Chapter 8
The Overlook Inn
The innkeeper thrust the key at Sarah.
The innkeeper, Barton Harvey, glanced expectantly at the man who’d followed Sarah from the municipal offices. “I’ll show her to her room,” Conner offered.
“Thank you, Kale,” Harvey said, making no attempt to conceal his relief that he would be in Sarah’s presence no longer than absolutely necessary.
Funny. Sarah was the one paying for the room and he hadn’t thanked her.
More of that compassion Conner spoke of so ardently.
Sarah followed him up the stairs to the second floor.
When Conner hadn’t driven away after seeing her to the inn, she’d been surprised.
Evidently he’d decided to ensure she didn’t go off nosing around town without him.
Once she’d gotten out of her rental car, she’d expected him to speed away.
Instead, he’d insisted on carrying her suitcase, but the show of chivalry hadn’t been needed.
She’d wagged that damned thing all over the country by herself plenty of times.
She gave the inn’s high ceilings and intricate architectural details a cursory survey. Nice place. As long as there was hot water and a comfortable bed, she would be happy.
At the door marked 13, he moved aside for her to unlock it. She hadn’t used a hotel room key like this since Charlotte, North Carolina. Once the door was open, he took two steps inside and set her bag on the floor. He was ready to split. As it was, he’d lasted longer than she’d estimated.
“Call me”—he looked anywhere but at her—“in the morning.”
“I don’t have your number.”
“I’ll give you my cell number.”
Monotone, uninspired. Yep, still ticked off. She dug out her phone and entered the number he recited.
“If you need anything, you can let me know.”
He turned to the open door.
She should say something. It wasn’t like she’d wanted his company today. She hadn’t asked for it. But she couldn’t deny that he’d made things marginally more interesting. Even if the way in which he’d made them interesting wasn’t in her best interest.
Say the words. “Thank you.”
He hesitated but didn’t turn around.
What now? She glanced around the room, didn’t find the answer. To hell with it. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
He walked out, closed the door behind him.
For one long moment she stood there staring at the closed door. “That was weird.”
Why?
She had no reason to feel guilty about disappointing this guy. She’d done pretty well today. She’d only pissed off two people. Not counting the innkeeper. In all fairness, the mere fact that she’d shown up appeared to have pissed him off.
Whatever.
Sarah picked up her bag and tossed it on the bed.
Then did the same with her shoulder bag.
She set her hands on her hips and turned all the way around to view her room.
She hadn’t been surprised that she’d been given room 13.
What did surprise her, however, was that it turned out to be quite nice.
Generally, when she met with the kind of hostility she’d sensed in the innkeeper, she wound up with the worst room in the place.
Bad plumbing, drafty windows, no air-conditioning, she’d had it all.
If this was the worst, then it was no wonder the inn was the most popular one in the county.
Four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Lots of big fluffy pillows and lush bedding. Antique furnishings. Cable television. High-speed internet service. Her own private bath and a nice big bowl of fruit.
She sat on the mattress and bounced.
“Not too bad.”
’Course, a good mattress didn’t guarantee she would sleep.
She pushed up and wandered over to the massive window. Kale Conner strode down the front steps and across the parking area to his Jeep. Long, confident strides. She felt a prick of disappointment that he didn’t spare a glance back at the inn as he got into the vehicle.
There it was. The most fundamental reason she should avoid him at all costs.
Attraction.
He really did have nice eyes. She didn’t usually pay attention to eyes other than for assessing intent and emotion.
As good-looking as Kale Conner was, his best assets were definitely his eyes.
Looking at him from a purely physical perspective, she had to confess that he fell into the hot category.
He had a good voice, too. Low and deep, and he was obviously intelligent.
As his Jeep moved down the twisted road leading back to town she wondered if he really believed that sales pitch he’d given her about the citizens of Youngstown. Was he really that naive?
Then again, his life didn’t revolve around murder.
Whatever he thought, the fact was that a murderer could crop up anywhere. Their reason for becoming a killer could be environmental, could be genetic.
