The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  “What does the N stand for?”

  “My son’s name,” Gina said, stroking the letter tenderly. “But he’s been gone for a long time.”

  My whole body seemed to tighten around my heart. Gina had lost a child. I had lost a parent. No wonder we had bonded so easily.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She smiled weakly. “I keep the locket as a reminder of what I lost. If you’ll excuse me, I should put this in a safer place.”

  As she disappeared into the bedroom, I reached for another bite of my scone. It was deliciously crumbly, and it settled my fragile stomach. The tea helped too. I took another sip, but when Stella appeared out of nowhere two feet from my face, I nearly spilled the entire mug on the white sofa. My heart took off as adrenaline rushed through me.

  “Christ, Stella! You’ll kill me if you keep doing that.”

  “Are you insane?” the ghost hissed, looming over me in her usual red dress and ridiculous heels. “What are you doing here?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m drinking tea.”

  “You absolute fool,” Stella said. “Get up. Get up.”

  The command was followed by a sharp stab of energy to the head. With the headache from earlier, it couldn’t have hurt worse.

  “Stella, stop!” My voice was all air, a desperate whisper from my windpipe that had no help from my actual vocal chords. I hoped Gina couldn’t hear my distress from the next room over. “Please stop.”

  “Then get up and leave,” Stella whispered in my ear, chilling the air around me to a degree that should’ve been reserved for the slopes. “You shouldn’t be here. Don’t trust her. Don’t tell her anything.”

  Stella vanished as quickly as she’d come, just as Gina emerged from the bedroom. The older woman wiped a tear from her cheek. She was the only person Stella could’ve been talking about, but I couldn’t fathom why Gina would be any kind of dangerous. Nevertheless, Stella was still manipulating my energy. I could feel her essence yanking on all of my muscles, pulling me toward the door. The longer I resisted, the worse it ached.

  “I should get going,” I said, taking our used plates over to the kitchen sink to be washed. “Thank you for everything, Gina. I feel much better.”

  Gina peeked into my mug. “You didn’t finish your tea.”

  I faked an apologetic smile. “I told you turmeric wasn’t my thing, no matter how healing it’s supposed to be. See you around?”

  Gina smiled and squeezed my shoulder in what was meant to be a reassuring gesture, but with Stella’s warning in my head, I couldn’t help but feel threatened instead.

  “I certainly hope so,” Gina said.

  26

  In the hallway outside Gina’s suite, I caught a glimpse of Stella amongst the bustling crowds. The evening at White Oak was in full swing, but while the guests were all enjoying their dinner, drinks, and shopping, I was trying to catch a ghost’s attention without being too obvious. Stella was easily visible amongst the throng. Her outdated crimson dress stuck out, too bright and padded to blend in with the sleek designer outfits of White Oak’s finest. I wove through the crowd, working my way through the long corridor with practiced caution. Gina’s tea, though disgusting in flavor, had helped ease some of the overall discomfort I’d been feeling all day, but one good push from an overenthusiastic guest could push me over. I worked my way toward Stella, who for some reason lingered at the other end of the shopping corridor instead of meeting me where I was, but as soon as I got close enough to speak to her, she frowned and disappeared.

  “Wait!” I called. My voice cracked. It was busy enough in the corridor that no one noticed my plea to no one. A few curious heads turned in my direction, but only one of them noticed I was Madame Lucia. Thankfully, the crowd swept her along before she could approach me.

  Stella reappeared farther on, near the lobby. I followed along, but she continued her random disappearing act every time I made it within fifty feet of her. Like a sprite, she poofed in and out of existence, leaving behind a wispy essence that only I could see every time she did it. Eventually, I gave up chasing her. When she lured me toward White Oak’s quiet room, I ignored the hint and veered toward the elevators instead. I was tired of bending to everyone else’s will. All this time, I’d been worrying about Riley, Jazmin, Nick, my mother, and now Stella. It was time for me to go upstairs, lie down, and order an extravagant meal from room service now that my stomach was feeling a bit better. Unfortunately, as soon as the elevator cleared out and I stepped inside, Stella decided to stop playing tag and join me.

