Page 8 of Room Serviced
Max just shook his head, smiling. “Go be a ghost.”
“Look,” Sloane said, taking a step closer. They weren’t close or anything now, but she did notice the way his eyebrows twitched. “We both know that when you see the footage, you’re going to point at a shadow and say Ooh, that’s weeping Mildred, the harridan of the coast?—”
“Marguerite, but go on.”
“—there she is, isn’t she ghostly, the stories are true and spirits are real.”
“You’ve figured me out,” he deadpanned and crouched behind the camera again. It was boxy and green, and Sloane was pretty sure it was a trail camera—the kind rangers used in forests to take pictures of bobcats and coyotes—but it wasn’t like that made less sense than anything kind of camera. “Go walk from there to there and channel Marguerite so I can make sure she’ll be in the frame. Apparently that’s her route.”
“Marguerite doesn’t have a route,” Sloane called over her shoulder as she headed to the spot at the base of the steps. A flagstone path led from there down to the beach, where a jetty stuck out into the water. She had to hand it to Marguerite: It was a pretty dramatic spot to haunt. “She doesn’t exist. Ready?”
“Look ghostly,” Max called as she started walking. Whatever the fuck that meant.
She got about ten feet before he shouted, “Oh, come on. Ghostly.” Apparently he was going to be difficult.
“Wooo!” Sloane shouted back, waving her arms over her head. “I’m incorporeal and fake!”
“Spirits are usually a little more graceful.” Now he was standing up straight again and looking way more amused than Sloane would have preferred. “Less arms! More fingers! Back straight!”
Sloane straightened her back, turned around, and flipped him off with both hands. It got a laugh out of him, a big, loud laugh that sounded a little like a honk and seemed like it surprised him. Sloane grinned and felt something warm coil in her stomach.
“Do I have to go on the jetty?” she shouted when she got to the beach.
“Nah, don’t die,” Max called back. “Okay, we can go inside now.”
Inside, it turned out, did not mean to the hotel bar, which Sloane considered incredibly misleading. She told Max so.
“I didn’t say the bar was next,” he said as they, at least, headed back into the building where it was ten degrees warmer and one hundred percent less windy.
“You insinuated it.”
“I’m starting to regret inviting you along as my assistant,” Max said as he pulled up some sort of building plans on the iPad.
“No, you’re not. You’re having a great time torturing me.”
He led them up the broad staircase, onto the mezzanine, and into a hallway.
“Torturing you,” he said, but he was smiling.
“I had to stand in the freezing cold and act like a ghost.” She’d taken her giant hat off and gestured with it now, accidentally knocking into a sconce on the wall. “Oh, sorry,” she told it, and Max snorted.
“I’m glad you survived your tribulations,” he said. “Think you can survive one more?”
As if on cue, the lights in the hallway flickered. Sloane suddenly felt very alert.
“Was that you?” she asked, eyeing the iPad.
“Was what me?”
“All the lights just flickered.”
Max glanced up and looked around. “It’s an old building. That happens. They probably started the microwave and the toaster at the same time.”
“The microwave,” Sloane repeated, flatly. “And the toaster.”
“Yeah, I can’t use them both at the same time in my apartment, or it’ll flip the?—”
“I know that.”
