The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  “At the lodge,” she expanded. “She didn’t stay behind. The ones I hear are stuck there. They can’t go.”

  “To the spirit realm, you mean.”

  “Whatever.”

  I wished she would move out from under the ski lift. “Riley, how many ghosts are there in the lodge?”

  She kicked a drift of snow, sending it flying like white fireworks. “A lot. And they’re all angry.”

  “Riley, ghosts aren’t—” I stopped myself mid-sentence. Ghosts aren’t real. That was what I was about to say before I remembered I wasn’t just Lucia Star right now. I was Madame Lucia, infamous Internet psychic medium. It was my first instinct to comfort Riley with science. I was moments away from admitting Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed was a scam, that I’d never contacted a ghost a day in my life unless you counted the weird nightmares I used to have about my dad as a kid, and that the King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort, albeit creepy, was no more haunted than my crappy apartment. But I couldn’t do that. One, because it might break the kid’s heart if she knew I was a fraud, and two, because it was only my second day at King and Queens. If I wanted the payoff, I had to stick out this act for a week.

  “Aren’t what?” Riley asked.

  “Aren’t always feeling what you think they might be,” I finished hastily. “Everything’s different for them. They’re stuck in a world they no longer belong to.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she said. “Ask them how they really feel?”

  “Yes, actually.” Cold sweat dripped from my brow. I wiped it off with my glove and sighed. It was a long way to the bottom of the mountain. “Spirits linger for a reason, usually because they feel something about their death was unfair. If you can embrace that, if you can listen to what they need from you, they’re more likely to leave you be. Does that make sense?”

  Riley finally moved away from the support tower her mother died next to. “I think so. You mean they’re not bad? They don’t want to hurt me?”

  I ruffled her hair. “Some spirits can be violent. I won’t lie to you about that. But it’s because they think they’ve been wronged. They react just like living people, but they have to resort to other methods of expressing their anger because no one else can see them.”

  “So tonight when they come visit, I should let them.”

  I suppressed another shudder. Who exactly came to visit Riley in her room when the sun went down? “Just try it,” I suggested. “See what happens.”

  Riley went easy on me the rest of the way down, slowing her pace to make up for my clumsiness. By the time we reached the café at the bottom of the mountain, my legs felt like jelly. Liam took pity on me and returned my equipment to the rental shop so I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Riley disappeared again, claiming she had to catch up on her homework. Why she would have homework over the winter break, I had no idea. As I limped through the lobby, soaked to the bone with melted snow and sweat, Oliver came out of his office.

  “Lucia!” He smiled and waved. “I see you got out on the slopes after all. How was it?”

  I unstuck my hair from where it was matted against my forehead and swept it over my shoulder. “Challenging. Riley is one hell of a professional.”

  “She is?” Oliver scratched the balding spot on his head. “That’s funny. The ski instructors are always talking about how difficult she is on the hill. Hmm. Anyway, I’m glad the two of you finally met. Did she mention anything about the, uh, voices?”

  “We talked a little.” I leaned against one of the marble pillars in the lobby as my legs shook beneath me. “I don’t have much to tell you right now other than we’re making some progress.”

  Oliver freed another five hundred dollars from his billfold and handed it over. “The fact that she told you anything is a good sign. Did she talk about her mother at all?”

  I opted out of the truth. Who knew what Oliver would think if he knew the reason Riley took me skiing in the first place was to check out the exact spot where her mother bit the dust? “She mentioned her, but I don’t think she’s ready to get into the details yet.” I shivered as a draft chilled my already cool skin. “Oliver, do you think we could catch up later? I’m desperate for a hot bath.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, leading me to the elevators. “Thank you so much again, Lucia. You don’t know what it means to me to have you here.”

  “No problem.”

  As soon as the elevator doors separated me from Oliver’s view, I slumped against the glass windows and hammered the button for the twentieth floor. It was only lunchtime, and I was completely exhausted from the morning’s ski run. Hopefully Riley wouldn’t make this a habit. Halfway up, my phone rang. I patted down my jacket’s many pockets to locate it. By the time I did, I had a missed call from Jazmin. I called her back.

