by Katie Berry
Arriving at the first-floor mezzanine, Minerva stopped and peered intently at the massive painting overlooking the lobby. A small, engraved brass plaque underneath the portrait read, ‘The Sinclair Resort Hotel in Springtime’. “Well, I’d never have guessed,” she said, moving closer to inspect the amazing detail that the artist had achieved.
The obscenely large painting was attached to the wall with heavy-duty steel cables to help support its enormous weight. Minerva was sure that if it ever fell off the wall, it would do more than just make a small thud, and she wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby if it did. She measured it out by pacing along the floor in front of it. At just over eighteen feet long and ten feet high, the painting was the first thing you saw when you came into the lobby of the hotel. Apparently, they wanted to remind you of where you were, just in case you’d forgotten on your short walk in from seeing the building in real life as you came through the front doors.
The artist’s ability was exceptional and the level of detail phenomenal, almost like it had been photographed, instead of painted. Minerva marvelled as she looked inside the miniature hotel’s windows, admiring the detail. Outside it was a beautiful landscape of lush green forest, bright blue sky and jagged, snow-capped mountains.
Lively was correct, with the dense swirl of foliage in the woods outside and the detail in the hotel’s windows, this painting definitely seemed similar to one of Martin Handford’s ‘Where’s Waldo’ challenges.
Minerva looked into the painting’s woods to see if the artist had painted any indigenous fauna to go with the flora, and sure enough, she saw a bear peeking out of the trees on the left side of the hotel. The beast looked very large compared to the forest around it, and it also appeared very hungry. Over on the right side of the monumental canvas was more of the beautiful woods. In the background, peering through some bushes, was a lone wolf. Its long face appeared sly with intent as it watched a small boy playing ball with an even smaller mottled grey dog next to the vibrantly coloured forest. She said to the painted boy, “You’ve got company, my friend. Keep an eye out, or you and your little dog could end up as somebody’s snack.” With a shake of her head, she added, “Maybe they should have called this painting ‘The Watchers in the Woods’ instead.” She stepped back, admiring the painting a bit longer, and then continued her climb to the third floor and the royal suite.
Minerva gasped, startled, as she stepped to the top of the last stair riser before the second floor, thinking she’d spied someone across the spacious room staring back at her. But as she moved the rest of the way up to floor-level, she realised she’d forgotten about the mirrors scattered across the expanse of the second-floor common area. Their strategic placement made the room appear much larger than it actually was, and created numerous reflected doppelgangers, depending on where you stood.
At the top of the third-floor staircase, portraits of three very intense-looking men resided. They were definitely not as lovely as the people in the huge painting on the mezzanine that had entranced her moments before. The middle portrait depicted the hotel’s namesake, Thomas Sinclair, flanked by portraits of his two sons, Edward, and Matthew. None of the men smiled in their paintings. “You would think with the money that you guys had, you’d have a least a glimmer of a smile on one of those serious-looking mugs,” Minerva said. Looking at the portrait of Thomas, she added, “And where’s the portrait of your wife? Very misogynistic,” Minerva observed with a tsk-tsk.
Thomas Sinclair glared back at her, stern and unforgiving. His Scottish heritage showing through in his bushy red hair that seemed to float around his head like a hazy halo. However, the face behind the halo was anything but angelic. In the portrait on the left, Matthew had a little less anger in his face, but had the same, red, most likely bushy hair, though it was harder to tell as it was slicked down and parted in the centre, as was the style of the time.
Edward Sinclair was another matter altogether. “How did any of the guests ever make it past you on the way up these stairs?” Minerva asked, looking into the piercing eyes that seemed to be the predominant feature of Edward’s handsome face and chiseled jawline. Wavy reddish-brown hair and a neatly trimmed moustache completed his look, making him appear remarkably similar to a famous actor of the time, Errol Flynn. “You must have been quite a hit with the ladies, I’ll say that much.”
She slowly moved past the portraits and watched as the portrait’s eyes seemed to follow her. Thanks to her stunning appearance, Minerva was used to the gaze of men upon her. It usually didn’t bother her, but the way these portraits glared at her made her uncomfortable. With a small shrug, she said, “Well, I should’ve figured that would’ve been a given in a place like this.”
At the far end of the long corridor lay the door to the royal suite. Before exploring further, Minerva wanted to check out some of the information Lively had gleaned from his reports and interviews about the third floor. A nearby conversation seat covered in rich, embroidered red silk looked like a comfortable spot to read. Taking a handkerchief from her backpack, she placed it on the dusty seat, then sat down and cracked open her copy of the Big Book of Ballroom Busting. It was time to check into the royal suite.
***
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Sinclair’s royal suite had been host to dozens of high-level politicians, royalty and celebrities. Rob Ruby was one such celebrity, a well-known host of a popular game show taped in Vancouver called, ‘You Bet Your What?’
Rob Ruby also had a penchant for younger women and was a notorious womaniser, dating starlet after starlet, some already married and some not, it didn’t matter to him. This particularly beautiful fall afternoon in October 1965, Ruby was hosting a little get together of his own with the very married wife of his executive producer, Sonny Wright.
