The Bone Key (23 page)

“ . . . And Mr. Ampleforth isn’t the only one. It gets harder as you go back to—to figure out whose deaths might be, er, odd. There’s a suspicious number of women who checked in for postpartum depression and never checked out again. And then I found Marina Stedman.” I didn’t want to talk about Mary Anne Dennys and the elevator; I’d had nightmares about it all night.

“Something tells me I shall be sorry I asked, but who is Marina Stedman?”

“A lady who checked in and never checked out.”

“Mr. Booth, you are becoming increasingly gnomic.”

“I’m sorry. You see, she didn’t check out, but she didn’t die, either, at least . . . not that anyone knows. She just vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Into thin air. There’s a long entry in the ledger—this was during the . . . the reign of Mr. Haverforth, who ran the hotel before the Thackerays. She liked to walk in the gardens, it says. One sunny afternoon, five people saw her walk into that gazebo—” I pointed; it was a pretty gothic curlicue in the middle of the roses, the same gazebo where Mr. Granger had been discovered, hanged with a woman’s rose-patterned scarf that no one in the hotel had ever seen before— “and she never walked out.”

“Oh, come now,” said Mr. Ormont uneasily.

“There’s only one door to the gazebo. An active and vigorous young woman—which Miss Stedman wasn’t, being in the middle stages of dying of tuberculosis—a healthy young woman
might
have climbed out another way, but she couldn’t have done so without . . . there would have been signs. And yet Miss Stedman walked into the gazebo at 3:33 p.m., by the watch of one Mr. Cypresson, who was testing the sundial, and at quarter of four, when one of her friends went to ask her if she wanted to join the group on the terrace for tea, she was nowhere to be found. They searched for her high and low, but they never found so much as a hair ribbon.”

I stopped, nervously, realizing how much I had been talking. Mr. and Mrs. Siddons had always preferred me when I was silent, and Blaine had chided me sometimes about talking too much about boring things. But Mr. Ormont merely looked bleak and thoughtful.

“Vanished into thin air,” he said.

He was listening and interested. I gathered my courage and plunged on: “And I’ve, er, there are several complaints from Mrs. Thackeray to the agency she used to hire maids. She says that she’s tired of them sending out morbidly imaginative girls who can’t look into a teacup without seeing disaster. And the turnover rate for servants here has always been abnormally high.”

“I am not comforted,” Mr. Ormont said.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, why should you be? But I had hoped
I
was being ‘morbidly imaginative.’ Poets tend that way, you know.”

“I’m afraid this isn’t your imagination. This hotel seems to be a very odd place.” And then there were Carrie and Doris—but I knew that Mr. Ormont liked them.

“You’re taking it very calmly.”

I grimaced. “I have some experience of . . . oddness, and I feel a debt to Mr. Marten. But you aren’t running either, Mr. Ormont.”

“I’m with Mrs. Whittaker. It doesn’t seem to me that this poltergeist is intent on hurting anyone. Its disturbances take place at night, when no one is around, and they really aren’t more than petty destruction.”

“ . . . Except for the urn.”

“Yes, I know. It could have fallen on Miss Hunter.”

“Do you think she’s in danger?” I said, since it was a thought that had occurred to me.

“I think she might be. That was why I wanted to talk to you. None of things which I have witnessed, you see, have done anyone any direct physical harm. I am afraid there can be no doubt that the unfortunate Jemima Kell hanged herself.”

“I understand. You were looking to see if the pattern would hold.”

“Yes, but I find that it does not. The story of Marina Stedman is most disturbing.”

“Yes,” I said. And the story of Mary Anne Dennys even more so, but I could not bring myself to speak of it. I knew my voice would shake.

“Have you found any other evidence of poltergeists?” Mr. Ormont asked.

“I wasn’t looking particularly, and certainly no one left any records, as Mr. Haverforth did. . . . But I remember that in the books for the hotelkeeper before him, a Mr. Lazenby, there was a run of about six months with inordinately high purchases of china. I assumed he had been changing the pattern, but perhaps . . . perhaps that assumption was unwarranted.”

“Perhaps.” Mr. Ormont sighed deeply. “Food for thought, Mr. Booth. Food for thought.”