  “What are you doing?” I grumbled. “Because I refuse to chase you all over the hotel.”

  “That woman is not on your side,” Stella said. She refused to look at me, instead staring at the button panel with unwarranted intensity. “You need to stay as far away from her as possible.”

  “Who, Gina?” I asked. “You’re kidding, right? She’s a nice old lady. What’s she going to do to me?”

  Stella, her expression hard and fragile like glass, fixed her eyeliner above my head. “Trust me.”

  “I’m getting sick of all these cryptic clues,” I scolded her. “Odette did the same crap at King and Queens, but at least she had a reason. No one’s stopping you from filling me in.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Stella said in a hushed undertone, as if we weren’t alone and she wasn’t dead. “I’m not all powerful. I have constraints too, just like Odette.”

  “Constraints.” I mulled the word over, wondering what it could mean. Odette hadn’t been able to tell me too much because the other ghosts at King and Queens would punish her for it. Did Stella suffer from a similar fate? “Where is Odette anyway? I got used to her. She was less abrasive than you are.”

  Stella’s mind had wandered. That was evident in the glaze of her eyes. The elevator reached the twentieth floor and the doors opened, but Stella remained in place and I couldn’t find the heart to leave her when she looked so forlorn.

  “Stella?” I said softly. “Is something wrong? Other than the obvious, of course.”

  “Odette is stuck,” she whispered. The moisture in her stunning blue eyes caught the overhead lights of the elevator. “At King and Queens with the rest of them. She’s not safe.”

  “The other ghosts?” I asked. The elevator doors tried to close, but I hit the button to keep them open. “You mean they didn’t vanish when King and Queens burned down?”

  “Trapped energy doesn’t simply vanish,” Stella snapped, reverting to her usual brusque tone. “If anything, the fire strengthened the spirits there. They thrive in the shadows and destruction, growing stronger each day. And you’re here watching birds and ordering room service instead of doing something about it.”

  The accusation drove me from the elevator and into the hall. “Have you been paying attention? I’ve been juggling a lot the past few days. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I look and feel like I’m about to drop dead myself. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  At the door to the suite, Stella examined me from head to toe. “You do look absolutely dreadful, but I’ve already given you the information you need on that front. Odette has been telling you the same thing since the two of you met. Balance your energy. Come to terms with your past. All that bottled-up emotion is throwing your physical body out of whack.”

  I swiped the key card. “Are you sure that’s it? When Odette was around, it was like my whole body was on fire, but it faded if I concentrated hard enough. This feels different. I feel like I’m coming down with pneumonia. It gets worse. Then it gets a little better. Then it gets worse again. Maybe the stress is getting to me.”

  Stella pursed her lips.

  “What?” I asked. “You have another idea?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it can’t be.”

  The key reader flashed green. I pushed the door open.

  “In the past few weeks, I’ve learned not to say that,” I informed Stella.r />
  She opened her mouth to answer, but when she looked inside the suite, she immediately vanished. When I matched her gaze, I understood why. Jazmin had finally returned from her trip to the clinic, but she wasn’t alone. Lourdes Calvo sat right next to her. They were all buddied up—sharing a throw blanket and everything—as they examined the screen of my laptop. From here, I could see that they were manipulating something on my YouTube channel: the channel I’d been locked out of that very morning.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” I said, letting the door slam shut behind me. “The two of you hacked my channel?”

  Jazmin nearly severed Lourdes’s fingers as she shut the laptop and set it aside. “Lucia, you don’t understand—”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” My voice trembled, dropping into a register so low that I almost sounded digitally modified. “I don’t understand why my best friend in the entire world who knows everything about me, including the passwords to my personal accounts, would team up with a nosy reporter and use my personal life as a story to sell the tabloids. We’ve been friends for over fifteen years, Jazmin. How could you do this to me?”

