The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Please don’t be dead bodies,” I muttered, pulling the lock free of the door and flipping the hinge to the other side. “Please don’t be dead bodies.”

  The room was dark. I searched the wall for a light switch, found one, and flipped it up. A single bulb, hanging from a string in the middle of the ceiling, flickered on.

  It wasn’t dead bodies. It was someone’s office. The place was papered with yellowing newspaper articles, old pictures, and handwritten notes. A small desk was stationed in the middle of the little room, leaning at an angle. From the looks of its scorched legs, it had been pilfered from what was left of the old wing. A single chair kept it company. There was no rhyme or reason to the contents in the room. The clippings were scattered and pinned to the walls, across the floor, and all over the desk. Paper crunched and rustled under my shoes as I approached the desk and examined its contents. The articles and photos all encompassed the same event: the tragic 1988 fire of King and Queens.

  Crimson Basin’s King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort was once considered a prime destination for skiers and snowboarders from all over the world. With its top-of-the-line accommodations, roomy suites, panoramic views, and remote access to some of the best ski runs in the world, King and Queens was the ultimate skier’s paradise, but no more. Ever since the fire two weeks ago that killed forty-nine people, King and Queens has been in a state of flux. This reporter visited the tragic scene, interviewed the board of trustees responsible for the resort’s future, and investigated the untold story behind the biggest tragedy in Vermont’s recent history. Read ahead to find out more.

  I skimmed the article. Some of it, I already knew. The fire had taken out the majority of King and Queens’s original structure. Oliver, eight years old at the time, was the only survivor. His parents and sister didn’t make it out. Since the youngest Watson wasn’t of eligible age to run an entire hotel, a board of trustees took it over. Oliver was sent off to live with an unknown relative, one that didn’t have anything to do with the hotel business. By the time he was old enough to accept his inheritance, he had become a reckless playboy. A few articles documented Oliver’s multiple arrests. He’d gotten into all sorts of trouble prior to taking responsibility for King and Queens—he’d even stolen a yacht from a marina in Monte Carlo and crashed it—but his excessive funds bailed him out every time. Considering Oliver’s frazzled personality these days, it was hard to imagine him as the blond billionaire playboy with a penchant for destruction. Nevertheless, the faded photos were impossible to deny. Oliver’s sharp nose gave him away. He was undeniably attractive back then, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist chiseled out from years of skiing. It was no wonder Thelma fell for him so quickly. From the looks of it, Oliver and Tyler had more in common than I thought. Tyler, with all of his terrible behavior, was the spitting image of his father in attitude, not in looks. Riley had that portion covered on her own.

  A surprising amount of articles focused on Oliver. The newspapers and tabloids had been obsessed with the little boy who had survived the fire. Apparently, he shouldn’t have. The blaze was so intense that it took the Crimson Basin fire department several hours to extinguish everything. I picked up another article that looked promising. It was an obituary of sorts that focused on the Watson family.

  Richard Watson, owner and operator of King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort, has passed away in a fire at his own establishment. He was forty-two. Richard was known for his incredible charity work and, of course, the resort itself. His wife and daughter, Stella and Odette respectively, also died in the fire. The Watson family is survived by its youngest member, eight-year-old Oliver, who sustained life-threatening injuries in the accident.

  Stella and Odette. The ghosts who haunted the resort. Stella was Oliver’s mother, and Odette was his sister. How the hell had I missed that? There was an entire photo album sitting in my suite full of the evidence. It had pictures of Stella and Odette and the rest of the Watson family, but I never made the connection. How did Riley not recognize her own aunt roaming the hallways as a spirit? I remembered we’d talked about this before. Oliver kept Riley in the dark about the fire, claiming she was too young to hear about the tragedy, but I never thought that he would keep the history of his family from her too. Was it too painful for him to speak about the people he lost so long ago?

