Inside the envelope were half a dozen documents and another note, slightly shorter than the first.
“Senile but concise,” Claire muttered. “Congratulations, you’re the new owner of the Elysian Fields Guest House.” She glanced up at Dean. “The Elysian Fields Guest House?” When he nodded, she shook her head in disbelief. “Why didn’t he just call it the Vestibule of Hell?”
Dean shrugged. “Because that would be bad for business?”
“Do you get much business?”
“Well, no.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.” She bent her attention back to the note. “Stay out of room six. What’s in room six?”
“There was a fire, years ago. Mr. Smythe didn’t need the room, so he saved money on repairs by keeping it locked up.”
“Sounds charming. That’s all there is.” She turned the paper over but it was blank on the other side. “Maybe these will give us some ans…” Her voice trailed off as, mouth open, she fanned the other papers. Her signature had been carefully placed where it needed to be on each of the legal documents. And it was her signature, not a forgery. Smythe had lifted it out of the registration book.
Which could only mean one thing.
“Mr. McIssac, could you please go and get me a cup of coffee.”
Dean found himself out in the office, the door to Mr. Smythe’s rooms closed behind him, before he’d made a conscious decision to move. He remembered being asked to go for coffee and then he was in the office. Coffee. Office. Nothing in between.
“Okay, so your memory’s going.” He ducked under the counter flap. “Look at the bright side, boy, you’re still employed.”
Jobs were scarce, and he hoped he could hang on to this one. The pay wasn’t great, but it included a basement apartment and he’d discovered that he liked taking care of people. He’d begun to think about taking some kind of part-time hotel management course; when there were no guests, and there were seldom guests, he had a lot of free time.
All that could change now that Mr. Smythe had gotten tired of waiting for a buyer and given the place away to a total stranger. Who didn’t seem to want it.
Claire Hansen was not what he’d expected. First off, she was a lot younger. Although he’d had minimal experience judging the ages of women and the makeup just muddled it up all the more, he’d be willing to swear she was under thirty. He might even go as low as twenty-five.
And it was weird that she traveled with a cat.
“I can’t feel the summons anymore, because I’m where I’m needed.”
Austin blinked. “Say what?”
“Augustus Smythe is a Cousin.”
“Augustus?”
“It’s on the documents.” Claire fanned them out so the cat could see all six pages. “Printed. He knew better than to sign his name. He’s been here for a while, so obviously he was monitoring an accident site—a site he’s buggered off from and made my responsibility.” She dropped down onto a sofa upholstered in pink cabbage roses and continued dropping, sinking through billowing cushions to an alarming depth.
“Are you okay?” Austin asked a few moments later when she emerged, breathing heavily and clutching a handful of loose change.
“Fine.” Knees still considerably higher than her hips, Claire hooked an elbow over the reinforced structure of the sofa’s arm in case she started to sink again, dropping the change into a bowl of dubious looking mints. It might have made more sense to find another place to sit, but none of the other furniture looked any safer. “The summons wasn’t coming from the site, or I’d still be able to feel it. It had to have been coming from Augustus Smythe.”
The cat leaped up onto the coffee table. “He needed to leave so badly he drew you here?”
“Since he left last night, which is when the summons stopped, that’s the only logical explanation.”
“But why?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Why?”
Austin put a paw on her knee. “Why are you looking so happy about this?”
Was she? She supposed she was. “I’m not drifting any more.” Starting the day with neither a summons nor a site had been disconcerting. “I have a purpose again.”
“How nice for you.” He sat back. “We’re not going to get our vacation, are we?”
“Doesn’t look like it.” Her smile faded as she tapped the papers against her thigh. “Why didn’t Smythe identify himself when I didn’t recognize him?”
“Better question, why didn’t you recognize him?”
“I was tired, I was wet, and I had a headache,” she pointed out defensively. “All I could think of was getting out of that storm.”
“You think he fuzzed you?”
“Where would he get the power? I was distracted, all right? Let’s just leave it at that.” After another short struggle with the sofa, Claire managed to heave herself back up onto her feet. “Since the site’s in the hotel—or Smythe wouldn’t have bothered deeding it to me—and since I can’t sense it, I’m guessing that it’s so small it never became enough of a priority to need a Keeper and Smythe finally got tired of waiting. I’ll close it, and we’ll move on.”
“And the hotel?” Austin reminded her.
“After I seal the site, I’ll give it to young Mr. McIssac.”
“You think it’s going to be that easy?”
“Isn’t it always?” She picked up a squat figurine of a wide-eyed child in lederhosen playing a tuba, shuddered, and put it back down. “Come on.”
“Come on?” Trotting to the end of the table, he jumped over a plaster bust of Elvis, went under a set of nesting Chinese tables, and beat her to the door. “Where are we going?”
“To get some answers.”
“Where?”
“Where else? Where we were told not to go.”
Austin snorted. “Typical.”
Room six was on the third floor. As well as the standard lock, the door also boasted a large steel padlock on an industrial strength flange. Both locks had been made unopenable by the simple process of snapping the keys off in the mechanism.
“Seems like a lot of fuss over a small site,” Austin muttered, dropping down from his inspection.
“Well, he could hardly have guests wandering in on it regardless of size.” Releasing the padlock, Claire straightened. There were a number of ways she could gain access to the room, but most of them were labeled “emergency use only” as they involved the kind of pyrotechnics more likely to be deployed during small Middle Eastern wars. “I wonder if young Mr. McIssac has a hacksaw.”
“Ms. Hansen?” Dean put the tray down on the desk and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. She wasn’t in Mr. Smythe’s suite—her suite now, he supposed—and she wasn’t in the office. He hoped she wasn’t upstairs packing. Am I fired if she leaves?
Footsteps descending the stairs seemed to confirm his worst fears, but when she came into view, she wasn’t carrying her bags. She hadn’t even put her coat on.
“Oh, there you are, Dean.”
There he was? He hadn’t gone anywhere except to get her the coffee she’d asked for. “I brought cream and sugar,” he told her as she squeezed under the counter flap. “You didn’t say how you took it.”
“Definitely cream.” She poured some into the mug and frowned at the sugar bowl. “Do you have any packets of artificial sweetener?”
“Sure.” As far as he could tell, she didn’t need to watch her weight. While not quite a woman a man could see to shoot gulls through, she was on the skinny side and that much cream would pack on more pounds than a bit of sugar. “I’ll go get you some.”