Knollenberg’s forehead looked glossy with sweat. “Of course, sir,” he said. “I’ll take care of it immediately.”
“Thank you, Murray,” said Beckworth. “And now, Mr. Gillespie and I shall iron out the details before I let him book his flight home to retrieve his equipment.”
Knollenberg gave one curt nod, got up, and left the office, and Beckworth and Gilley hashed out the deal. When they were finished, Heath and I were tasked with ridding the hotel of any and all things going bump in the night, and that included this three-clawed demon, if it was still loose in the hotel.
Heath gave Gilley permission to negotiate on his behalf, so within the hour we all had a deal, and we left Beckworth’s office with a mixture of moods. Gilley was, of course, elated; I was excited but nervous; Heath floated from stunned to exuberant; and Steven was pensive and uncommunicative. I had a feeling he didn’t like this job one bit. Before I had a chance to ask him about it, however, I heard, “Uh, excuse me,” and I glanced in surprise at Gopher, who was following us down the hallway. He’d been so quiet throughout the meeting that I’d forgotten he was even along. “Might I suggest one more idea?”
“Yes?” said Gilley, stopping in the hallway to listen to Gopher, and as he did I had a tickling sensation that Gilley had allowed Gopher into the meeting on purpose.
“What would you guys say to letting us film the exorcism?”
“It’s not an exorcism,” I snapped, hating that word and the thoughts of pea soup splattering everywhere that it always invoked for me.
“Okay, this ghostbust,” said Gopher. “What would you guys say to letting me and one other crew member film it?”
I scowled in distaste. For a guy who had just had one of his lovers murdered he sure seemed like a shallow, insensitive opportunist to me.
“Talk numbers to me,” said Gilley, who apparently wasn’t nearly as put off as I was.
Gopher cleared his throat, obviously surprised by the suggestion that he would have to fork over some cash to film the bust. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking it would just be a continuation of the same per diem we were already giving you guys for the Haunted Possessions shoot.”
Gilley laughed as though Gopher had just told him a really good joke. “You’re funny!” he exclaimed. “Which is why I’ll thank you before I say, Not on your life.”
Gopher appeared to squirm with frustration. “Okay,” he reasoned, his eyes blinking rapidly as he thought about the alternatives. “Can I make a few calls and get back to you?”
Gilley waved his hand nonchalantly. “Yes, but you’ll need to catch us before we leave for the airport, and FYI, there’s no way we’re allowing a film crew to interfere on a serious ghostbust like this for less than ten thousand dollars.”
My eyes bulged, and next to me Steven actually coughed. It seemed we both had a serious new appreciation for Gilley’s cojones.
To our surprise, however, Gopher didn’t even flinch. “Lemme get back to you,” he agreed, pulling his cell phone out of his back pocket as he dashed ahead down the hallway.
Gilley then turned to the rest of us and said, “You guys go pack while I call the airlines. Heath, you can stay here if you’d like. We’ll catch a flight out first thing in the a.m. and be back in town by midmorning, day after tomorrow, with our equipment.”
Heath nodded. “Sounds good,” he said. “It’ll give me time to do a little sightseeing and go shopping for more clothes. I only brought enough for two days.”
“I won’t be able to come back,” said Steven, and I looked at him curiously.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I have lectures to give, remember?” Steven said, reminding me about his lecturing gig for the University of Massachusetts Medical School on cardio-thoracic surgical techniques.
“Crap,” I said, and was a little surprised by how disappointed I was that he wouldn’t be along for this ride.
“But may I just say,” he said in a tone that was very serious, “that I don’t like this idea one bit. I think it’s dangerous and that you should not do it and we should all go home to stay.”
I was aware that both Gilley and Heath were ready to argue with Steven, but I cut them off by saying, “I can’t very well leave the general public to face this thing without giving it at least one try, honey.”
