“How long are you planning on staying around?”
“Actually…” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and turned to face Claire. “Actually, I’ve been thinking of leaving.”
“Leaving?”
“Yeah. You know, getting on with my life.”
Silently congratulating herself for maintaining a neutral expression, Claire wondered why her reflection in his glasses looked as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. “When?”
“Soon. If you want, this can be my two week notice.” When Claire gave no indication of what she wanted, he shrugged. “Nice meeting you, Diana. I’ve got to go make some phone calls.”
“Well, thud,” Diana said, as he disappeared down the basement stairs.
Claire felt as though she were waking up from a bad dream, the kind where she was trying to cross the road but her feet kept sticking in the asphalt and there were two trucks and a red compact car bearing down on her. “What do you mean, thud?”
“Thud. The sound of the other shoe dropping.” Diana straight-armed herself up to sit on the edge of the counter. “A little more than a month ago, Mom said Dean was the most grounded guy she’d ever seen and now look at him. You’ve just cut the ground right out from under him, haven’t you?”
“I have not.”
“He must really dig your looks ’cause it can’t be your personality.”
“Diana!”
“I mean, Jacques is cuter than I expected and, okay, he makes me laugh with those corny pickup lines, but he’s dead. In spite of the glasses, Dean’s big-time beefcake. If I can see that, you should be able to. You had the perfect opportunity here, and you blew it.”
“The perfect opportunity for what?” Claire demanded.
“For making the best of the situation and building a partnership with a really nice guy. Not my personal cup of tea, but a lot of people would jump at the chance.”
“Why can’t a man and a woman run a hotel together and just be friends?”
“Well, gee, I don’t know, Claire. You’re the one doing the horizontal mambo with the dead guy, you tell me?”
“We’re not talking about Jacques!”
“Sure we are. Enlighten me; if you needed to bed one of them, and obviously you felt a need, why Jacques and not Dean? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. They’re both bystanders so that’s not it. Is it because Dean’s alive? No, from what I hear that’s never been a problem in the past. Oh wait, could it be because you’re an ageist?”
“A what?”
“You heard me, an age-ist! You think I’m incompetent because I’m younger than you, and you ignore the evidence and think Dean’s a kid for the same reason.”
“I don’t have to stand here and listen to this.”
“True.”
“I have work to do.”
“Okay. Go do it.”
“Fine. I will.” About to leave the kitchen, Claire whirled back around to glare at her sister. “Don’t blow the place up while I’m not watching.”
“I came to help, remember.”
“Oh, you’ve been a big help.”
Leaning back and kicking her heels against the lower cabinets, Diana waited until she heard the door to Claire’s sitting room slam shut before she smiled triumphantly. “Made her think.”
“And I’m all for that,” Austin agreed, jumping up beside her. “As long as you don’t blow the place up while she’s not watching.”
“I promised I’d stay out of the furnace room.”
“Good for you.”
“How come Claire screwed things up so badly?”
The cat shrugged. “She’s a Keeper. She’s trained to come in post-disaster and deal with the mess, so she has to make a mess of any potential relationships before she feels competent to deal with them.”
“I’m a Keeper and I don’t do that.”
“Yet,” Austin said, looking superior.
Golf had replaced the soccer game and Jacques was gone. Still steaming, Claire turned off the television and stomped through to the bedroom. In order to get far enough from her sister to keep from wringing her neck, she’d have to leave the hotel. Yanking open the wardrobe door, she stepped inside.
Right at the moment, she’d enjoy dealing with a troop of killer Girl Guides.
Still sitting on the counter, Diana searched the cupboards for cookies, found three-quarters of a bag of fudge creams, and sat happily eating them while she worked out a way to fix Claire’s life.
Obviously, Claire needed to leave the hotel.
Since no other Keeper had arrived to take over the site, the site had to be closed.
In order for the site to be closed, the exact parameters of the current seal had to be determined.
“And since there’s only one remaining witness…” Scattering cookie crumbs, Diana jumped down off the counter. “…the logical solution would be to ask her.” She snapped her fingers toward the kitchen and headed for the stairs.
Behind her, the crumbs cleaned themselves up and dropped into the garbage.
Paying only enough attention to keep from tripping over unexpected phenomena, Claire strode deeper into the wardrobe.
There were, Diana realized, a couple of ways to get into room six. The first involved pulling enough power to melt the locks, but that kind of heat would probably also burn down the building.
She went looking for a set of keys.
I should have told her flat out that it was none of her damn…darned business. Her mind on other things, Claire moved toward a soft gray light. I am not an ageist.
“Hey, Dean, sorry to bother you, but I wanted to go poke around in the attic ’cept the door’s locked and Claire’s gone off with her keys.”
“Claire’s gone? Where’s she at?”
“Oh, she stomped off into the wardrobe.” Rocking backward and forward, heel to toe, Diana grinned up at him. “We had a fight, and she took off to think about what I said. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Keepers have this tendency to think they’re always right.”
Dean’s brows rose. “Aren’t you a Keeper, then?”
“Well, sure, but that doesn’t make Claire any less of a pedagogue.”
“A what?”
“A know-it-all.” Her eyes gleamed. “Although I’m leaving off a few choice adjectives. The attic?”
“Okay, sure.” He pulled his key ring from his pocket dropped it in Diana’s outstretched palm. “It’s the big black one. You, uh, know about Jacques, then? The ghost? He might be in the attic.”
“Yeah, Claire told me all about him.” Closing her hand around the keys, she reached out and punched Dean lightly on the arm. “Don’t worry, you’re better off without her. She snores.”
Don’t worry? If Claire told her sister all about Jacques, Dean thought, watching Diana bound back up the basement stairs, what did she tell her about you, boy?
“Don’t stand around with your thumb up your butt. What do you want?”
Claire’s wandering attention snapped home. She was standing in a long room, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Directly in front of her, sitting at a library table stacked with shoe boxes, was an older woman with soft white curls, wearing an ink-stained flowered smock. “Historian!”
“I know who I am,” the Historian snapped. “Who the hell are you?”
“Claire, Claire Hansen. I’m a Keeper.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. Wait a minute.” The Historian’s eyes narrowed, collapsing the pale skin around them into a network of grandmotherly wrinkles. “I remember now, you were here three years, twelve days, eleven hours and forty-two minutes ago looking up some political thing. Did you finish with it?”