Violet angled forward even more, hands clasped as if Janey were the ghost of Mother Teresa. Janey jammed her cigarette into her mouth to stifle a chuckle.
“Thank you,” Violet said. “I can replace it in six weeks.”
“You won’t tell anyone?”
Said the spider to the fly.
Violet almost stuttered. “Will you?”
Janey stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, one of the lipstick-stained butts rolling free and bouncing to the floor. “I think we can work something out.”
A few thousand, Violet had said. According to Janey’s reckoning, the actual amount of the embezzlement had been somewhere around four thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred. Janey had noticed because she was constantly calculating how much she could steal for herself. After all, a woman had to rely on her own devices. When looks faded, all you had left was cunning. It was a lesson Violet was still at least two decades away from learning.
Chad and Stevie would never notice the parched till. They’d bought the hotel as an “investment” that was actually a tax loss to offset the millions they were making in Palm Beach condominiums. The one time the couple had actually visited the property, they’d decided to book a room at the Courtyard by Marriott in neighboring Boone rather than sleep under their own leaky roof. So Janey’s accounting was a like a whore’s career in a seaport—tight going in and loose going out.
Violet looked so exuberant that Janey wished she’d played a little longer. But Janey tended to burn them out too fast, and with the hotel’s new billing as “the Blue Ridge Mountain’s most haunted hotel,” the job had been getting harder to fill, despite the recession and the fringe benefit of occasional free drinks at the bar.
“We can stick some extra charges on Wayne Wilson’s bill.” Janey stood, the chair creaking with a metallic brittleness that befit the hotel’s reputation. “A set-up fee here, a maintenance surcharge there. We’re giving him the hotel for the weekend, so he shouldn’t be surprised by a few surprises.”
Janey made a slow, stately trek across the floor, which was difficult because of the travel magazines, electric heater, broken lamp, and mop bucket that created an obstacle course on the floor. She made a ceremony of opening the door, which gave a gratuitous creak. She’d instructed maintenance to quit oiling door hinges. She also added extra mirrors in the hall and reduced the wattage of the light bulbs. All to create atmosphere.
Stroke of genius, marketing the hotel as a ghost hunter’s getaway. Hype your cobwebs. It’s easier than dusting.
“Make sure Mr. Wilson gets what he needs,” Janey said. “He’s talking about making this an annual event.”
“He’s kind of creepy,” Violet said.
“Play along. Act scared. Let him believe what he wants to believe.”
“He asked me if I’d ever had any ‘experiences’ here.”
“A little white lie never hurt anybody,” Janey said, appreciating the irony. She’d busted Violet for embezzling, but here she was promoting dishonesty as simply good business.
As Violet exited in a waft of lavender and apples, Janey smiled, the parchment of her cheeks crinkling. The pleasure was still spreading across her face when the phone rang. Cell phones rarely worked here on the carapace of the Eastern Continental Divide, another advantage to the new marketing angle. The jangling phones and crackling lines added to the mystique.
“Janey, it’s Stevie.”
“Hey, good news. We booked it full for the conference.”
“Good,” Stevie said, though his tone was ambivalent.
“Something wrong?”
“This isn’t easy for me. You know how I much I love the place.”
Janey didn’t fall for it. Instead, her gut tensed in paranoia. “Yes.”
“Chad and I had an offer.”
“An offer? I didn’t even know you were selling—”
“Two mil an acre. Condo project. They’ll knock off a little for the demolition costs, but they want it fast to catch the good interest rates. We couldn’t pass it up, not the way the hotel has been bleeding red ink.”
“How soon?” Janey said, skin tingling, hoping she’d have a good half a year or so to rob the till. Early retirement wasn’t so bad.
“Sunday.”
Sunday? Two days from now.
“I don’t—”
“We’ll be down next week to deal with it. Don’t worry, Janey, you’ll get a nice severance package. Chad and I aren’t monsters.”
“What about the staff?” Janey said, not that she cared. She was buying time to give her racing mind a chance to settle down.
“Don’t say anything so they don’t walk out. Give the ghost hunters their money’s worth. One last hurrah for the old White Horse, eh?”
You can bet your sweet little tush on that one, Stevie.
“Farewell, love.” Stevie hung up.
The hotel was her life, her identity, her playground. She’d imagined keeping her room on the second floor until they wheeled her out in a zippered bag. Janey gripped the dead phone, unable to face the void that loomed in front of her.
“Two days.”
Had she said it aloud?
She had the acute feeling that someone was watching her.
Janey turned. Nothing.
Paranoia.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching.
She wondered if they’d overheard.
Two days.
Chapter 6
Smells like pigeon poop and mummies up here.
Wayne played his flashlight beam along the narrow strip of decking that served as a crawl space. The attic was insulated with shredded newspaper, so it was a miracle the White Horse hadn’t long since burned to the ground, especially given the shoddy state of the wiring. The rafters were crisscrossed with cables and pipes, evidence of the hotel’s attempt to change with the times. The upgrades had been haphazard, and the tangles created the suggestion that monstrous, hairy spiders would come creeping out of the shadows at any moment.
He planned to make the attic a hunt location, but he couldn’t picture running a bunch of forty-something TAPS wannabes up the ladder and through the cramped quarters. One of them might wander off the decking in the dark and plummet through the gypsum ceiling. Even though Haunted Computer Productions was a limited-liability company that owned nothing besides its namesake computer, Wayne didn’t want the hassle or legal fees involved with getting sued. Hunters were required to sign waivers, but a waiver would be nothing more than Exhibit A in a court case that could drag for years.
He backtracked to attic access, deciding to use the main one off the hall closet instead of the one in Room 318. He yelled down through the access hole to the hall. “It’s a no go up here.”
“How about a couple of IR cams?” answered Burton Hodges, the former rock ‘n’ roll roadie Wayne had recruited as SSI’s tech specialist.
Infrared cameras would allow people to watch the attic on monitors. Every waft of dust or wind-blown shadow could become proof of the afterlife. The unbelievable became more real if it was on television, and he could edit together clips to create a commemorative DVD and rake in some extra cash on the side.
The only thing better than sending customers away satisfied is sending them away broke.
“Sure, let’s rig it with audio, too.” Wayne figured the eaves had enough cracks and gaps to allow moaning breezes, and with any luck the place was infested with bats.
Wayne sent his flashlight beam bouncing deeper into the attic. Specks of dust swirled in the orange cone, creating the illusion of a thousand floating fairies. Any digital flash photographs taken up here would result in generous orb phenomena, something the armchair spiritualists accepted as paranormal activity.
Wayne had always wondered why a ghost should choose to inhabit a fuzzy white space the size and shape of a billiard ball when presumably it knew no bounds of time and space. Every professional photographer insisted orbs were the result of lens flare arising from reflections of dust or water droplets, and in the era of Photoshop programs, no digital image was trustworthy anyway.