NOVEL WEB Moochers and Freeloaders
Cally resumed her work at the desk in the hall. Joan came out of her office and crossed through the Hall several times, on her way to and from the kitchen to refill her tea mug, but she had nothing to say to Cally and did not look at her. Cally began to feel a little sorry about the snarky remark she’d made earlier – but not too sorry.
She dug through the papers she had filed the day before, and found the ones Bethany had told her about – bills with payment checks attached that had not yet been signed, and the notes saying “Ian please sign here.” She piled them on the corner of the desk, returning the ones that had been marked “paid” and initialed “I. M.” to their proper folders in the drawer.
After Nell and Foster had left for Blackthorn, Katarina came into the Hall to offer Cally lunch. Cally took the opportunity to ask her if she knew what had happened to the second pill bottle. “Only it was the one with the correct dose in it, the doctor said this morning.”
“Oh, no.” Kat shook her head. “No, I didn’t do anything with either bottle. Maybe it fell off the night stand? I’ll look for it when I try to get Bethany to eat some lunch. If she’s awake and interested in company I’ll call down to you, and you can join us!”
“That would be nice,” she said, and then thought to suggest, “Maybe you can ask Ignacio if he’s seen the medicine?”
Katarina promised to do so, and Cally settled in to try and work on her book for a while, but she had hit a block after the first page of her new Chapter 1. Maybe it was Joan’s voice droning through the office doorway, complaining about various matters to unfortunate souls on the other end of the line, that was disturbing her. She turned on her MP3 player and put in her earbuds, combing through her research notes, looking for inspiration. Maybe she could interview Bethany tomorrow, if she was feeling better then.
And maybe she really would interview George, too. She looked up from time to time, half expecting – or hoping? – to see him slouching there smiling at her, but he did not put in an appearance that afternoon.
Over the course of the afternoon, Cally took several phone calls from people wanting to book reservations. Most of them were people who wanted to stay at Vale House during October, due to the house’s reputation for being haunted. But when Cally looked at the October section of the register, she found it already booked almost solid. “Maybe Joan has something there, after all,” she thought, noting with a smile that the Iversons had booked the Wisteria Room for October 31.
She was, however, perplexed to see the entire page for October 25 blocked out with a large, double X in dark blue marker. In the end, she was only able to find room for one party of four, early in the month of October, and had to express her regrets to the rest of the callers.
Joan emerged from her office with her purse over her shoulder, during one of these calls, and scowled at Cally until she hung up. “Why are you turning down business?” she asked sharply.
“It’s for October,” Cally said. “You’re almost booked up for the whole month already.”
Joan grunted, “If Ian would throw out some of these freeloaders and hangers-on,” she said, “We’d have room for more paying guests!”
“And then there’s this...” Cally turned the register around and showed Joan the page for the 25th of October. “For some reason you are closed for a whole day right in the middle of the busiest season?” She tapped the big, blue X with a finger.
“Nobody stays in this house on October twenty fifth,” Joan stated flatly. “Nobody. Even the Captain has to go find somewhere else to mooch, that night.”
“But why?”
Joan glared at her. “It doesn’t do any good to ask,” she said. “It’s a rule. It’s been that way since Ian’s grandfather’s day,” She glanced up at the portraits above the fireplace behind Cally, then put her tea mug down on the desk. “Take that to the kitchen,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse. “I’m going in to Blackthorn to get my hair and nails done for our big day tomorrow. The paranormal investigators will be here by three o’clock. I hope you also intend to make yourself presentable by then. Good luck with that, since there aren’t any beauty parlors in this pathetic little town.”
Cally shut the book sharply and put it back in the drawer. “I’m sure I’ll manage to make myself presentable, somehow,” she said.
As soon as Joan’s little white car had left the parking lot, Cally closed her laptop and opened the key drawer. Removing one of the few keys that did not have a flower fob on it, she walked across the hall to Joan’s office door and let herself in. A faint twinge of guilt stopped her for only a second as she paused in the doorway and looked backward into the empty Hall, then she shut and locked the door behind her.
The room was dim, lit only by a lamp on the modern office desk and the light of a television on the book case. The television was muted, silently showing a program that seemed to be about renovating old houses for re-sale. The desk was covered with papers, but none of them appeared to pertain to the running of a business. Most of them were junk mail and mail-order catalogs. Heavy, dark drapes on the large windows were drawn shut, and it took Cally’s eyes awhile to adjust enough to see the rest of the room.
In structure, the room was almost a mirror-image of the large parlor across the hall, and was even furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs in addition to Joan’s desk, though most of this furniture had sheets drawn over it. “This would be a lovely room if someone would clean it up a bit,” Cally thought. “And open the drapes and let the sun in.” She had a perverse idea she should open the drapes and leave them open when she left the room. Joan could blame the ghosts. Cally grinned, but left the drapes alone.
The room did differ from the main parlor in that it did not extend all the way back to the back hall, but ended instead in a wide closet. Beside this closet, in an alcove, Cally spotted what appeared to be the foot of a dark staircase. “What would you call that, then?” she wondered. “The front backstairs?” She stuck her head into the alcove and looked up. The stairs were very narrow, and after only three steps rounded a corner and continued into the dark. Cally wished she had a flashlight, but she went up the first three steps anyway. The staircase appeared to continue up, winding around every three steps, until Cally could see light at the top. “This is really a bad idea,” she told herself, but she couldn’t stop now. She went the rest of the way up.
The stairs emerged into a room very similar to all the upstairs guest rooms, but this one had not been decorated in any botanical theme. The walls were plain white and the carpet was beige. Plain white curtains framed windows that looked out on the same view as the one visible from the Rose Room. An unmade bed faced the dresser on which stood a large television set (currently playing a program about a psychologist who was encouraging a young woman to sob out the details of her childhood trauma for the benefit of a studio audience.) More magazines covered the night stand and the upholstered chair by the bed.
“So Joan does live at Vale House!” Cally exclaimed. “So much for booting out all the freeloaders and hangers-on to make room for paying guests!” Joan was right about one thing: Ian really was too kindhearted for his own good.
Cally decided it would probably be wisest to leave through the door that led out to the upstairs hall, rather than risk going back down through Joan’s office. She did so, nearly tripping on a pair of shoes on her way, and emerged into the south end of the upstairs hall. This door did not face the open Gallery railing, but instead faced across the hall to a narrow closet door marked “Staff Only.”
Cally turned to close the door behind her and gasped. There was no knob on this side of the door. In fact, the door on this side was not a door at all, but was instead covered with wallpaper and wainscoting to exactly match the wall. Cally pushed it carefully shut and ran her hand over it. If she had not just come out through it, she would not have been able to tell there was a door there at all.
She ducked her head into the Daffodil room to check on Bethany (who was still sound asleep, with Doctor Boojums snoozing next to her elbow) she slipped back down the stairs to the front desk. She replaced the key in the drawer and checked the voicemail.