  “I didn’t,” said Jazmin. “Well, I helped Lourdes edit and upload the new video to your channel, and we agreed to lock you out so that you couldn’t take it down, but I swear we had a good reason.”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with the news report though,” Lourdes added. A sneer lifted her top lip. It made her look like a petite angry bulldog. “I’m actually kind of pissed off that someone sniped my story and turned it into such a dumpster fire. This is so much more than the morning’s gossip.”

  “Don’t even try to act like you weren’t the one filming me and Nick at Porter’s,” I said. “You’ve been following me around since day one like an obsessive stalker. For your information, I am not dating Nick Porter or colluding with him to bring down the other businesses in town. How desperate are you to come up with something like that?”

  Lourdes grimaced. “Fine, I did film you and Nick at the restaurant, and I’ll even admit to selling the footage to the local news channel. What can I say? I needed a quick buck. But they came up with that dumb story all on their own. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Get out,” I ordered.

  Jazmin stood in front of Lourdes. “Lucia, wait.”

  “You too,” I said. “Jazmin, do you know how worried I’ve been about you? I haven’t seen or heard from you since I dropped you off at the clinic earlier. Anything could’ve happened to you. For all I know, you were airlifted to the hospital to have your ankle reset and cast.”

  “My ankle’s fine,” she said. “It’s just sprained. They gave me a low dose of painkillers that I’m probably not even going to take. I ran into Lourdes—”

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “But I’ve found you together twice now, and both times felt premeditated.”

  I picked up Lourdes’s camera bag from the kitchen counter. She leaned around Jazmin, her fingers clenching the armchair. She wanted to stand up and take her things from me, but she was also waiting to see what I would do. Truthfully, I wanted to take out her camera and hurl it across the room, but a lot of that desire stemmed from feeling like I had no control over my life right now. I settled for popping out the memory card. A question popped into my head.

  “You already have this information on a hard drive somewhere, don’t you?” I asked Lourdes, holding up the memory card.

  Her attempt to hide her smug smile fell short, but she reined her reply in as best she could since I was still holding her camera hostage. “It’s habit. I copy everything almost immediately. You never know when you might lose a memory card or have one stolen from you.”

  I flicked the memory card into the garbage, just in case she was bluffing. If she was, she didn’t flinch. “Get out of my room.”

  “Lucia—” Jazmin began.

  Lourdes clasped Jazmin’s hand in a gesture that seemed far too familiar considering they’d only known each for a few days.

  “It’s okay,” Lourdes said, getting up. When she reached me, she held out her hand for her camera bag. I placed it in her grip and folded my arms. She shouldered the bag with a practiced motion. “Just so you know, Lucia. Jazmin was acting in your best interest. We did this for you, not my thesis project.”

  “You’re so full of yourself,” I said. “You took advantage of Jazmin because she’s kind and trusting, and you knew that you could use that against her. I won’t fall for the same games. Stay out of my life, Lourdes, or I’ll make yours a living hell.”

  Lourdes chewed on the inside of her cheek as if trying to contain a retort, but she merely glanced over her shoulder and shrugged at Jazmin. “Sorry. I tried my best.”

  “Out,” I ordered again.

  Lourdes obeyed, but she took her time about it to annoy me as much as possible. At the door, she paused to look back. “Really, Lucia. Getting mad at Jazmin is pointless. Hell, getting mad at me is pointless. Although, at least I understand that anger. Anyway, just think about what you say before it leaves your mouth, okay? I’ll be around if you need me.”

  “What makes you think I would ever need you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  The door clicked shut behind her, leaving me alone with my best friend at long last. When I turned to look at Jazmin, she determinedly held my gaze. She wasn’t the type to back down and give me the win. Most of the time, she gave me some much-needed perspective on a situation.

  “What is this?” I asked. “What the hell are you doing with that girl? She’s barely an adult. She’s using us for a story and a grade. Why would you let her do that, especially at my expense?”

  “Trust me—”

  “Trust you?” I scoffed. “Normally, I would, but you’ve been acting weird ever since we got to White Oak. Next time you want to disappear on me or hang out with some reporter who’s trying to exploit me, at least shoot me a text first.”

