Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1) (7 page)

“Agatha is your current wife?” I asked, remembering him mentioning the name at The Witch’s Brew.

“Yes.”

“Well, great. I look forward to meeting everyone.”

We made our way to the tree line, where the hiking trail started. “We’d like to preserve this existing trail,” Lance said. “But clear some more of the woods to make room for a barn and pasture, and add a horseback riding trail as well.”

“What about the old buildings back in those woods?” I asked as we headed back toward the hotel. The area around the Mount Phearson was littered with the remains of outbuildings, from the days when it had been a private estate.

“Most of them are in ruins. We can clear them out easily enough. But a few of the more picturesque ones we’ll preserve, throw some signage in front of them. Do a historical walking tour, maybe, with a guided map.”

“You could add a ghost tour.” I knew of at least one scary old ghost living in some of those crumbling remains. Although, if memory served, he might be
too
scary. It could be dangerous. “Or maybe not.”

Lance gave me an irritated look. “Yes, let’s go with
not
. The last thing people here need is more of that sort of encouragement.”

I laughed. “Madeline Underwood felt the same way, believe it or not. She thought that kind of thing was low class.”

“It’s certainly not the kind of tone we’re going for.”

I smiled. “I agree the ghost tour is probably a bad idea. And I can see that all this supernatural stuff annoys you. But a word of advice from someone who grew up with these locals you seem to be having a hard time with: you won’t be able to will away two hundred years of local culture just by frowning at it. If you embrace it instead, you can probably find some ways to make it profitable.”

“I’ll think about that,” he said, but I could tell he wouldn’t. “Come on, let’s go inside and I’ll tell you about the new wings. More guest rooms on the upper floors, of course, including some luxury suites. We’re up to almost two hundred rooms now, and there will be over three hundred by the time construction is finished.”

I gave him credit for ambition. “And there are three restaurants planned, too?”

Lance nodded. “The Cask & Barrel is already open—”

“Wine and small plates,” I said. “I heard last night.”

“Right. They’ll actually offer service at a couple of other points around the hotel as well, including some seating by the fireplace. That’s one of our best features, and we don’t take enough advantage of it.”

“I agree. I always loved it as a kid. What about the other two?”

“Colonel Phearson’s Pub is three weeks out from its opening. Casual, fun. Interesting cocktails, craft beers, and upscale pub food with a Southern twist. The third will be fine dining. I don’t have a name yet. I’d like that to be a real showpiece for us.”

“Well, that might be something I can actually help with,” I said as we walked in the main entrance. “I was managing a fine dining restaurant until a few days ago.”

Lance’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah? I don’t suppose you know any good chefs who might be looking to relocate? I’ve tried making overtures to a few of the better ones in Asheville, but— dammit, what does she want now?”

I followed his gaze to the seating area by the fireplace, where a beautiful, thin and toned woman stood talking to another, equally thin but much less fit-looking. Almost cadaverous, in fact, with her pale skin and severe, dark gray bun.

I didn’t know the first woman, but I knew the second. And my thoughts echoed Lance’s.

“Balls,” I muttered.

Lance glanced at me. “I take it you know Marjory Smith?”

“She was Miss Underwood’s best friend,” I said. “I suppose she’s head of the cov— the Garden Club now.”

“Among other things. Frankly, she’s a pain in my rear.” Lance sighed. “But we might as well go and rescue Agatha from her.”

Personally, I’d have left Agatha to fend for herself, but I followed Lance across the lobby. He kissed his wife on the cheek, and her irritated expression eased slightly.

“There you are,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I was giving Verity a tour of the renovations.” He gestured at me. “Verity, my wife, Agatha.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. Then, supposing it couldn’t be put off any longer, turned to Miss Smith. “Miss Smith. How nice to see you. I was sorry to hear about Miss Underwood.”

Marjory Smith raised a very thin, very sculpted eyebrow. “Were you, dear? You seem to have benefited a great deal from her loss.”

I wasn’t expecting her to hug me like a lost daughter, or insist I call her Marjory now that I was all grown up, but I wasn’t expecting such blunt hostility either. Miss Underwood’s witches were usually more subtle than that. Maybe I was feeling the fallout of the Bristol devil leaving town; maybe there was no need to even pretend to be kindly toward me anymore.

“Well, no matter,” Miss Smith said. “I only wish I could have saved you the trouble of coming all this way. If Mr. Pickwick had only listened to me—”

“John had to go to Asheville on business for a few days,” Lance interrupted. “We didn’t know to expect Verity, or he would have made sure to be here. But since he’s not, let’s table this nonsense until he gets back.”

Marjory turned her flat, birdlike stare on Lance, who didn’t seem as discomfited by it as I’d always been. “You don’t think she deserves to know?”

Agatha made an irritated noise. “Marjory, really, let’s not start—”

Miss Smith ignored the Boyles and turned to me. “I’m afraid there’s no inheritance for you after all, dear,” she said. “Max Underwood is still alive.”

The last time I saw Max Underwood, I was cleaning the owner’s suite, and he was supposed to be dead.

