“Sure,” I said. “When do you need me?”
“Is right now too soon?” Stella asked, clasping her hands in prayer position. “I’ll only be an hour or so, and Odette naps like she’s dead. She probably won’t wake up the entire time you’re there.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better offer. Hanging out with baby Odette sounded way better than going back to my own room alone. “Right now sounds great. What floor is your room?”
“The twentieth.”
“Oh, same as me.” The elevator button was already alight. “I didn’t realize anyone else was staying up there.”
“I keep to myself,” Stella said, gazing dreamily beyond the glass. “Reading and such, you know.”
Stella’s room was across the hall from mine. The suite was a mirror image of the one I was staying in, though the view from Stella’s balcony included the dueling chairlifts of both mountain lodges. A constant mechanic whir, muted but audible, filled the room. It drove me crazy, but Stella didn’t seem to mind it as she led me into the bedroom. A polished wooden crib with hand-carved details stood next to the bed. Odette, pink and perfect with her tufts of inky curls, snoozed peacefully on a smooth mattress printed with cartoon cows and moons.
“Wow, she’s like a tiny little goddess,” I said. I wanted to touch one of Odette’s chunky baby hands but refrained from doing so. If she was sick, I didn’t want to give her any more germs than she could handle. “She needs a staff or a trident to rule over her people.”
Stella laughed and stroked Odette’s flawless curls. “I’m afraid her people are limited to me and her father, and she certainly doesn’t need a staff or a trident to rule either of us.”
“I can see why,” I said. “I would definitely bow down to her.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay with her?” Stella asked.
“Absolutely,” I assured her. “I used to watch over my nieces all the time before my sister moved out of state. She’s safe with me. Do you mind if I get my laptop before you leave though? I thought I might get some work done while Odette catches up on her beauty sleep.”
Stella scrunched her eyebrows. “Your laptop?”
“I’m a vlogger,” I explained. “But I’ve been slacking on providing my viewers with content. If I don’t upload a video soon, they might revolt and make me irrelevant. And we all know that irrelevant is the worst thing to be on the Internet.”
She chuckled in that polite way people did when they didn’t quite understand what you were saying but didn’t want to offend you by asking you to repeat yourself. “Go ahead. Fetch whatever you need.”
I ducked across the hall and into my own suite to get my things. The hot chocolate had dried on the carpet in the bedroom, proof that something had knocked it over in the middle of the night. On the upside, nothing made my skin question its place on my body. Whatever visited us last night appeared to have moved on, but its absence didn’t make the suite any less creepy. I was glad to return to Stella’s room, which smelled faintly of baby powder and rose petals.
“Help yourself to whatever you like,” Stella said, threading her arms through the sleeves of a fabulous, floor-length coat. “There’s not much in the fridge, but feel free to order room service on me. It’s the least I can do in return for your trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” I insisted. I set up my laptop at the table by the window. “And Oliver’s comped my entire stay anyway, so I can order room service for free.”
“Oliver?”
“Mr. Watson.”
“Right.” She shouldered her purse. “I’m off. See you in a little while.”
“Be safe out there. I hear a big storm’s coming.”
She was gone before the warning left my mouth, too preoccupied with Odette’s oncoming ear infection. I hoped she could get in and out of the pharmacy in town before the snow started coming down too hard. Flakes drifted by the window and alighted on the railing of the balcony, piling up at a rapid pace. It wouldn’t be long before the resort was covered in a fresh layer of powder.
A baby monitor was perched on the corner of the kitchen counter. It was one of those high-tech ones with audio and visuals. Though I hadn’t noticed a camera mounted to Odette’s fancy crib, the monitor’s screen showed a perfect angle of the dozing baby. I set the monitor next to my laptop to keep an eye on her and got to work. After days of accumulating footage from around the lodge, I was long overdue for an editing session. As I dragged and dropped clips into a semi-coherent order, I lost myself in the puzzle pieces of the vlog. The footage was never boring. Either it showcased the enormity and grandeur of King and Queens, starred Riley in the middle of an interview, or featured me exploring the mysterious parts of the resort. Tyler’s prank was the best stuff I’d caught on camera in a long time. My terror as I fled from the library in the old wing wasn’t staged. The camera caught glimpses of the falling bricks and Tyler’s friends in their hooded getups. That combined with Riley’s confessions and King and Queens’s general air of creepiness made this episode of Madame Lucia’s the most realistic yet. Maybe the Parlour wasn’t doomed after all.
“Lucia?”
I perked up at the sound of my own name. For one wild moment, I thought baby Odette had called out for me, but a look at the monitor showed her napping in the crib. The voice called again, this time accompanied by a muted knock.
“Lucia, it’s Riley.”
I got up and opened the door to Stella’s suite. Riley waited outside my room across the hall. “Hey.”
She turned around. “What are you doing over there?”
“One of the other guests asked me to babysit for an hour,” I said. “The kid’s asleep. I’m sure her mom won’t mind if you join me as long as we don’t wake her up.”
“I’m pretty quiet,” Riley said as she joined me in Stella’s living room. She wandered over to my laptop and examined the screen. “This looks complicated. You know how to do all this?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” I pulled a chair around to the same side of the table so she could watch me work. “It’s glorified copy-and-pasting.”