  Odette and Riley had the same hard gaze, but Odette bore more of a resemblance to Tyler than anyone else in the Watson family. How had I not seen it? The black hair and sapphire eyes? There was enough of a difference in their face shapes to distract me from the similarities, as if Tyler’s genetics had been watered down over the years. My brain worked through their family tree like a weird puzzle. Oliver was closer to the haunting of his hotel than I thought. It was no wonder Riley was the focus of Odette’s goal. They were family. That was why Odette had led me down here. She wanted me to know who she was.

  I collected a few of the articles that explained the truth about who died in the fire. Riley needed to see them for herself. As I turned to leave, a pile of books in the corner of the room caught my eye. They were the only things stacked neatly as opposed to the rest of the disarray. I glanced into the hallway, checking to see if the disembodied eyes bothered to monitor my progress. It was empty, so I knelt by the books in the corner and picked up the topmost one. It was a leather-bound journal. Half of the pages were full of scribbled entries. The other were blank, as if someone came down here regularly to jot down their daily life. I opened it to the first page.

  I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson. I am Oliver Watson.

  The declaration was written over and over again. The handwriting varied. Sometimes, it was neat and concise. Other times, it was indecipherable, as if Oliver had been in a varied state of mind during that time. I checked the other journals. Every single one of them was covered, front to back, with the same phrase. Each journal was dated too, starting in 1990 and going all the way to present day. This was not the work of a sane man. Oliver needed help. Before Tyler’s death, I wouldn’t have believed Oliver came to the old wing and filled out these journals on a regular basis. He seemed normal enough. Prior to Thelma’s ski lift accident, King and Queens attracted enough visitors to keep it afloat. Oliver had not yet failed his family’s legacy, but it was starting to get to him. The person who kept these journals was underneath Oliver’s customer service persona, and he was starting to come out more often.

  A shrill ring made me jump out of my skin. My phone. I’d forgotten to silence it before descending into the basement of the old King and Queens. I wrenched it out of my pocket, wrestling with the confines of my jeans, and swiped to answer the call so that the stupid thing would shut up.

  “Jazmin, I’m fine.” I muttered before she could say hello. “I can’t talk right now. I just hit major King and Queens gold. Would you believe Odette is Oliver’s—?”

  “Lucia, is Riley with you?”

  The question stopped me dead in my tracks. “What? No, why?”

  “She’s missing,” Jazmin said, her voice cracking with stress. “I woke up in the living room and both of you were gone. I figured you took her out for some weird psychic medium purposes, but if she’s not with you and she’s not with me—”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  I knew it in my heart as soon as I said it, and the other ghosts weren’t happy about it. Newspaper clippings tore themselves off the walls and the floors to form a swirling vortex of the past. The corners of the pages nicked my skin and pulled my hair as I fought my way to the door. I covered my face with my hands and made a run for it. Just as I cleared the office and stumbled into the hallway, the papers burst into flames. I screamed as the flaming tornado followed me to the ladder tunnel.

  “Lucia!” Jazmin yelled through the phone. “What’s going on? What’s that sound?”

  I couldn’t answer, too busy clambering up the ladder
as fast as I could. The metal rungs were red hot, burning the skin off the palm of my hands.

  “It’s not real,” I shouted at myself over the roar of the fire as it licked my heels from below. “Odette said it’s not real.”

  The blisters on my palms and the heat climbing up my legs begged to differ. I heaved myself out of the manhole, pulled my legs free, and slammed the trap door shut just as the flames reached the top of the tunnel. I had two seconds to catch my breath before the entire library went up in smoke.

