The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  “You idiot—” Daniel growled.

  “It was just a prank,” Tyler said.

  I smacked him clean across the face. The slap echoed through the lobby as his sick smile dropped. For a second, he looked completely stunned. Then his expression morphed into one of rage. He lunged toward me. Were it not for Daniel’s solid grip, he would have surely taken me down.

  “You stupid bitch,” he spat. “Slap me again. Do it!”

  “Gladly!” I said but kept my distance. “Riley’s life is complicated enough without your asinine antics. Stay away from her.”

  “You think you know Riley?” Tyler challenged. “Please. You haven’t even been here for a whole week, and she’s already got you wrapped around her little finger. Newsflash, Madame Lucia. That’s what she does. That’s what she did to my mom. That’s what she’s doing to my dad. Everyone thinks she’s so sweet and innocent. That little kid’s a freakin’ monster.”

  “Shut up, Tyler.”

  My hand cocked back of its own accord, but Daniel—holding Tyler steady—blocked the incoming blow with his forearm.

  “Lucia, get out of here,” he ordered, pivoting around to force Tyler in the opposite direction.

  “Me? What about him?”

  “He’s an idiot,” Daniel declared. “But you knew that and you still let him get to you. Get out of here. Go cool off. Mr. Watson’s upset enough about this issue with Nick Porter. We don’t need to add assault charges to his list of things to worry about it.”

  “But—”

  “Go.”

  I threw Tyler one last dirty look before leaving to find Riley. After last night’s run-in with whatever passed through my room, she was bound to be more than upset by Tyler’s prank. At the Eagle’s View, Karli rinsed out bar glasses.

  “Riley snuck into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ve told her a hundred times not to go in there. The cooks don’t like it, and she could get hurt. What happened anyway?”

  “Tyler.”

  “Say no more.”

  I gestured behind the bar. “Do you mind?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I ducked under the counter and pushed through the double doors into the kitchen. The room was hot and stuffy. Fresh bread and pastries rose in the ovens, sending the delectable scents of cinnamon and rising yeast into the air. The cook Xavier and his assistant Matisse jabbered in rapid French. A silver mixing bowl lay askew on the floor, pouring orange batter out of its mouth like a vomiting pumpkin. If their emphatic hand gestures were any indication, neither one was pleased with the situation in the kitchen that morning. When Xavier caught sight of me, he brandished a batter-covered spatula at me.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. “I should have known that you would not be far behind. Get the strange little girl out of my kitchen before we dice her up and put her in the soup for lunch.”

  “Threatening her isn’t going to help,” I said. “She’s already scared. That’s why she came in here in the first place. Where is she?”

  Xavier mouth contorted as if he had smelled something unpleasant. “Je ne sais pas! She ran in so quickly, she knocked over my muffin mix!”

  “Not the muffin mix,” I replied dryly.

  “I was too disturbed by the waste to notice where she went,” he said. “Locate and evacuate her. Please.”

  “Stop talking about her like she’s a rodent.”

  “What is the difference between a little girl and a rat?”

  “You’re not married, are you, Xavier?”

  “Pah!”

  As Xavier made Matisse clean up the mess of batter on the floor, I searched the industrial kitchen. With its many cabinets and pantries, it was the best place in the resort to play hide and seek, as long as the participants didn’t mind the increased likelihood of incurring injuries during the course of the game. A collection of sharpened knives, each longer than my forearm, was stuck to a magnet strip above the counter. The edges of the ovens were blazing hot, waiting for someone to lean on them for a moment too long. Heavy-duty pots and pans hung from a storage rack bolted into the ceiling. Xavier and Matisse handled the cookware with reckless nonchalance, causing the storage rack to swing to and fro. I gave the cooks a wide berth as I continued to look for Riley. Upon opening a cabinet in the far corner of the kitchen, a pair of eyes peered out at me from behind a massive open bag of white rice. Were it not for the light glinting off of Riley’s silver bracelet, I wouldn’t have known she was there.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Riley, everything’s okay now. Detective Hawkins caught your brother. He’s not going to bother you anymore.”

