“So you think it will be an easy job?” he asked tentatively. “No, well, you know…”
Taryn bit her lip. “I don’t know. I haven’t looked at my pictures yet.”
She wasn’t ready to tell him about the one in the break room. No reason to worry him any more than she already had.
“Why not?”
“Because maybe I’m afraid of what I’ll find?” It was a question more than a statement.
“You think there’s something there?” he pressed. Matt knew all about the things that had happened on her other jobs. Indeed, he had been there for some of the occurrences.
“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen or felt anything but I know the stories. And once I…oh, it sounds silly.”
“No,” Matt urged her to continue. “It’s not silly. Once you what?”
“If there is something there then once I look at the pictures and see it then I’ll be a part of it,” she finished lamely. “And then I can’t turn back.”
“The jobs that need the most work seem to find you and pick you,” Matt said carefully. “Is that what you’re thinking? That perhaps this job called to you and if you delve into too far you’ll be caught up in something else again?”
“Yes!” Taryn all but shouted in agreement. Sometimes it felt really good to have someone in her life who totally “got” her.
“I know how that must make you feel,” he said. “I know how it makes me feel. I worry about you. I worry with each thing that happens that it’s going to be too much on you, that you’re going to buckle eventually. Not that you’re not strong but, well, there’s only so much a single person can stand.”
“Things have been so good lately,” Taryn said. “I’ve been so happy and peaceful. I don’t know that I am ready to rock that boat.”
As if in agreement, her bubbles began popping in clumps, leaving her in a murky film. Her water had lost its warmth.
Six
Taryn stood before Room #5 and observed it with interest.
There might have been twenty rooms at the Black Raven Inn, but only one of them was famous. Only one of them had seen the death of a celebrity.
She’d only been commissioned to paint this one.
The room didn’t look any different than the others from the outside. All the doors looked identical, with varying degrees of neglect, wear, and tear. There was nothing exceptional about Room #5 from where she stood.
Still, her fingers trembled slightly as she clutched Miss Dixie to her chest. If there was something inside the motel, it was in this room. This was the one the investigators were interested in, the one the paranormal fans had stumbled over themselves to stay in.
“I can’t turn back once I go inside,” she whispered to herself, lest Aker heard her and thought she was nutty.
Taryn was no stranger to the supernatural. She’d seen more than her fair share of haunted places, had been targeted by ghosts and other unexplainable forces. Yet, in most of those cases, she’d walked into the situation with blind eyes. The Black Raven Inn was different; it was known for being famous.
Despite the establishment’s rough reputation, the room never had any trouble finding visitors when it was open. Its famous occupant had garnered a cult following and many of those fans, some fellow musicians, had flocked to stay in the place where he’d taken his last breath. They’d even built a little shrine to him in the courtyard; Taryn was going to take a look at that next.
The paranormal investigators had come as well. They’d brought their video camera and EVP equipment and whatever else they used and attempted to make contact with the young man who hadn’t been able to resist the urges of the dark mistress who dealt him her fatal kiss.
Taryn knew all about those people, the ones who had ignored the drug deals and prostitutes and occasional domestic disputes so that they could stay in their fallen idol’s room.
“It would be like me staying in Graceland,” she said aloud, trying to put herself in a position of understanding.
And now, here she was, standing inches from the door itself. If the rumors were true, if the room was haunted, then she’d be exposing herself to something she might not be able to walk away from.
“Well,” she sighed with resignation. “Maybe he’s a friendly ghost anyway.”
The key clicked in the lock and she let herself in.
Parker Brown’s room was much smaller than she’d anticipated.
The king-sized bed took up most of the floor space so Taryn found herself all but turning sideways to walk to the other side of the room. There wasn’t much light filtering through the dusty window but she found that the electric was having a good day and decided to come one.
The broken light fixture above provided little in the way of illumination but it did cast away a few of the darker shadows.
A small television stand held a model from the 1980s. Rabbit ears extended from a dinosaur screen with a hairline crack down the middle. Someone had left a bottle of maroon-colored nail polish on top of the grimy surface.
Two nightstands flanked the bed with the saggy mattress and stained, floral quilt that was partway pulled back, like someone was getting ready for bed. A rodent had left a copious amount of droppings on the quilt. At some point it looked like something had started to make a nest on one of the nightstands and then given up, as if the room was too depressing to make any kind of permanent home in.
Although the room didn’t have a closet, it did have a small alcove with a curtain rod in which wire hangers dangled. A beat-up bureau rested under the rod, two of its drawers gaping open.
Taryn walked over to one of the closed doors and opened it nervously. Even though Aker had thoroughly checked the room before she arrived that morning, she’d seen enough horror movies to worry about such things.
Inside was a miniscule bathroom with a sink that could be reached from the toilet and a shower with a mildew-splattered plastic curtain. The toilet and sink looked original to the room. For a moment Taryn stood there and let the realization of where she was sink in.