Isabelle Wright had been in the middle of a passionate afternoon delight with Rob when her husband, Sonny had come knocking with both fists on the royal suite’s front door. When Sonny Wright finally came through that door, he did not turn the handle. In fact, he quite literally came through the door, bringing most of the surrounding frame with him in the process.
Sonny Wright was Rob Ruby’s producer on ‘You Bet Your What?’ But many years before that, Sonny had also been a professional wrestler and bodybuilder. Standing six-feet-seven inches tall and sporting three-hundred and twenty-five pounds of solid muscle, Sonny was a moving slab of a man. Like a side of lean beef with legs, not an ounce of his frame was allocated to fat. He was the kind of man whose muscles seemed to have their own muscles when he clenched his fists.
The front desk manager had reported that Wright had been in such a hurry when he stormed through the main doors, that he had almost flown across the lobby. And then he’d purportedly mounted the grand staircase taking a nearly impossible three steps at a time with each stride of his long, muscular legs.
The only reason that Wright still had anything to do with Ruby at this point in his career was because of the money involved. Between the two of them, they’d made a lot of it. Starting out as friends many years before, Sonny produced for Rob on a couple of shows back in the late 1950s with moderate success. When ‘You Bet Your What?’ premiered in early 1961, the show had taken off. Now, the simple fact of the matter was that Sonny simply made too much money producing Ruby’s show to even consider giving up the partnership.
Working with Ruby, Sonny Wright had made the kind of money to which neither he, nor Isabelle could say no, especially since they needed it so badly. Isabelle’s exorbitant spending habits and Sonny’s own experimental foray into steroidal drug use had added to their cash flow woes. But it turned out there was an additional thing that Isabelle couldn’t say no to, and that was Rob Ruby’s sexual advances.
But something big had come along that had changed things for everyone — life-changing for some, and life-ending for others. When Sonny learned of Isabelle’s infidelity, his anger had been huge, but when he discovered who she’d been cheating on him with, it had gone supernova.
Rob Ruby had been insanely popular for many years and had what seemed a cult-like following all his very own. He could have had any woman he’d ever wanted, but he, or perhaps the little thinker between his legs, had decided it was a good idea to seduce Sonny Wright’s gorgeous wife instead.
Isabelle was as beautiful as she was untouchable. Any man who had ever flirted with her had been in a very sorry state the next day, collecting either a black eye, a broken arm, or both for their interest. Another thing that added to Sonny’s expenses were the constant lawsuits caused by his incessant jealousy.
Almost everyone knew you’d be signing your own death warrant if you tried to get it on with Isabelle Wright. Sonny had even reportedly said to Rob at one time, if he ever found out about any guy screwing his wife, well, that guy wouldn’t need to worry about living for very much longer.
For whatever reason, Ruby decided not to heed those words of warning. Much like a predator that is so focused on its prey that it sometimes fails to see other potential predators or hazards nearby, so it was with Rob Ruby and his advances on Isabelle Wright. When Rob had laid his predatory eyes on Isabelle, he’d seemingly forgotten that he was toying with the wife of a man so large his muscles required an extra seat on the airplane whenever he travelled.
This mass of muscles now plowed through the royal suite’s locked bedroom door, leaving nothing but wooden fragments in its wake.
It seemed Sonny was in a hurry to redecorate the royal suite with some lovely new fall colours that he was just itching to try out — colours that featured bright splashes of crimson and a heavy emphasis on black and blue.
Outside the hotel, on that beautiful fall afternoon in October 1965, the sun was shining, and what few leaves remained on the trees, fluttered to the ground in the light, crisp breeze. Overhead, a V of Canada geese flew south for the winter, their plaintive cries mingling with the blood-curdling screams that rang out from the top floor of the Sinclair Resort Hotel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
December 24th, 2021, 1011 hours
Lively’s breathing seemed louder inside his head than usual. But this seemed to go hand in hand with his accelerated heart rate, which wasn’t unexpected. The door leading into the operating theatre lay just up ahead, and he moved slowly toward it.
He was fairly certain his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks. But he decided not to take any chances and moved cautiously nonetheless, in case there actually was a person lying in wait, just out of sight beneath the viewing window — someone who looked an awful lot like him. With a slow turn of the knob, he clicked the door open and peered into the room.
“Anybody home?”
The theatre room remained mute to his inquiry, unable to verify its current occupancy, but it looked to be empty. An operating table lay in its centre, but there was something ‘off’ about it. It was coated in white porcelain like a bathtub. A large drain was located at one end, and a shallow gutter ran around the circumference of the table’s raised edges. And then it dawned on him; this wasn’t an operating table; this was an embalming table.
“What? Why on earth would they need an embalming table in a hotel?” Off to one side of the table sat a rack containing a series of bizarre devices, not dissimilar to the crazy looking apparatus overtop of the dish in the golden room. “What were you guys doing in here? Trying to make like Jeffery Combs and reanimate the dead?”
There was a tall, white medicine cabinet in the far corner of the room. Thanks to the large pane of glass that took up most of the front of the cabinet, he could see it contained a variety of drugs. “This looks well stocked for just about every emergency.”
