Black Raven Inn: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 6) (2 page)

Taryn
figured
she probably spent more time between the art supply store and camera repair shop than anywhere else when she wasn’t out on the road. For the first time in a long time she would be working a job right there in Nashville, her hometown. That made things much easier; she knew where everything was and could run out to the store and pick things up whenever she wanted.

Still, it was important to get a head start.  “I need to hit the ground running with this one,” she told the salesman at the camera store as she picked up an extra battery charger for Miss Dixie.

At least he’d had the courtesy to look impressed when she name dropped her client.

“Ruby Jane Morgan?” he’d asked incredulously.

“I
know
, right?”

“What are you going to do?”

She quickly filled him in on the job and then watched as he processed the information. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and leaned in to her. “You know that place is meant to be haunted, right?”

Taryn nodded. She knew that paranormal investigators had gone in there and supposedly caught orbs and EVPs on recordings. She wasn’t going to put too much stock into those until she explored it herself, though.

“I’ve heard that,” she replied. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know man,” he said, scratching his head in thought. “Some pretty weird shit has gone down at that place, you know? Some bad characters hanging around.”

“You think the place is haunted because of the people who stayed there? Kind of picked up on their energy?”

“Or maybe they were drawn there because it was a bad place,” he reasoned.

Taryn bit her lip and considered. It was the chicken or the egg riddle.

“Well, good luck,” he said sincerely. “Break a leg and all.”

Luck was something she might actually be needing.

Taryn would be doing a series of paintings for the old Black Raven Inn, a special project commissioned by the entertainer herself. For the next couple of months, Taryn would be spending her days immersed in the history and ambience of the rundown, seedy roadside motel.

The Black Raven Inn was
not
the kind of place she was used to working at.

Granted, the structures she was usually called in to paint tended to be neglected, rundown, and even abandoned, but they’d all contained their own kind of unique beauty–or at least some fascinating historical significance that the community was intent on seeing preserved.

Not this time.

There was nothing pretty about the Black Raven Inn, nothing exciting ever happened there. At least, nothing that anyone was
proud
of. It was like the Viper Room in Los Angeles, which would always be known as the place where River Phoenix overdosed on cocaine and morphine. People drove by the old motel to point and whisper, but it wasn’t a part of Nashville’s history that the city boasted of in its brochure. It would never appear alongside of, oh say, Belle Meade or Grassmere on a downtown billboard.

The Black Raven Inn was a far cry from the opulent splendor that was the Jekyll Island Club Hotel or even the fine-looking reckless beauty of Griffith Tavern. This was unlike any other place she’d ever worked.

For the most part, Taryn was hired to recreate buildings to reflect their glory days. She was brought on board to restore (on canvas anyway) the magnificence of old private residences, historical buildings central to the town’s development, and other noteworthy structures that had, for various reasons, fallen into disrepair over the years.

She’d worked at antebellum mansions that had remained in the same family for eight generations. Quaint mills turned into charming B&Bs. Soaring courthouses built right after the Civil War. School houses constructed by the WPA in the Roosevelt era. Buildings with historical significance.
Sentimental
significance.

She’d been employed by historical societies, nonprofit organizations, private homeowners, and even concerned citizens who raised the money themselves through crowdfunding sites to hire her. On canvas, she could revision the building’s past and recreate it through her paintings to reflect the grandeur of its heyday–before it lost a wing or a roof or most of its backend to a fire.

Sometimes her paintings were the
only
thing anyone had to visualize what the building had once looked like before it fell into ruin. Oftentimes, the buildings had been constructed before cameras were popularized, or even existed. Or, perhaps, the only pictures made of it had been lost over the years. They’d been destroyed in storms or fires…

Occasionally her paintings were given to architects for the sake of remodeling jobs, or her employers simply wanted them for the sake of preservation, especially if the building was on the verge of demolishment.

Now, for the first time
ever
, Taryn had no inkling as to why she was hired or for what purpose her work would be used.

“Nobody will miss the Black Raven Inn if someone just tore it down,” she’d confessed to Matt. “Trust me.”

Unlike some small hotels that were old and ugly but still held sentimental value to those who’d stayed there and treasured fond memories of the place, she highly doubted if the majority of the folks who’d stayed at the Black Raven Inn even
wanted
to remember their time in it. Or could.

“You should have read the reviews of it before it closed,” she told Matt. “In fact, you can still read them. They’re still online. Just don’t do it before you go to bed.”

“I think I’ll pass,” he’d replied drily.

“Your loss,” she’d laughed. “You’re missing out on some incredible reading. One reviewer called his review ‘The Second Layer into the Fiery Pits of Motel Hell.’ I mean, how awesome is
that
? And that’s not even the worst one!”

She could feel Matt shuddering all the way from Florida. There were few things he hated more than the idea of dirty hotel rooms, bedbugs, and cockroaches.

Guests at the Black Raven Inn enjoyed all those and more.

The motel had turned off its “Vacancy” sign for one last time a year ago, but before it closed it was well-regarded as a seedy establishment that nobody with any sense visited after dark. It was a well-known fact in Nashville that the motel’s parking lot and rooms were filled with hookers looking for quick cash and lonely men looking for a quick companion. Addicts looked for a quick fix, pushers for a quick sale. And down-on-their-luck entertainers who’d lost everything to hock and needed a place to crash before running home with their tails between their legs, full of stories of how they’d “almost” made the big time.

