“Yes sir.” The girl flipped through the guest book and found the page she wanted. She handed him a pen, and pulled a ledger out from behind the desk. She asked his name, for their records.
“Horatio Korman,” he said. “I’m here looking for—”
“Sister Eileen,” Violetta supplied. “I know. She’s been asking every day, if there’s word from Austin. Every day she asks if they’ve sent a Ranger yet.”
“Is it that obvious?”
The padre smiled with one corner of his mouth. “You may as well carry a sign. But forgive me, please—I am Juan Rios. We have the sister in common, you and I.”
“She sent for you, too?”
“That’s right.”
While the Ranger filled out the provided form, he asked, “And how long have you been here?”
“Since yesterday.”
He put down the pen and looked up. “Then you barely beat me.”
“I’m sure Sister Eileen will join us soon. I’m told she’s a late riser,” the padre said…but upon saying so, he felt a small flash of dread. The hotel was making him paranoid. “Then again, we should go and knock, and let her know that you’ve arrived. She’s just up the stairs, on the second floor.”
Violetta added, “Ask if she’d like some breakfast sent up; I could make her a plate. And Ranger Korman, here’s your key. You’re in room 221.”
The Ranger tipped his hat at her, and adjusted the bag he wore slung across his chest. “Thank you ma’am.” He pocketed the key. “And where exactly is the nun?”
“She’s in 203, Ranger. Just down the other wing,” she informed him with a smile. “Go left for your room, and go right for hers.”
“All right. Padre, you go on and see if she’s up. I’ll drop this off, and join you in a minute.”
The padre retraced his earlier steps to room 203, halfway down one hall that curved slightly, even though the exterior of the hotel suggested that it shouldn’t. But all the angles were strange inside. All the sharp corners, the straight pathways, rectangular rugs, and oversized fire doors still managed to somehow feel convex to the naked eye.
Now that he’d noticed it, it gave him a headache.
Before he knocked on the door, he listened closely. He heard nothing, but that meant nothing; so he knocked softly and waited. On the bed something stirred, and he was relieved—not that he’d expected anything else, but less than twenty-four hours in the hotel had taught him that anything was possible, especially if it was terrible.
Momentarily, the door opened.
Sister Eileen was fully dressed and behind her, the bed had been made. A small Bible lay there, open to some place in the middle. “Good morning, Father. I see your frock has dried, and you’re restored to your ordinary self.”
“I retrieved it this morning, good as new—and I’m glad to see I didn’t awaken you. When you didn’t appear at breakfast, I assumed you’d chosen to sleep, instead.”
“I wasn’t hungry,” she told him. “And all things being equal, I figured the time spent eating might be better devoted to prayer. Heaven knows we could use some guidance, right about now.”
“Guidance is good. But a mortal helping hand may also prove useful.”
“You’ve been very useful indeed, so far.”
He tried to give her a thankful grin, but it felt hollow. “I appreciate you saying so, but that isn’t what I meant. We have a visitor. He just arrived, and—” as he heard the sound of booted footsteps clomping up the stairs—“here he is, now.”
The Ranger joined them with a polite touch of his hat toward the nun, who greeted him with an enormous smile. “A Ranger!”
“Yes ma’am. A Ranger who’d apologize for getting you out of bed, but it seems the Father here has beaten me to it.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she beamed. “I’ve been up for an hour. Please, let me just close the room—and let’s exchange our pleasantries at the sitting area down the hall. I’ll ring Violetta for some tea.”
“Coffee?” tried the Ranger.
“I’ll ask for both.”
Violetta came summoned by the bell in Sister Eileen’s room, and ten minutes later the girl returned to the sitting area with a tray—then left them alone to acquaint themselves.
The sitting area was comfortably appointed and offered a place for everyone, with a view of a balcony that no one wished to visit. It was barely raining yet, but what drops did fall were hurled against the windows with the force of bullets; and the wind rose and fell, from frantic and wild to uncannily calm, moment to moment, while the sky turned brown, and lilac, and navy blue.
