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.
“Whoa,” I said as I sifted through the pages, and felt Heath lean in to look over my shoulder.
“You’ve kept track of each and every one?” he said.
“We have,” said Knollenberg. “All of the previous owners, including Mr. Beckworth, insisted on it.”
“Why?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Liability,” said Knollenberg. “It’s a litigious world, I’m afraid.”
I didn’t really know why it was important to catalog ghost sightings for liability reasons. I mean, what kind of lawsuit could be brought about by a ghost sighting? But I didn’t question it. I was too happy to have found such a treasure trove of detail.
Lots of the complaints were eerily similar in both use of wording and description of the event. The most common one was about a small girl playing on the staircase, and concerned guests worrying over her safety.
Others referred to an older gentleman in “period costume” calling for his daughter, Sara.
Many of the accounts I had already heard or read about, beginning with a woman in a gray dress on the top floor knocking on doors at three a.m., asking if guests needed their beds turned down. A friendly bellhop who opened doors for guests, then promptly disappeared. A dark shadow appearing at the foot of the bed in room 518. Yet another complaint talked of the closet door constantly being opened and closed, along with faucets turning on and off by themselves, in room 420.
Still another set of accounts told of guests being touched by unseen hands in what used to be the dining hall and was now one of the largest conference halls, the Stargaze Room. And, of course, the suicidal woman I’d seen on my balcony, Carol Mustgrove from room 321.
I looked down at the list in front of us and said, “The woman on the top floor who knocks on doors hasn’t been seen since 1984?”
“That’s correct. No one has reported her since then,” he confirmed.
“She’s probably gotten across, then,” said Heath.
I nodded in agreement. “We’ll do a spot check just in case.” I then frowned as I thought about that friendly bellhop. “Mr. Knollenberg,” I said, regarding the manager thoughtfully, “didn’t you say you knew this bellhop who died and appears to be sticking around?”
Knollenberg nodded, his eyes taking on a faraway cast. “Mickey O’Reilly,” he said. “He was a sweet old guy. He worked here into his eighties, you know. He loved the Duke, and we all knew something had happened when he didn’t show up for his shift right before Christmas. Mickey never missed work.”
“Have
you
seen his ghost?”
Knollenberg shook his head. “No. But not a week goes by that one of my other bellhops doesn’t tell me Mickey’s at it again. He’s especially known for holding the door open for pretty ladies. We had Brad and Angelina here recently, and we’re pretty sure Mickey held the door open for Miss Jolie, because one of the check-in clerks told me that she wanted to tip the sweet old man out front, but she couldn’t seem to find him to give him her thanks. At that time no one over the age of twenty-five was working the door.”
I smiled and asked delicately, “Is it all right with you if, as long as he isn’t scaring anyone, we leave him as he is to open the doors? It just seems to me that Mickey got a lot of enjoyment out of his job, and I don’t think he’s here because he doesn’t know he’s died so much as he’s formed a very strong attachment to the Duke, and I’d hate to force him to give that up.”
“Er . . .” said Knollenberg. “I guess. As long as you don’t think he’s suffering or anything.”
“I really don’t,” I said gently. “Still, I’ll try to check in with him just to be sure.”
“Okay,” Knollenberg agreed.
Heath was also studying the list, and he asked the general manager, “What about the lady in the mirror?”
I’d forgotten about the woman whom both Heath and I had seen in the mirrors of the Renaissance Room and the bathroom.
“What lady in what mirror?” Murray asked.
Heath and I exchanged a glance, and I explained. “We both saw a beautiful young woman with long black hair in two of the mirrors you have here at the hotel.”
Knollenberg looked completely puzzled. “What mirrors?”
“The one in the Renaissance Room and the one above the sink in the ladies’ restroom,” I told him.
Knollenberg continued to look at me blankly. “Those mirrors are new,” he said. “Mr. Beckworth purchased a set of four of them at auction. We’ve put them in several areas of the hotel.”
“Well, there seems to be a spirit who’s very attached to them,” I said.
“Do you mean to tell me that we’ve acquired yet
another
ghost here that we haven’t heard of before?” He gasped.
“ ’Fraid so,” I said. “Can you tell me where the other two mirrors are?”
“One is by the elevators on the ground floor, and the last one I believe is on the third floor.”
A chill went up my spine, and I looked at Heath. “The vestibule with the elevator is where we encountered that wicked powerful serpent, remember?” I said to Heath.
He nodded gravely. “I’m seeing a pattern,” he said.
“A pattern?” asked Knollenberg.
But I ignored his question and asked him instead, “Where did you say those mirrors came from?”
“Mr. Beckworth brought them back from his most recent trip to Europe. He said he bought them at an auction and thought they would go perfectly here at the Duke.”
“Do you know anything more about them? Where they originated? Who might have owned them previously?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I can certainly ask Mr. Beckworth.”
“Please do,” I encouraged. I knew it was more than a mere coincidence that the mirrors were new and so was all of this violent poltergeist activity. I strongly suspected that there was a link.
We left the general manager ’s office shortly thereafter armed with a list of the spooks we’d have to tackle and our floor plans. Heath and I decided to get a drink and talk strategy. I texted Gilley to see if he wanted to join us, but he sent back a message that he, Tony, and Gopher were still testing out the reception of the monitors, cameras, electrostatic meters, and walkie-talkies, and that Heath and I should just fill him in later about how we planned to tackle the bust.
So Heath and I headed next door to the restaurant again. After we’d taken a seat at the bar and given our drink orders to the bartender, I pulled out the list, along with copies of the hotel’s floor plans, and spread them out on the bar. I then began to cross-reference with the sightings documented in Knollenberg’s files and came up with the areas within the hotel where we’d need to concentrate. “If we focus on these hot spots and take care of the easier ghosties first, we’ll have more time to deal with the more negative energies.”
“Okay,” Heath said, “I’ll go with that. Where did you want to start?”
I circled the top floor. “Here,” I said.
“The woman in gray?”
I nodded. “And I think we should split up.” Heath looked at me doubtfully, so I explained. “With these easier spirits we might as well tackle them on our own, and you did such a great job getting little Sara across, I’m confident you can do the same for a few of these other ones.”
“And if the gray lady has already gotten herself across?” he asked, likely remembering that the last sighting had been well over twenty years ago.
“Then you can move to room five-eighteen.”
“What’s in there again?”
“A dark shadow hovering at the foot of the bed.”
“Great, a dark shadow. Those spirits always creep me out,” he admitted. “I mean, what’s up with the shadow form anyway?”
“It’s easier to maintain,” I said with a smile. “Full form is much more difficult and uses up a ton of energy.”
“Ah,” said Heath. “Okay, then. I’ll tackle the lady in gray, then the shadow guy. Where’re you going to be?”
“If you’re working from the top down, I’ll work from the bottom up. My first target is going to be Mr. Duke; I want to get him to his daughter pronto. Then I’ll tackle the handsy ghost in the Stargaze Room.”