“Huh,” she said, taking in the confined space.
It was a morbid thought but Parker Brown had, at one time, stood in that very spot. He’d washed his hands and brushed his teeth in that sink. He had used the now filthy toilet. She was looking at a room that had not changed in forty years, seeing it the same way he would have. That was about as close to time travel as most people would ever get.
Taryn shivered at the thought.
“A goose walked over your grave,” she could all but hear her grandmother, Stella, telling her.
A goose or a ghost?
Back in the bedroom Taryn leaned against the cold wall and studied the space again. The floor was tile, stained and scuffed from years of use and abuse. An old wall heater was the only heat source. The window unit in the back was still intact in this room. Its bulky frame filled most of the window, blocking out the light on that side. There was another closed door that led to the courtyard. She’d go out there in a minute.
A threadbare area rug covered most of the floor. It was impossible to see the original pattern or color.
For the most part, the room was a cold, sad, lonely sight…if not for the walls.
She hadn’t expected the room to hold onto the mementos that visitors had left behind. She guessed she thought they would’ve been carted away or even trashed when the motel closed.
Room #5 was a veritable memorial to Parker Brown.
A large poster of him and the band, advertising a show in Tulsa, hung over the bed. Faded pictures printed off the computer covered the wall above the television stand. Two of his album covers were nailed above the nightstands. Here and there, scattered without thought to design, were pieces of paper with handwritten song lyrics to some of his most popular tunes. Framed photographs adorned the room and, stuck between the plastic and glass, were dozens of guitar picks people had left behind. A framed picture of him set on the nightstand, turned to face the very spot
he’d died in.
“That’s a little creepy,” Taryn said. Something about the picture’s position didn’t set right with her so she walked over to it, picked it up, and turned it to face the other direction. Now Parker was looking towards the door, not his death bed.
Most captivating were the personal messages that had been written on the walls and furniture. They’d been left behind in ink, marker, pencil, and even fingernail polish and what appeared to be lipstick. Personal memories of Parker, original poems and song lyrics penned by artists who’d stayed in the room, thank you notes for songs that had gotten the writer through a tough time, experiences visitors had had in the room…
Taryn turned and looked at the wall behind her where she’d been leaning. There were half a dozen messages scrawled there. She leaned forward and read one written in what appeared to be a red Sharpie:
“Stayed here 09/05/98. Woke up in the middle of the night and saw a ball of light in the corner of the room. Watched it bounce around the room and then hover over the television. Swore I heard someone strumming the guitar. I’ll never forget the feeling that someone else was in the room with me.”
Taryn winced and wrapped her arms around her chest, a defense mechanism she’d used since she was a child. She wished she’d left the door open. In the tiny, cramped space she was starting to feel claustrophobic.
Another message read:
“As I was drifting off to sleep I heard a voice close to my ear whispering ‘Hello.’ I slept with the TV and lamp on but when I woke up in the night to go to the bathroom both had been turned off.”
And then, simply:
“Parker Brown’s music saved my life.”
They’d come to that dreadful room to feel connected to him, to get as close to their idol as they could ever be. They’d all been trying to capture some of his essence, his energy.
“Did you know how much you were loved?” she asked the room.
Or was it that he was only loved because he was dead?
Damn, I’m getting cynical. Taryn shook her head.
It was time to get to work, though.
Taryn spent the next fifteen minutes capturing every inch of the room, in her own way trying to capture its essence in much the same way that the overnight visitors had. She took wide shots of the room and furnishings and then zoomed in on many of the messages, focusing on the uplifting ones as much as she could since she knew Ruby Jane would be viewing the photos.
By the time she finished, she was coughing and sneezing from a combination of the cold air and stuffiness, combined with the mold and dust and rodent excrement. Aside from the environmental factors of the motel’s age and neglect, however, she wasn’t feeling anything unusual.
Taryn breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps the ghost stories were just that–stories. Tales made up by people who wanted to feel and see something that proved their hero wasn’t completely gone.
When she was finished she went out the back door and entered the courtyard.
As expected, the small shrine to Parker stood erect a few feet from the patio. The wooden cross bearing his name was bordered by two rotting benches that once boasted blood-red paint. Beer and wine bottles had been left behind, as well as statues of crosses, the Virgin Mary, angels in various poses, and folded hands in prayers. Hundreds of guitar picks were scattered about, some faded by the sun and rain. Everything had a slight film over it, damaged from being left unattended to the elements.
She thought there was something poignant about the little shrine, about the people who were heartbroken enough to find their way to the motel and leave such things behind.
Taryn took pictures of the small memorial and then walked around, getting shots of other doors that opened to the enclosed space.
With a good budget and landscaper the courtyard might have been charming. There were a few trees growing in the middle and picnic tables with charcoal grills beside them. Under the right circumstances she could easily see flowering plants, leafy shades, and musicians sharing songs and drinking together in the moonlight.
