Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Sometimes Max thought about what it was like to be a ghost. Upsetting, probably.
There weren’t a whole lot of ghost stories that featured the ghost having a good time, partying or hanging out with their loved ones or coming back just to meet a new grandchild.
Whatever it was that made people stick around, it apparently wasn’t happy memories.
Besides that, it seemed frustrating. Ghosts always needed something, right? But ghostliness, as a state, meant one could never tell anyone anything. It had to get on their nerves.
Then again, going through walls seemed cool.
“Are we going somewhere in particular?” Sloane asked, from behind him. Every so often, her flashlight beamed over his shoulder into the narrow corridor laid out in front of him. Now it shone on a wall opposite what looked like an intersection.
“This part of the hotel was used as a speakeasy in the 1920s,” he said. “They stored the liquor up here. Sometimes other illicit stuff, too.”
Sloane was quiet for a moment. When they reached the T-intersection, it had just enough room for them to stand side by side.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Max admitted. “They did a good job of keeping it secret. There’s speculation that Belle offered the hotel as a safe house for women who needed somewhere to go when they left their husbands, but nothing concrete. She sure never wrote it down.”
“Smart of her.” Sloane turned to look down a hall, shining her flashlight along the walls. She still seemed tense and ready to snarl at a moment’s notice, but talking seemed to help.
“That’s the impression that I get,” Max agreed. “Her public persona was a bit…I don’t know…fluffy? Not exactly vapid, but a lot of people from the time seemed to think of her as a silly woman with too much money and an unhealthy attachment to her late husband.”
“Do a lot of silly women write wildly popular novels and oversee a resort that’s still going strong a century later?” Sloane looked over her shoulder at him.
Max grinned at her. “That’s why I said public persona. Anyone who actually talked to her knew better. Should we go that way? You want to lead, or should I?”
Sloane glanced around at the wooden plank walls and the plank floor, and her face tightened again. “You go first,” she finally said.
As best as Max could tell, the narrow corridors followed some of the walls on the second floor, but not all the walls. He wasn’t going to pretend to understand the construction of this place. It had probably made sense when it was built, but now it seemed haphazard and nonsensical.
“So,” he said, walking slowly down the corridor-like area, shining his flashlight ahead though a light haze of dust. “This is where the speakeasy was. Well, below us. I think. Like I said, they stored stuff up here, so there’s gotta be rooms here somewhere.”
“It’s been a while since then,” Sloane said from behind him.
She sounded like she was breathing very, very evenly, keeping her voice perfectly controlled, and Max made sure he knew exactly which turns to take to get back to the entrance.
She was grown, obviously. She could make her own choices about where to go and what to do, and for fuck’s sake Max wasn’t going to try to stop her, but—still.
The exit. “Maybe they rearranged the walls,” she continued.
“There’s no record of it.”
“There wouldn’t be.”
“Anyway, people who venture up here at night have heard the speakeasy,” Max went on. “There’s ghostly singing, talking, the floor creaking like people are dancing. And then,” he said, and turned around to look at Sloane for maximum effect. He pointed his flashlight up at his face.
After a moment, Sloane made an unimpressed Well? gesture with her free hand. There was a smudge of dust on her forearm.
“A gunshot,” he said.
Sloane waited for a moment, like she thought he wasn’t done. Then she swung her flashlight around at the walls. No bullet holes.
“So someone got shot in the Bellwether speakeasy, and now the ghosts replay it every night?”
“That’s the story,” Max said. He shrugged and kept walking.
“There’s no official record, obviously, but the rumors are that some organized-crime guy from Chicago came in and thought he could big-time the locals out of business.
They put an end to that. Then they stuffed his body into a whiskey barrel and threw him out to sea. ”
The corridor turned sharply right. Max put his hand on the wall that was now in front of him. It was slightly warm. He was pretty sure it was the south-facing exterior wall, so that made sense.
“That’s a terrible way to get rid of a body,” Sloane said. “It would float back to shore immediately. Are we going the right way?”
“I don’t think that part of the story is true,” Max said. “Makes for a good haunting, though. And yeah, as far as I can tell the map says—”
The map was a liar, because two steps into the new corridor was a weird wall.