  She curled up smaller, all but disappearing behind the rice. Across the kitchen, Xavier slammed a sauce pan into the metal tub sink, and Riley flinched as the clang echoed through the counter above her.

  “I watched the video from last night,” I told her. “I saw what happened to the hot chocolate. The footage got deleted though. Not sure how. I didn’t do it. I tried to show Daniel, and he—”

  “You saw it?” Her voice squeaked like a mouse. She sniffled and peeked out from behind the rice. “You actually saw it? The ghost?”

  “I saw the hot chocolate levitate,” I explained. “What did you see?”

  “A woman.”

  “What did she look like?”

  She trembled so violently that the rice shifted and threatened to spill over. I righted the bag before Xavier had something else to complain about. Riley tucked her head between her knees like she was trying to disappear into the darkness of the cupboard.

  “Never mind,” I said since the questions weren’t helping Riley’s fragile state of mind. “Forget I asked. Don’t think about her. But can you come out of that cupboard?”

  She didn’t move. I sighed, tugged the rice out, and inserted as much of my top half as would fit into the poorly ventilated space. Riley hugged me.

  “Please don’t leave me,” she whispered. “No one else believes me.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  I stayed there, half in and half out of the cupboard, until Riley’s breath evened out. When she seemed ready, I drew her out of the cupboard into the kitchen’s fluorescent lights.

  “Get off the floor!” Xavier scolded, making Riley jump.

  I ignored him as I helped Riley to her feet. “Come on,” I said to her. “Let’s have breakfast together. Nothing is ever as bad when you have a giant plate of chocolate chip pancakes and an enormous cup of coffee in front of you. Well, maybe not the coffee because you’re still growing. But tea! You can have tea. Do you like tea?”

  Riley actually laughed as I rambled. “I like Irish breakfast tea.”

  “Xavier, make us some Irish breakfast tea,” I ordered the cook. “But have Matisse or Karli bring it out. Your mustache is scaring Riley.”

  His mustache bristled, but it wasn’t copious enough to cover his indignation at being ordered about by a guest of the resort. “You—!”

  “Thanks, Xavier!” I called as I piloted Riley out of the kitchen. “We’ll put in our order soon. Don’t spit in our food, okay? If you do, I’ll know.”

  I gave a cheeky wink over my shoulder at the Frenchman. As soon as the kitchen door shut behind us, he threw a stale baguette against it. Riley cackled, her trauma from that morning all but forgotten. In the lounge, we picked a table near the window to let the sun warm us through the glass, but a layer of clouds moved in to block out the sky.

  “Those are storm clouds,” Riley said, squinting up at the gray dome. “Look at how fast they’re moving. It’s going to be a big one.”

  “You can tell just by the clouds?”

  “When you’ve lived on a mountain for your whole life, you pay attention to what the sky’s trying to tell you,” she said. “No one should be out on the runs right now. It’s going to dump.”

  “Good thing we’re inside.” I slid the breakfast menu across the table to her and opened my own. “I’m content with a cozy day in from the cold. Doesn’t King and Queens have a theater
room? We could take it over and watch whatever you want.”

  Riley flipped through the menu, closed it, and flipped through it again from the back cover. “Did you actually see something on the camera?”

  Apparently, I was never going to get used to the involuntary tremble that shot through my entire body whenever Riley mentioned a ghost. Madame Lucia never reacted with such fear in her parlour. She was always stout and stalwart, confident in her ability to control whatever spirits passed through that apartment. None of it was real, of course, but why should my attitude toward the spiritual world change now? I needed Madame Lucia’s confidence more than ever.

  “I keep trying to work it out in my head,” I said, keeping my voice low though Karli was the only other person in the bar. “How that mug could have lifted off the table on its own or how the vase fell off the shelf my first night here. The feeling I get sometimes late at night. I keep thinking there has to be a reasonable, scientific explanation for it or that my mind is screwing with me.”

  “I thought that too at first,” Riley said. “But what are the odds that the two of us are having a conjoined mental breakdown?”