  “Hola, mi amor,” she said. “You didn’t call me last night. How’s King and Queens?”

  “Friggin’ nuts.” I stepped out on the twentieth floor, staggered into my suite, and stripped out of my many layers. “This place is weird, Jazmin. I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  As I filled the Jacuzzi tub with hot water and enough bubbles to turn the bathroom into a car wash, I told Jazmin everything that had happened between the time she left yesterday and now, including Riley’s weird freakout the night before and the broken vase.

  “I’m sure the vase was a fluke,” she assured me. “Anything could have made it fall. And you don’t know for sure Riley was looking at it the night before. You said she was just looking into the kitchen. She could have been staring at anything.”

  “Yeah, but there’s this vibe up here.” I set my phone on the side of the tub so I wouldn’t drop it and sank beneath the bubbles, sighing as the warm water soothed my aching bones and made my cold skin tingle. “I could barely sleep last night.”

  “Well, it’s not like there are actual ghosts hanging out in the resort, Lucia,” Jazmin said. “It probably feels that way because no one’s around.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” I said, flicking bubbles from the tips of my fingers. “But I think most of it is because of Riley. I feel bad for her, but that kid is creepy. She could make anyone think this place is haunted.”

  “Hang in there,” Jazmin said. “In six days, Madame Lucia will be free of creepy children and have ten thousand dollars to her name.”

  “Six days,” I mused. “I can’t wait.”

  5

  Two days later, I had made no further progress with Riley. After our trip up the mountain, she avoided me as much as possible. If she saw me in the lobby or at the Eagle’s View, she veered in the opposite direction. The time we spent together was sanctioned by her father. We sat in the chairs by the fireplace or wasted the afternoon reading books in the café, but Riley never brought up the voices unless I asked her to, and then she ducked and dived to avoid my questions, bombarding me with philosophy theories or psychological facts to divert my attention. On the morning of my fourth day at King and Queens, I woke up to a cheerful sun and a hot plate of pancakes from room service. As I dunked them in maple syrup and rented the latest movie from the hotel’s direct TV service, I decided on a new plan of action regarding Riley. If she wanted to tell me something, that was great. If not, I would treat her like any other twelve-year-old I’d been asked to babysit. No talk of ghosts or voices. Just two people keeping each other company. The wad of cash from Oliver piled up behind the coffee machine. I had two thousand dollars already, just from living at the hotel for a couple of days. The more bills I added to the pile, the less I noticed the resort’s eerie vibes. It was no use to worry or buy into Riley’s shenanigans. This was practically a paid vacation. Why shouldn’t I treat it as such?

  Since Riley was often as evasive as a garden snake, I spent my spare time at the resort rebooting Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed. The channel itself had taken a nosedive after the last video’s suppose
d hilarity petered off. Though it had been less than a week since my last upload, subscribers were already complaining about the lack of content. I filmed a short vlog, sans Madame Lucia’s usual garb, and announced that the channel would be undergoing a reconstruction. New content was to return at some point in the near future. My appearance in the video—normal Lucia with normal hair and makeup dressed in normal jeans and a King and Queens sweater from the gift shop downstairs—sent my followers into a frenzy. Some of them mourned Madame Lucia’s old look. Some of them asked if I was okay, wondering if the events of the Parlour’s last episode had depressive effects on me. Others complimented the new look, claiming they never cared for Madame Lucia’s overdramatic costume. They preferred the new, natural look. Apparently, it made me more relatable.

  Satisfied with that for now, I turned my attention to what I wanted for the channel in the future. Between Riley’s confession from the other night and the footage I’d taken around the resort during the last two days, I had enough content for a new vlog about King and Queens. But my viewers didn’t just want Riley’s ghost stories. They wanted action. That was why the previous videos were so popular. They stood in as evidence that ghosts and spirits existed in this world. Other than the mystery of the broken vase, which I hadn’t gotten on film, there was nothing else indicative of a haunting in the resort. If I wanted the new vlog to hit, it had to include corroboration of King and Queen's otherworldly occupants, so I went into town and bought several reels of fishing wire.

