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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I THINK IT WAS BECAUSE Harper had chuckled on and off all the way back to Haigton that I let down my guard.

By the time we got out of the Continental, and I conscientiously locked it, Axel King had disappeared back inside. It left Harper and me alone in the parking lot, with the last of the day’s light dazzling us.

Harper was waiting for me a few paces away from the car. As I drew closer, she said, “Guess you’ve got my marker now, huh?” Her tone was sour.

It took me a few seconds to understand what she meant. Abruptly, my skin prickled and fury rose up inside me like a geyser. “What the fuck ?” I still had enough sense left to want to verify that she had meant what I thought.

She didn’t blink. “I owe you for looking into this Calloway thing,” she said flatly. “And I don’t like owing favors.”

I lost my cool. I can’t remember the last time someone provoked me into a rage this great, but it surely had been Jasper, toward the end of our marriage.

I threw out my hands. “Not everyone counts favors, Harper! Not everyone goes around with their shields up, afraid someone will steal from them!”

Harper was unmoved. “You’ve got more wrinkles than me, but you’re a complete babe in the woods, aren’t you?”

“That’s a shitty way to live !” I screamed.

“It’s called survival.” She was so cool, I wanted to claw at her face. Vaguely, I was aware of people spilling out of the side door. My screaming had drawn them out.

Too bad. I would have my say. I’d had enough of trying to tolerate and empathize with Harper Gibbs. “At some point you have to trust someone. You have to let them help just because it’s the right thing to do!”

Harper snorted. “If you can’t get by without help, you might as well slit your own throat and do the world a favor.” She stalked toward the stairs where everyone who had been in the bar was witnessing my complete lack of chill.

I wanted to haul her back and slap her into fighting me…and that thought pierced the envelope of fury around me. I deflated and was left with a new headache. My heart beat heavily.

I was shaking.

I headed for the front of the hotel. I would use the front door. I had no desire to pass through the bar, where Harper was probably already on the window seat, a boot on the edge of the table in front of her, and a whisky in hand, while everyone around her laughed and relived the last few moments of entertainment.

At the corner of the parking lot, where the footpath that ran in front of the hotel ended, Ben stood with a hand against the rendered and whitewashed wall. He dropped his hand as I got closer.

I didn’t have the courage to speak. I didn’t know what I could say, anyway. Had he heard all of it?

When I was within hearing distance, Ben said, “I only heard the last part.”

“Small mercies,” I said.

His response shocked me. “You should heed your own advice, Anna.”

I came to a halt on the sidewalk, feeling like I’d been slapped.

Ben said over his shoulder, as he headed for the front door, “Dinner’s in ten minutes, according to Olivia.”

·

It had been an intense few days. Once I had cleared up after a perfectly adequate but plain dinner and put some basic planning in for breakfast prep for the morning, I headed upstairs, my head still thumping.

My lawyer, Lucinda, had left me a text message, giving me the date, time and Zoom location for a meeting between me and Jasper to sort out the delinquent taxes on his house. It was too soon, as far as I was concerned. But anywhere in the next year would be too soon for me. I texted back an affirmative.

The next few days were remarkable for their lack of drama, but they were all marathon sprints that made me appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass more than I ever had when reading it as a child. The constant running to get nowhere…yeah, I could understand that now.

Five more guests arrived over the next three days. That put us close to full capacity, for everyone but Axel’s group had rooms to themselves. That would have to change if we had more people arriving, asking for a room. Which Olivia repeatedly assured me would happen.

I didn’t know the guests’ names, nor had I the time to stop to observe them and guess their species. Ghaliya said they were human in appearance, and that was my only criteria for accepting guests at the moment.

Axel King and his people took up near permanent residence in my dining room. Between meals, they yanked the tables around so they were working in a rough circle and could talk to each other. Pads of paper, laptops and glasses with the remains of water and other beverages, plus plenty of coffee cups, littered the room.

My moving around the room with a garbage bag, sweeping the detritus into the green bag, they took as a clear signal that I wanted my dining room back for the next meal, and they would pack up without protest.

Broch had stopped listening in on their conversations. “They’re not saying anything, anyway,” Broch told us. “Except that all of them are wondering why Axel King can’t stir himself and head back to Gouverneur to finish the investigation.” Broch had smiled at that. So had we all.

Except me. “Why is the town keeping him here?”

“It’s waiting for us to get Harper off the hook,” Broch said. “Keeping King close until we can.”

“Or keeping him out of Gouverneur where the investigation can progress and lock Harper in as the primary suspect?” Ben suggested.

“Either way, it’s giving us time,” Broch concluded.

