The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  Jazmin swept her bangs out of her face. “Lucia, you can’t be serious.”

  “What?”

  “Do you really think you’re capable of taking care of Riley?” she asked. “You’re broke, unemployed, and essentially homeless. What makes you think a social worker is going to appoint you as her legal guardian?”

  The words hit me like a punch in the throat. Of all the people to doubt me, the last one I expected to do so was Jazmin. It seemed more like something my mother would say than my best friend.

  “So that’s what you think of me,” I said. “Okay, then.”

  As I turned on my heel, Lourdes tensed up, as if expecting me to do something other than walk away. This time around, I didn’t have the strength to tell her to where to put it. There was no point without Jazmin to back me up. My stomach felt heavy, as if I’d swallowed a jagged piece of concrete. Every step away from their table made me feel even more lonely. Behind me, a chair scraped.

  “Lucia, wait,” Jazmin called across the café.

  I sped up instead, slipping through the door and into the cold. Jazmin wasn’t letting me get away that easily though. She picked up her pace and followed me out.

  “Come on,” she said, hopping down the Slopes steps. “Lucia, we don’t do this to each other. We communicate. I’m sorry about what I said in there. I was just trying to be realistic—ow!”

  The sharpness of her cry forced me to spin around. As I watched, her ankle buckled beneath her and she went down hard on one knee, kneeling in the black slush. With a moan of pain, she rolled to her hip, clutching the injured leg.

  “Jazmin!”

  I rushed to her side. The half-melted ice had already soaked through her jeans and there was a rip in the knee where she’d fallen. A big scrape marred her pale skin, but she ignored that in favor of holding her ankle steady.

  “Did you break it?” I asked, trying to pull her hands away to check the joint. “Jazmin, let me see.”

  She rolled to her opposite side, out of my reach. “It hurts.”

  “Honey, you have to get up,” I coaxed. “You’re going to freeze. Let’s get you inside, and I’ll call for someone to take us to the hospital. I think you need that ankle X-rayed.”

  “No, no.” She took a steadying breath and got to her knees. Gingerly, she rested her weight on her good foot. “I’m fine.”

  I took her under the arm and helped her up. She wouldn’t put any weight on the bad ankle. “You’re not fine. We should have that looked at. You probably need it casted.”

  She tentatively rested her foot on the ground, winced, and lifted it up again. “I’m not going to the hospital. It’s a waste of time. Besides, it’s not broken.”

  “No offense, but you don’t exactly have the medical knowledge to ascertain that or not,” I pointed out as I drew her arm over my shoulder and supported her around the waist. “Let’s go.”

  But she stubbornly dug her good foot into the snow to keep us from moving. “Lucia, I mean it. I’m not going.”

  She shivered violently. If I didn’t get her inside soon, I wouldn’t be the only one with a fever.

  “Fine,” I said. “We don’t have to go to the hospital. What has gotten into you lately? I thought I was supposed to be the one who was devoid of common sense?”

  She finally let me walk her toward the door of the main lobby. “I guess you’re rubbing off on me.”

  “Seriously, though,” I said. “What were you doing with Lourdes? You can’t possibly think she just wanted to chat and have coffee with you.”

  “I know that.” She grimaced as she accidentally set too much weight on her bad ankle. “But I need you to trust me, okay? Have I ever let you down before?”

  “No,” I said. “You certainly haven’t.”

  25

  The waiting room at White Oak’s onsite clinic was full of skiers and snowboarders who had accumulated all sorts of bumps and bruises. Most of them were surface injuries. A scrape here or a bruise there. One poor kid wailed over a jammed finger as his mother tried to distract him with a grape lollipop. I helped Jazmin into a chair and brought her a clipboard to fill out all the necessary information.

  “Seriously, Lucia,” she said. “I’d rather just go up to the room. Look, it feels better already.” She tentatively set her weight on her foot. Surprisingly, it held. “See? Let’s get out of here.”

