Chapter 33
Max was still staring at Eve like she was a ghost. “Here,” he whispered. “Take my coat.”
“I don’t want your—” she began, but he’d already removed it and thrown it towards her. She caught it instinctively, covering it in ink and making it pointless to pass it back.
“The stains probably won’t come out,” she warned, slipping it on, finding the woollen material still warm from his body.
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I owe you a coat. How are you doing this? How are you moving about through time like this?”
“I already told you. I have a key. And anyway, you’re doing it too. You came to see me in 2016.”
“Twenty sixteen?” Max slowly shook his head, aghast.
“You don’t believe me?”
“No, I do. That’s the problem. You were there, back in 1918. You saved my life, right here on this very roof. Can you use this key to get back?” Max asked. “To your own time, I mean?”
“Yes, but only if I check out for good and sacrifice all my memories of the hotel.”
“Is there any possibility that I might persuade you to do so?”
“None at all,” Eve replied levelly. “Not until I’ve finished what I came here to do.”
Max scowled. “I don’t wish to offend you, but aren’t you a little old for scavenger hunts?”
Eve wiped away a trickle of ink that was running slowly down from her hairline, heading straight for her eye. “If you don’t wish to be offensive, then try not saying offensive things.”
“It isn’t safe,” Max replied. “You were here in 1918. I’ll swear it in front of the Eavesdropper if you wish. So why are the Roths denying all knowledge of you?”
“Perhaps they don’t remember,” she said.
“Maybe they forgot me. The hotel works differently for time-travelling guests. They tell me we pay for our stay with our memories of our time here. The bellhop explained that when I check out, I’ll forget everything that happened at the hotel.
Maybe it works both ways? Perhaps the staff will forget about me as well. ”
“Convenient,” Max replied. “But if you won’t listen to me, then perhaps you might listen to yourself. You wrote to me, just last week. I can show you the postcard and your own words printed there. Why would you ask me to come and help if you weren’t in trouble?”
Eve shook her head. “I didn’t send it. I couldn’t have. I wasn’t here last week. Someone must be playing a joke on you. Besides, I don’t need any help.”
“What an idiotic statement. Everyone needs help sometimes. It’s…”
He trailed off, frowning at the lake. Eve turned to follow his gaze.
Unlike yesterday, there were no pleasure boats out on the water today.
In fact, there was only a single boat sailing towards the hotel, about halfway across.
There were two men in it, both dressed in black coats and top hats.
And lying in the body of the boat was a gleaming dark coffin, stark and incongruous against the sunshine and the blue water.
Somewhere downstairs, there had been a death.
“I need to get changed.” Eve gestured at her ink-splattered clothes.
“Wait.” Max followed her to the door. “I spent six months at this hotel in 1918. I know a couple of its secret octopuses and will gladly show them to you. Only a fool would refuse to accept help freely offered, and I know you’re not one of those.”
Eve paused. What harm could it do? Anna hadn’t said anything about working alone. “All right,” she said. “Meet me in the Palm Bar for cocktail hour.”
She took the stairs and managed to slip into her room without anyone seeing her.
She knew from experience that octopus ink was difficult to scrub off and it took some while in the bathroom to remove all traces from her skin and hair.
Finally, though, she lay in the bath, filled almost to the brim with clean, hot water.
The tattoo had returned to its rightful place on her thigh and was innocently motionless, almost as if it were a perfectly normal tattoo on a perfectly normal woman.
She lingered for longer than she’d meant to, her head full of the things Max had said and all those strange paintings hidden behind the wall.
She kept thinking of that last painting in particular—the man and woman perched on the edge of the roof, those dark wings of shadow filling the sky.
And the keys. Three rooms with sevens in them.
Eventually, the water began to cool and Eve got out of the bath and dried herself quickly.
She’d tossed her ink-stained outfit, including Max’s coat, back into the wardrobe and when she opened the door now it had all vanished, to be replaced with suitable attire for cocktail hour: a dark blue lace dress with a silk liner and sheer sleeves.
Once she’d dressed, she took the stairs to the floor below and paused outside Room 17, trying to work out whether there might be anyone in there. There was no sound from within and no answer when she knocked. The same was true for Room 7.
When Eve arrived at the Palm Bar there were several guests there already, elegant in their gloves and velvet as they enjoyed pre-dinner cocktails.
All around, the room buzzed with talk of the scavenger hunt.
There was no sign of any Eavesdropper behind the curtain tonight. She joined Max at the bar.
“I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said.
“It takes a while to wash away octopus ink.” She glanced over at his drink—a cloudy green concoction served in a crystal coupe and garnished with a single dark rose petal. “What’s that?”
“A Death in the Afternoon,” Max replied.
“Champagne and absinthe. Seemed fitting after seeing that undertaker’s boat.
I found out who it was, by the way, the person who died.
It was Mrs. Roth, the resident historian.
Old age, apparently. No hint of foul play, if the staff can be believed. Not a murder weapon in sight.”
Eve thought of the woman she’d had tea with just a few hours ago and felt a little flutter of sadness.
“And you don’t think the cocktail is in poor taste at all?” she asked, glancing towards Harry, who was serving someone on the other side of the bar. Mrs. Roth had been a member of his family, after all.
“What, because of the old dear?” Max shrugged. “Why should she mind? She’s the lucky one, dying peacefully in her sleep in her nineties. No one gets a better result than that.”