It gave their introductions a sinister backdrop, even as they sipped hot beverages and nibbled at the toast and muffins Violetta had added to the cart. But over coffee and over the sound of the wind outside, the Ranger began to explain himself.
Horatio Korman had not precisely been “sent” to the hotel…so much as he’d seen Sister Eileen’s plea for assistance and decided to come on his own. Officially, this was not Ranger business. But unofficially, Austin knew of his whereabouts and was watching at a distance.
“I don’t understand,” the nun frowned when he told her this.
He leaned into the floral cushioned seat, and stretched his arms to splay them atop its back. “There are only so many men to go around, and you must admit, your request was a mighty strange one. You tell us that nine people have died in the course of a month, through mysterious circumstances and no hint of a killer—at one of the finest hotels in the state. But there’s been no mention of it in the papers, save a handful of obituaries, and there have been no complaints against the hotel or its owners.”
“Ten people,” she corrected him glumly. “There was another last night.”
He appeared surprised, but not particularly stunned. “A tenth? But who? I didn’t hear anyone nattering about it downstairs in the lobby.”
The padre sighed. “No one ever natters. No one ever talks about the deaths, except for poor Sarah…and all she’ll do is cry to you about them.”
“Sarah?”
“The desk clerk,” the nun provided. “Or the manager, perhaps—for she wears many hats. She helped us last night, after poor Mrs. Fields breathed her last.”
“Where is she now?”
She looked to the padre. “I don’t know…in her quarters? Resting, I assume.”
“It was a long night,” Juan Rios mumbled around a stifled yawn. “There was a lot to clean up.”
“No one told the police? No one summoned the authorities?” the Ranger asked incredulously.
Sister Eileen answered as squarely as she could. “Well, we summoned you. In the past, yes, Sarah called for help; and at first, the police did come. But after a while…they stopped bothering, unless we asked them to take away a body to dispose of it. It’s like there’s a spell on the place, you understand? What gossip finds its way around speaks only of accidents, and unlikely tragedies with ordinary explanations—when any fool could see that’s not the case.”
“What about last night? Mrs. Fields, I think you called her.”
The padre supplied the rest. “It was very late, very bloody, and the storm…” he winced as a tree branch slammed into the window beside him; but the glass did not break, and he did not stop there. “The storm was coming for us. Sister Eileen thought it might hold off, and we would have another day to ask questions…but six hours ago, I had my doubts.”
They all kept silent for a long, uncertain moment—watching the gale whip the trees back and forth, throwing flowers and leaves, newspapers, laundry yanked from lines, and everything else that wasn’t nailed down…all of it boiling to a cauldron of mayhem, just on the other side of the glass.
“The eye of this thing will overtake us soon, that much is certain,” she said quietly. “What you see out there—it’s barely a fraction of what the weather will bring us. Have either of you ever encountered a hurricane?”
The Ranger said, “No, but I’ve heard stories,” and the padre
shook his head. He’d heard stories too, but none of them reassured him. The stories he’d been told were all about destruction, death, and an uncaring swipe from the hand of God. They were stories of coastlines scrubbed clean by a surge of debris, of entire towns that vanished into the ocean in the span of an hour.
“Stories never tell the half of it, or else they’re twice the truth,” she told them. “But it’s hard to exaggerate a thing like this. I hope that most of the island has evacuated. The official order finally went out before dawn, and anyone who can’t leave—or won’t—has been urged to seek shelter.”
Horatio Korman said, “You should’ve seen it, as I was coming in yesterday: all the ferries full, coming out of Galveston. I was the only idiot headed in.”
The padre gave a small, short laugh that sounded like a sigh. “That’s how it was for me, too. Now you’re stuck here, with us. And with whatever…” he paused.
The Ranger spared him, and summed up quickly: “With whatever’s killing people, inside this hotel.”