  I tried to pull up the damp leg of her jeans to check if her ankle was swollen or not, but she drew away from me. “I’d still feel better if you got it checked out. Especially under the circumstances.”

  The circumstances worried me more than anything else. Jazmin had sprained her ankle during the escape from King and Queens, when the nightmare demon in the basement had grabbed her leg and tried to drag her into the depths of the hotel. It wasn’t like we could tell that to the White Oak medical team either. I assumed that was one of the reasons why Jazmin was so hesitant to get the injury looked at.

  “Give me that,” I said, taking the clipboard from her and filling out her information myself. “You’re slow.”

  “I find it slightly hilarious that you forced me to go to the clinic when just this morning, you refused to do the same thing,” Jazmin said as she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “At least I haven’t been puking up black bile.”

  On my other side, the mother with the broken-fingered son scooted away from us.

  “I feel fine now,” I assured Jazmin, loudly enough to reassure the eavesdroppers. It wasn’t entirely true. My headache, it seemed, would never truly subside, but the intense nausea from this morning was almost entirely gone. I felt weirdly smug about that. Maybe Stella was wrong about all this confronting my past crap.

  I finished the forms and returned them to the tired woman working the front desk. She perked up at the sight of me.

  “Aren’t you Lucia Star?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered wearily. “Can you take a look at this and make sure I filled out all of the information correctly? I’d like to get my friend in to see the doctor as soon as possible.”

  “There’s a wait,” said the mother near Jazmin, cradling her son’s broken finger.

  “Actually,” the front desk secretary said, scanning the paperwork. “Your friend can go on back. Mr. Porter gave all the employees explicit instructions to accommodate your party in whatever way possible.”

  The mother threw us the dirtiest stare as I got Jazmin from her chair and began to lead her to the door to the offices. Halfway there, my head throbbed, sending a jolt of pain all the way down my spine. I stumbled and Jazmin caught me.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” she asked. “Is it the nausea again?”

  “Headache.”

  “Why don’t you go back upstairs,” she suggested. “I got it from here.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She urged me to the exit door. “Go.”

  Were it not for the blinding pain, I wouldn’t have left her, but the staff at White Oak was competent enough to take care of Jazmin for me. I staggered toward the elevators, massaging my temples.

  “Really, Stella?” I grumbled under my breath as I jabbed the call button with my thumb and leaned against the wall to wait for the elevator. “Enough with the headaches already. I know it’s your fault.”

  “Who are you speaking to?”

  I whirled around, my palm pressed to my chest to still my racing heart. My mother’s voice, in any capacity, always gave me palpitations. She strolled up from the lobby, sporting several shopping bags from the White Oak spa. The contents of the bags—no doubt several age-defying products that wouldn’t work half as well as my mother hoped they would on the lines around her mouth—clinked together with her every step like the annoying chirp of a persistent cricket.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Who was it?”

  “No one, Mom,” I said hastily. “Just reminding myself of my to-do list. Super busy today. Got a lot on my plate. How was the spa?”

>   “Don’t try to divert,” Mom said. “I know you had Nick Porter change my room. He wouldn’t say it was you, but I’m not stupid.”

  “The three of us are already cramped in that suite,” I replied, pressing the elevator button again in the desperate hope that it might arrive faster. “Nick was doing me a favor.”

  “No, it’s fine. I get it. You don’t want your mother around.” Her voice cracked and she heaved a pitiful wheezing sigh as she let her shoulders drop. “You’ve been avoiding me for the past ten years. I wasn’t sure why I thought I had a chance to change that now.”

  The pitiful sob story drew the attention of other passing guests. As my mother melted into a puddle of crocodile tears and spa products, the elevator finally announced its arrival by opening its doors. I hustled my mother inside then hit the button for the twentieth floor. A young couple wearing matching ski suits filed in behind us, eyeing my mother as her shoulders shook with emotion. They pushed the button for their floor three times, as if trying to get away from us as quickly as possible.

