by Amy Cross
Prologue
Twelve years ago
"Paula! Get in here!"
Hearing her mother's voice, the girl freezes. She knows she's supposed to be in her room, but she crept out of the house and has been spending the past couple of hours at the bottom of the garden. Her plan was to get back into the house before her mother noticed her absence, but time has flown past and now Paula feels her chest tighten as she realizes she's made a huge mistake.
"Paula!" her mother screams, her voice filled with anger.
Trembling with fear, Paula hurries around the shed and peers toward the back door. Sure enough, her mother is standing there, her face filled with the kind of righteous fury that Paula knows so well from other beatings. Although she's only ten years old, Paula knows that there's no point trying to hide any longer. She made a mistake with her timing and she disobeyed her mother, and she realizes that her punishment will only be more severe if she wastes time. Taking a deep breath, she glances back at the rockery where she was playing, before stepping out from behind the shed and starting walk slowly across the lawn.
"What the hell were you doing out there?" her mother shouts. "I told you to play in your room!"
Without answering, Paula walks up the steps and stops. She wants to turn and run, but she's learned over the years that any attempt to avoid her punishment will only make her mother more furious.
"Didn't you hear me tell you to go to your room?"
Paula nods.
"And did you hear me tell you to come out of your room at any point?"
Paula shakes her head.
"So what the fuck were you doing out there? I mean, seriously, kid, do you think you can just go running around, doing whatever you want?"
Paula opens her mouth to reply, but no words come out.
"Got an answer?" her mother asks. "Go on. Tell me what made you believe that you had the right to disobey my explicit instructions. Tell me what made you think you could ignore everything I said." Without any further warning, her mother grabs her by the hair and pulls her through the door. Tripping on the step, Paula crashes to the ground, landing hard on her shoulder.
"So what were you doing out there?" her mother asks, using her foot to force Paula onto her back. "Do you think I just tell you these things because I like the sound of my own voice, huh?"
Paula shakes her head.
"Do you think it's fun to disobey me? Do you think my authority is meaningless?"
Again, Paula shakes her head.
"Go to your fucking room," her mother spits dismissively, turning and walking over to her laptop. Shutting the lid, she turns back to see that Paula is still flat on her back on the kitchen floor.
"Paula!" she screams. "Now!"
With an aching shoulder, Paula gets to her feet and starts shuffling to her room. She knows what's coming next, and she's already begun to switch off, forcing her emotions to the back of her mind as she prepares for the pain that's going to follow. By the time she reaches the door to her room, she's almost a blank slate, lumbering forward in a zombie-like fashion. She barely even blinks as she hears her mother storming to the closet and pulling out the belt, and finally Paula simply sits on the bed and waits.
"Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to raise you alone?" her mother shouts through from the hallway. "Do you have any fucking idea how much extra work you are? Even if you didn't constantly act up, it'd be difficult, but you just go and make everything even harder."
Paula stares at her blue bedroom wall and tries to lose her last remaining flicker of thought. It's that last little bit that's the hardest, but she knows she can do it if she just focuses.
"Your father was the lucky one," her mother says as she reaches the door and stops for a moment. "He got to fuck off with some little bitch, leaving me to do all the hard work. I'm sure he's having a great time. Meanwhile, you probably think I'm cruel, just because I'm the one who's left to discipline you. If you want to know who to blame for your situation, kid, it's not me. It's your rotten, stinking father. You got that?"
"I don't think you're cruel," Paula says, her voice a blank monotone. The words are leaving her lips, but she's not thinking about them at all. She's running on automatic, and her head is almost completely empty. "I know it's Dad's fault."
"You know your grandparents are coming round later, don't you?" her mother continues. "I swear to God, Paula, you'd better be acting normal by the time they get here. Do you understand?" She waits for an answer. "Look at me!" she shouts eventually, her shrill voice filling the room.
Slowly, Paula turns and looks directly at her mother.