“You believe us? Really, you do?” asked Sister Eileen. Relief was written all over her face, but Juan Rios couldn’t imagine why. Believing wasn’t going to save any of them; she knew it as well as he did.
“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t.” He pulled out a pouch of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette while he said the rest of his piece. “Look, I know the Jacaranda Hotel is strange—damn strange, if you’ll pardon the language. But I’ve seen strange things before, and even the weirdest cases have some explanation behind them. It’s not always rational, and not always something you can prove…but I’ve seen patterns, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He paused to lick the rolling paper and tap it shut. “And the way you described it all in your letters to Austin, I got the sense of another pattern. This one looks awful, and I don’t know if I can help…” For an instant, his calm concentration flickered—and the padre saw something uncertain behind his eyes. Then it was gone, and the Ranger produced a match. “But here I am, anyway.”
Juan Rios let him light the end and suck it until the coal glowed, and then he said, “It’s almost like you were called here.”
Sister Eileen protested, “No, it’s not like that at all. He’s a man doing his job, isn’t that it? I called him here, not the hotel.”
“Sure,” the Ranger said. But there it was again, that droop to his brow—a thoughtful glance that went sideways, and back again. He wasn’t half so sure as the nun pretended to be. “But for starters, let’s treat this like it isn’t strange.”
“How do we do that?” the padre asked.
“By asking questions. You two have tried that, I assume?”
The nun nodded. “Yes, but the hotel’s guests aren’t the most forthcoming bunch.”
She then told him what little they’d learned so far, mostly from Sarah. Finally, though she seemed reluctant to confess it, she added Sarah’s feeling that everyone was called there for a reason. “But not you,” she insisted again. “You’re not one of the guests, not really.”
“If you say so, sister, but we’re all in the same boat now—so I’m not sure it matters any, who called whom. Besides that, do you think she meant that folks were called here…or they were sent here?” he asked.
“I don’t understand…”
He tried again. “Do you think they’re lured here by the hotel, or do you think they’re sent here by some other power? That’s what I’m wondering: What if this is where you go, when it’s your turn to go to hell?”
The Ranger took a few more notes while he listened to Sister Eileen and Father Rios; and when everything had been said—everything they could remember, no matter how ridiculous—when it was all laid out, he declared his plan.
“I know you two didn’t get very far in your investigation, and I can guess why. You,” he pointed at Sister Eileen, “aren’t from around here. And neither are you,” he said to the padre. “But you, Father—you’ve got a leg up with the Mexicans here…or the ones who used to be Mexican, you know what I mean. What Spanish I know isn’t very good, and I’m well aware of how your people tend to view Texians, not that I take it very personal.”
“It’s just as well that you don’t,” the padre said.
“With that in mind, I’m an officer of the law—and that gives me both an advantage, and a disadvantage. First, I can run around asking questions and nobody will think twice about it. But second, most of them would rather chat with a preacher than the police.”
“We’re a veritable triad of difficulties,” the nun sighed.
“Nah, don’t call it that,” he argued. “Let’s say instead, that between the three of us…we just might get somewhere. Let’s start with that desk woman, Sarah. You think she’s up and around, yet? Let’s go pester her and see. She talked first, and she might talk the most. Or then again, she may clam right up at the sight of me. We won’t know until we give it a shot.”
Sister Eileen knew where Sarah’s quarters were, so she led them there—to the first floor, where the girl lived in an oversized suite almost big enough to call an apartment. She knocked, quietly the first time, louder the second time, and with true insistence on the third round.
From within, there was no answer—not even a sleepy mumble telling them to come back later.
The nun pressed her ear to the door, very near to the crack; and Juan Rios couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that she was sniffing again, trying to catch the scent of whatever waited on the other side. She regarded the two men with an instant of gold in her big brown eyes, a flash of light like a glimmering seam in a boulder. “Something’s wrong.”