“Huh,” said Sloane. She was behind him, close enough that he could feel her breathing softly onto his shoulder. Her arm brushed his as she held out her flashlight, and Max took the chance of glancing over at her.
She was flushed light pink, color blooming along her cheekbones and down the side of her face. There was a cobweb in her hair. Her jaw was clenched, the muscles flexing under her skin as Max watched.
“That’s weird, right?” she said after a moment. “It looks different from the other walls. It’s different wood or something. And it doesn’t…”
She elbowed past him to stand in front of it, running a few fingers lightly along one edge. “It doesn’t connect to the wall here,” she said. “Not like the other side.”
“And there are footprints in the dust.” Max pointed his flashlight at the floor.
“Definitely fuckery afoot,” Sloane muttered. “Or something. Probably not ghosts.”
“Could be ghosts.”
“Ghosts do construction now?”
“The spirit world is mysterious and unknowable.”
That earned him a look so haughty and dismissive it made his toes tingle. Max ignored it and tried for nonchalant.
“Poltergeists throw things. Allegedly. Maybe they can also put up weird walls.” They both looked at the barrier in front of them for a moment. Then Max leaned in. “That plank looks weird.”
“Yeah,” Sloane agreed. “Can you—”
She gestured, and Max held the beam of his flashlight on the wooden piece that was darker than the rest. It was a little shiny, like it had been handled, but probably not by ghosts.
“That looks like it might have ghostly traces on it,” he said. “We should take it with us so I can scan it later.”
Sloane was busy frowning and wiggling the plank. If she was ignoring Max’s nonsense, at least she didn’t seem as stressed as she had a minute ago.
“It’s sort of loose,” she was saying. “I think if I just…” Sloane bit her lip and pushed the plank up and in, then jumped when it popped back out. Carefully, she pulled it through the hole it had left, maybe two feet long and four inches wide. Then she looked at it in her hand.
“Huh,” she said, and then she and Max looked at each other. “I was kind of hoping for something cooler. Do they all come out?”
“I don’t think so,” Max said, and stepped in so he could see into the gap.
Sloane moved but not much, and as he shone his flashlight though the hole, he could feel all the places they were touching: thighs, shoulders, her elbow brushing against his rib cage as she peered through next to him.
Her stray hairs tickled the side of his face from two inches away, sending little shockwaves cascading down his neck.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, and right, yeah, they were looking at ghost shit.
“I think…” he said, then pulled out his phone, turned on the front camera, and stuck it through. In the dim light of the screen, they could see a bolt on the other side of the door. “Yup, there it is.”
The door swung in when he pushed it, and Sloane made a gentlemen first gesture.
Max gallantly stepped through, and she followed, still so close he could feel the warmth of her skin.
Once on the other side, they took a minute to check out the back of the door: dusty wood, a simple sliding bolt so new it was still shiny.
Max wasn’t a hardware expert, but the screws holding it in place looked distinctly modern.
“I wonder what hardware store the ghosts go to,” Sloane deadpanned, and Max sighed.
“No whimsy,” he said, and she poked him in the ribs. “Hey.”
They left the door open—Sloane didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look like she wanted it closed—and followed the corridor another ten feet until it opened onto a small, dark room.
“I think we’re above the hallway,” she said, her flashlight playing along the top of the wall.
They were still standing in the doorway, side by side, arms touching from shoulder to elbow.
From Max’s bicep down, it was bare skin on bare skin.
He wasn’t entirely thinking about ghosts or hotel layouts.
“No, that’s the other way from the entrance,” he said after a delay.
“The first hallway, where you thought the entrance was and it wasn’t. That far wall is the back of the room where the ladder is.”
“That sounds right,” Max agreed, because it did and because Sloane had taken a couple of looks at some very confusing blueprints and led them directly to where they wanted to go. The floor creaked when they stepped into the room, but that was nothing new.
“So now we’re in the—uh. What the fuck?”
Sloane’s flashlight beam illuminated a chalk circle on the floor. There was a star in the middle of the circle, symbols drawn around the outside, and five melted lumps of wax at each point of the star.
They stared at it in silence.
Finally, Sloane spoke. “Are you kidding me?” she asked conversationally.
“What?”
“A pentagram with candles? You can’t be serious.”
Max had one hand in his messenger bag, reaching for his camera. He paused, then looked up at her.