"I mean it," she continues. "You need to act like a normal fucking kid for once when they get here, do you understand? I'm sick of the way they look at each other, like they think I'm doing a bad job of raising you." She waits again for some kind of answer. "What's wrong?" she asks finally. "Have you forgotten how to talk?"
"I'll be normal," Paula says blankly.
"Jesus," her mother replies, "do you ever actually look at yourself in the mirror? I don't wanna be cruel, kid, but you act like a freak."
"Sorry."
"Get in position," her mother says wearily. "Christ, this is the last thing I needed today, do you realize that? I'm already tired, and now you make it so I have to punish you for being a disobedient little bitch. I don't enjoy beating sense into you. I'd much rather you could behave yourself without having to be told over and over again what you're doing wrong. Most mothers don't have to do this to their children, but then again most children don't act up the way you do. You have no fucking idea what I'd give for a simple life."
Slowly, Paula kneels down and gets into position, ready for the belt.
"I hate you for making me do this," her mother adds, her voice full of tears as she raises her arm, ready to strike down with the belt. "Why can't you think about how this makes me feel, Paula? Why can't you think of other people sometimes, instead of your own selfish needs?"
Today
Joanna Mason
"You want a room?" asks the man, staring at me skeptically. "You're in luck. Come on in."
"Actually," I reply, "I'm not here for a room." Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pull out my police I.D. badge and hold it up for him to see. I guess there's no way he could possibly guess that, technically, my badge has been rescinded while I'm on temporary suspension. "I'm here on official business," I add, gilding the lie.
"Great," he sighs, stepping back and holding the door open. "I knew it was too good to be true. Two paying customers in a month would be a goddamn miracle. I don't think I'd two in six months for more than a decade."
Stepping inside, I'm immediately struck by the fusty smell of the place. I'm at a large, overbuilt-looking building in the suburbs, and it turns out that the place has been turned into a small hotel. Or at least, that was the intention, but the owners clearly haven't had much luck. It looks as if the interior decorations haven't been improved for decades, and there are suspicious damp patches on the ceiling, as if there's been water damage over the years. All told, it's probably the least inviting attempt at a hotel that I've ever seen. Even Norman Bates would feel bad about trying to offer rooms in a place like this.
"I can tell you for a fact that no-one's done anything wrong in any of my rooms," the guy says, pushing the door shut. "You wanna know how I know that?" He pauses, as if for effect. "Easy. I have so few paying guests, I have no trouble keeping tabs on them. Most of the time, it's just me and Rita Hayworth knocking about the place, so I can assure you, I have a very good memory of the handful of poor souls who ever come and spent a night here."
"That's good," I reply. "Maybe you can help me with something."
"I'm glad my economic pain can be of benefit to you," he continues, turning and limping through to the kitchen. Following him, I'm surprised to find a large white parakeet hopping about in a cage. "Don't mind Rita Hayworth," the guy says as he fills a kettle. "She's not the kind of bird that talks. She just stares.
The only reason I keep her around is 'cause I like to hear a little noise in the building from time to time. Whenever one of the ghosts makes a racket in the middle of the night, I can just tell myself it's the parrot making the noise. That way, I can get back to sleep. It's amazing how easily the human mind can fool itself, huh?"
"I'm here as part of an investigation into an old case," I reply, trying to ignore the bird's beady eyes as it fixes its stare on me. "I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but I have reason to believe that a man might have hidden something in your hotel a long time ago, and that someone else might have come and found it more recently."
"It wasn't a fish, was it?"
I stare at him.
"There's been this weird fishy smell lately. It's probably just rat droppings in the vents, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a rotten fish somewhere."
"It's a diary," I reply, hoping to get the conversation back onto a less surreal setting. "Actually, it's the diary of a man who committed a number of murders."
"You want tea?" he asks. "Coffee?"
"No, thanks." I wait for him to reply, but he seems busy setting out a cup and filled it with instant coffee.