One of the many positions Lively had held through his work for CSIS was that of an interrogator. However, he abhorred using violent or cruel interrogation methods on anyone and preferred instead to question his subjects under controlled circumstances. Thanks to his natural ability to suss things out from a person, he rarely used any drugs during an interrogation. But there was the odd occasion when a suspect was less than forthcoming with their information. Then, and only then, would Lively pump them full of powerful, mind-altering drugs.
He opened the cabinet, feeling like a kid in a candy store. The top shelf contained vials of morphine, oxycodone, fentanyl, and other potent pain medications. On the next shelf down, bottles labelled lysergic acid diethylamide sat next to tinctures of THC, which were just across from several large bottles of ether. Psilocybin extract from magic mushrooms sprouted on the shelf below and in one corner he discovered several glass vials of sodium thiopental and ketamine. Nodding in satisfaction, Lively smiled as he picked up a vial of thiopental, saying, “Looks like the truth has been inside this cabinet all along! I’ll have to let David Duchovny know once we get things resolved around here.” He placed the vial in his jacket pocket, then scooped several more vials of each drug into his hands and placed them into a large side pocket in his messenger bag. “Because you just never know.” He closed the cabinet door and patted the cabinet’s side as he moved away toward the far corner of the room, saying, “Keep those diamonds up in the sky for Lucy, my friend.”
A door in the corner exited the room, and he decided to carry on through to wherever this maze of hidden corridors came out. Another long hallway lay before him, this one was quite dim. A musty scent filled his nostrils, and Lively felt like he was going to sneeze again.
More cables and piping ran along the ceiling, exiting through various shafts into other parts of the hotel. Where did those go, he wondered? Were there other areas around this hotel that were somehow connected to whatever had been in the gold room?
A sudden noise caused him to turn in surprise. He shone his light down the dim hall at his back and saw nothing. “Must be getting a little jumpy here.” He continued forward, and within a few seconds, the noise came to him again. It was a skittering noise, like something small and light moving quickly and surreptitiously in the dark, shadowing his movements. He paused once more and listened intently.
Nothing. No sound.
After a couple more hesitant steps forward, he heard the noise again. This time he was able to detect the direction from which it came and aimed his light up into the piping and conduits overhead.
“Gah!” Lively pulled back against the wall of the corridor with an adrenalised jolt. He moved sideways a few feet, never taking his light off of what had been perched above his head.
Eight dark eyes regarded him from atop a sizeable conduit near the ceiling of the tunnel. Attached to those dark, shiny eyes were eight, long, hairy legs belonging to one of the most massive wolf spiders he had ever seen. There weren’t many things in this world of which a man the size of Lively was afraid. But spiders just happened to be one of those things that freaked him out to no end. And ones that had bodies the size of dinner plates like the one perched on the pipe made him feel even more panicked.
He couldn’t imagine how he would have reacted if the creature had dropped down onto him from overhead without warning as it stalked him. He shivered as he thought of the spiky little leg hairs that covered the creature’s long, spindly legs wrapping around his neck or his head. “Man, you are one homely not-so-little dude,” he said to the spider, as he sidled another foot or two along the wall in the opposite direction from it, just in case.
The large arachnid regarded him without moving, the flashlight’s beam reflecting off its multiple sets of eyes. After what seemed like a very long time, the creature began to move along the pipes once more toward the corridor’s end. Lively had a choice to make since the hallway branched into a ‘T’ intersection here. “Okay, which way now?” he asked the arachnid. It scuttled down the branch to the left, and Lively followed it at a safe distance. Another closed door stood at the end of this short hallway. Near the door, he glimpsed the spider scuttling up into a gap in the ceiling cut for an electrical conduit.
Lively edged toward the doorway, shining his light up into the space where the spider had moved, but there was no furthe
r sign of the creature. He was still on edge, ready for the beast to pounce on him as if he were some unsuspecting prey destined for one of its silken cocoons.
The door had no doorknob, but rather a handle meant for sliding it sideways to open. Giving the handle a good hard pull to the side, Lively paused. He blinked several times rapidly in the bright light that flooded from the open doorway. Stepping through the opening, Lively turned around and saw that the other side of the door was a shelf lined with boxes. He slid the door closed and smiled. It once more looked like heavily laden shelving resting against the concrete wall behind it. To the rack, he said, “I wonder what other little secrets are scattered around this hotel behind innocent-looking shelves like you?”
Turning slowly around, Lively swept the space with his questing flashlight revealing a large storage room. Tall metal shelves lined both sides of the elongated space. Despite being only fifteen feet wide or so, it ran about sixty feet long in the other direction. Another row of shelves ran down the middle, separating the room into two halves. The shelves were stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of all shapes and sizes, all labelled by someone’s tidy hand in black grease pencil.
To his right were located several boxes with ‘Lost & Found’ on them. Lifting the lid on the first box, Lively peered inside. Apart from some eyeglasses, a pair of dentures and a few books, there didn’t seem to be anything of much interest. He decided to take a quick browse through a few more of these boxes just to see what there was to see.