She pointed to a thumbnail. “That’s me.”
“Sure is. You didn’t change your mind about being in my vlog, did you?”
“No, I guess it’s okay.” She picked up the baby monitor. “She’s cute. Not like other babies.”
“I think so too.”
“Two days,” Riley said.
“Hmm?”
“It’s nearly the weekend,” she clarified. “My dad said you only had to stay here for a week before he would pay you the money. Two more days, and you’re free.”
I closed the laptop to focus on her, but she fiddled with the dials on the monitor rather than making eye contact with me. “Riley, when I promised you that I wouldn’t leave you here alone, it wasn’t dependent on my contract with your dad. I’ll stay as long as I can. You never know. We may end up helping each other out.”
“So you’re not going home on Monday?”
“I don’t really have a place to go home to,” I said. “I’m sort of in the lurch right now.”
“But you’re staying?”
I ruffled her hair. “Yes, I’m staying.”
She melted into the chair. “Good.”
I opened the laptop. “What happened with your dad and Tyler? Did they resolve anything?”
“Detective Hawkins showed up before Tyler could do anything stupid,” she said, pulling a book from the inside of her sweater and opening it to a dog-eared page. “I snuck away as soon as I could. Dad’s not very smart about Tyler.”
“I can see that,” I said. “Any guesses why?”
“He was a mistake.”
“Come again?”
“Tyler,” she clarified. “That’s why he’s so much older than me. He was a mistake. Mom always said he was a surprise, but I think she only did that to make him feel better. Anyway, he wasn’t planned.”
“So your parents got pregnant early.”
“Mom was seventeen.”
“Wow.”
Riley gazed at Odette on the baby monitor. “I never want kids.”
“You don’t have to have them if you don’t want to.”
“Do you want kids?”
“Nah, it’s not in the cards for me,” I said.
“Why not?”
I spliced together a montage of the chair lift and the butterfly garden. “I guess because I don’t see the point of bringing more kids into the world when there are already so many that need homes. If I wanted kids, I’d adopt.”
“A baby?” she asked.
“No, I think I’d get someone older,” I mused. “The older kids get screwed over because all these young couples want babies. I like to think I’d give one of them some hope and love.”
Riley kicked her feet up on the table and buried her nose in her book. “I think you’d be a great mom.”
“Thanks, kid.”
We settled into a comfortable silence. I worked on the vlog while Riley read the book she’d brought with her. The novel was thicker than a cumulative British anthology of literature, but she worked her way through it at a steady pace, her brow scrunched up in concentration. Stella’s suite became a nugget of peace. Between the hush of snowfall and the buzz of the ski lift—which acted more as helpful white noise than distracting annoyance now—it was the perfect place to work. Odette’s little snores were a sense of comfort. I dreaded Stella’s imminent return, unwilling to give up our peaceful space, but the hour passed without word from her.
Absorbed with the vlog, it took me a minute to hear the eerie whispers emanating from the speaker of the baby monitor. Riley tapped the back of my hand, and I accidentally spliced a clip in half.
“What?” I said.
“It’s the voices.”
The whispers grew, as if two people were arguing in Odette’s room while trying not to wake her up. None of the conversation was discernible, but from the look on Riley’s face and the all-too-familiar prickle on my neck, the people involved were not members of the living world. Riley and I stared at the baby monitor. Neither one of us dared to pick it up. Odette rolled over in her sleep, and a dark figure approached the crib.
“It’s them,” Riley whispered, her eyes wide with terror.
The baby monitor shut off.
I shot to my feet, tugging out of Riley’s grasp as she tried to stop me from going into the bedroom. I picked up a brass candlestick from the mantel and held it over my shoulder like a baseball bat as I stormed into the room, shaking from head to toe with rage and fear.
“Get away from her—”
I stopped dead. The bedroom was empty. No dark figure. No crib. No baby.
“Lucia?” Riley’s voice wavered. She appeared in the doorway with the baby monitor in hand. She’d popped open the back of it. “There are no batteries in this thing.”
We fled from the suite. I clasped Riley to my side in the elevator. We rode all the way to the lobby like that, both of us shaking. On the ground floor, we stormed the concierge desk, where Trey tilted his smartphone from side to side as he played a racing game, leaning on two legs of the desk chair.
“Trey!”
He lost his balance and the tall chair fell over. Trey toppled to the ground with a loud grunt. As he righted himself, he said, “Crap, Miss Star, you freaked me out. Did you need something?”
“I need you to look up a guest for me.” I held Riley’s hand in mine. The calluses on her palm grounded me. Every few seconds, she squeezed my fingers as if to check I was still there. “She’s the only other person staying on the twentieth floor.”
“Guest records are confidential,” Trey said as he picked up the chair, “but I don’t have to look it up. I know for a fact that you and Detective Hawkins are the only guests staying at the resort.”
“What do you mean? I saw her.”
“Miss Star, I promise. No one else is checked into this hotel.”