  “I don’t know. What are they?” I asked. “We’re both cooped up in this resort. No one’s around. We only have each other for company. Cabin fever is a real thing. People have been known to hallucinate—”

  “I’m not hallucinating,” Riley snapped.

  “I didn’t say you were,” I said. “I’m sorry. The last thing you need is another person insinuating that you’re crazy. I know you’re not. I just meant that maybe this place is messing with our heads.”

  Riley folded her cloth napkin into an origami swan and set it on top of the fake candle in the middle of the table. “You and I both know that’s not the case, but you have to admit it to yourself before we can do anything about it. You may not be the Madame Lucia from your YouTube videos, but you are something. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to feel that thing you were talking about. The prickle on your neck. I get that too. I told my dad about it, and he said it was goosebumps. No one else feels it. Just you and me. That’s gotta mean something, right?”

  “You think I’m actually a psychic medium?”

  “If you are, then so am I.”

  I slouched in my chair and stretched out my legs for a long minute. As the muscles loosened themselves, I imagined whatever “feeling” Riley was talking about flowed out of the fibers. If I stopped stretching, it would get caught up in my tendons and bones again, lingering under my skin and waiting for its next opportunity to escape. For five years, I pretended to be something I wasn’t, only to discover I might not have been pretending at all. But if I had the choice between Madame Lucia’s theatrics and Lucia Star’s real-life ghost stories, I preferred the fishing wire and the parlour tricks.

  “Why though?” I asked Riley. “Why us? What makes us different from everyone else?”

  “I’m twelve,” she said. “What makes you think I’d know?”

  “Because you know everything,” I replied. “My only reference for this sort of thing is the new Ghostbusters movie. Can we eat before we talk about anything else? All this communication with the dead is making me hungry.”

  We ordered half the breakfast menu, partially because we were determined to make it through the resort’s supply of eggs and bacon and partially because we wanted to make Xavier crazy. The food was excellent though, and I suspected Matisse made it instead. The pancakes were fluffier than Xavier’s usual batter, and someone had drawn a smiley face on the top of the stack with freshly whipped cream. Riley scooped up an eyeball and licked the cream off her finger.

  “It’s so much better when it’s not from a can,” she said.

  Halfway through the meal, Oliver crested the stairs from the lobby and weaved toward our table. His light-blue shirt sported an ominous, crusty red stain.

  “Oliver, what happened?” I said, springing up from my seat to check the wound. “Did you get hurt?”

  He waved me to sit down. “No, no. I’ve just come from cleaning up Tyler’s mess in the lobby. He tracked that awful stuff everywhere, and I wasn’t going to make Trey mop it up.”

  Riley shrank, disappearing beneath the table at the mention of her brother, but Oliver knelt beside her chair.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry,” he said, stroking her hair. “Detective Hawkins told me what Tyler did to you this morning. I wanted to let you know that I grounded him for the rest of the season. He won’t be allowed to snowboard until spring, and by then all of the good powder will be gone. Does that seem fair?”

  Riley groaned, unfolded her swan napkin, and covered her face with it. “No, that’s going to make everything worse.”

  Oliver appeared stupefied. “How? What do you mean?”

  “At least if he’s out snowboarding, he’s not inside to bother me,” Riley said. “Now he’s going to be here all the time.”

  “It’s different this time,” Oliver said. “I really laid down the law. He’s not going to scare you again. I promise.”

  Riley shoved her chair away from her father. “You think that just because you said not to, he won’t do it? Dad, you’re so oblivious. Tyler does whatever he wants.”

  “I can assure you he’s done with doing what he wants,” Oliver said. “My focus is on you, Riley. I’m going to do whatever needs to be done to help you, and Tyler can—”

  “Tyler can what?”

  The eldest Watson kid had been listening from a shadowy corner of the lounge. He emerged like a demon from beneath the mezzanine, his gait slow and calculated as he approached our table. My skin crawled at the sight of him. He hadn’t managed to wash off all the fake blood. It coagulated in his hair and beneath his fingernails as if he’d bathed in real blood after pulling off a successful murder.