  With another yelp, I scrambled to my feet and ran from the room. The spirits had awakened, and they were determined to take me to death with them. Hazy figures appeared from the smoke, mouths agape as they screamed. But they weren’t screaming at me. These were the yells of terror that the guests of King and Queens let out while they burned alive thirty years ago, calling for their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers as they died. Screams of pain and pleading. Prayers and confessions. Tears poured down my cheeks as I ran wildly through the old wing, crashing into burning debris every step of the way. My own prayers dropped from my lips without conscious thought. In the corner of the corridor, right before the lobby, was an emergency fire extinguisher that I didn’t remember seeing earlier. I yanked it off the wall, pulled the pin, and shot a stream of white foam to clear the path ahead of me. It worked, putting out the blaze directly in front of me and silencing whatever spirits controlled that portion of the burn. With a stoic stride, I kept going, coating the flaming red lobby in globs of the stuff, until I reached the chained door. Like before, when I slipped through the gap into the ballroom and looked back, the old wing was just as it was when I had arrived. Even the fire extinguisher had vanished. I ran from the ballroom, wiping my eyes on Riley’s dirty, singed sweatshirt. Riley. Where was she?

  In the lobby, Jazmin was pacing from the door to the front desk so quickly that she was practically a blur. When she saw me, she rushed into my arms. I winced, anticipating pain from all the blisters that the fire had left, but no discomfort came. This time around, my illusionary wounds healed themselves. Did that mean I was getting better or worse at balancing my energy?

  “No sign of her?” I asked, patting Jazmin’s back.

  As tall as she was, her hug engulfed me. She drew away to let me breathe. “No, not since I woke up. What’s all over your sweatshirt? Never mind. I’ve searched most of the resort, but I don’t know this place like she does. God, what if someone took her? What if the killer—?”

  “Don’t think like that,” I said, though my own mind was racing through the exact same thought process. “This isn’t the first time Riley’s disappeared. Let’s not worry yet.”

  But I was worried. Because the feeling in my gut that something was terribly wrong hadn’t gone away. My stomach felt tight, and something pulled at my core, like a rope leading me toward a final destination.

  “She’s definitely not in the old wing, so we can rule that out,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I was just there.”

  “Lucia, why would you go back there without telling me?”

  “You can yell at me after we find Riley,” I promised her. “Let’s get Oliver. He should know that she’s missing.”

  I turned around and led Jazmin back into the hallway that I’d just come from. This time, I bypassed the old restaurant and ballroom—I could have sworn I smelled smoke coming from the old wing—and continued to Oliver’s room. We both pounded on the door, shouting.

  “Oliver, wake up!” I called. “Riley’s missing.”

  “We need your help,” Jazmin added.

  No matter how much we shouted and knocked, no one came to the door.

  “Do we have the right suite?” Jazmin asked, looking up and down the hall for a clue.

  “We don’t have time to check every room on this floor.” I pressed my ear to the door, listening for sounds of life inside. Nothing. “Forget this. If Riley’s in trouble, we’re all she has. Let’s keep moving.”

  “Where to next?”

  “Riley’s room. Fifth floor corner suite,” I recalled from a previous conversation. “I’ve never been there, but that’s where she used to hide from Tyler.”

  It was a relief to get out of the older half of the resort. As we headed for the fifth floor, my heart did the opposite of race. Instead, it went silent. In the elevator, Jazmin’s pulse hammered in her neck, but mine seemed to have forgotten I was alive. I pressed two fingers to my wrist to make sure my heart was still beating. For a second, I didn’t feel anything, but as panic surged through me, so did another rush of blood. The elevator doors opened, and we ran toward the last door in the hall.

  “Riley?” I called, hammering on the door harder than I’d knocked on Oliver’s. “Come on, kid. You’re scaring us.”

  No answer. I slammed my fist against the door with such gusto that it rattled in the frame, and Jazmin jumped out of the way.

  “Get back.” I took a big step away, raised my foot, and put my entire weight behind a front kick against the door. Instead of forcing it in, my foot went right through the old wood. Not exactly what I was going for, but the jagged hole was big enough for me to reach through and open the door from the inside. Jazmin rushed inside to look for Riley, but I didn’t get my hopes up. I already knew she wasn’t here.

  “Now what?” Jazmin said.

  The rope around my heart, whatever it was, pulled me downward, back to the first floor. Riley was somewhere below. I took Jazmin’s hand and led her from Riley’s room, back to the elevator. We returned to the lobby, and I looked down the hallway blocked off with velvet rope.