The gong sounded for lunch, and we went in.

Friday night, I dreamed about Blaine. He had died three years previously, in one of those episodes of “oddness” I had mentioned to Mr. Ormont, and I had dreamed about him and his death on and off for months. But it had been nearly a year since the last dream, and even sleeping I was aware of that oh-God-not-again feeling with which we greet nightmares that have grown almost too familiar to be disturbing. Almost.

In my dream, I was walking back into the apartment we had shared as undergraduates, although I was thirty-five and myself. And there, as I had known he would be, was Augustus Blaine, sitting in the overstuffed armchair by the bay window; he was still twenty—an undergraduate with the world in the palm of his hand—except for his eyes, which were the eyes of the man he had been when he died.

“Hello, Booth,” Blaine said. “Do you want to sit down?”

“No, I don’t think so. I can’t stay long.”

“Do you know what the wall of clouds is, Booth?”

“The . . . it’s something out of a book I read as a child.”

“That’s what you
think
it is.” Blaine winked at me grotesquely, his fresh, youthful face contorting around his ravaged, staring eyes. “Try again.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Boothie, Boothie.” He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. “Come on. I know you’re not that dumb. What’s the wall of clouds?”

“It’s what imprisons the maiden.”

“That’s better! That’s almost right. But you’re still not
thinking
.”

“I don’t know what you want!”

“I don’t want anything, Booth my boy. This is just a dream.”

As he said it, I woke up. I lay there for a moment, my heart hammering at my ribs, afraid—as I was always afraid when I woke from dreams of Blaine—to sit up or roll over or even open my eyes, lest I should find myself staring at Blaine’s shape in the darkness of my room. As I was lying there, my hands clenched together beneath my pillow, I heard a noise.

It was a noise I had grown accustomed to in the weeks of my illness. One of the boards in the passage creaked when weight was put on it, more or less loudly depending on the weight and vigor of the person involved. This time, it was barely a gasp; if I had not been straining my ears, praying not to hear any noise that would signal Blaine’s presence, I might not have heard it at all.

I was not afraid of anything outside my room, although it would later occur to me how exquisitely stupid that was. I got up and grabbed my dressing gown without a second thought for Blaine, and opened my door just in time to see a dim shape drifting around the corner at the end of the hall. By the long hair, I knew it was a woman. I remembered Mr. Haverforth’s account of Marina Stedman’s disappearance, and this woman was headed for the stairs, not the elevator, so I followed her.

There was only one way she could go without the telltale rattle and click of a door-latch, so I followed the corridor around to the stairs and down. There was no sign of the woman in the front hall, and I was standing, wondering which way to go, when I heard a crash like the fall of the Tower of Babel from the conservatory. In the daylight, I would have hesitated. In the middle of the night, dreamlike and brave, I ran to the conservatory door and looked in.

I believe I had been entertaining some confused notion that our poltergeist was not a poltergeist at all, but a purely material being intent on mischief. That idea was dispelled immediately.

The woman, a pale shape in the moonlit dimness, was standing motionless in the middle of the room. All around her potted plants were whirling like moons circling a planet. The crash I had heard had been one of the monstrous philodendrons; as I watched, another tipped and strewed its length across the floor. The woman was perfectly motionless, and she was nowhere near them. She was smallish and fair; of all the women in the hotel, there was only one she could be.

“Miss Hunter!” I said. And then, although I had never used her Christian name before, “Rosemary!”

Her eyes flew open. The pots crashed down around her, and she screamed, her hands going up to clutch at her face. I heard the breath she pulled in, like the prelude to a sob, and she cried out, “Oh God, where am I? What’s going on?”

“I think you’ve had a bad dream, Miss Hunter,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Mr. Booth? What are you doing down here? What am
I
doing down here?”

“I heard . . . that is, I followed you. I think you were sleepwalking. It’s . . . it’s all right.”

“But . . . ” She was looking around, her eyes dark pits above her white, clutching fingers. “Oh,
no
. Did I do this?”

“Miss Hunter—”

“I did, didn’t I?” She began to laugh, the pealing chimes of hysteria. “I’m the poltergeist! I broke the plates! I tipped the urn! I only wish it had smashed Aunt Erda!” And then she was sobbing in earnest, her hands covering her face, standing still in the midst of the wreckage.