  “Why am I not surprised?” he said, scowling at Riley. “You were always the favorite. I get grounded, and you get everything you want. Are you happy now?”

  I planted myself between Tyler and Riley. “Where’s Detective Hawkins?”

  He licked his lips and glanced at mine to screw with me. “Not so quick to pull the trigger when your boyfriend isn’t around, huh? Danny Boy had to check in with the station, so it’s just you and me, sweetheart.”

  “Tyler,” Oliver warned. “I already told you. You’re grounded. If you want to make this worse—”

  “You can’t ground me,” Tyler scoffed. “I’m almost twenty years old.”

  “And you live under my roof,” Oliver thundered. “When you move out, you can do whatever you want, but I’m the boss here.”

  “Oh yeah?” Tyler stepped around me to stand as close to his father’s face as space would allow. He towered over the older man, making it difficult for Oliver to exert any aura of power. “I’d like to see you try to be the boss of me, old man. You ignored me my whole life. You tried to pretend that Riley was your only kid. What makes you think you can change that now?”

  “Sit down,” Oliver said.

  “Make me.”

  Oliver didn’t back away from Tyler’s challenging stare. “Lucia, would you mind giving me and my family some time to talk? We have a few kinks to work out.”

  I looked at Riley. “Do you want me to go?”

  She shook her head.

  “Miss Star,” Oliver said. “I appreciate your concern for my daughter, but this is a family matter, and you are not a part of this family. Please go.”

  Though the request was worded politely, his tone was far from courteous. Riley begged with her eyes for me to stay, but all I could do was give her an apologetic shrug. As I collected the camera and took my leave, I caught sight of Karli. Her face was set like concrete as she waved her phone at me. If anything drastic happened, she had a call to the police already set up. In the lobby, Daniel attempted to wipe fake blood off his gray thermal with a wet paper towel. I grabbed a fresh towel from the front desk and helped him blot.

  “I’m glad I caught you,” I said, dabbing at his sleeve. “The Wa
tsons are playing family feud in the Eagle’s View. Oliver kicked me out, but someone needs to be up there in case Tyler does something stupid. Can you spy on them for me?”

  “This case is starting to feel like a domestic dispute,” he grumbled. “I’m a homicide detective, not a family therapist, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Please go up there,” I said. “I’m sure Oliver can hold his own, but I’m worried about Riley. She doesn’t need the stress. This shirt is toast by the way.”

  He stretched it out to examine the damp, stained fabric. “You’re right. It’s a goner. I was heading up to the Eagle’s View anyway for a drink.”

  “A drink?”

  “Water,” he rectified as he tossed the shredded paper towels into the wastebasket next to the front desk. “Or coffee. Something non-alcoholic. I’m as sober as a rock. Would you like to join me? Cappuccinos on me.”

  “I got kicked out, remember?”

  “Right, right,” he said. “Well, I better get up there. Thanks for the heads up, Lucia.”

  With Daniel off to settle the Watson family dispute, there was nothing for me to do but head back upstairs to my haunted suite. As I waited for one of the elevators to arrive on the first floor, I flipped the camera on. The memory card hadn’t magically restored itself. The footage of last night’s hot chocolate ghost was officially gone. Somehow, I was more disappointed about not being able to include it in my King and Queens vlog than losing all evidence of the resort’s supernatural guests. The elevator dinged. The door slid open, and I stepped inside without looking up.

  “Something wrong?” said a lilting voice. It was Stella. I was so absorbed with the malfunctioning camera that I hadn’t noticed her at first.

  “Hi,” I said. “No, nothing’s wrong. Actually, yes— Don’t worry about it. How are you? I haven’t seen you in a few days. How’s your daughter? Odette, right?”

  “I’m afraid she might be coming down with an ear infection,” Stella said. “I’d like to run to the store for something to soothe it, but I’m afraid to leave her alone for too long. Say, is your offer to babysit still good?”