“But you’ve already been hurt by this thing,” he argued. “What if it did murder that girl? What if it decides that it likes murdering girls in general?”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised, raising my hand up as if I were taking a vow. “We’ll come back armed with our equipment, and I’ll have both Heath and Gilley to keep me out of harm’s way. If it gets too dicey, then I’ll quit and head back home.”
Steven frowned, and I knew he didn’t think much about my ability to determine when things might get too dicey. “We can’t always take the easy jobs,” I said to him. “Sometimes this occupation of mine gets a little freaky, and the more experience we have with this type of thing, the better prepared we’ll be for anything else we might encounter down the road.”
“I am not liking this,” he groused, and pulled me in for a nice, tight hug. “Keep her safe, Gilley,” I heard him say over my head.
“You got it, Doctor,” Gil agreed.
Chapter 9
We arrived back at the hotel thirty-six hours and a whole lotta headache later, the major crisis being that the airline we booked with had lost Gilley’s bag containing his magnetic sweatshirt. The airline had promised to track the bag and have it delivered to the hotel later. This did nothing to alleviate the panic attack Gilley was presently having. “What if it doesn’t arrive in time?” he wailed.
“For the eighteenth time, Gil, we can always make you another one, or you can simply stay at the command center and lay out a bunch of magnetic grenades on your table. You’ll be fine.”
Gilley whimpered and looked at me with big puppy-dog eyes. “I want my sweatshirt,” he whined.
“Jeez, Gil, you sound like you need a binkie and a baba too.”
I waved at the security guard posted outside the hotel lobby, and he opened the door for us and helped us inside with our bags. The staff looked as though it had been cut back to the bare minimum, and as we were allowed entrance into the lobby by the security guard, we couldn’t help but notice the large posters on the doors declaring that the hotel had been temporarily shut down due to construction. I felt a bit of unease enter the pit of my stomach.
The police crime-scene tape was still up across the ladies’ room door to remind me of the awful things I’d seen in there, and I felt that tickle of unease intensify.
We found Heath sitting in the lobby reading a paper. “Hey, guys!” he said when he spotted us. He then glanced at his watch and declared, “When you say you’ll be right back, you really mean it.”
I yawned and set down the heavy duffel bag of equipment I was carrying to stretch. “I need a nap,” I declared. My head felt as though it were in a fog, and my bones ached with fatigue.
“Didn’t get much sleep on the plane, huh?” Gil said, and from the way he was looking at me I knew he was likely assessing the dark circles under my eyes.
“Nope,” I said. “And I’ll never know how you do it, Gil. You were asleep even before we took off from Boston.”
Gilley smiled and bounced his eyebrows. “It’s a gift,” he said. “Go up to your room and get a little shut-eye. I’ll talk to Knollenberg and find a central location to set up from; plus, I’ve got to find Gopher and his other crew member and coordinate with them.”
This came as a surprise to me. “They’re filming us? You didn’t tell me that we agreed to that.”
“They came up with the money,” he said, smiling at both Heath and me. “How’s an added five grand for your pocket, Heath?”
“Works for me!” he said happily. “Man, Gilley, I can’t thank you enough. My mom’s getting up there in years, and I worry about her. She lives in this crappy trailer, and it’s full of issues.
I’ve had my eye on a house near my apartment building for a while, and with this money I’ll actually be able to purchase it for me and Mom to live in. You’re a life-saver, buddy.”
Gilley studied his nails nonchalantly, but the look on his face let me know he thought he was all that and a bag of chips. “I do what I can,” he said with a sigh.
“Well, I for one am going to catch some Zs. Heath, why don’t we meet back down here in a couple of hours and we’ll come up with a plan of attack? Gil, when you go meet with Knollenberg, see if Heath and I can meet with him briefly, say around two-ish?”
“No sweat,” Gil said. “Now go; you look dead on your feet.”
I didn’t linger but headed off, leaving the heavy duffel of equipment with Gil so that he could set it up when he found a spot for the base camp.
