Chapter 5
“Edward, you have to calm down,” Dorothy said firmly. “You’ll alarm everyone in the building! Are you a guest here?”
Edward stopped screaming and nodded. “With my wife.”
“Good. Why don’t you go to her now?”
“Because she’s having hysterics in our room, where there was a rat on the windowsill and another running past our door when I came out to complain,” Edward said. “What is wrong with this place? How can it be so inundated with rodents?”
“It’s just a temporary thing,” Dorothy said, playing it cool. “Someone must have disturbed the nest and made them run for a new hiding place.”
“A hiding place suggests they’ll just move to a new place in the hotel,” Warren ventured. “It might be better if they were eradicated completely, don’t you think?”
That was obvious, yes, but she’d been stalling for time, darn him!
“Yes. What are you going to do about it?” Edward demanded aggressively.
“Don’t worry, I have an idea. I’ll get Jasper to help us out,” Dorothy reassured him. “And dinner for the next three nights will be free.”
That seemed to mollify Edward. He drew himself up to his unimpressive height and looked thoughtful. “And you’ll definitely get rid of them?”
Dorothy hoped she wasn’t lying when she nodded. “Jasper is very good at his job.”
“All right then,” Edward said, and he turned to head back into the dining room.
Dorothy let out a sigh of relief. “Okay, he’s been dealt with. But we’re going to get a lot more calls if things keep going this way. I mean, look at that thing. It’s just sitting there.”
It was perched on the edge of the desk, watching them, twitching its little pink nose inquisitively.
“Shoo!” Sadie said with a clap of her hands that made the rodent take off in fright.
It scampered down the desk and across the floor toward Dorothy’s aunt. She screamed and ran, throwing herself into Warren’s arms. Dorothy had the oddest feeling of jealousy as her aunt clung to him. For the briefest of moments, she wondered what it would be like to swap places with Sadie.
“Oh, I can’t take it!” Sadie cried. “Get it away from me!”
“It’s not anywhere near you!” Warren reassured her, patting the older woman on her back.
“It’s following me!” Sadie insisted.
“It’s not, it’s under the bookcase now,” Michael said, pointing.
Dorothy turned in time to see a bald tail disappear. She turned back to her aunt. “See, it’s gone.”
Sadie regained her composure, stepped back from Warren, and smoothed the front of the skirt. “Right. Well. Since I know Jasper’s grandmother, I think I’ll go now and speak to her. That boy must get to work immediately!”
Without waiting, she turned on her heel and left the hotel at speed.
“Sadie really doesn’t like rodents,” Dorothy explained after a moment’s silence.
Warren nodded. “Most people don’t.”
Michael looked livid. “What on earth is going on here? First, Mac won’t talk to us, and then we discover the man so rich he funded an entire town’s operations is living in a fleabag of a hotel full of rats?”
“It’s not a fleabag!” Dorothy shot back defensively. “Things have just gotten a little … slack in the management of matters. I don’t know what the problem is. But I’ll find out.”
Hurrying after Mac, she caught up with him in the corridor, heading down to his office on the first floor. “Mac! What are you doing? They came all this way to talk to you and now you’re brushing them off? And rats? The hotel is suddenly overrun by vermin? What is happening!”
He patted her shoulder. “Well done, Dorothy. I know I could count on you.”
“What are you talking about?” Baffled, she demanded, “So will you see Michael and Warren? Or maybe even just talk to me? Really, Mac, I?—”
He stepped close to her and whispered, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. There are ears everywhere.” Stepping back, he nodded. “I’m sure we can catch up. I have something pressing that I must attend to. See you later!” His gestures were agitated, and he looked quite disturbed.
“Mac? What are you talking about? Mac!”
Unlocking his office door, he opened it and stepped inside. Dorothy tried to follow him, but he closed the door in her face.
“Go to the terrace and have dinner,” he said through the door. “Good night, Dot.”
“What?” she exclaimed. Raising her fist, she hammered on the door. “We have to talk, Mac! You can’t ignore everything! Warren and Michael came a long way to see you. You can’t do this!”
Silence. He wasn’t even going to speak to her. He’d made up his mind.
Great! What am I going to do now? I have all this information that he needs to see and he’s running scared of something. Not to mention that Warren and Michael came all the way from Texas, and Mac has lost his mind. What am I going to tell them?
How could Mac have gone crazy in such a short time? Something must have spooked him. Determined to find out what, Dorothy went back to reception.