  “Now you’re just being terrible on purpose,” Jazmin said. “You know for a fact that I would never do anything to hurt you. Did it ever occur to you how hard all of this is on the rest of us? You’re not the only one who had to fight for her life at King and Queens.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” I snapped. “But Lourdes Calvo wasn’t one of those people. In case you forgot, it was you, me, Nick, and Riley. I don’t consider myself the worst off either. Riley lost her entire family at that damn resort.”

  “And what have you done to help her?” Jazmin demanded. “What have you done at all other than mope around the resort and act like some kind of psychic martyr? So what if the world knows about your powers? So what if they think you teamed up with Nick to take over Crimson Basin? It doesn’t matter in the long run. What matters is what you’re doing right now to fix the situation, and I don’t see you doing a damn thing.”

  “I’m sick!”

  “You’re flailing,” Jazmin countered. “And I get that. You need some time to recover from what happened, but that time is over now. This has always been your problem. You hit one setback, and you refuse to move past it. You can’t throw this one under the rug. You can’t binge eat and cry on the bathroom floor until I come home to put you in the shower. I can’t pick you up this time, Lucia. You have to do it yourself.”

  As she called up images of the past, I lost the motivation to stand. I sank into one of the high-top chairs at the kitchen counter and cradled my aching forehead in my cold hands. A sigh whooshed out of Jazmin’s lungs as she walked over to me and leaned her head against mine. She rubbed my shoulder reassuringly.

  “I’m here for you,” she murmured. “But I can’t hold you up. Not this time.” She collected her coat and swung it over her shoulder. “I have to go find Lourdes. We didn’t finish what we were working on.”

  “By all means, go finish,” I said, sarcasm automatically injecting itself into the phrase.

  Jazmin fished the memory card out of the trash and pocketed
it. She kissed my forehead. “You should get some rest. That way, you’re fresh for tomorrow. It’ll be a new day. Maybe some new opportunities will pop up.”

  “What if they don’t?” I asked her on her way out.

  She shrugged. “Then you have to make some on your own.”

  For the second night in a row, I dreamt of the demon with terrible eyes. The eyes morphed from yellow to red and back again. I wasn’t sure which color was more terrifying. The red invoked the deepest pits of hell, like embers burning the bare skin of my feet no matter where I stepped. The yellow spoke of poisonous gas, filling my lungs with its noxious fumes until I choked on my own spit. I woke in a pool of sweat and tears, gasping for breath as if I was back at King and Queens, fleeing from the ghosts and the burning remains of the old wing. When I wiped my forehead on the nearest pillow, a yellow tint came away with the moisture, as if I was releasing the demon’s poison through my pores. On the upside, I didn’t vomit this time, though my stomach rolled around like a washing machine on the highest setting.

  I went out on the balcony in my slippers and robe, letting the chill soothe my heated skin and pounding head. The cold cut right through the satin robe. If I stood out here too long, I’d catch an actual illness rather than the one brought about by unbalanced psychic energies, but it felt too good to go outside. It had snowed last night. The air smelled fresh and clean. I wished the weather could cleanse my energy the same way. I wished it could lay atop my soul like a blanket and smother the aches and pains that I’d carried with me from King and Queens. Alas, as Jazmin pointed out, I was the only person who could fix myself.

  Though it was early, skiers and snowboarders had already taken to the new snow on the mountain, cutting unruly patterns that crisscrossed each other like poor embroidery work. From this height, each vacationer was a tiny colorful dot in the snow. It was as if I were a god looking down at my subjects from above. I could pick up each person and place them where I wanted them to go. If I had that power, I would rearrange almost everyone. I’d put Riley somewhere safe, where she would have access to her favorite ski runs without running into hazardous inexperienced riders. I’d put Jazmin in the spa or maybe the indoor tennis courts. She would enjoy either place, and I’d be able to keep her far away from Lourdes Calvo. My mother, I would put anywhere but White Oak. She belonged in a psychiatrist’s office, but even if the real hand of God dropped her at the door to the building, she would never admit that she needed help.