As I got into my room and glanced at the freshly made bed, I had a pang of sadness that I’d be sleeping in it all by my lonesome. I was going to miss Steven on this trip, and was quite surprised that I was developing such strong feelings for him. I wasn’t known for letting men—other than Gilley, of course—get too close. Probably had a lot to do with my childhood, but it wasn’t anything that I overanalyzed. No, Steven was the first guy I’d let in for a long time, and it both unsettled and thrilled me.
He was a good balance for me too. He was levelheaded, even-keeled, and logical. I was temperamental, prone to flying off the handle, and did things based solely on my gut feeling. Hey, maybe there was something to this opposites-attract thing after all?
Several hours later, and after a deliciously long shower, I was back downstairs and looking for Heath. Instead I found Gopher milling about the mezzanine with a light meter. I walked up to him from behind and said, “Hey,” to get his attention.
He started and whipped around. “Oh!” he said, putting a hand over his heart. “Hi, M.J.”
I smiled wickedly at him. “You seem a little jumpy, Gopher. Are you going to be able to handle this gig?”
Gopher laughed, but it sounded pretty forced. “Oh, sure. I just didn’t hear you come up, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not believing him for a second. “Have you seen Heath or Gilley?”
“Heath went out for takeout, but he should be back anytime, and Gilley is in the Twilight Room.”
I pivoted in a half circle. “Where’s that?” I asked.
“It’s the smallest of the conference rooms,” said Gopher. “You go down that hall and it’s the second door on your left.”
“Thanks,” I called over my shoulder as I trotted away. “And if you see Heath, can you tell him I’m in with Gilley?”
“Will do,” he said, and went back to his light meter.
I found Gil in the room that Gopher had indicated, and he had two long tables set up with monitors and computer screens, and magnetic spikes taped to his chair and the table. “Hey, girl,” he said when I entered the room.
“Still no sign of your luggage?” I asked, looking pointedly at the spikes all about his area.
Gil made a face and said, “Stupid airlines! They’ve lost track of my bag, but they assure me they are devoting their best people to finding it. They mentioned something about its being routed to Thailand, and I hung up on them.”
“Wow,” I said. “Your bag is probably having more fun than you are right now.”
Instead of answering me, Gilley lifted a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Great, Tony, I’ve got good reception. Let’s move to the next floor.” He then turned to me and explained, “That’s Tony. He’s the other cameraman from Gopher’s team who’s going to be following you guys around tonight.”
“So you’re almost set up?” I asked.
“Yep,” said Gil, looking down at a clipboard that held his notes. “I know you wanted to skip the baselines and get right to the ghostbusting, but I thought it might not do us any harm to take a few readings on each floor anyway—that way we’ll know if any spikes on the electrostatic meters are out of the ordinary or not.”
I smiled. Gilley could never let go of his protocols. “That’s cool,” I said, then glanced at my own watch. “Did you get us a meeting with Knollenberg before we begin?”
“Sure did. He’s expecting you in half an hour. Heath went out to bring us back some takeout, and I had him pick you up a club sandwich. He should be back anytime.”
And just as Gilley finished speaking, the door behind me opened and Heath walked in loaded down with bags of takeout. “Who’s hungry?” he asked.
We ate quickly; then Heath and I left Gilley to finish gathering his data and testing his equipment.
We found Knollenberg behind the front desk talking to three other men in ties. It was pretty obvious that these were the assistant managers, and Knollenberg was reassuring them that the hotel would be back open within three days’ time and no one would be out of a job.
He also asked one of the men to return Detective MacDonald’s phone call about security footage. “He left a voice mail on my phone,” Knollenberg was saying. “Apparently the footage we forwarded to him cuts off immediately after the poor girl entered the restroom. It might be a malfunction of the cameras, but he wanted to know if perhaps the one above the door had captured anything. I took the liberty of reviewing the footage, and it’s the oddest thing, but for a period of about two minutes all it recorded was snow. It then shows Miss Holliday coming out of the bathroom after discovering the young woman inside. So, Andrew, if you will kindly return the detective’s phone call for me and make arrangements to get him a copy of the footage, maybe his lab techs can do something with it.”