  When I returned, I sat down to edit what I already had of my first official King and Queen’s vlog. The bartender, whose name was Karli, worked as the lounge’s barista in the morning. She brought me a piping hot Americano and joined me at my table. Karli was one of the quieter employees at King and Queens. She didn’t ski or snowboard, so she didn’t fall in with Liam, Ari, Imani, and the others. She did, however, admit to mistakenly falling for Tyler Watson. According to her, he had a sweet side before his mother died. She wouldn’t talk about him unless in passing. It became our routine to work together in the Eagle’s View. Since no one else was around for her to serve—except Detective Daniel Hawkins on the rare occasion—she sat at my table and studied for her undergraduate degree in biology.

  “What’s with the fishing wire?” she asked, adding cream to her coffee as she set up her note-taking accessories. Highlighters, pens of different colored inks, and tiny sticky notes to mark certain pages in her massive textbook. “We don’t really do ice fishing around here. At least, not as far as I know.”

  I shoved the reels under the table and out of sight. “It’s for my YouTube channel.”

  “Oh, right. Madame Lucia. Sometimes, I forget that’s you.”

  “The others don’t.”

  Anytime I passed Imani in the lobby, the teenager bombarded me with questions. When was Madame Lucia’s next episode coming out? Was I going to feature Riley and King and Queens on the show? Could she be the next caller?

  “I don’t spend as much time on the Internet as the others do,” Karli said. “Between classes and work, I don’t have time. Oh, crap—”

  “What?”

  She hastily slammed her textbook shut and shoved it toward my side of the table like it didn’t belong to her. “Mr. Watson’s here. Cover for me, will you?”

  Unsure how I was supposed to pass off a biology textbook as my own, I slid it off the table and into the bag with the fishing reels as Karli returned to the bar. Oliver made his way over to my table.

  “Two coffees?” he said, eyeing both mine and Karli’s cups. “Aren’t we ambitious?”

  “More like exhausted.” I took a sip of Karli’s mocha to prove it was mine, but it was laden with artificially flavored syrup. I hid a grimace. “Hmm, delicious. What’s up, Oliver?”

  He took Karli’s recently vacated chair and scooted closer to me. I discreetly switched desktops on my laptop. Though I had permission to film in King and Queens, I wasn’t so sure how Oliver would feel about me using Riley as the centerpiece of the Parlour’s next episode.

  “We haven’t talked about Riley in a couple days,” he said. “How’s it going with her? Are you making any progress? I noticed she’s not around this morning.”

  “You know Riley,” I said. “She doesn’t do anything unless it’s on her terms. I tend to wait until she’s ready to work, and then she finds me.”

  Oliver signaled Karli to bring him his usual cup of Irish breakfast tea. “She gave you the slip, didn’t she?”

  Yes.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  He chuckled as Karli poured hot water for him. “Don’t worry. I guessed this would happen. Riley’s very independent. She likes to solve all of her problems by herself. I think that’s why she wouldn’t let me take her to a doctor. I thought she might be more willing to talk to you, but—”

  “We are talking,” I insisted. “And it’s evident that Riley is indeed able to communicate with the spirits here at King and Queens.”

  Oliver dunked two tea bags in and out of his mug. “Really? Would you mind elaborating? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand your line of work.”

  “This lodge is home to many restless spirits,” I said, dropping into a paler version of Madame Lucia’s accent on instinct. “It just so happens that Riley is the only one with an ability like mine to sense them. Tell me, has anything strange ever happened in the lodge? Something that might have trapped a number of spirits here?”

  He stirred his tea, tried a sip, and added a dollop of honey. “Nothing I can think of.”