  “Listen, Mom,” I said in a hushed tone. “I’m not trying to offend you, okay? The reason I haven’t reached out today is because I’ve been sick. I was in bed all morning.”

  My mother lifted her teary eyes to examine me. “Sick? Star women don’t get sick.”

  “Technically, you’re only a Star woman by marriage,” I reminded her.

  The elevator stopped to let off the couple in the matching neon suits. I breathed a sigh of relief as the doors closed again. Now if I could only drop my mother off at her floor in the same manner.

  “You know what I mean.” She sniffled, dabbing at the corners of her eyes to keep her mascara from running. “We don’t get ill in our family. Sickness is for people—”

  “With weak blood,” I finished for her, remembering the phrase from my youth. My mother was not the type of woman to admit defeat and visit a doctor. She believed her Latin blood was hot enough to stave off any illness. “I guess I’m weak then because I came down with a stomach virus this morning.”

  She drew in a dramatic gasp. “What are you doing out of bed then? This is why you have weak blood! You don’t let yourself recover!”

  “Mom, that is not how the body works.”

  We finally arrived on the twentieth floor. I hurried to the door of my suite, tempted to fake another vomiting attack in order to get rid of my mother, but she was stuck to me like glue. Her spa bags bumped against me as I flashed my keycard. She pushed past me, dumped her things on the kitchen table, and immediately pulled the fridge open.

  “There’s nothing in here!” she exclaimed. “How am I supposed to make you something to eat?”

  “Call room service.” I sat at the table and rifled through the products she’d brought home from the spa. They were all sample sizes. “Did you actually buy anything or did you just clean out the free samples?”

  “They said I could try them.”

  “One each, I assume,” I replied dryly. “You have twenty of everything.”

  “I have sensitive skin.” She harrumphed at the empty fridge again. “Let’s send out an errand boy to bring us groceries.”

  “The roads are still a mess,” I said. “I don’t even know how you found a car to drive you here.”

  “Nick arranged it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course he did. You don’t have to cook for me or do anything else either. I’ve been taking care of myself for quite a few years now.”

  Mom shut the fridge. Despite her cooking mastery, she couldn’t do much with a tray of ice cubes and the leftovers from Jazmin’s room service call yesterday. To my surprise and discomfort, she sat across from me at the table. I scooted my chair back a few inches, unaccustomed to being so close to her.

  “I would like to rectify that,” she said. “It’s been too long, Lucia. We should put the past behind us. Don’t you agree?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Why now? You’ve never had any interest in making amends with me before.”

  “It’s time,” she said. “I’ve tired of not having my daughter with me.”

  It all felt too contrived, like someone had given my mother a script to read off. I was grateful for the way my mother had raised me. I liked to think that I had turned into a relatively decent person, and I had never gone wanting anything as a child other than a little more love and affection. Otherwise, I was clothed, fed, and housed, which was more than a lot of less fortunate kids could say. Despite that, my mother and I had never been particularly close. Sometimes, I wondered if she had ever meant to get pregnant. Before my father’s addiction had gotten out of hand, he was the one to pay attention to me, not her. When I left home, it was a load off for both of us. We didn’t have to pretend to fulfill that obligatory mother-daughter bond anymore, which was exactly why I was so confused that she had showed up at White Oak under the pretense of reconnecting with me.

  Another sharp pain stabbed at the base of my skull. I winced and squeezed my eyes shut. My mother reached for the back of my neck, but I wasn’t used to her delivering any kind of physical comfort. Back in the day, she was more likely to smack me than hug me. I jerked out of her reach.

  “Don’t.” I stood up, accidentally knocking a few of her beauty products to the floor. The cans rolled across the pristine white floor. “Look, if you’re really here for me, then you need to respect who I am now. I’m an adult. I have my own life, and you’ll probably disagree with how I live a lot of it.”

