The Inn (8 page)

“O
h, I'm sorry,” Jack said. “I didn't know anyone Owas in there.”

Priscilla blushed a deep crimson, holding the towel as tightly around her as possible. She had just stepped out of the shower when the door to the little bathroom had opened and Jack had walked in. She didn't think he'd seen anything, as she'd already been wrapping the towel around herself. But she couldn't be sure.

Now he stood on the other side of the door, having closed it again, apologizing.

“It's all right, really,” Priscilla told him. “I should have locked the door.”

“I forgot there were no bathrooms in the individual guest rooms,” he told her. “We're going to be changing that. When you come back next time, every room is going to have its own private bath.”

“Wow, that's ambitious,” Priscilla said.

“We've got a lot of big plans,” Jack told her through the door.

Priscilla thought it was a little odd that he kept talking to her, knowing that she was naked and dripping inside here. But she kind of liked it. Jack was very handsome. He'd made her heart flutter as she was talking to him. That never happened with Neville.

She suddenly felt bold. Making sure her towel was firmly secured around her, Priscilla grabbed the door handle and walked out into the hallway.

Jack was still standing there, as if waiting for her. She noticed the way his eyes looked her over. Priscilla felt a tingle of electricity race through her body.

“It's good to have plans,” she told Jack. “I can't wait to come back and see how you've remodeled the place.”

He didn't reply immediately. His eyes were too busy eating her up.

Priscilla was being very naughty, and she knew it. Jack was a married man. But what harm could a little flirting do?

“Yeah, well, you won't recognize the place,” Jack told her.

“I would hope you'd talk with me first before you start knocking down walls.” It was a new voice. They both looked around.

The old woman, Mrs. Devlin, stood at the end of the corridor. Priscilla let out a little gasp.

“I was just heading back to my room,” she chirped, and hurried down the hall.

“C
ome into my room,” Cordelia told her grandson. She could feel her lips tightening into a scowl.

Jack obeyed. Once they were inside, Cordelia closed the door behind her.

“Now, don't worry, Gran,” Jack was saying. “We're not going to start tearing down walls. Anything we do, we'll include you in on the plans.”

“Now, listen to me, Jack,” she said, her tiny frame standing up to him, her neck craned to look up into his face, her bony finger pointing. “This house has stood for more than a century. There is an integrity to this house. Your father believed so, and his father before him. You can't come in here with a wrecking ball.”

“I told you, Gran. It will be nothing like that.”

Her fingers curled into two tiny fists. “When I'm gone, do whatever you want. But for now, Jack, please, just leave things as they are.”

“Gran, Annabel has some ideas. Good ideas. They'll make the place even better.”

“Ideas!” She sniffed. “Other people have had ideas, and it's done them and us no good.”

Jack made a face as he looked at her. “Are you talking about my mother?”

Cordelia wished she hadn't said that. She tried to backtrack. “Your mother was a dear, kind woman. She meant well. But if she had succeeded in tearing up the place as she had planned . . .”

“Mom wasn't going to tear up the place, Gran,” Jack said. “And neither will Annabel and I. Maybe if Mom had succeeded in fixing the place up all those years ago, it wouldn't have gone into the red.” He made another face, which Cordelia took to indicate sympathy, but which seemed simply idiotic to her. “I've gone over the books you gave me, Gran,” Jack went on. “This place hasn't made any money in years.”

“We get by,” she told him.

“Gran, I've spent too much of my life just getting by,” Jack said. “You asked me to come up here and take over from you. I plan to do that. And I plan on making a success of things. A success of me!”

Her gnarled old fingers gripped his wrists. “Jack, please, go slow. And please don't do anything without talking to me first.”

“I told you we'd include you in everything,” he said, smiling at her, lifting her hands to his lips to kiss them.

Cordelia's eyes stung with tears. Nearly sixty years ago she had come to this house a happy bride. How had it come to this?

“H
elp me!!”

Cordelia, aged twenty-five, had stood there, not believing what she was seeing.

The woman struggled. Her face was a mask of terror.

“Help me!” the woman screamed again.

Cordelia tried to run to her, but her husband stopped her.

And she had watched in sickening horror as the woman was pulled down into the darkness.

“J
ust please go slow,” Cordelia said to her grandson, her voice low and whispery.

Jack pulled her in for a big bear hug. She practically disappeared against his chest.

“Don't you worry about anything, Gran,” he said. “We'll respect the integrity of the house. You'll be pleased with the changes. You'll see.”