  “Hmm.” I feigned a pensive mood. “Oliver, I get the sense that Riley is overwhelmed by all of the spirits here, but she seems free of them on the slopes. Perhaps if you’d like to know more about what she’s thinking and feeling, it might be prudent for the two of you to traverse the mountain together.”

  “Together?” He tapped his spoon against the saucer. The rattle of metal on porcelain grated on my nerves. “No, no. Riley and I haven’t been skiing in years. She only skis—skied—with her mother.”

  “All the more reason,” I said. “Riley’s normal routine was upset by your wife’s untimely passing. She might respond in a positive manner if you return her to a regular schedule, and spending time with her will reinforce the idea that she still has a parent who loves and cares for her.”

  Oliver swept his patchy hair from one side of his head to the other. “You’re right, aren’t you? I’ve been ignoring my children.”

  “No, no.” I patted his hand. “You’re all dealing with this as best as you can. However, none of you have consulted the others. Now’s the time to do that. It’s been a few weeks since the incident. Reconnect with your children. Take today off and go skiing with Riley. I’m sure she’d love it.”

  “I’d love what?” Riley bounded up the stairs into the lounge, dressed in her atrocious ski outfit once again. Snowflakes dotted her beanie but melted rapidly into the fabric.

  “Have you been outside?” Oliver asked, all parental disapproval. “I thought I told you to let me know before you do that.”

  “I just went for a walk around the garden,” Riley said, dusting snow off her shoulders. Ice splattered to the floor and seeped into the lounge’s carpet. “That’s all.”

  Oliver glanced through the Eagle’s View massive windows. It wasn’t snowing nearly enough to warrant Riley’s chilly appearance. “Uh-huh. If that’s the case, you won’t mind accompanying me for a ski then, right?”

  “You want to ski with me?”

  “Yeah, I thought it might be nice to have a ride with my daughter. What do you think?”

  She shuffled from foot to foot. “I don’t have to work with Lucia today? No offense, Lucia.”

  “None taken,” I said. “I think your dad wants to spend some time with you on his own. What do you say?”

  Riley looked at Oliver, who waited patiently for her answer, and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I need a new pair of gloves though.” She held up her hands to show us ho
w chapped and red they were. “I lost mine somewhere.”

  “Here.” I reached into my bag and handed her a pair of old but effective purple gloves. “I couldn’t find mine this morning either, but these were hanging around in my room. I guess another guest left them. They’re a little too small for me, but they should fit you just fine.”

  Riley pulled them on and flexed her hands. It was a perfect fit. “That’ll work. You ready to go, Dad?”

  Oliver jostled the table as he stood, spilling our tea and coffee over the lips of their mugs. “Yeah. Yes. Well, no. I should change. Do you want to—should we—?”

  “I’ll meet you at the chairlift in ten minutes,” Riley offered.

  “Great,” he said, relieved she’d taken over. “I’ll be right back.”

  As he headed up the elevator to his suite, Riley said to me, “What’s gotten into him? He never wants to spend time with me. He’s always obsessing about the resort.”

  “Maybe he’s changing his tune,” I suggested. “Business is slow, and your dad’s hurting too. Give him a chance.”

  “It’s weird,” she said, watching the glass elevator ascend. “Did you put him up to this?”

  “I might have encouraged it.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Riley, I’m trying to help.”

  She sat in the chair right next to mine, so close that melted snow dripped onto my pants and chilled me through the fabric. “I’m not a puppet. Just because we both hear voices doesn’t mean we’re the same. All it means is everyone else thinks we’re crazy. Both of us. Not just me. My father doesn’t trust or respect you. Don’t get it in your head that he does.”

  The creepiest thing about King and Queens was Riley Watson. Just when I started to think she was a normal kid, she went and said something like that. Something too mature and insightful for a twelve-year-old. Something with an air about the words, like she knew more than anyone else did. And there was that stare again, clear as the snow falling outside, fixed and unblinking as if she were gaining access to your mind through eye contact.