I picked my way across to her, cautiously. “Miss Hunter,” I said, “don’t you—”

“Oh, can’t you call me Rosemary?” Suddenly, she flung her arms around me, pressing her face into the front of my dressing gown. “If only you
knew
! I’ve been waiting and hoping, but you wouldn’t say anything, and no one ever
does
! I feel like there’s a wall around me, a wall nobody can see, and I can’t break it down myself but if someone outside would just
push
!”

“The wall of clouds,” I said without meaning to, putting one hand up awkwardly to pat her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, sobbing and laughing, her face still pressed against me. “That’s exactly what it is, a wall of clouds. You try to push through it, and it’s not where your hands are, it’s everywhere else. Oh, I hate it, I hate it!”

“Miss Hunter,” I said, trapped by the iron grip she had on my dressing gown, “why haven’t you left your aunt?”

“I can’t. I haven’t any money, and she wouldn’t let me. And no one will marry me. You won’t marry me, will you?” She looked up at me then, her eyes huge and dark in her pinched face.

“I . . . I . . . Miss Hunter, I’m really not—”

“ ‘Not the marrying kind,’ I know. No man I meet ever is. It’s because I haven’t any money.”

“I wouldn’t care about that, but I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t . . . ”

“Of course not,” she said bitterly. Behind her, I saw something move—the shards of terra cotta from the potted plants, starting to jerk and twist.

“Miss Hunter—”

“
Nobody loves me!
” she screamed at me, shoving me suddenly backwards. “
Nobody ever will! And it’s all Aunt Erda’s fault! Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!
” With each “damn,” the pot shards leapt higher and higher, starting to spin around her, to form a miniature cyclone here in the middle of the desolated conservatory.

“
Rosemary, stop it!
” I shouted back at her, still too wrapped in dreams and moonlight to think of running.

She recoiled as if I had slapped her. The pot shards crashed to the floor again. We stood, staring at each other, both of us panting for breath. I did not know how to help her; I was not the hero for whom she waited, the man whose touch could dissolve the wall around her and set her free.

That was when I heard a noise, a noise I think I had been dreading, subconsciously, for days.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Booth,” Miss Hunter said stiffly. “I’ve—”

“Hush! Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“That’s the elevator.”

I glanced at her; her eyes were as big as bell wheels. “Aunt Erda!”

And just then, the noise of the elevator stopped.

“Oh God I think it’s stuck,” I said, and then we were both pelting down the corridor. Miss Hunter had somehow picked up on my urgency, for she asked no questions, merely ran after me until we came to the elevator doors. They were closed. Looking up at the sundial-style pointer, I saw that it had come to rest, with a kind of smug stolidity, between “2” and “1.”

“What’s she doing in the elevator?” I hissed at Miss Hunter.

“She must have been coming to look for me. She won’t use the stairs on her own.”

How like her, I thought savagely. “Go, run and wake . . . ” I nearly said Collie Ricks, but he had left the employ of the hotel almost twenty years ago. “Go get Mr. Marten. Hurry!”

Miss Hunter shifted her weight, but her look was puzzled. “It’s only a stuck elevator, Mr. Booth.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, looking for a way to get the doors open. “
Go!
”

I glanced at her; even by the dim night-lighting of the hall, I could see the doubt in her eyes, the pull between her rational mind and whatever she had felt about the elevator on her own account. I had kept a nervous tally of the hotel guests who would use the elevator and those who would not, and I knew that Miss Hunter was among the Nots.

“This is no time to be reasonable,” I said. “Please.”

She went.

By the time she came back, I had managed to pry the doors open. Although even the shaft made the back of my neck prickle, I leaned in and shouted up, “Mrs. Terpenning?”

“Who’s that?” a voice demanded from the elevator. She sounded irate; I hoped that was a good sign.

“It’s just me, Mrs. Terpenning . . . er, Mr. Booth. Your niece has gone to get Mr. Marten, and we should . . . we should have you out of there in no time.” It was the sort of comforting thing Blaine would have said; he would have brought more conviction to it, too.

“What was she doing? What was she doing running around the hotel this time of night? And why were you with her?”