A
nnabel was having a grand time, mapping out designs for the house. She'd found a little table in one of the other, unused bedrooms and dragged it back to her own, making it into a desk for herself. She began sketching a rough blueprint of how she envisioned the parlor could look. One wall gone, the fireplace opened up, the windows enlarged . . .

This is just what I need
, Annabel thought to herself.
A project.

In New York, she had liked nothing more than to be immersed in a project. During her short tenure at
Orbit
, she had loved designing the look of the magazine, working with their graphics team to come up with a sleek, stylized presentation. She was always sketching, trying new ideas out. In those days, Annabel was at her happiest, most fulfilled.

Too bad her nights had been consumed with coke.

But that was over now. She had triumphed. She had made it through rehab, survived her breakdown, and emerged whole and healthy. She had not wanted to come to Woodfield with Jack. She'd felt pressured into doing so, as if she'd had no other choice. But maybe that was changing. Maybe the challenge of remodeling this place would be just what she needed.

Because Annabel needed something.

She needed to feel as if she mattered. As if she could run her own life. She needed to feel strong and capable again. She'd triumphed over the addiction, but what she still felt she hadn't regained was the self-confidence. She wondered if she'd ever really been self-confident, if maybe all her time as a hotshot New York fashionista and designer had been a sham, if she'd been fooling herself and everyone else. She wondered if she had ever really believed in herself, or if she had been putting on a show—if she had still been, at heart, the scared little girl Daddy Ron had locked in the closet.

Yet Dr. Adler at the hospital had told her that before she could believe that she was strong and capable, she needed to believe she was safe.

“Do you feel safe, Annabel?” Dr. Adler had asked her.

“I feel safe here,” she had replied, meaning the hospital, “but I'm not sure I'll feel safe anywhere else.”

She had hated the hospital—hated feeling confined and boxed in—but at least she had felt safe there.

I need to feel safe here, too,
Annabel told herself.
And I can feel safe by making this place my own
.
So long as it doesn't feel like my own, then I won't feel safe.

And feeling unsafe was a terrible way to live.

Already she had hallucinated since coming here. Her mind was sometimes going to play tricks with her—Tommy Tricky, as a matter of fact. Dr. Adler had warned her about that. But she couldn't succumb to such tricks. She had to teach her mind to distinguish between reality and illusion. She had to make her mind strong—working it out every day, the way people worked out their bodies by going to the gym. And the best mental calisthenics Annabel could do were the designs and blueprints for her renovation of the inn.

If Annabel could meet the challenges of living here at the Blue Boy—if she could find her courage and her strength and her self-confidence here—then all the pain and struggle she had gone through would have been worth it. But most important, she needed to do it on her own. Jack had been a steadying influence during the worst of her ordeal. He'd been a great support. But Annabel needed to do this next part on her own. That was vital.

I need to find a way to feel strong and safe again on my own,
she told herself, as she sketched out the windows she had in mind to open up the parlor.

From a corner of the room, she heard scratching.

“I may need to find an exterminator as well,” she said with a long groan.

Damn it. The idea of vermin running around inside the walls of the house creeped her out, made her flesh crawl. She'd heard scratching downstairs in the parlor. Probably mice. Or maybe chipmunks. Annabel hoped it was nothing worse than that.

She stood and walked over to the wall. Crouching down, she pressed her ear low to the wall. She could definitely hear something, but in fact, she realized it wasn't the same sound she'd heard downstairs. Up close, Annabel wouldn't describe it as scratching. It sounded more like . . . scuffing. Like someone was scuffing along the floor behind the wall....

“That's crazy,” Annabel said out loud. “Mice and chipmunks don't scuff.”

But it sounded bigger, heavier than a mouse or a chipmunk.

Pressing her ear harder against the wall, Annabel was surprised to discover that a part of the wall buckled just a bit. A sliver of the plaster actually moved. She looked down.

She saw a small panel, about two feet by three feet, where the wall met the floor.

Slowly, carefully, Annabel slid the panel back. If there was some animal behind there, she didn't want it jumping out at her. But the sound was gone now. There was utter silence. Still, Annabel moved very slowly, frightened that a skunk or a possum was about to poke its snout through the panel at her. With careful deliberation, she pushed the panel aside, trying to catch a glimpse of what was behind the wall.

It was too dark to see. Annabel stood and hurried over to her pocketbook, snatching up her phone. There might not be any reception up here, but she could still use her flashlight app. She pointed her phone into the panel and switched on the light.