Agnes was back behind her counter, straightening things. She looked up when Dorothy reached her and smiled.
Dorothy leaned her arms on the countertop and returned the smile. “So, how have things been? I see Mac is feeling a little …”
A shadow crossed Agnes’s friendly face, like a cloud momentarily obscuring the sun.
“He’s been a little off-color since he arrived, especially when we suddenly got a case of rats.
They appeared all over the hotel in a day.
Suddenly they were running down the hall, through the kitchen, in the rooms. I honestly thought that Mac was going to have a heart attack. He’s been livid ever since.”
“They just appeared one day?” Dorothy asked. “There was no sign of them and then …” she snapped her fingers, “there they were?”
“Just like that. It’s very odd, and none of us know what to do. We’ve never had a rat problem, not in twenty years of business. My mother was horrified when I told her. She said it was all her fault for handing the front desk over to me. As though I caused the rats to invade!”
“It’s not your fault at all,” Dorothy assured her as Agnes’s face turned red with anger.
“Oh, I know.” Agnes rolled her eyes. “That’s my mother for you though.
She always thinks she worked the front desk better than me.
She forgets that I grew up here with her.
I learned to greet guests before I could even spell the word, so any mistakes I made, I learned from her.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if she blamed me for Mac’s mood as well. ”
“He seems worried,” Dorothy said. “Is it just the hotel he’s worried about? Has he said anything to you?”
Agnes’s face got redder still. “Really? You think he’d confide in me?
I think he’s just paranoid. He told me that people are listening to his conversations through the walls.
There’s no one listening to him! Why would there be?
” She paused and gestured to Dorothy to lean in closer.
Then she spoke in a softer voice. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m really worried about Mac.
I think he’s having some kind of mental breakdown. ”
Dorothy nodded. She was beginning to think that might be a possibility. Mac wasn’t well. She’d never seen him like this. “Is there anything else going on that I should know about?” Dorothy asked, pressing for any details that might give her a hint about what was happening.
“What do you mean, like in the town?” Agnes asked.
Dorothy nodded. “I’m trying to think of what might make him worry so.”
“There’s been some trouble,” Agnes offered. “Some folks have been attacked by ruffians. It’s nothing big though. Nothing connected to the hotel. It might be keeping a few people away, but I don’t think our numbers of guests have dropped so much that Mac would need to worry.”
“Well, if you think of anything that might help, let me know. Okay?” Dorothy asked.
Agnes nodded. “We all love Mac. You know that, right?”
Dorothy nodded. “I know.”
She headed out onto the dining terrace and watched the sun beginning to set, turning the clouds pink and gold.
It was a truly spectacular view that always took her breath away.
When she reached the table, she found Michael pacing with his whiskey glass in hand.
Warren hadn’t moved from where he was before. And Aunt Sadie was missing.
“Well?” Michael demanded when he spotted her. “How is Mac?”
Dorothy took her seat. “Not good. There’s trouble here too, and Mac is letting it get to him.”
Michael snorted. “Wonderful, the one man who can help us fund an assault on El Aguila is too skittish to do anything. We wasted all of this time and money coming out here for nothing. It’s a complete disaster!”
“No, I would put it at a 40 percent disaster,” Warren corrected. His whiskey was hardly touched, while Michael’s was almost empty.
“Really?” Michael snapped. “And I suppose you have reasons for that?”
“Of course I do—” Warren began.
“It’s okay, we don’t need a full report,” Michael interrupted, moodily looking out over the terrace.
“Okay,” Warren said with a shrug. “So, the plan is to let Sadie get Jasper the rat catcher and then we can talk to Mac?”
“We should probably wait for the morning,” Dorothy suggested. “Mac’s in a strange mood.”
Warren nodded. “All right. We can wait one more day, I guess.”
Dorothy nodded. “Maybe in the meantime, Warren and I can work on some of the information I brought and package it for Mac to read when he’s feeling better.”
“Yes, I think that would be a good use of our time,” Warren agreed.
Dorothy kept looking around for more rodents, but perhaps it was a little too cold out on the terrace for them. It was a little too cold for her too. “Should we go inside?”
The two men agreed.
They found a table near the fireplace. Two other couples had found themselves tables close to the fire as well and sat talking softly together.
“This hotel … why is it here?” Warren asked, frowning, after they’d all sat in silence for a comfortable while. “Why here in Pine Hill? Is there a mine or something nearby that people come to work in?”