"How far back are we talking?" he asks eventually.
"Twelve years."
"Huh." Walking over to a small desk in the corner of the room, he opens one of the drawers and fishes around until finally he pulls out a small black book. "I hate computers," he mutters. "I keep all my records manually. My son, he keeps telling me to get online and start advertising the hotel, but I prefer to rely on word of mouth, you know? Keeps things honest." He flicks through the pages of the book, as the kettle starts to boil on the stove. "So give me a date. Where am I aiming here? You might be surprised to learn that I'm not a mind-reader."
"Did a man named Sam Gazade ever stay here?" I ask, feeling a slight shudder at the mere mention of his name.
"Gazade? That seems familiar." He turns a couple of pages. "Twelve years ago? No, I don't see anything. Of course, I check people's I.D. when they take a room, but as long as they pay upfront, I've got no real inclination to go into detail. I believe that a man's business is his own, and that no-one else has a right to go nosing about. I know that's an unpopular point of view in the twenty-first century, but I'm sticking to my guns. Why do you wanna know, anyway? Who's this Gazade guy?"
Smiling, I realize that I seem to have found the only person in the entire city - hell, in the entire country - who doesn't know about Gazade. "He's just someone I'm looking into," I reply. "What about more recently? Have you had any suspicious guests in the past six months?"
"All my guests are suspicious," he mutters, turning to the back of the book. "The very act of booking a room in this crumbling old place is pretty suspicious, if you ask me. And in the past six months, I've had the grand total of..." He pauses, as if he's studying the figures closely, before setting the book down on the table. "One guest."
"Just one?" I ask, walking over and picking the book up.
"Dr. Alice Huston," he replies as he limps over to the stove and removes the kettle, before pouring some boiling water into a cup. "I remember her, not only because it was so rare to actually get a paying customer, but because she seemed so picky."
"In what way?"
"Never satisfied with her room," he says. "She was a real pain. I checked her into my best room, but after she'd been in there a couple of hours, she said she didn't like the view, so I moved her into another room. Half an hour after that, she said the bed was too hard and she wanted to try again. She ended up trying four rooms before she was satisfied. That's a third of the rooms in the whole goddamn hotel. She seemed nice enough, but she was just constantly switching rooms, like she was never quite happy, but she couldn't tell me what she wanted. Goddamn woman nearly drove me insane with her constant demands."
Staring at the name in the book, I realize that this must be the person I'm looking for. Still, it can't be this easy. The name must be fake. After all, why would anyone leave open even the slightest possibility that they might be tracked down? Unless they were so arrogant that they believed no-one else could ever come looking for Sam Gazade's diary, in which case I guess they wouldn't bother to take too many precautions.
"You wanna see the rooms?" the guy asks after a moment.
I shake my head. There doesn't seem to be any point. After all, the diary's obviously been retrieved, so there's not going to be anything else of interest in here. This Dr. Huston woman obviously changed rooms so many times because she wasn't sure which room, precisely, would contain the hidden diary. She eventually struck lucky in the fourth room, but if she hadn't, I guess she would have gone through every room in the hotel, probably driving the owner crazy in the process. Gazade must have picked this place to hide his diary precisely because he knew there was little chance of any of the rooms ever being too busy.
"You got any kind of surveillance system?" I ask, glancing up at the walls and realizing that I don't see any cameras. The whole place seems like it's stuck several centuries in the past.
"Oh yeah," he replies airily, taking a sip from his cup of coffee. "I've got state-of-the-art facial recognition and infra-red scanners. The same kinda stuff they use in casinos, you know?" He smiles. "The only surveillance system I bother with is my eyes. Dr. Huston was a decent-looking woman. Smart, tidy. Kinda young-looking, too. God knows what she was doing staying in a place like this, but I didn't poke too much. I think the world'd be a better place if we each kept out of one another's business." He pauses. "That said, I was a little worried she might be one of those broads who checks into a hotel and then checks out of life, if you know what I mean. I was kinda relieved when she came down for breakfast. It'd have been just my luck if my only paying customer in the past few years had been a suicide."