Now, however, it was a cheerless abandoned wasteland, littered with used needles, empty fast food cartons, and broken tree limbs.
Beautiful, abandoned and derelict houses broke Taryn’s heart. The ones that were neglected tugged at her in the same way some people fell apart at the sight of abused animals.
Black Raven Inn bothered her in a different way. Here, she saw what could have been but never was. The potential of the place was reflected in the kind of crowd that had gathered there–desperate and, in many cases, hopeless.
“What brought you here, Parker? What were you doing here?” At the sound of her voice, a nearby Styrofoam cup was lifted gently in the air and floated past her face on a breeze. She watched it drift across the courtyard where it was deposited against a window. It landed with a soft sound.
Parker had family money, even without the band’s success. He could have done better. What had brought him to the Black Raven Inn? What had kept bringing him back?
Taryn left the courtyard with a great weight resting on her shoulders. Such a place didn’t deserve someone like Ruby Jane. There was too much sadness there, too much heaviness. Nobody needed that.
Taryn was usually against the destruction of history but in this case she thought tearing the motel down would be in everyone’s best interest.
Feeling unsettled and a little dejected, she let herself back into Room #5 and locked the courtyard door behind her. As she crossed the room to leave, however, a cold dagger stabbed her through the chest, leaving her winded and shocked.
“Oof!” she gasped, grasping at her chest and shaking her head from the blast of pain.
Doubled over from the throbbing, Taryn paused and attempted to collect herself while the waves of bitter air gathered around her, chilling her to the bone. This was different from the coldness that she’d felt earlier. This time it was wet and probing, trying to penetrate her clothing and skin and sink inside of her. The acrid smell of filth increased and churned around her, making her gag and cough until acid rose in her throat and nose.
Taryn looked up, trying to find a reason for what was happening. Her eyes landed on Parker’s picture on the nightstand. It was turned back around, facing the bed again.
The cold slowly began lifting from her, the pain easing up as the room returned back to normal. When the feeling subsided and she could move again Taryn sprinted for the exit, fumbling for the key.
The heavy hand that gripped her shoulder from behind as she flung open the door was pure ice.
“Hello,” it rasped in a voice neither male nor female.
The breath that rained down on her neck reeked of the grave.
Seven
Taryn was busy uploading her photos to be edited when the ringing of her phone startled her. The only person who ever called her was Matt, she conducted business through email, but it wasn’t his ring tone.
“If you’re wanting money from me you’re going to have to wait in line,” she called as she stalked across the floor to where the phone was charging in the wall.
When she saw the caller ID, however, her face lit up.
“David!” Her voice was filled with genuine warmth as she answered.
“There’s my favorite ghost chaser,” came the smooth, deep reply.
Taryn had met David earlier that year while working at an upscale resort on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. He’d been working there as an anthropologist and they’d bonded over ghosts, alligators, and other assorted adventures.
He’d also saved her life, but not before Matt had been certain he had designs on her and Taryn was almost equally certain he was trying to kill her. One of them had been wrong.
“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” she chided him as she settled onto the floor, her phone still plugged into the outlet.
“Never,” he laughed. “I’ve just been up to my nose in work. I do have some news, though.”
“What’s up?”
/> “I’m going to be in your neck of the woods in two weeks. I’m doing a lecture at Belmont Mansion, part of the university’s convocation series, and will be talking about our finds on the island. I was hoping we might be able to get together and have dinner while I’m in town,” he said.
Taryn could feel the tinges of excitement edging around her. “Are you kidding? I don’t just want to have dinner, I want to come to your lecture!”
“I don’t know. It might be boring. I’m a scientist, not much of a speaker,” he warned her.
“Oh please,” Taryn scoffed.
It didn’t matter what he said; once those college girls got a look at his dark skin, long ebony hair, and beautiful smile they’d be putty in his hands. David, full-blooded Creek Indian, was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen off the movie screen.
“I don’t know much about Nashville so I’ll leave it to you to find us a place to eat and hang out,” he told her.
“Sure. Where are you staying?”
“Some place downtown. Has a color in the name of it,” he said.
“Hotel Indigo probably. It’s one of those new, hip places.”
“I probably won’t fit in very well then,” David laughed. “I haven’t been hip in at least ten years.”
“You’ll be fine, I promise. I’ll find something within walking distance of it.”
They spent the next few minutes chatting about his work and the discoveries on Jekyll Island. Taryn had spent several months living between it and St. Simon’s and they had been some of the best months of her life. Having David nearby, someone she could grab for the occasional dinner and day trip, had been icing on the cake to a summer that was relaxing and productive. Although she hadn’t worked once her job was finished on Jekyll, when she moved over to the house on St. Simon’s she had used her time to paint, take photographs, and read at leisure without a thought to bills or money.
Black Raven Inn: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 6) Page 6