Violet pointed to the closet ceiling, where an access panel was cut into the gypsum board. “You get to the attic here,” she said. “Miss Mays said you had all access for the weekend.”
Wayne passed up the chance for a lame double entendre, and he couldn’t recall the access from his previous visit. But they’d spent more time in the bed than in the closet. “Was this access in existence back in 1948?”
“You’re thinking Margaret Percival slipped though here, found another way outside, bypassed the front desk and her security deposit, left her Packard in the parking lot, and hitchhiked away to start a new life?”
“It’s one theory.” Wayne noticed black streaks on the wall, probably made by the shoes of people who had scrambled upward in search of the missing woman’s spirit. Margaret was an Internet urban legend, and Wayne had researched more than a few sketchy photos on various paranormal sites.
“The service stairs run along the back, to the kitchen and laundry rooms. Margaret could have used the side doors, except those were kept locked because the manager didn’t want the hired help to sneak out, either. This was back before excessive fire and safety regulations.”
“I noticed the sprinkler system was an add-on,” Wayne said, indicating the sprinkler system that hung suspended six inches below the ceiling. “These pipes don’t do a whole lot to promote elegance.”
“The White Horse gave up on elegance in the 1960s,” Violet said. “Since then, we’ve been selling ‘quaint.’”
“With appropriate rate increases along the way.”
“A hotel is like a woman, Digger.” Violet made a sudden turn and her face was eight inches from his, but for only a moment, and then she flitted back to the dresser, where the alarm clock was blinking again. “She not only gets better with age, she makes it an asset.”
“But her wiring gets a little more temperamental,” Wayne said. Blinking lights and power surges gave a thrill to those who accepted them as proof of visitation. If they needed so little to believe, then who was Wayne to question their faith? It was no different than seeing the Virgin Mary in buttered toast or the devil’s face in the smoke of a terrorist attack.
Or believing in the face that stared back from the mirror. Where was the proof in that?
“We undergo our annual inspections, and our hotel is up to code,” Violet said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have guests waiting.”
Wayne stepped into the bathroom, where a cast-iron, claw-foot tub sat off the floor. He and Beth had played there, soap bubbles, laughter, candles, and champagne. The dripping faucet, inaudible in the bedroom, echoed with a stony resonance. The bad lighting and the rippled, frosted mirror over the vanity would give suggestible people plenty of shivers.
“This will do,” Wayne called. “But I’ll need a cot brought in for my daughter. And some paranormal activity for my customers.”
“Sorry, we don’t have any Indian graveyards,” Violet said. “No axe murders, no hung preachers, no hillbilly vampires.”
Thunder rolled down the hall, accompanied by giggles of mirth. Wayne frowned. The hardcore purists didn’t like busy, noisy traffic that contaminated their evidence, and children were the worst. He didn’t recall anyone registering children for the conference, and while he didn’t forbid it, the ghost-hunting crowd generally followed an adults-only rule. After all, they tended to miss bedtime.
“I thought the hotel was blocked off for the conference,” Wayne said, tightening the faucet handle to no avail. “I didn’t know there would be small children here this weekend.”
“The children are always here,” Violet said, and by the time Wayne entered the bedroom, she was gone, out the door with not even a whisper of its closing.
Nice exit line.
Children underfoot or not, Wayne had picked the perfect place to stage his traveling freak show. But he’d already known that, because of the promise he’d made 17 years ago. Much had changed since then, including his view of promises.
He went downstairs to retrieve his gear and his daughter, dreading the weight of both.
Chapter 2
Maybe ghosts are like clouds on a windy day. The ether merges in tapestry—then is torn away, and all you were is never again. A memoir writ in invisible ink.
But that was the sky and dreams and imagination, Emily Dickinson crap, and this was the real world. Real, real, real, no matter how deep inside your head you hid or what games you played.
Kendra Wilson ran her pencil lead across her sketch pad, threading spidery gray lines over the paper. She roughed out the hotel’s main entrance, a set of double doors featuring large oval windows. The glass was beveled and tinted, so she drew them as if they were dewy eyes, complete with pupils. It was the kind of doorway that looked right back at you, just what you’d expect from the most haunted hotel in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Kendra wasn’t sure what was spookier: the idea that dead people might still be checked into the hotel’s many rooms, or that the structure itself might have taken a life of its own, sucking in the dust and detritus of the years and imitating the breath of those who had passed through its halls.
Dad would laugh at either notion. Then again, Wayne “Digger” Wilson had built a cottage industry on such lame curiosity, and he had a lot of money riding on the White Horse Inn’s reputation, whether it was “the most haunted” or merely grim and gray and in serious need of a makeover. But Dad was busy scoping out the cold spots, or else the blonde bimbo who headed up hospitality, so Kendra couldn’t get his opinion on the matter.
Which left her by herself, alone with the creatures she set down on paper and the games inside her head.
And they wonder why I don’t play well with others. At least the ones I can’t erase.
Kendra let the pencil tip float over the page, eyes almost closed. She’d read in one of Dad’s books about automatic writing, or “ghostwriting” as some called it, where psychics supposedly tuned into voices from the other side. They’d drift into a trance and scrawl out messages from beyond, whispering exactly the types of sweet nothings the living wanted to hear.
I’m fine over here on the Other Side. It never rains, the flowers are always in bloom, and even the old folks are good-looking. It’s sort of like Southern California without the smog and plastic surgery. Come on over when you get a chance, but don’t forget the cheese dip.
Her art induced an equivalent trance, but despite being dragged along to a dozen of North Carolina’s darkest destinations, she’d yet to witness so much as a stray bit of cigarette smoke. So she wished herself into dreams and nightmares, summoning up specters that delighted her fellow sophomores and horrified Bradshaw, the guidance counselor.
Yet even with her obvious talent, she was going nowhere. Her high school art teachers summed up her ouvre as “comic-book doodling,” and even though coffee-shop geeks and Hollywood producers read nothing but books that were mostly pictures, if you wanted to be serious, you had to render nudes and faded roses and geometrically precise duplications of European townscapes. Or close your eyes and pee on the canvas a la Pollock.
Even her pencil was ludicrous, the Big Fattie, the kind favored by kindergarteners with stubby fingers. Never mind that her mother had given her a box of them before leaving her with the Digger and six billion other people who would never understand.