"Get a lot of those, do you?" I ask.
"I wish! At least they'd pay, and they wouldn't need food in the morning!"
"Did you get any I.D. from this Dr. Huston woman?" I continue.
"She paid by cash."
"State law requires -"
"State law can kiss my ass." He stares at me for a moment. "She paid in cash. Up-front. I'm not gonna scare away a paying customer just 'cause of some dumb law." He sniffs. "She sure seemed like she was genuine. She seemed smart, you know? She didn't do anything to make me doubt her."
"What about a phone number?"
He shrugs.
Turning, I watch as the parrot hops to the far side of its cage.
"You're not gonna get me fined, are you?" the guy continues. "I can't afford to pay a fine. I'm running on the edge as it is. Frankly, if someone tries to fine me, I'd rather just board up the doors and windows, load my rifle, and take a little target practice." He pauses. "I was kidding. I'm not that kind of crazy. I'm more relaxed. Until the zombie apocalypse, I'll keep my guns under lock and key."
"I'm not gonna get you fined," I say, tossing the book onto the table. "I don't care enough. But I might be back. This is a complex investigation."
"What did she do, anyway?" he asks as he follows me to the front door. "She seemed pretty high-class. She into something dodgy? Or was she murdered or something like that? She seemed in a pretty good mood when she left in the morning. Nothing about her struck me as being particularly noticeable, apart from the fact that she insisted I call her Dr. Huston. She was very particular about that, like Mrs. Huston or Ms. Huston wasn't good enough. She wanted her full title." He pauses. "So? What's she done? Or what's been done to her?"
"I don't know," I reply, stepping out onto the porch. "I'd never even heard of her until I came here to see you." Turning to him, I can see that he's desperate for me to throw him a bone. "You've been very helpful," I add. "I'd rather you didn't mention this to anyone, though. In the unlikely event that you bump into Dr. Huston again, I'd appreciate it if you could refrain from letting her know that I was asking after her. Also..." I pause for a moment. "If any other police officers come calling, there's no need to mention it
to them, either. They won't come, but if they did, I'd appreciate it if you could keep a little quiet."
"You doing some work off the books?"
"Something like that."
"Do me a favor in return, yeah?" he continues. "Spread the word a little. Word of mouth, you know? If you happen to hear of anyone looking for a cheap, clean hotel room, I'd appreciate it if you could send 'em my way. All I need is a few good customers to kick-start things, and this place could really take off." He grabs some grubby-looking, faded brown business cards and shoves them into my hands. "Pass 'em out to anyone you meet, yeah? Talk the place up. Tell 'em we do really good breakfasts. It's true. Sure, the place might be a little faded, but I've never had a guest complain about my food yet."
"I'll keep it in mind," I reply, pocketing the cards before turning and walking away.
The truth is, I can't help thinking that this whole thing seems way too easy. There's no way someone would check in using their real name, not when they're looking for Sam Gazade's diary. Still, it's probably worth checking out this Dr. Huston person and seeing if she's a real person. After all, I might strike lucky. As I know from bitter experience, smart people make dumb mistakes all the time, and sometimes the smartest people make the dumbest mistakes of all.
Dr. Alice Huston
"What would you have done if I hadn't shown up last night?" I ask, watching as Paula hauls the last of the black sacks to the clearing. "Did you have a plan in mind?"
As she drops the sack next to the other two, Paula takes a step back. She's out of breath after having carried the old man's remains from the car, which is a shame since she's now got another job to do.
"Here," I say, holding the shovel out toward her. "You're going to have to do the honors. Make sure it's deep. There's a reason most graves are six feet. It's to stop animals digging the bodies up, so you'll need to put your back into it. The last thing you need is for some fox to bring the old guy back to the surface."