8
My first instinct was to get the hell out of King and Queens. My entire body quaked with loaded energy. The door was right there. I could walk out, call a cab, and be at Jazmin’s in four hours, ten thousand dollars be damned. Any sane person would have left as soon as Riley laid down her creepy sixth sense prediction in my suite that first night.
“That’s not possible.” I bumped Trey out of the way to look at the guest records myself. “She has to be here somewhere.”
“You can’t do that,” he protested.
“Shut up,” Riley said, and he fell silent.
I scrolled through the resort’s files but found no trace of a Stella or Odette on the guest lists. Neither one of them existed. Dazed, I let Trey scoot me out from behind the front desk.
“Can I offer you ladies tea or coffee?” he said, keeping Riley within his eyesight at all times. “You both seem a little on edge.”
“Tea would be great, Trey,” I said. “Thanks.”
He hurried off to the Eagle’s View to fetch it.
“You didn’t see her, did you?” I asked Riley. “Maybe in the lobby earlier or when you were coming up the hallway? She’s a tall brunette with pretty blue eyes, like yours but darker.”
Riley shook her head. “No, I haven’t seen anyone like that.”
“What about Odette? You saw Odette.”
“I saw her on the baby monitor,” she reminded me. “Did you actually see her in the bedroom?”
“Yes,” I insisted. “Stella showed me into that room. There was a crib and a baby. God, am I going insane?”
Riley wiggled the baby monitor at me. Without the batteries, it was a hunk of pointless plastic. “If you are, you’re not alone. I thought this thing was on too, remember?”
I flipped the switch to turn on the monitor, shook it to and fro, and banged it against the palm of my hand, but it gave up nothing. No glitch or fault. I dunked it into the wastebasket next to Trey’s desk, where it swished against the plastic liner bag before thunking to the bottom.
“I gotta get out of here,” I announced. “I can’t deal with this—”
The blood drained from Riley’s face. “What do you mean? You can’t leave!”
“Riley, I know what I said—”
“You promised me,” she protested. “Hours ago, you promised me that you wouldn’t leave me here alone with the ghosts. Madame Lucia—”
“Madame Lucia isn’t real,” I said. “I made you that promise before I knew actual dead people were roaming around the corridors of King and Queens.”
“Shut up. You knew.”
“Excuse me? Don’t say shut up to an adult.”
“Shut up,” she said again with intentional ferocity. Her shoulders rose like the hackles of a plucky alley cat. “You knew, before you came to King and Queens, that you had some kind of power to see ghosts. You created Madame Lucia for a reason, because you felt your ability before you knew about it, so don’t pretend like any of this is a surprise. Furthermore, just because you’re scared doesn’t mean you’re allowed to treat me like everyone else does. I thought you were different. I thought your promises meant something, but I guess you really were just in this for the money, weren’t you?”
The accusation felt like a slap across the face, not because she was wrong, but because it was true. My supposed vacation at King and Queens had never been about helping Riley. I wanted to reboot the Parlour and make a quick buck. If those were the only things that mattered to me, I could cut my losses, take the money Oliver had already given me, and leave the resort, but something else held me back. Someone else. As Riley stared me down, defiant and dauntless, I realized I couldn’t leave here to deal with her ghosts, her father, and her brother all by herself. She needed me.
I sat on the floor, my back against the front desk, and pressed my palms flat against the frigid marble designs. It soothed the nervous heat coursing through my body. Riley deflated and sat cross-legged next to me.
“You’re right,” I said, resting a hand on one of her bony knees
. “I showed up here because I needed the money. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I’m not sure if what you said about my ‘ability’ or whatever is true, but if it is, I can’t run from it, can I?”
“No more than I can,” Riley said.
“I’ll stay,” I said. “Against my better judgement. I overreacted anyway. All Stella wanted was a good babysitter. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to watch Odette while she was alive.”
Riley braided the strings of her hoodie, set them free, and braided them again. “If only all the ghosts at this resort were so nice.”
My experience with the dead made me forget about Riley’s. No matter how many times I watched the footage of my interview with her, her speech about the ghosts’ orders and threats never failed to send shivers up and down my spine. I wanted to forget about Riley’s voices. I wanted to attribute all of King and Queens’s weirdness to Stella’s benign presence. After all, nice ghosts were never the problem in horror movies—all they wanted was to cross over to the other side and be at peace—but the way Riley put it, the resort wasn’t home to one or two benevolent spirits. It was infested with violent ones.
“We need input from an objective source.” I tugged Riley’s hoodie strings out of her hands before she could twist them together a third time. “Someone who won’t judge us for what we’re seeing but can also give us solid advice.”
She scrunched her nose. “I don’t know anyone like that.”
“Good thing I do.”
Jazmin arrived at King and Queens late in the afternoon. When the Land Rover rumbled into the parking lot, I dashed out to help carry her bags. Snow poured from the sky and coated Jazmin’s shoulder-length copper hair. As she rounded the Rover to unpack the trunk, I tackled her into a hug and took a deep breath of the familiar jasmine shampoo she used partially because of her namesake and partially because it smelled so damn good.
“Don’t let go,” I warned, clasping her tightly.
She chuckled and rubbed my back. “I missed you too, Lucia.”
The Haunting of Riley Watson Page 13