He and I were around the same age. All three of Madeline’s siblings were quite a bit younger than her, and lived with an aunt in town. When we were in the third grade Max died—or I guess “died”—after he was struck by a speeding car that lost control on the mountain road.

And then came a day, six years later, when the girl who usually cleaned the third floor of the hotel had to have surgery, and another girl called in sick. I ended up being handed the key to the owner’s suite. This was quite unusual; I’d lived in the hotel for fourteen years, and had never seen Miss Underwood’s inner sanctum. I was warned not to disturb anything. Apparently that also meant any
one
.

I wasn’t supposed to go into the walk-in closet, but I heard a noise. Curiosity is always a mistake.

I recognized Max right away. The Underwoods had very distinctive features, for one thing: thin faces, thin noses, thin everything. He was wearing blue pajamas and a lost expression, and had a lot of bruises.

Judging by the sleeping bag and the little box of snacks beside it, he lived in that closet.

“Max?”

He just stood there, staring at me, clutching a stuffed animal. I remember distinctly that it was an elephant.

“Do you remember me, Max? We were in Mrs. Tremont’s class together. I’m Verity.”

“Verity means
truth
,” said Max.

“That’s right.”

“No, wait. That’s
veritas
.”

“
Veritas
is Latin, but Verity means truth, too. They just made a name out of it.” I knew all that from a fifth grade project. I had no idea how the supposedly dead and, I was beginning to suspect, decidedly crazy Max knew it.

“Mrs. Tremont was nice,” Max said.

I nodded. “Yes, she was. She was really sad when you had your accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“No? Everyone thought you were in a car accident. And that you were dead.” A little blunt and tactless, maybe, but I was fourteen.

But Max seemed undisturbed. “I didn’t die. I just stopped.”

“Stopped what?”

“Are you the maid?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better do your cleaning, then. You aren’t supposed to come into my closet. I’m supposed to be left alone.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I shifted from one foot to the other, debating whether to just close the door and go about my business, or ask one more question.

I went with the question.

“But Max, do you
want
to be alone?”

Curiosity is always a mistake.

Max burst into tears. I must have spent nearly an hour trying to soothe him. Talking to him only made it worse. I couldn’t drag him out of there (the one time I tried to touch him resulted in an ear-piercing shriek). I couldn’t think of anybody I could call, even the police. There was no one in Bristol I trusted to defy Miss Underwood.

Finally Ellis, who had been the Mount Phearson’s handyman for as long as I could remember, found us. Whether he came in because he had a job in Miss Underwood’s suite, or because he’d heard Max, I never knew.

Ellis took one look at us, then went into the kitchen. He came back with a single sandwich cookie, which he handed to Max. Max pulled it apart, still sniffling, while Ellis gently tugged me away from the closet and over to the office side of the suite.

“Stay here,” he said.

I could hear them talking, over on the apartment side. Mostly Ellis’s voice. Finally there was the click of the closet door, and Ellis’s heavy footsteps coming back to me.

And then Ellis, who never frowned at anybody, was frowning at me.

“You’re not supposed to go into that closet,” was all he said.

Miss Underwood had more to say, when she came to see me that night. She told me that her brother was deeply disturbed, and that she kept him isolated for his own good.

It wasn’t like me to talk back to Miss Underwood, but I was at a rebellious age, and what I’d seen hadn’t exactly been easy to stomach. “He had an awful lot of bruises,” I said.

“Self-inflicted,” she answered, without hesitation. “Verity, you’re too young to understand what you saw today, which is why I wish you’d followed instructions, so you wouldn’t have seen it. But I am sure you don’t want to be responsible for my brother having to live out his days in some horrible institution, cut off from his family and everything he’s ever known. Do you know what they do to weak people like him in places like that? What the other inmates would do to him?”

I shook my head.

“Nor do you wish to know, I assure you. You are never to speak of Max again. To anyone. I suggest you forget you ever saw him.”

For three days, I took that suggestion. By the fourth, I was so racked with guilt for not even trying to help that I broke down and told one of my teachers what—who—I’d seen. That was what they always told us to do, if we knew a kid was being abused: tell a teacher or someone at the school. They were trained to intervene, and to report that kind of thing properly.

She reported it, all right. To the only real authority Bristol had.

I got sick that same night. I shivered, I ached, I coughed. It might have been the flu, just a coincidence, if it hadn’t been for the blinding, shooting pain that went through my whole body—each and every time I tried to speak.

My fever went up so high I had to be hospitalized. I had no ink there, and I was too weak to write in any case. I had no way to defend myself. Not that my magic would have been a match for Miss Underwood’s, anyway.

A week later almost to the minute, the fever broke. The mysterious illness was gone as quickly as it had come.

The day I was released from the hospital, a nurse told me that she’d never seen someone make such a lucky escape. I came very close to permanent brain damage, she said, even close to death.

I’m sure it was all carefully orchestrated so that the devil’s daughter was never in any real danger. But it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Miss Underwood was the one who came to pick me up. She brought me back to the Mount Phearson, and never said a word about it.

She didn’t have to. I’d learned my lesson.