Although I had no time at all to follow up on the Calloway thing. As Ben’s temporary nursing assistant, I had tended to Frida and Hirom. I knew neither of them could move off their bed. With Frida and Hirom both out, I was close to being too slammed to draw breath.

I harangued the grocery store for more food every single day and paid premiums to have it delivered before any other delivery they made. I needed every scrap they delivered, too, for food was going off within hours of delivery.

Even the canned goods on the shelves spoiled. I discovered a can in the far back of the shelf, up by the side door of the kitchen, had swollen, tearing the label and bulging at the seams. I handled it gingerly, the way one would handle an unexploded bomb—which was exactly what it was—and took it out to the big dumpster behind the hotel.

I started watching the cans and spotted that the wave of rotten whatever it was seemed to be working its way from that corner toward the front of the shelf and down the shelf toward the dining room door. It just didn’t work as fast on the cans as it did the fresh food.

Broch tended bar, and because he did not need to sleep, he was the perfect substitute for Hirom—he worked as many hours as Hirom did, without need for rest or sustenance. He seemed to be enjoying himself, too. Perhaps the change of pace appealed to him.

At least one local was happy.

The guests seemed to mind their own business. They sometimes left during the day, always on foot, and would reappear for dinner. Sometimes they stayed in their rooms. Or, like Aurora Caro, they spent their days in the bar. Not always drinking. But reading or playing games or talking. I found more dusty board games in the cellar and brought them up. I tried bringing in the Tribune-Press from Gouverneur, but the locals got their news on the Internet and the guests didn’t seem to care for newspapers.

“News passes differently, here,” Wim told me, when I offered him the newspaper as starting fodder for the fireplace.

“Then I wish I knew how to plug into the feed, because I always feel ignorant.”

Wim considered me with his leaf green eyes. “You knew to go to Gouverneur and take Harper with you.”

“But that was just…” I sucked in a breath. “Right. Got it.”

On the third day after our trip to Gouverneur, I came rattling down the stairs, already far behind in my lunch preparations, and found Orrin Stonebrunch staring through the mullioned window beside the front door. He was standing close enough to touch the glass, but he dominated the lofty foyer, anyway.

Like the other guests, Orrin lingered inside the hotel for most of the day. Usually, he sat in the bar and drank gallons of Hirom’s beer. He had maintained his human appearance, which I appreciated. It was one less thing to fret over. Because of the gratitude I felt over his appearance, I moved to stand beside him and looked up at him. “You’re still comfortable here, I hope? I know rooms are...a far cry from the forest.”

He didn’t answer at once. I half-hoped that he would agree and decide to move back into the forest. At least my food would stop spoiling.

Instead, Orrin kept his gaze on the window and said, “The walls are quiet. The stone beneath holds no grudge. That is enough.” I think it was the longest speech I’d heard him make since he had arrived.

It took me a moment to understand that he was saying his room was enough. I hadn’t thought of a building as a structure sitting upon earth and stone that might resent it. That was something to think about later.

“Well, good,” I told Orrin truthfully. “Most guests just want fresh towels and working plumbing.”

Orrin didn’t look away from the window. “They are not guests. Not as you think of them. They have gathered—not for comfort, but for turning.”

“ Turning?”

Orrin didn’t move his head to look at me. He shifted his whole body, and I found myself swaying out of the way, to make room for him. He looked at me with the same solemn expression he always wore, and said, “The wheel creaks. The year rolls forward. There is a night when silence leans close...when the breath of the land holds still to listen. They wait for that.”

I looked past his massive elbow, out through the window at the crossroads. “Beltane.”

He nodded. Slowly. “The veil thins on Beltane, aye. All that slumbers beneath stirs. Listens. Watches. Judges.”

Judges . Is that why he was here? To judge us? He had the power to destroy all of us. Was this the time of year when he used it?

Then a secondary thought occurred to me. “You know about the will of the town.”

“It names itself thus?”

I didn’t have a good answer. “It’s what we call it. You’re saying the will of the Town is waiting for something?”

“It will hear what the fire has to say. And what walks the green road that night. What it decides will bind or break.”

I couldn’t decide if he was merely being poetic. After all, Broch had revealed that Beltane was basically a festival celebrating sexual bonding, which humans had formalized with hand-fastings.

But if he was being literal….

I had more dreams that night. Most of them were dark shadows of dread that I was happy to forget. I woke in the morning in a cold sweat. I could still feel the rough, dried bark from the torch I had been holding in my hand, while a silent Juda urged me to burn the bed of branches he laid upon.

It was hard to shrug off the fear, though. It followed me around like Pooh’s little black rain cloud.

I never for a moment thought that anyone else had caught my mood and was trailing their own invisible black rain clouds, until I found Ghaliya weeping in her room.