But while Taryn had trouble understanding
why
Ruby Jane wanted her to do the work, she had no trouble when it came to understanding why Ruby Jane
herself
had bought the old place (though the wild price of $1.3 million dollars threw her a little).

The motel was, after all, the scene of not only one of country music’s most senseless tragedies (VH1 still counted it as one of the “top 10 heartbreaks in music history”), but the setting of a catalytic moment in Ruby Jane’s own personal life.

Her musical partner and rumored lover had died in Room #5 nearly fifty years earlier, the result of an apparent overdose.

That monumental loss to the music world changed the way some record labels would handle the welfare of their entertainers on future tours, and Parker’s memory would forever cast a shadow on each album Ruby Jane would go on to record–all thirty six of them.

If there was one thing Taryn understood, it was the inability to let go of someone who had died tragically and unexpectedly.

Especially when that person’s death was your own fault.

“
You’re
not
going there alone, are you?” Matt asked in dismay.

“Uh, no?”

“Taryn!”

“What! It’s not like someone is going to shoot me in broad daylight,” she muttered as she navigated the busy street.

“You just spent the past two days telling me how awful the motel was, and I
did
read some of those reviews. They were as bad as you said they were,” he admitted.

“Yeah, but that was when it was
open
,” Taryn teased him. “It’s closed now!”

“And I’m sure the abandonment has made it a dozen times better,” Matt remarked wryly.

Taryn wasn’t meeting with her new employer for another day but, as nervous as she was, she wanted to be as prepared as humanly possible. She’d stayed up most of the night before doing as much online historical research as she could and it had been eye opening.

Thank God for You Tube.

Never before had research on a site been so entertaining or enlightening (or well documented; most of it was like watching an episode of “Cops”, indeed, an episode of “Cops”
had
been filmed there).

Today, she was going to visit it in person.

“It’s not like I’m not prepared,” Taryn promised Matt. “I’ve got my mace and pocket knife.”

“You know they’d have to be right on top of you for that knife to be useful,” Matt said.

“Yeah, well, that’s what the mace is for!”

“I remember that motel when we were growing up. It was bad twenty years ago,” Matt mused. “My parents used to talk about it in a whisper, even spelling the motel’s name up until I was ten. Like ‘raven’ was a bad word.”

“Maybe they thought the bad word was ‘black’,” Taryn snickered.

“Considering who we’re talking about, you have a point.” Matt sighed. “I refuse to believe I came from them. I
am
going to order that DNA test one day.”

“I can see the Jerry Springer episode now… ‘Help! I’m A Genius and My Parents are Morons: Who’s My Daddy?’.”

Matt laughed in spite of himself.

Having lived between Nashville and Franklin her whole life, Taryn also knew the Black Raven Inn; everyone did. Growing up, it had been known as the cheap motel that singers who had zero money and fewer connections liked to stay in until they “made the big time.” In college, it had garnered the reputation as a place
so
bad and
so
dangerous that cops no longer even responded to complaints. High school kids even pooled their money to stay in nicer places after school dances; it’s cheap prices weren’t worth it.

It advertised itself as a “no frills budget motel” but that was code for “crack house” around town.

“Did you notice that the motel’s website said it had a ‘vintage feel’?”

Taryn snorted. “Yeah. Saying it has a “vintage feel” and claiming it contains ‘some of the original features and fixtures’ might have sounded good and looked attractive on paper, but what it
really
meant was that the building hadn’t been updated since it was built. Original features meant something totally different when one is talking about lighting fixtures versus toilet seats.”

“I could never sit in a toilet in that motel,” Matt said, his voice shuddering.

“I could never sit on a bed in that motel,” Taryn agreed. “I hate to think of the things that went on there.

Unfortunately for its neighbors, it was located in what was turning into a desirable part of town. The area was becoming gentrified and the eyesore had everyone up in arms. Hipsters didn’t like their upscale shops and fusion restaurants being just a stone’s throw away from its run-down entrance.

The new condos and townhomes building up around it were currently on the market for half a million bucks for a 2-bedroom unit. Taryn still couldn’t get over the idea of living in what basically constituted as an apartment for so much money. Especially considering that her job as a freelance artist had her traveling all over the country. It provided her with a glimpse of other markets and just how far a dollar could stretch.

Expensive townhomes and condos, boutique hotels, specialty coffee shops, bakeries with artisan bread, daycares that cost more than her college tuition ten years earlier, upmarket shops…

And the Black Raven Inn.

A blemish on the Nashville roadmap that stuck out like the oozing sore it was, making everyone who lived, worked, and played around it cringe in disgust.

Still, the property had two acres in a prime location. The sex shops and massage parlors that had once surrounded it had been bought out, closed, and razed.

Everyone on that side of town was hoping that once the hotel closed, the razing would come again, especially now that the property had been sold. When it
did
come down, and everyone assumed it would, Taryn was sure she’d hear an audible sigh of relief from all of East Nashville.

She had no idea what Ruby Jane’s plans were for the unmentionable blot on the landscape. Most people weren’t even aware that the singer was the one who’d purchased it; they assumed it was a corporation or real estate mogul who intended to develop it into some high rises or new chain hotel. Perhaps a nice Hibachi Grill, surrounded by trendy boutiques. Or a Whole Foods Market. Maybe an Embassy Suites with a manager’s cocktail hour and made-to-order omelet bar.

Taryn had a feeling they were about to be sorely disappointed.