Bottled Up

by K. J. Emrick

  “No, no,” he interrupts me. “I mean to say, are there any groups coming in over the next few months.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything at all. Spelunkers. Motivational speaking retreats. Rabid Socceroos fans with their foam fingers and painted faces. That sort of thing.”

  Oh. Now I get it. “We have a few things booked, I suppose.” Every winter there’s groups who book themselves into the Inn, taking up four or five of our rooms. Friends going hiking, mostly, looking to brave the bush in the cold. I think they’re nutters, myself, but stuff like that is one of the main sources of income over the winter months of June, July and August. “There’s nothing that should bother you, Mister Brewster. Your reservation is guaranteed, just like always.”

  “No overenthusiastic sports clubs, then?”

  “Promise,” I swear to him. “No foam fingers. No funny hats, no didgeridoos. We like to keep it peaceful here for all of our guests. You included, Mister Brewster.”

  Now a genuine smile crosses his face. Not something I see him do very often. “Thank you, Miss Powers. It’s nice to know you’re on the ball.”

  Then he turns around and walks away, all the way down to the stairs at the other end, going down to the first floor and his own room. At least, I assume that’s where he’s going. Might be going anywhere. I don’t see him out and about in Lakeshore much, come to think of it. Usually just walking about here, at the Inn.

  I really should ask him what he does for a living someday.

  When he’s gone, I go back inside my room, and throw the lock again. I know Mister Brewster would never try to force his way in here, but that doesn’t mean my attacker from Blue Laguna isn’t out there, somewhere. Doubt he’d have the same kind of consideration for me. If Mabel McGowan’s ghost could follow me to this Inn, then what’s to say the maniac Jasmine was working with couldn’t follow me here, too?

  If you think I’m being paranoid, you might be right. Then again, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out to get you. Better safe than sorry, is what I say.

  It’s been a day full of odd things, that’s for sure. Even Mister Brewster coming to my door to ask me about sports is odd. I can understand him wanting his peace and quiet. That’s something that’s always been important to him. As far as him even knowing that the Socceroos play, ya know, soccer… I never took him to be someone who had even that much interest in sports.

  Partway back to the bathroom a thought hits me.

  Well, a partial thought. About the Socceroos, of all things. Wasn’t I thinking about them earlier today? I’m sure I was. It must’ve been kind of important, too, because it’s really bugging me. Something about Australia’s national football team—because let’s face it, most of the rest of the world knows the game as football instead of soccer—and their logo, that green and yellow ribbon spiraled into the shape of a soccer ball.

  Wait. Yeah, the logo. I remember the logo from somewhere recently.

  Blue Laguna?

  Yes. I’m getting… I remember…

  Knock, knock.

  The rapping on my door breaks up the line of my thoughts again, which is annoying, because I’m sure they were leading me somewhere important. If my attacker had followed me… yes. That’s it. If my attacker followed me from Blue Laguna just like Mabel’s ghost had, then…

  What?

  Did any of this mean anything at all?

  The Socceroos logo. Did I see it somewhere in Blue Laguna? Is that why it was on my mind? Yes! Oh, yes I did see it there. I saw it on that groundskeeper, Gimble Harris. It was on his jacket.

  But… so what? Lots of people where the logo.

  Did I see it somewhere before that…?

  Knock, knock.

  Oh, snap. That knocking was going to drive me crazy. So help me God I’m going to give whoever that is a piece of my mind. Mister Brewster, probably, coming back for some detail he’d forgotten to ask about. Maybe he wanted to know if I could institute a curfew at the Inn for the rest of the winter. Maybe he wanted to ask me about a movie night. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wish he’d wait until later to bug me.

  I’m onto something that could solve this mystery and give me the missing pieces. Jasmine… Zacron… Blue Laguna… What was the connection…?

  Knock. Knock.

  “Okay, okay!” Obviously, I’m going to have to finish my thinking later. I’ve got an Inn to run, after all. “Look, Mister Brewster, I’m sort of busy.”

  I reach for the doors, to undo the lock.