She saw no animal or any sign of one. There was just a very narrow space that seemed to lead all around the room. No way was she going in there to explore. Annabel hated enclosed, tight spaces. She just wanted to close this panel and seal it shut—

But then her eyes landed on a small dusty pile of books just beyond the panel opening.

Hesitantly, Annabel reached in and grabbed the book on the top of the pile.

Bringing it back out into the room, she looked down on its cover. The book seemed ancient. The binding was cracking and covered in mold. The mold made a pretty blue-and-white pattern across the black leather cover. Carefully, Annabel opened the book. She let out a little gasp when she read the words on the frontispiece.

 

D
AEMONOLOGY

 

The date at the bottom was 1862.

“S
tay back,” Chief Richard Carlson told the kids who had gathered along the trail. “Stay behind Deputy Burrell.”

The call had come in about half an hour ago. Some kids had found something along the path through the woods. One of them, little Julie Chen, had run home to her mother screaming and then Mrs. Chen had called the police.

The kids claimed it was a body.

A dead guy, they said.

Richard had ordered the kids kept back. A group of curious adults had gathered by now, too, and Adam was holding them back as well while the chief made his way up the path.

“It's right over there,” called one of the kids who had found whatever it was. “Just off the trail beside a log.”

Richard could see something in the direction the kid was pointing. It looked like a clump of dark brown blankets from where he was standing. He continued toward it.

What if it was a body?

What if it was murder?

There hadn't been a murder in Woodfield since Richard had taken over as chief. The job was very different from his time working on the Boston police force, where he'd had to turn over a dozen dead bodies a year, all of them potential homicides until proven otherwise. During his years in Boston, Richard had seen his share of bloodshed. But since coming to Woodfield, his worst problems were those damn town meetings where everybody was fighting with everybody else. That and the occasional underage drinking down at the lake, or thrill riders going ninety down the old twisting back roads.

Woodfield was a quiet, peaceful little village. But Richard knew it hadn't always been so.

Before he'd come to town, there had been a string of unexplained deaths. Many of them were out at the Blue Boy Inn, but not all. On slow days, Richard sometimes went through the cold case files, lifting the bulging manila folders down from the shelf and leafing through them. For such a small town, there were an awful lot of unexplained deaths.

And from the looks of it, there had just been another one.

Richard turned back toward his deputy. “Adam,” he called. “Get the EMTs here pronto.”

He heard Adam make the call.

The chief knelt down beside what from a distance had looked like a brown clump. It was brown all right. Brown, hardened blood. The corpse was lying on its right side and its clothes were all drenched in blood. The poor guy's face was turned, pressed into the dirt, so Richard didn't recognize him as a local. At least not right away.

He felt for a pulse. He knew there wouldn't be one, but he did it anyway. The guy was dead. And cold. Richard guessed he'd been dead for a while.

“What is it, chief?” somebody called from the crowd.

He wasn't sure he could say exactly. From the looks of it, the guy might have been jumped as he walked down the path. Or maybe he'd been dumped here. But it was clear he must have been stabbed to produce so much blood.

Richard took out his phone and snapped several pictures. Then, carefully, he turned the corpse on its back.

That was when he recognized him.

Holy shit.

Roger Askew.

He heard Tammy's voice.

“He sure as hell didn't,” Richard whispered.

“Hey, chief,” Adam shouted over to him. “The EMTs are on their way.”

Richard nodded.

His first thought was this was a drug deal or a gambling debt gone bad. Roger Askew had lots of enemies. It wasn't going to be easy to find his killer.

Richard was looking down at the corpse. Roger's right arm was twisted under his body at an odd angle. All Richard could see was his shoulder. Gently, the chief reached forward to examine the arm. The odd angle might be a clue as to how Roger died.

But as he felt under the cold, stiff body, Richard uttered a little sound in surprise.

There was no right arm!

It had been severed just below the shoulder. That was why there was so much blood.

Richard stood up. The sun was dropping a little lower in the sky and the woods were filling up with shadows, strange twisting shapes cast by the bare branches of the trees. Had the arm been cut off for some reason, and then tossed aside? The chief stepped away from the corpse, walking through the dead leaves, trying to see if he could discover the arm. But the leaves weren't disturbed for several yards around the body. There was no sign of any more blood.

He and Adam would do a more thorough search, and the state forensics team would likely be called in. But at the moment, Richard suspected that Roger's arm had been cut off and then his killer had taken it away.

But why?