“Truer words were never spoken, ma’am.”
“No, something new—something else. She’s in there, I can sense it,” she said vaguely. “But she isn’t moving. She isn’t breathing. I don’t smell any blood, but I don’t think she’s alive.” Before either of her companions could argue with her, or wonder aloud how she knew all that, she declared, “We have to open this door!” She tried the knob, wrestling it back and forth until a loud snap announced that it’d broken in her hands.
The Ranger drew his gun, but the nun told him to, “Put it away—just help me, she’s in there alone.”
Before the padre had a chance to listen, before he could even come to stand beside her, she shoved her shoulder against the door: once, twice, a third time in very quick succession…each blow sounding heavier than it looked. And before the men could lend her aid, the door collapsed inward with a crash—it banged against the wall and ricocheted, then stopped against her foot as she flung herself inside.
The Ranger and the padre looked wide-eyed at one another, and then at the door. The jamb had been smashed to splinters, and a long fault line had cracked the main panel almost in two.
But there was no time to comment upon the little nun’s strength.
Not when Sarah swung from a long cotton belt, fastened around her neck, tied around a heating pipe that ran along the ceiling. Not when her feet dangled over the nightstand from which she’d leaped.
No one moved.
No one thought for a moment that the girl was still alive; no one’s neck makes an angle like that, while the neck’s owner is alive to remark it. No one soils herself until her body’s fluids drip from the tips of her toenails so the rug is a soggy mess, not if they plan to account for it later.
She was wearing a nightdress and nothing else. Not even a bow in her hair.
Juan Rios closed the door behind them, and the Ranger nodded with approval. No one else needed to see this.
“I can’t believe it,” the nun said, never taking her eyes off the swaying corpse.
Korman could. “From what you’ve told me, it makes perfect sense. It looks like the poor girl had enough, that’s all—and this is the simplest death yet. Or it’s the most ordinary one, anyhow, if your descriptions can be believed.”
But the padre stood with the nun. “No, I don’t believe it either. Say what you will, some measure of cour
age is needed to fling yourself into the afterlife; and this girl had not one drop of courage to her name. You see, it isn’t simple, it isn’t…” he came closer to the corpse, and examined it as closely as he dared, at a distance. “It isn’t easy to break your neck, not like this. All she did was tie a little slip…” he drew it in the air with his finger, pointing at the spot where it dug in deep against her throat.
Now the Ranger looked too, and now he agreed. “You’re right. Hell, I’m not even sure that ribbon, or whatever it is…I don’t think it’s strong enough to break her. Strangle her, sure—but it’d be one hell of a yank to jerk her neck apart like that.”
“We should cut her down,” the nun fretted, looking for some handy blade to perform the task. “Are there any scissors, any knives…?” But no one saw any. “I suppose I could climb up and untie it…”
“Don’t,” the Ranger told her. “Don’t, there’s no point. She’s beyond help.”
“She’s not beyond dignity,” Sister Eileen snapped.
“Neither was Constance Fields, but I folded her in two and buried her behind the bushes,” Juan Rios said. “I don’t know if Sarah did this herself, or if it wasn’t her own idea. But whatever has harmed her, it did so without the mess it made of Mrs. Fields. We owe the dark forces a small measure of thanks for that, at least.”
She all but snarled at him. “What a disgusting thought.”
The wind agreed, chiming in with a fierce whistle that tore around the drains, and hissed through the cracks around the windows.
Korman pleaded, “Ma’am, we don’t have time to lay her out. We have another dozen people to speak with, and a hurricane to brace for. I won’t pretend there’s any chance we’ll make it off the island, but there’s plenty of hope we can hunker down and get ready for what’s coming.”
“As if we’re any safer inside these walls, then outside them.”
“One deadly threat at a time, if you please,” he persisted. “One we can prepare for, and one we can’t even understand. Let’s do what we can for the former, and work on the latter as we go. If the place is still standing tomorrow morning—”