Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“I meant to do this over drinks and dinner,” Max was saying.
He had the iPad and a couple of printouts on the table in his hotel room.
Both of them were leaning over it. Sloane was doing her best to eat a burrito without getting any on what looked like a tide chart.
“But then, somehow, I ended up playing fuck, marry, kill about dead people instead.”
“That must have been awful for you,” Sloane said, carefully dotting more hot sauce onto her next bite of burrito. She had a method. “Sorry that happened.”
Max looked up at her. “Could have been worse.”
Sloane licked hot sauce off her thumb. Max looked back down at the table and cleared his throat.
“I’m going to do the attic first,” he said. “Best to be up there making noise before quiet hours start so fewer people hear me stomping around and talking to myself about demonic symbols.”
“They’ll just think we’re ghosts,” Sloane pointed out. “That’s win-win, right?”
“I.”
“You what?”
“They’ll think I’m a ghost,” Max said, patiently. “I’m not making you come back into the attic where you had a panic attack, Sloane.”
“It’s fine. I’m here to help, so I’ll help,” she said, putting hot sauce on her next bite of burrito and not looking Max in the eye. “That’s the point, right?”
“Sloane,” Max said again, then waited for her to look at him. “Come on.”
She wanted to disagree some more. She wanted to go back into that stupid attic and look at stupid laundry symbols around a stupid, incorrect pentagram. She wanted to prove that she was, shit, some kind of supercool, fearless badass or something.
Instead, Sloane sighed, made a face, and reminded herself that part of being an adult was knowing one’s limitations and accepting them gracefully.
“Okay, okay,” she said, and only rolled her eyes a little, which was pretty good, she thought.
“Get good pictures of the weird symbols, though. And the weird writing on the wall. It looked sort of familiar, but I can’t tell if it just looks like something I’ve seen before or whether it is something I’ve seen before. Do you have any Ziploc bags?”
“I can find something Ziplocky.”
“Try to get a sample of the stuff that glows under black light. And use gloves. It’s probably not something gross, but you never know.”
Now Max was grinning, and Sloane pressed her lips together so she didn’t smile back. To distract herself, she put more hot sauce on her burrito. “And if you explore the rest of the attic, take the black light and see if there’s anything else,” she finished.
“Any more expert ghost-hunting tips?”
Mouth full of burrito, Sloane flipped him off.
“Should I also take my night-vision camera? Maybe the thermometer in case I hit any cold spots?”
She rolled her eyes.
“What about a flashlight? I just can’t decide.”
“You’re the one who dragged me down here because I lost a bet,” she said. “Do you want my suggestions or not?”
“I’ll black light every corner of the attic, just for you,” he promised. “Want to meet me at the poison garden when I’m done there?”
Despite reading several brochures, Sloane didn’t really understand why the romance hotel had a garden full of poisonous plants. Was it some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing? A veiled threat to anyone who did their lover wrong? Some sort of secret confession from Belle herself?
There was a fence around the most dangerous part of the garden, high and wrought-iron and very dramatic. Sloane was pretty sure you had to do a lot more than just touch one of the plants inside it to get poisoned, but she couldn’t fault the hotel for not wanting to take any chances.
And Sloane did, in fact, want to touch the plants.
Even though she knew they were poisonous and she was more than smart enough to understand that it was a bad idea.
She just wanted to see. To make sure. To see what would happen, though she knew it would probably be nothing.
With most toxic plants, you had to ingest a pretty good amount before they’d do anything.
But deep down, the thing Sloane always wanted to say was: Prove it.
“Already plotting?” a familiar voice asked, and Sloane turned from where she’d been examining a shiny, red, heart-shaped leaf to see Max standing on the path, dimly backlit and dressed in his ghost-hunting getup.
The getup was not sexy: some kind of harness over his torso with a camera in the middle, a headlamp strapped to his forehead, a fanny pack, and a small duffel bag. Objectively, Max looked like a dork.
Subjectively, Sloane took her time looking.
“Why? Did you do something I should plot about?” she asked. “If I tried really hard and get my botany right, I think I could give you a pretty bad stomachache.”
“If I die of arsenic poisoning, I’ll tell them to look for you first,” he said, walking over and putting the duffel bag down. “Sorry I’m late, but I got all the pictures you wanted. And a few more.”
The first image that Sloane’s brain offered up when Max said pictures was not, alas, of ghostly writing on a wall. It was…adult.
