Chapter 14 #2
My security system was offline. Nothing was being recorded upstairs in the hallway after I’d had several guests complain about the invasion of privacy. Cameras were for hotels, not B&Bs, I’d been told both to my face and in online reviews.
My thought had been that I didn’t want to dissuade guests. I wanted them to feel comfortable. And really, what were the odds that there would be another murder or kidnapping at my house?
I had assumed slim odds.
But it seemed like we’d had an intruder.
The floorboard groaned, obligingly, same as it always had, same as it had for every guest who'd ever stumbled down the hallway at two in the morning.
But when I ran my fingers along the seam where the board met its neighbor, I found something I hadn't bothered looking for the first time, back when I'd been too busy reassuring four alarmed adults that the house wasn't actually trying to kill anyone.
A thin, pale scratch along the edge, fresh enough that it hadn't had time to dull into the wood grain the way the rest of the surface had.
Not a scuff from a shoe. Something narrower.
A pry mark, maybe, or the edge of a tool worked in and levered up and set back down by someone in a hurry, someone who hadn't quite managed to seat the board flush again in the dark.
I sat back on my heels in the hallway and stared at it.
I hadn't checked that night, not properly, not with a flashlight and a purpose.
I'd looked, seen no dust disturbed and no footprint on the runner, and decided that meant nothing had happened, because I'd been thinking about ghosts and not about hands.
Dust told you about feet. It didn't tell you a thing about fingers.
Room Two. Which was Vivienne's. I sat with that fact and didn't love where it wanted to take me.
I was still crouched there, deep in a spiral that wasn't doing me any favors, when the front door banged open downstairs and Vivienne's voice came floating up, bright and a little too cheerful for the hour.
"Harper? Are you home? Oh, Maggie, hi."
I stood up fast enough to see spots and smoothed my skirt. I went down to meet her.
Vivienne was in the foyer, looking up at me with a smile that seemed at odds with the evening.
Maggie was in her socks on the sofa, still tapping away at her phone.
"I left the reception," Vivienne said. "I couldn't do one more toast. And I got to thinking, this whole weekend has been so heavy, hasn't it? Death and blood and Hyacinth on a gurney. What we all need is something a little lighter. A little fun."
“Any ideas of what that might be?”
She shrugged. “A ghost tour? There have to be some in the Quarter.”
“Just have Harper do her ghost tour,” Maggie said without glancing up from her phone. “This house is haunted and she gives a bomb ghost tour. Vivienne, do you want any Thai food? We’re ordering delivery.”
“Really? That sounds fun. I just can’t sit in my room all night. And yes, I’ll take a veggie Pad Thai, extra spicy.”
Under any other circumstances, I might have hesitated, might have pointed out that a woman requesting a haunted-house tour hours after another woman requested privacy for a ouija board felt like a theme I didn't especially care for.
But Vivienne's face had a genuine, worn-thin quality to it, the look of someone who'd spent three days being calm for other people and had run entirely out of runway.
"I can do that," I said. "Maggie, you in?"
"Obviously." She was already getting up. “Food is ordered. I've heard you tell these stories at parties. You do the voices."
"I do not do the voices."
"You absolutely do the voices."
I gave them the tour the way I'd given it a hundred times before, dimming the hall lights for effect.
I told them about Céleste, who'd tried to speak to her sister lost to yellow fever and never quite left afterward.
I told them about the gardenia scent that showed up out of season, about the chandelier's habit of flickering when it felt overlooked, which got an appreciative shiver out of Vivienne and a flat, unimpressed nod out of Maggie, who'd heard it all before and still let me have my moment.
“Your voices are off tonight,” Maggie commented.
“Everyone is a critic.”
We were standing at the top of the stairs, Vivienne leaning in close to examine the exact spot on the wallpaper where a guest had once reportedly seen a woman in a high-collared dress who wasn't there five seconds later, when the front door opened again and Taylor's voice carried up, considerably less steady than Vivienne's had been.
"Am I missing a party? I could hear you three cackling from the front walk. Also, who ordered Thai food without telling me?"
"Ghost tour," Maggie called down. "You're late for the good parts. And sorry, we can share."
"Story of my life." He came up the stairs two at a time, tie loosened, jacket slung over one shoulder, smelling faintly of bourbon that wasn't his own brand, which felt like a small betrayal on his part.
"Put the food on the dining room table. Hopefully Reginald will be out late and we won’t have to share with him too. "
"He didn't come back with you?" I asked.
"Last I saw him he was deep in conversation with some fella about wrought iron gates. Man's got a soul mate somewhere in that crowd. I gave up on waiting."
I glanced at the window, out toward the dark street, and thought about a preservation architect who took his historical accuracy seriously enough to still be arguing about ironwork at a dead woman's memorial well past a reasonable hour.
And about a floorboard scratch three feet from a door that had once been Vivienne's, and about a legal pad with underlined words tucked under Allison's laptop that I still hadn't gotten a proper look at.
"Come on," I told Taylor, forcing my voice back into tour-guide brightness. "You're just in time for the part about the woman in Room Seven."
But my mind wasn't really on Céleste the ghost anymore.
It was on a metal straw and a woman who while everyone knew who she was, no one seemed to know her at all.
Allison burst from her room without warning, glancing wildly from left to right.
“I’ve figured it out,” she proclaimed.
“What?” Taylor asked.
“All of it!”