Eve supposed he was right, but still, she felt sorry for the remaining Roths. Losing loved ones was hard at whatever point it happened.
Harry came over to them then. “What can I get you, Miss Shaw?” he asked.
“A scotch, please.”
“On the rocks?”
She winced. “Neat. And, listen, I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Roth.”
The barman inclined his head. “Thank you. We’ve lost too many people in our family lately; my parents both died last year. But the hotel will go on and that’s what matters most, to all of us.”
Only it won’t, Eve thought. The White Octopus Hotel will close its doors for good tomorrow. It’ll fall into ruin beyond repair. It’ll be a shell.
For a brief flicker of a moment, Eve saw the Palm Bar decaying around her. She made out the graffiti and the broken glass and the rotten furniture. Max remained beside her on the bar stool, but he was the old, old man who’d limped into her office. The man who’d died on the steps outside.
“There’s a sort of delicious temptation in it, do you not think?
” Max asked now, and suddenly the Palm Bar was back to normal, all black velvet and golden palms. And Max was in his thirties again, dark eyes like magnets as he looked at her.
Eve still wasn’t sure that you could call him handsome in the conventional sense, but there was something about him that drew her in.
Something that made her hungry to know him better.
Something that made her wish they could be normal people meeting under normal circumstances.
“A temptation in what?” she asked, lighting a cigarette of her own.
Max smiled slowly. “Well, if you’re to give up your memories of this place when you leave, then you could be as wicked as you like and wouldn’t have to burden yourself with the memory of it afterwards. No regrets. No nightmares.”
Eve shrugged. “I’d prefer to remember it all.”
I’d prefer to remember you, she added silently.
And yet…there was something a little freeing in the idea that, one way or another, none of this would matter later.
Either she would forget about Max once she checked out or, if she was successful, then her past would be rewritten without him in it at all.
For a while, they drank and smoked in silence.
The other guests were discussing the scavenger hunt and Eve heard little snippets of the conversation filtering through the hubbub.
“They say there was a real octopus in the walls….”
“I spoke to him on the phone, my husband. He died three years ago….”
“Something not right about this place….”
“Got half a mind to check out this very night….”
“They say one of the octopuses is hidden in the past….”
“He coughs whenever a lie is uttered….”
Eve’s eyes slid towards the curtains, and she saw that the Eavesdropper was back, the tips of his shabby shoes poking out from beneath the hem.
“Who do you suppose he is, really?” Max asked, following her gaze.
Eve shook her head. She had no answer. All she had was questions piled on top of more questions. “Maybe he’s just a lost soul,” she said. “Maybe he feels safe at the hotel.”
“I say,” came a loud voice.
Eve glanced around and recognised the thin man from the Smoking Room earlier.
“Is it true what people are saying about the basement?” he asked. “And the forbidden objects?”
Harry glanced up with a sigh. “There are no forbidden objects in the basement, sir.”
Behind the curtain, the Eavesdropper gave one of those terrible, wet, choking coughs.
Then the curtain rippled as he shuffled his feet and was gone.
To Eve’s surprise, the guest didn’t say any more about the basement, but simply ordered a Sidecar and then retreated to a table by himself on the other side of the room.
“I apologise for not recognising you before,” Max said, draining his drink.
“If our roles had been reversed, then I suspect you would have known me at once, but I’m a dense fellow at times.
Not dense enough to leave a friend in the lurch, though.
I can say that for myself, at least.” He flicked a glance at her.
“I realise you don’t know me yet, but you and I are very old friends.
So I meant what I said about helping with the scavenger hunt. ”
“Friends or not, why would you help me?” she asked. “If you believe a hotel key is letting me travel through time, then you must accept the other objects here could be magical too. Don’t you want to win a prize for yourself?”
Max shrugged and looked back at his empty glass. “I already told you. You saved my life. I owe you.”
“Aren’t you curious about what object I’m pursuing?”
“What difference does it make?”
It could make all the difference to you, Eve thought.
If she changed the past and prevented Bella from dying, then Eve herself would never come to the White Octopus Hotel in the first place.
And if Max was right about her saving his life in 1918, then that meant she wouldn’t do that either.
Which meant…what? That Max died in 1918?
She thought of that painting again, of the two people on the edge of the roof, the sinister dark wings that filled the air around them.
A gate creaked loudly inside her head, and she suppressed a shudder.
She wasn’t responsible for what happened to Max Everly.
She was responsible for what had happened to Bella.
She snapped open the clutch bag and handed over the scavenger card.
Still five clocks and sixteen octopuses to go.
“Here,” she said. “Take a look, if you want.”
Their fingertips touched briefly, and she felt a shiver ripple over her skin.
“I haven’t been to the steam baths yet,” she added. “They told me it was closed again this morning.”
“There are several clocks and octopuses there,” Max said. “There’s one in the Gatsby Room too.”
The Gatsby Room was a small, private dining room close to the main restaurant. “I went in there earlier, but I didn’t see it,” Eve said.
Max indicated her scavenger card. “Shall I write it in?”
She shook her head. She had the feeling she needed to see all the clocks and octopuses for herself or else perhaps it might not count. Certainly, she wasn’t going to take any chances. She drained the whiskey in one gulp and stood up.
“Show me.”