  “Can you come back later?” I ask him.

  I undo the lock and reach for the handle.

  Through the door a face appears, followed by the rest of the man with his arms stretched out and his hands trying to grab me. His mouth stretches in a silent scream, a wide gaping hole of darkness threatening to swallow me up.

  Suddenly I’m on the floor. I remember throwing myself backward, away from this apparition rushing at me right through my door. I must have fallen. I don’t remember the landing, but the pain radiating up my backside lets me know that I fell, sure enough.

  The ghost coming through the door was Lachlan Halliburton. Now that I can take a moment and focus, I see that it’s him. His face is stretched out of proportion, angular and horrifying. He scared me. Terrified me, in fact.

  At this point, if Lachlan wasn’t already dead, I’d murder him myself.

  “Lachlan! You know you aren’t allowed in my room!”

  That probably would’ve sounded a lot more indignant if I hadn’t been struggling to get back up on my feet like an overturned turtle. Now that I’m up, and dusting off the seat of my pants, I turn a glare on him that speaks louder than words.

  His face snaps back into place like a rubber mask. That’s him and his penchant for changing his shape. Usually, he only does it to tell me something. This time it was like he wanted to hurt me. The knock knock part of his little act just now would’ve been easy for him. One of his favorite tricks is to scare the guests with a few well-placed thuds against their walls. Usually I pass it off as trouble with the pipes, but the Pine Lake Inn has a fine reputation for being haunted now, thanks to him. I don’t complain, most times, because it drives in business when people book a room just so’s they can try and sneak a peek at a ghost.

  I might not usually complain, but I’m complaining now.

  “You know the rules!” I shout, before remembering to lower my voice because the walls aren’t exactly soundproof and there are other guests staying up on this floor. “You know the rules, Lachlan. You don’t get to come into my rooms without my permission. Ever!”

  He holds up his hands like he’s going to argue the point and use his pantomime to give me some excuse, but I don’t want to hear any of it. He’s got no right. Not when I’ve got so much on my mind. Not when I was just about to remember something important about this mystery.

  Keeping my glare on him, I reach over to the wall where I’ve left the broom leaning from earlier.

  His eyes go wide, and this time it’s him who’s scared.

  Good.

  I know there’s ways to disperse a ghost. Exorcism, lines of salt, all that stuff I’ve seen on television. I honestly couldn’t do any of it if I tried. I don’t know how to send a spirit packing from this world to the next.

  But I know they absolutely hate it when I do this.

  The broom in my hands makes a loud whooshing sound as it whistles through the air. I swat at Lachlan, actually swinging the broom right through him, until his form is shredding into wisps of color and shadow as if he was a column of smoke I was trying to blow away. After each swat he pulls himself back together, but each time it’s harder and harder for him. He floats backward toward the door, parts of him scattered and blurry, trying to get away from me.

  I take a step closer to him every time he backs away, swinging the broom like a pro baseball player. I don’t stop until his back is up against the door.

  The broom is
smacking against the walls at this point. The only reason I stop is because I don’t want to wreck my place just to prove a point.

  Pointing dramatically, I whisper-scream, “Now get out!”

  He looks at me in that way he has, not saying a word but still able to tell me exactly what he wants. “I don’t care if you’re here to tell me something. I don’t care if the world’s coming to an end. I don’t care if the Queen herself has come to see me. I need to have privacy in my own rooms. I need to think. Now, get out, get out, get out!”

  Dodging one more whack of the broom, Lachlan phases out through the door. The last thing I see is his eyes beseeching me to listen. I don’t want to.

  Then he’s finally, blessedly, gone.

  With a long sigh, I lean hard against the wall, and drop the broom in the corner, because I can take care of it later. One of the benefits of having my own rooms—other than being able to insist on privacy—is that I can leave things in a mess if I want. Right now, I want.

  Sitting down on the bed, I try to pick up the thoughts that had been coming to me before Lachlan disturbed me.

  Let’s start from the beginning.