“Arsenic is a metal. It doesn’t come from plants,” Sloane’s mouth said, while her brain went Dick pics??? “Sometimes it’s in plants, but only because they absorb it from ground water.”
Both of Max’s eyebrows went up, scrunching his forehead underneath the head lamp. “You know, I wasn’t worried until right now,” he said.
“You mean you got pictures of the writing on the walls!”
“Did you lick that?” Max was eyeing her with half concern, half suspicion. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” Sloane lied, instead of saying dick pics. “I’m not licking poisonous plants. And you’re thinking of, like, cyanide and strychnine. Those are in plants. Arsenic is in old green paint.”
“Oh, yeah,” Max said. “I think I knew that.”
“And it bioaccumulates, so it’s a bad poison to use for murder because it’s easy to test for,” Sloane went on, because she was still, a little bit, thinking about what Max’s dick pic would look like, and she didn’t hate it, and maybe a brief talk on How to Be Good at Murdering with Poisons would cover that up.
“Noted,” Max said. “No arsenic. There go my weekend plans. You ready for this?”
“Don’t tell me you were recording me just now, giving murder advice,” she said. “Was this whole trip a setup?”
“Nah. That’s all just between the two of us,” Max said, voice going lower. “Totally secret. You changed your outfit.”
As if she’d never heard of clothes before, Sloane looked down at herself. She’d put on jeans, a long-sleeved top, and a jacket before coming out, because it was cold.
“This works, right? I wasn’t supposed to dress up like it was nineteen ten?”
“It works,” Max said with a smile that hitched higher on one side than the other. “It’s great, unless you want the comments on this to be full of drooling perverts. Then you should’ve worn that robe thing you had on earlier.”
Sloane put her hands in her jacket pocket and tried to look unimpressed, even though she could feel the heat crawling up her neck. Max wasn’t looking at her face. She was fine with that. “You mean my swimsuit coverup?”
“Is that what it was?” Max tried, and failed, to sound innocent.
“Obviously. Only the drooling perverts would like it?”
He shrugged, which shifted the camera strapped to his chest. Sloane tried not to notice the way it made his T-shirt ride up. “Maybe some regular ones, too.”
“So the swim coverup is for perverts. Got it.”
“I didn’t say that,” Max told her, crouching to reach into the duffel bag on the ground. “I said the perverts will comment on the video. The rest of us know how to jerk off without telling everyone about it. Ready?”
Maybe he did mean dick pics, Sloane thought, then ran her hands through her hair and nodded. “What do you need me to do?”
“Want to bat your eyelashes and hang on to my every word?”
“Not really.”
Max, camera in hand, looked over at her and winked. “Then do whatever comes naturally.”
Sloane was perfectly aware she could be difficult and disagreeable. At work, she tried to at least be professionally difficult. With friends, she tried her to be pleasantly disagreeable, but sometimes they were wrong about things and there was no helping that.
For the past couple of years, in the time she’d gotten to re-know Max over various hometown weddings and holidays, she hadn’t bothered trying around him.
She had a little, at first. But the more she let the facade slip, the more his eyes lit up.
And now they were here, spending two nights in side-by-side rooms in an allegedly-haunted hotel.
“…so the newspapers dubbed this mysterious man the Coronado Casanova,” Max was saying. “Some guests have reported seeing a figure late at night in the poison garden, tending to the flowers. Could be him.”
Sloane, holding the camera and filming, was literally biting her lip to keep from talking, because Max was making a very nice video and she’d agreed to help.
“No one knows the exact number of people the Coronado Casanova murdered,” he went on. “There are some estimates as high as two dozen—”
“Zero,” Sloane said when she couldn’t help herself any longer.
Even in the ugly white-green night vision, Max’s face lit up. “Zero? How do you know?”
“Were they eating the bouquets?”
“I don’t know what people did back then,” he said, took the camera, and pointed it at her. “Maybe.”
“Be serious,” Sloane said, trying to ignore the camera.
“They could have done anything!”
“Was he including chocolates or something? Maybe a fruit basket?”
“Not that I know of,” Max said, and Sloane sighed, waving a hand at the garden.
“Then he—if he even existed—didn’t kill anybody,” she went on. “Unless they had a severe allergic reaction, maybe? There’s, like, three things in the entire world poisonous enough to kill you if you touch them, and none of them are these plants. A rash, sure. Death, no.”
There was a slight pause, and then: “I have to know what the three things are.”