Yet this whole village appeared to be convinced that their troubles were not related to a local. At least not one from this century. Give them a curse or a stranger, but not one of their own.
When Conner’s taillights disappeared, she shifted her attention to the village and harbor.
It was dark now, but the collage of lights around the waterfront twinkled in the clear night.
The sailboats drifted like ghosts with their white covers shimmering in the moonlight.
Squares of light glowed from the homes that clung to the hillside flanking the inlet.
She could only assume that the lack of sun in the winter prompted the owners to forgo curtains or blinds on their windows.
She couldn’t imagine, even on the fourth floor, leaving her windows naked for anyone’s viewing pleasure.
Though it had melted on the pavement and had been scraped from the parking lots and driveways, snowbanks loitered beneath trees and against the corners of buildings and rooftops.
The winding street up to the inn’s hilltop station had reiterated Conner’s point about four-wheel drive.
The first icy or snowy morning she would regret not having gone with a fully equipped SUV.
Kale Conner. She unzipped and shed her coat.
Her research indicated he was thirty, the eldest of three children.
After his father became disabled ten years ago, the full responsibility of the family’s fishing business had fallen upon his shoulders.
He’d left his university studies behind and returned home.
She wondered if he regretted that choice.
His younger brother was twenty-three and in his final year at the University of Massachusetts. His sister was eighteen and a senior at Youngstown High School. The matriarch of the family attended to the disabled father and took care of things at home, leaving the business to her elder son.
The four other village council members were much older than Conner, married with grown children and, of course, pillars of the community. Sarah hadn’t been able to find any dirt on the four. Typical small-town politicians with their fingers in every pie.
Chief of Police Benjamin Willard, sixty, was, from all reports, born with steel blue in his veins. A wife and two grown children. Mayor Fritz Patterson was the former principal of Youngstown High School and a widower. No dirt on the chief or the mayor, either.
Squeaky clean.
The whole village population appeared to be just what Conner said: good, God-fearing, compassionate folks.
But that was impossible.
Good, God-fearing, compassionate folks didn’t mutilate and murder young women.
Nope.
Someone here had a secret. A dirty, disgusting secret, and she was going to find it.
Sarah dragged off the ski cap. She threaded her fingers through her hair and braced her elbows on the window.
Randall Enfinger, the bicoastal developer who’d purchased the Young estate, was clean.
As clean as a guy that rich and with that many connections could be.
He’d bought the extensive property for the purpose of building a resort.
He didn’t care that the village’s founding father, Thomas Young, had been born there.
The greedy heirs didn’t appear to care, either, since they had sold to the highest bidder with no thought as to what happened after the sale.
As soon as the deconstruction had started, so had the village’s trouble.
At first there were protests from the residents.
Local media aired the controversy. Then Mother Nature stepped in.
Hurricane-force winds had struck in the middle of the night.
No lives had been lost, but the property damage had been significant.
Sarah had seen the trees along Calderwood Lane and Chapel Trail that had been snapped by the out-of-season storm.
As an encore, full-on winter arrived early in the form of heavier-than-usual snows in December and January.
All construction work had stopped for a couple of weeks.
Then when the forces of nature didn’t stop Enfinger completely, Valerie Gerard went missing. A few days later her body had been found, and a faction of the village residents had jumped on the curse bandwagon. Enfinger’s temporary office at the development site had burned.
Just like twenty years ago, the headlines had read.
The accidental unearthing of a historic, and previously undiscovered, family cemetery had set off the chain of events back then.
A hurricane had struck, doing substantial damage and killing four Youngstown residents.
Almost immediately afterward, two women, one eighteen and one nineteen, had been murdered in a very similar manner as Valerie Gerard—their bodies discovered at the chapel.
As if that wasn’t punishment enough, according to those who clung to the curse theory, the winter that followed was the worst in Youngstown history.
Until now.
Though Conner and Brighton hadn’t mentioned it, the tale went that the devil himself had been commissioned with punishing the villagers for any infractions of this nature.