  “What are we doing here?” Jazmin whispered, squeezing my hand.

  I stared at the door to Tyler’s room, halfway to the end of the hall. “I can feel her. We’re getting closer.”

  Jazmin resisted as I inched toward the forbidden hallway. “Are you telepathic now too or something?”

  I ducked under the velvet rope. Jazmin let go of my hand, staying on the safe side. “No, but we have a connection. Something’s wrong. If we don’t find her soon—”

  I didn’t finish my statement, not wanting to think about it. The truth was: the closer I got to Tyler’s room, the more that rope tightened around my chest, squeezing my heart, lungs, and ribs in toward each other until I thought I might burst. The last thing I wanted to do was check the inside of Tyler’s room. My biggest fear was finding Riley’s body the way his had been: spread eagle on the floor, her limbs limp and bloodless, abdomen full of violent gashes. Bile rose in my throat as I approached Tyler’s door.

  “Please,” I whispered to no one in particular as I grasped the handle. “Don’t let it be Riley.”

  I threw the door wide.

  No Riley. No corpse. But plenty of dried blood and flies to go around. I gagged and covered my nose with the collar of Riley’s sweatshirt. The room reeked of rot and decay. Without a crime scene clean-up crew, Tyler’s leftovers remained where we’d left them on the day we moved his body. For three days, the room had been festering.

  “What’s wrong?” Jazmin said, gathering the nerve to duck under the velvet rope.

  I shoved her away from the room and shut the door. “It’s not Riley, but you don’t want to go in there. Trust me.”

  Jazmin punched the wall. The aged plaster buckled under her knuckles. I’d never seen her like this, so angry and hopeless. I grabbed her hand as she wound up for another jab. The bones on the back of her hand were already red and angry.

  “That won’t help,” I said. “Come on. We’ll find her.”

  “This is my fault.” She ducked her head, letting her curtain of coppery hair cover her face. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep, I would’ve noticed she’d left the room.”

  “You can’t be on your guard twenty four-seven,” I said. “You need to sleep. I left too, remember? I should’ve known better than to leave the two of you alone.”

  “You should be able to trust me to keep Riley safe,
and I didn’t.”

  “Jazmin, stop,” I said. “This wasn’t your fault. I’m sure Riley’s fine—”

  A sleepy voice from the end of the hallway interrupted me. “Ladies?”

  It was Nick Porter, his usually perfect hair squished to one side from sleep. He wore blue satin pajamas and a workman’s overcoat, and he leaned against the wall sans cane. He breathed heavily, and he only put so much weight on the toes of his left leg.

  As innocently as possible, I guided Jazmin away from Tyler’s room. “Hey, Nick. We were just, uh, looking for fresh ice. The top floor’s out.”

  He wasn’t buying it. I wouldn’t have either if I’d seen someone standing outside the scene of the crime. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t call out the lie.

  “No matter,” he said. “Riley’s outside in the butterfly garden. She looks to be asleep. I don’t know how long she’s been out there, but any longer and she might freeze to death. I would’ve gotten her myself but—”

  I sprinted past him.

  “—I probably would’ve fallen in the snow, and a fat lot of good that would’ve done her,” Nick finished as Jazmin and I whizzed by him. He limped after us, his stride clumpy and uneven.

  The butterfly garden was visible from the café near the slopes. I cut through the gift shop hallway, rushed through the rental shop, and burst into the café. Sure enough, through the front window, there was Riley, lying across the stone benches beneath the trellis in the butterfly garden. The entire garden was layered in snow. Riley looked like part of an art installation, lying peacefully like an angel fallen from heaven. She lay flat on her back, her hands folded delicately as they rested on her stomach. Snowflakes alighted on her hair and nose. Was she breathing?

  “What are you doing?” Jazmin demanded as I yanked open the door to the café. A gust of wind nearly knocked me off my feet. The alarm went off too, a terribly shrill beat that incited more panic in me.