  “Lucia—”

  “I need you to hear me on this,” I said. “Don’t harass Jazmin. Don’t push your crazy agendas. I’m not the same kid you kicked out of your house all those years ago.”

  “You left,” she said.

  “That’s up for debate.”

  She rested her elbow on the table, looking up at me from beneath her absurdly long eyelashes. “I didn’t come here to argue with you, Lucia. I’m happy to see you again. Can I get you anything?”

  “No,” I said. “You can hang out in the suite if you like, but don’t make any trouble. I’m going to take a nap.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Anxiety squeezed my rib cage in a tight hug as I left her in the dining room and slunk back to my bedroom. It was like reuniting with the college roommate that you didn’t particularly get along with, but mothers were far more complicated than old acquaintances. I still didn’t understand my mother’s sudden turnaround in attitude. I suspected that she was only here for the free swag that Nick and White Oak were providing for her. I flopped into bed and drew the fluffy duvet over my head to block out the light. My migraine, or whatever it was, seemed to improve in the dark. King and Queens hadn’t had a whole lot of natural light, but White Oak was a magnet for bright white sunshine reflecting off the snow-covered mountains. Under the cool darkness of the covers, I fell back to sleep.

  When I woke up, a bowl of chicken soup and a mug of tea rested on a tray on the bedside table, along with a package of Vitamin C and a glass of water to dissolve it in. Mom had caved and ordered room service for me. I stuck my finger in the soup. It was cold, but I was hungry and I didn’t feel like walking out to the kitchen to warm it up in the microwave. I switched on the enormous television set, propped myself up against the pillows, and began to fish the biggest chunks of chicken out of the soup with the spoon.

  For such a fancy resort, White Oak had a pretty limited selection of TV channels. Most of them were ones that were billed to your room if you dared access them, though I’m sure Nick thought to include TV in our stay. I wasn’t in the mood to binge watch anything, so I flipped mindlessly through the free channels, looking for something to play in the background. When I passed a local news channel, I nearly spit out my chicken. The report featured a screenshot of my YouTube channel, Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed. I turned the volume up.

  “Authorities are looking into Lucia Star’s involvement in the tragedy that occurred at King and Queens Ski Lodge an
d Resort a few nights ago,” the anchor reported as live helicopter footage of the smoldering ruins played. “Miss Star is best known as the YouTube sensation Madame Lucia, a psychic who claimed to be able to contact the dead. Her last video, uploaded approximately three weeks ago, exposed her as a fraud. Fans were devastated, and Miss Star’s bi-weekly video updates went silent. However, Miss Star’s latest video has proven that she’s not out of the game yet—”

  I sat straight up as the news channel rolled a clip. It was filmed in the Eagle’s View, the bar at King and Queens, during the blackout. While we were stuck there, trying to pass the time, I’d put on a fake show for the other King and Queens employees who were also trapped. Someone filmed it from the side of the room, at a low angle, as if whoever was holding the camera was shorter than average. In the clip, I put on my best Madame Lucia accent and pretended to make contact with an employee’s old dog. Then, thanks to a quick trick from Jazmin, an entire table set went flying. It looked flawless on camera, as if a ghost really had yanked a tablecloth out of place. The only problem was that I had never posted this video to Madame Lucia’s official YouTube page. Not to mention, that footage had never been shared before. It was all stored on my personal hard drive. The only person who had access to it other than myself was Jazmin.

  I checked my phone. I had hundreds of notifications, all from the social media accounts associated with Madame Lucia. Hordes of new followers, messages, and e-mails flooded my inbox. Most of them were talking about the new video that had been uploaded to my channel that very morning.

  “Lucia!” My mother barged in, a hungry look in her eyes. “Did you see? You’re on the news!”

  I was actually trying to avoid looking straight at the TV. Every time I caught a glimpse of myself dressed as the wildly eccentric Madame Lucia, I felt even more ridiculous. This was bad. I did not need what happened at King and Queens to be plastered all over for the world to see.