist,” Wendy said.
“Right. One was a tourist,” agreed Caleb. “But the other four, their families have been here for generations. My grandma said she used to go with Terry Fowler’s father, back in the day. Almost married him.”
“But you don’t know of any recent connection?” I asked.
Caleb shrugged. “Only so far as everyone knows everyone, like you said. I don’t think they were especially close to one another.”
I was taking notes on my phone, per usual, though I didn’t have much on the victims so far apart from their names and, on Terry Fowler’s line, Caleb’s grandma says Terry’s dad was hot.
When I looked up from typing this, I noted that things had gone oddly quiet. Wendy was leaning over the counter, staring at Phineas. She snapped her fingers at her husband and pointed at Phineas’s face. Caleb leaned beside her. Phineas seemed completely unperturbed by this attention, but I tensed. It seemed unlikely they were just pointing and mocking at a smear of chocolate from the croissant.
“So, you’re not reporters,” Wendy said, straightening back up. “If you’re human, I’m an otter.”
“That’s a strange animal to choose,” I blurted, babbling per usual. “Wouldn’t most people say monkey?”
Wendy shrugged without taking her eyes off Phineas. “I like otters. So what are you?”
Phineas, still unbothered, said, “You tell me. Have you seen anyone like me before?”
Wendy narrowed her eyes and said, “No, but—”
I never found out what the but was. A couple of moms with babies in strollers came in just then. Caleb gave us a very slight, but very clear, shake of the head while Wendy greeted them. Not in front of them, it said.
I hoped they’d just get their coffees and go, but they settled into a table in the corner and started chatting. I saw a look of frustration on Wendy’s face very like my own, and decided she’d be happy to talk to us some more later, if only to get her own curiosity satisfied.
“So why is it called The Witch’s Brew?” I asked, figuring that was a normal touristy kind of question.
Wendy laughed, a deep, throaty sound that filled the shop. “Haven’t you heard? Bristol is full of witches.” She turned away to brush out the coffee grinder, but said over her shoulder, “Don’t worry though, some of us use our powers for good.”
We finished our pastries and thanked the Thaggards, and Wendy made sure to extract a promise that we’d come back again soon. She was obviously inquisitive, but she didn’t seem alarmed or even all that surprised. I wondered if anyone else in Bristol would realize about Phineas. Or if any of them, like maybe Madeline Underwood, already had.
We decided to make the library our next stop, in hopes of finding some local history or news. We’d brought Wulf out with us in case he caught a trail of something, but Wendy Thaggard’s casual acceptance aside, I doubted he’d be welcome in a library. We decided to take him back to the hotel, but walked up and down the main street (cleverly dubbed Main Street) first, to let him sniff around.
“Okay, so we can at least eliminate the tourist,” I said as we walked. “Surely we can figure out which one that was. Then I’ll email my genealogy guys about the other four. They don’t come cheap, but l think it’s worth it.”
“You can use my credit card,” Phineas said. “I gave it to Nolan for the rooms too, by the way.”
This was actually a big relief. The Mount Phearson hotel didn’t come cheap, either, and I was not getting paid for this job. But I wondered whether I needed to feel guilty for it. “How gentlemanly of you. Did you rob Mr. Murdoch, or what?”
He laughed at that. “We’ve got people who live here more or less permanently. People in high places, and with good investments.” He took a wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open to show me a driver’s license that did, in fact, identify him as Phineas Murdoch. “My department has no problem furnishing identities and money, when we’re in the field.”
“Good lord, you’re like the mob or something. Just how much have you infiltrated our world?”
“It’s a really popular spot for my kind,” Phineas agreed. “Most of us spend time here, at some point.”
“What, because you can get desserts here? Better weather? Earth girls are easy?”
He raised an eyebrow at that last part, but shook his head. “It’s pretty simple. You’ve got the fastest time.”
I pictured some sort of humongous track, with all sorts of alien beings running around it, and the human crossing the finish line first. “Say again?”
“When I told you I had to go home and check some things out? I was there for about three hours before I met you here yesterday,” said Phineas. “One hour for us is like a day for you. One of my years is around twenty-five years here. So people come and live whole lifetimes, do jobs, learn stuff, sometimes even marry and have kids. And then they go home and maybe two years have gone by.”
“That is the strangest shit I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Don’t you age while you’re here?”
“We age according to our own time, no matter where we are,” said Phineas. “If I stayed here for the next fifty years, you would get old and ugly, but I would still look pretty much like this.”
“Middle-aged and smug?”
“You think I look middle-aged?”
I was spared the need to respond by our arrival at the hotel. I’d been taking a tally while we walked and talked; we’d passed a diner, the Mexican place we'd eaten at the night before, what looked like a fancier restaurant, a hardware store, two antiques shops, an ice cream parlor, and a cute little general grocery kind of place that advertised a deli inside.
That was a lot of restaurants for such a small town t
o support. I guessed they were propped up by all the guests coming to those three hotels, which was also a strangely large number for a place that wasn't famous for anything and didn't seem to have much to recommend it other than being cute and in the mountains. Not that being in the mountains wasn't an asset. Leaf peepers in the fall, people looking to escape the heat in the summer, couples doing the bed and breakfast getaway thing, strolling down this quaint little street and shopping for antiques. Taken together, that might be enough to keep the town thriving.
Or else the devil was just doing a good job keeping up his part of the bargain. One or the other.
When we dropped Wulf off in my room, I saw two big black spiders, one on the back wall, one on top of the TV. The maid had already been in, and the place was sparkling otherwise. I watched the one on the TV crawl down across the screen for a second, then looked at Wulf, who was already sprawled on the bed and snoring. But I guessed if none of them had bitten us last night, he was probably safe for the time being.
I almost said something to Phineas in the hall, until I saw another one crawling across the carpet.
When we got outside, and a reasonable distance from the hotel for good measure, I asked Phineas, “Have you ever heard of a witch using spiders as familiars?”
If he found this question odd, he didn’t show it. “No. We could ask Wendy, when we see her again. Why?”
“Wendy said Bristol is full of witches. And weren’t witches originally thought to be the brides of the devil or whatever? I’m wondering if that’s how Madeline’s watching us,” I said. “I suspected poor Nolan at first, but when he came in this morning he didn’t even look around, let alone ask us any questions. If he’s a spy, he’s pretty good at it.”
“He’s not a spy,” said Phineas. “I can tell about people’s intentions, and his are good.”
“Personal talent, or magical fairy power?” Since dinner the night before I’d taken to using the word fairy as often as possible, just because it annoyed him. He ignored it this time.
Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2) Page 6