Ten years later, I stood in the lobby of the hotel with Lance and Agatha, and listened as Marjory Smith insisted that Max Underwood was still alive.

And who was I to argue with that?

“Mr. Pickwick told me Miss Underwood’s brothers and sister are deceased,” I said to Miss Smith.

“Matilda certainly is dead,” Marjory agreed. “But Max and Mark have only been
presumed
dead. Neither of their bodies were ever found.”

“When did…” I glanced uneasily at the Boyles, even now not wanting to betray the secret I’d kept for so long. “What happened to Max?”

“Well, he didn’t die in a car accident at the age of nine, as you well know,” Miss Smith said with a sniff. She followed it with a stern look, like this was my fault. Like it wasn’t her best friend who’d forced me to keep quiet.

And it worked. I was sure I looked as guilty as I felt.

“He disappeared from Madeline’s care a couple of years ago,” Marjory went on.

“And why are they assuming he died?” I asked. “How do they know he didn’t just run away?”

“Mark disappeared also, a few months later,” said Marjory. “There was some forensic evidence in his apartment, indicating he hurt Max there. And then a journal he left behind suggested… well, I don’t want to speak ill of Madeline’s family, but I think it’s safe to say that both brothers were quite disturbed.”

And wasn’t that convenient for Miss Underwood? Her parents had been hugely wealthy, in addition to owning the Mount Phearson. Having no siblings left to split all that with must have been nice. If only she’d made it out of prison to enjoy it.

I narrowed my eyes at Miss Smith. “What do you want, Miss—
Marjory
?” I asked, suddenly resolved to stop Miss Smithing her, either out loud or in my head. “Why this sudden concern for Max? You certainly didn’t do a thing to help him when he was here.”

“Madeline was acting in his best interests,” Marjory said. “As am I. It’s what she would have wanted.”

I very much doubted that, but I had no idea what her real game was. Eventually, the Boyles got rid of her by promising that we’d all sit down and sort things out when John Pickwick got back to town. But that wouldn’t give me a very long reprieve; apparently Lance expected him in the next day or two.

In the meanwhile, I shopped for new clothes and other basics, and ordered some supplies online. I would need to draw some blood and make some ink, as soon as possible.

I spent some time with Lance and Agatha, mostly talking about the plans for the new restaurants, contributing what I could. (I did not acknowledge any connections to chefs who might be willing to relocate.) I did my best to catch up with all that was new at the hotel.

And what was old, too. The day after I toured the grounds with Lance, I went to visit Cordelia after breakfast, and ran into Ellis walking across the lawn. I was glad to find him as hearty as ever, his hug tight and strong despite his weathered face and bending back.

“I figured you must still be around here somewhere,” I said. “You’re as much a part of the Phearson as the fireplace by now.”

“Not for much longer,” said Ellis. “I’m retiring next year. Moving to Charleston to live with my cousin.”

Like I said, hotel staff tends to have a lot of turnover; there was nothing surprising in an old handyman leaving. But Ellis was different, the one constant at the Mount Phearson, besides Madeline Underwood.

I was happy to see him. I’d never blamed him for not being able to intervene on Max’s behalf, despite blaming myself plenty. And I imagined I would be sorry when he left. But I was also glad he was planning a future for himself, away from Bristol. I took it as yet another sign that the town was changing.

And maybe, just maybe, I could help it change for the better. I would have some influence now, as owner of the hotel. Maybe it really could be the safe haven I needed.

Or maybe not. That same afternoon, I also ran into some high school classmates at The Witch’s Brew. I went in looking for Wendy and a croissant, but was instead greeted by a nasal laugh from a prime table by the window.

“Is that
Devilborn
?”

“I think it
is
!”

“I can’t
believe
she came back.”

They’d always done that—talked about me like I was some sort of animal who couldn’t understand what they were saying. If I’d been sixteen, I would have kept my head down, my eyes averted, doggedly pretending not to hear them. But I wasn’t a kid anymore.

I got my tea and croissant—Wendy wasn’t there—and stopped by their table on my way out. There were three of them, chatting over coffee but not, I noticed, any pastries. Still pretty, still wearing the superior expressions that said they knew it. One of them was heavily pregnant. Another had a baby sleeping in a stroller beside her.

I felt a small sense of victory, that it took me a few seconds to remember their names.

“Jessica, Abbie, Emily,” I said, with a scrupulously polite smile. “You all look great. So nice to see you.”

Jessica, always the leader, smiled back. “You look… lovely… yourself.” She put just enough hesitation around the word
lovely
to show she didn’t mean it. But I expected nothing less. She was welcome to judge my messy ponytail and cheap sweater to her heart’s content, as long as she didn’t hex my coffee. Or worse.

“You’ve moved back, then?” Abbie asked. “We wondered if you would.”

“Yes, I’m here to stay.” I leaned forward a little and whispered, “And you’d best keep your magic to yourselves, ladies. I’ve learned a lot since you saw me last.” I nodded toward the stroller. “And you have little ones to think of now.”

Did I seriously just threaten babies? Balls, what’s become of me?

I’d meant to be nothing but disarmingly polite. And they’d given me no reason to get so hostile, no threats to respond to.