I cleared my throat at that point. Knollenberg turned around, and, upon seeing Heath and me, he said, “Is it four o’clock already?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Knollenberg came out from behind the counter and said, “My apologies. I should be finished with my meeting here in a minute or two. May I show you into my office and have you wait there?”
“That’d be great.”
Knollenberg took us down a hallway past a portrait of the hotel’s first owner, Phineas Duke, and into his small but well-kept office. He pointed to two chairs in front of his desk and said, “I’ll be back in just a few minutes,” and he shut the door, leaving Heath and me alone, which gave us a chance to talk. “You okay with all this?” I asked him.
Heath laughed heartily. “Am I okay with twenty-five thousand dollars? Shit, yeah!”
“You know this is probably going to get dicey, don’t you?”
That sobered him. “I know,” he said. “But there are two of us, and we seem to work pretty well together. And Gilley’s already shown me your stash of magnet grenades, so I feel like we’re well armed, at least. Plus, a lot of these spirits from the hotel seem to be pretty harmless—if you don’t count that smoky, talon-wielding serpent demon, of course.”
I smiled. “Yeah, if you don’t count that.”
“I think we should start with the easy stuff first,” Heath suggested. “Let’s get rid of the regular spooks that the Duke is known for before we tackle the heavy stuff.”
I nodded. “That’s a good idea. It’ll give us a good chance to get familiar with the entire hotel too. That way we can work out a plan to deal with this demon when and if we encounter it.”
“Do you think it actually killed Tracy?” Heath asked me after a small lull in our conversation.
I shrugged. “I just can’t see it,” I said. “I mean, a knife-wielding demon? Doesn’t that just sound a little too far-fetched?”
“Then what do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, when MacDonald pulled me into the bathroom yesterday he asked me to make contact with her, but she wasn’t around, so it’s really hard to say.”
“She crossed over?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said, thinking that felt right. “And I’ll bet she’s currently in transition.”
“So she’s not going to be able to connect with any of us for
a while,” he said, and I was impressed that he was familiar with the state of transition for some souls.
“Looks like it,” I agreed. “Then again, if my hunch is off and she’s wandering around here, we might bump into her on our other detail.”
The door opened at that point, and Knollenberg came in, looking drawn and tired. He forced a smile onto his face and sat down at his desk. “So sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “Where would you like to start?”
“Do you by chance have a blueprint or detailed map of the hotel?” I asked him. “We’ll need to form a plan of attack, and it would really help to know what kind of structure we’re dealing with.”
“Of course,” said Knollenberg, turning to a folder on his desk, which he opened and from it removed a packet of the hotel’s plans, floor by floor. “I just had a few of these made up for our new assistant manager. They come in handy when we need to train incoming employees. How many copies would you need?” he asked us.
“Three should be good,” I said, thinking that one copy each for me, Gilley, and Heath would be enough.
Knollenberg counted out three copies and handed them to us across his desk. Then he seemed to think of something and he rummaged around in his desk drawer before coming up with two key cards. “You’ll need these, of course,” he said, handing them to us. “They’re master key cards which will give you access to any room in the hotel.”
“Awesome, thank you,” I said.
“What else do you need?” he asked us.
“We’ll want a list of all the ghosts that have ever been known to haunt the Duke, and if you can provide us with the locations for the most common sightings, that would be great.”
Knollenberg smiled and went back to the filing cabinet, pulling out one particularly thick folder and handing it to me. Opening it up, I realized that it was filled with dozens of complaints from both patrons and employees of paranormal disturbances going back some ninety-five years—which was almost as long as the Duke had been open.