  In Blue Laguna, a man attacked me in my hotel room. I thought that man was Zacron Haskell, the desk clerk. It wasn’t. Whoever it was, had to have a way into my room that bypassed both the card key lock, and the one that opened with a real key. I had those both locked, I know I did.

  Someone with hotel keys could have done it.

  On the other hand, I remind myself, Jasmine might have let the attacker in. No matter how much she wants to protest that she’s innocent, and no matter how much I want to believe it, that didn’t mean the person behind all of this wasn’t her.

  If it was either of those two, they had to have help.

  Who was their accomplice?

  Then, we had the very unpleasant experience of meeting Officer Halloway. He berated us, and he blamed us, but he did tell us the start of Orville McGowan’s legend. He did have brains enough to take a picture of the note before he left so that when the note got stolen, we could still see what it said. Not that we could read much of it.

  What we could read made us believe there was a treasure to be found. Everyone else believed it, too. Which was why people were trying to kill me.

  Then we met Gimble Harris, the groundskeeper for the McGowan Mansion. Tanned and tall, with that washed out blonde hair, and that mole on his cheek. He told us the rest of the McGowan’s story. He seemed to know a lot about the McGowans, actually, and about the notes Orville would throw over the side of his boat. Notes that would float home to his wife Mabel. All of them, except the last note he ever wrote. The one I found, decades later.

  On Gimble’s jacket was the Socceroos’ logo.

  That was what had stuck in my head. That logo. What about that logo? Did I see it anywhere else? Did I see it somewhere in Blue Laguna, before we left…?

  Oh, snap.

  Yes.

  Oh, yes I did!

  I don’t know why I didn’t remember this before. Right after we found the note in the bottle me and Jasmine were walking up the sidewalk, and there was a man watching us. I thought he was watching me and Jasmine in our club clothes but looking back now I realize he was staring at the bottle in my hands.

  He recognized the bottle. He knew that bottle.

  Other people looked at us, and then looked away. This guy hadn’t looked away. This guy had stared at us until he was out of my line of sight, and now I remember feeling like he was still watching us from behind.

  No. Not at us. At that bottle.

  He had deep tanned skin, this man did, and a mole on his cheek, and blonde hair bleached nearly white by the sun. Maybe he hadn’t been wearing that frayed straw hat like we saw him doing at the McGowan Mansion, but there was no doubt about it now.

  The man on the street had been Gimble Harris.

  I hadn’t even met him yet, but he certainly saw us. He saw the bottle in my hands when we were on our way back to the hotel. As we found out later, Gimble knew everything there was to know about the McGowans. He would have known exactly what that bottle was, because he knew all about Orville, and what bottles he used when writing notes to his wife from sea. He would know all about the rumors of his treasure. He wouldn’t pass up the chance to get rich.

  And if he followed us to the hotel, and if he watched to see what room we were in, and then if he followed us from the McGowan Mansion back here to Lakeshore just like Mabel’s ghost had…

  Knock, knock.

  Again, the rapping on my door distracts me.

  If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to kill that Lachlan! I don’t care if I have to raise him from the dead first to do it, either. I’m going to kill him! I’m going to send his little spirit bum into oblivion!

  “Lachlan, I told you to leave me alone!” I’m shouting at him through the door, not caring anymore if anyone hears me now. Grabbing the doorknob, I start to twist it, so I can pull it open because he will not come into this room again—

  The door bursts inward, throwing me backward, tripping me over my own feet, and I fall up against my chest of drawers with a crash that must’ve shook the entire Inn to its foundation. At least it seemed that way to me but then again, there’s stars swirling in front of my eyes and bells jangling in my ears. Not sure if the world is upside right or sideways at the moment.

  When my vision clears, a man is standing over me with a knife in his hand. I recognize the knife as part of Rosie’s special kitchen set. The edge of it flashes in the light.

  I recognize the guy holding the knife, too. Tall. Tan. Mole on his cheek. Blonde hair washed out by the sun.

  Gimble Harris is in my rooms.

  He doesn’t look happy.

  Chapter 9

  “You have no idea how much I want to kill you now,” he says, which pretty much makes his intentions obvious.

  Did I say ‘not happy?’ I may need to find a stronger word.

  Now I see that this is what Lachlan was trying to warn me about. I should learn to listen to my ghost friends.

  Gimble. All this time it was Gimble. He tried to kill me for the note. He stole it from me here in Lakeshore. For the love of God, Jasmine and I strolled up to him at the McGowan Mansion, easy as you please, and just about handed it right to him.

  Then again, maybe that’s what we should’ve done. Then he wouldn’t have come to Lakeshore. Then he wouldn’t be standing right here, in my room, holding a knife.

  And then again, he might have killed us right then and there. Me and Jasmine both.

  Jasmine… I doubted her, and I shouldn’t have. I blamed her, and I shouldn’t have. She hadn’t lied to me. It wasn’t her doing any of this. It was this man standing here in my room.

  The door was open. I could get help for myself by shouting. One simple shout. This could all be over in a minute.

  I took a breath.

  Gimble’s hand was over my mouth, clamped down tight, before the air was even in my lungs.

  “Uh-uh. None of that, now.”

  Holding me against the wall with that dirty, smelly hand over my mouth, Gimble swings his foot out behind him. His ankle catches the edge of the door, and slams it shut.

  “I want privacy for this. Just the two of us, girly. Oh, led me on a merry chase, ya did.” He clucks his tongue, and shakes his head, and smiles in a way that makes my blood run cold. “When I saw that bottle in yer hands on the streets of Blue Laguna, I knew exactly what it was. The last message ever sent by Orville McGowan. Knew ya had something important. The final clue to untold treasure, right there in yer arms, and no idea at all what ya found.”

  The knife in his other hand comes up. The point dances in front of my eye.

  It holds my gaze in a hypnotic way. Like it’s drawing me in. Like it’s going to bite me.

  “Wondering how I got into your room back at that fancy hotel?” he asks. “Heh. No worries, that. Pretty proud of meself on that, actually. Learned a few tricks be
ing the caretaker for the McGowan Mansion. Gotta take care of every bit of that house. Dirty job. Hate it. Need the money or else I woulda been gone years back. Still, learned me a thing or two. Especially when I’d forget my keys. I can get into any locked window nowadays. Part of me charm.”

  He snickers when he sees my eyes grow wide. Of course. Oh, snap, why didn’t I think of this before. I was so intent on figuring out how someone could have gotten through the locks on my hotel room door, that I never considered the other ways someone could’ve gotten in. The windows. He got in through the windows.

  But we had been on the third floor…

  “Ladder,” he grunts, as if he could read my thoughts, or at least see the question mirrored in my eyes. “Put a ladder up to yer window. Got plenty of them to do my work around the Mansion. Deep in the night like that, nobody was around to see me.”

  Of course. There it was. The police were looking at the door locks, same as me. They wouldn’t look outside for any signs of a break in through the window, either, because we were on the third floor!

  I’d missed all of it. The clues were all right there in front of me, and I missed them all.

  Even that funny walk when we saw him at the McGowan Mansion. Now I understood that was because I kneed him in the crotch that morning. I’d hurt him.

  Obviously he holds a grudge.

  After we left him standing at the mansion he followed me here. He saw where I parked the car. He picked the lock and used that emergency release button to get into the glove box. He was a handyman. He must know things about cars, too.

  Gimble knew where the note was. Jasmine and I told him when we were at the mansion.

  Gimble.

  Gimble.

  Gimble…

  All this time, it was Gimble.

  “Sorry about this,” he says to me. “But it’s gotta be this way. I haven’t deciphered all of the note yet, but when I do I can’t have anyone else getting to Orville McGowan’s treasure ahead of me. First you, then that friend of yers. Anybody else knows about this, they’ll be next. I’ve worked like a dog at that mansion all this time, trying to get close to the dead man’s gold, and I deserve mine. That treasure should be mine. The McGowans got no heirs left. I’m the closest thing to it. So it’s mine. Mine!”