Page 10 of Room Serviced
Finding the room with the attic stairs had been an adventure, that was for sure. This part of the Bellwether connected to the main building only on the ground floor and to the west wing only via a third-floor walkway, for some reason. The stairs and hallways here were narrower than in the main part of the hotel, and if Sloane thought about it too much, she was pretty sure they were closing in. Mostly, she wasn’t thinking about it.
It was creepy. Not haunted creepy, but if they had turned a corner to find a group of rats gathered around some sort of altar, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Let’s assume he does and that his permission includes this,” Max said, looking up the ladder/stairs and into a rectangle of darkness. Without looking back down, he tucked the iPad into his messenger bag, pulled out two flashlights, and handed one to Sloane. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s an attic,” Sloane said, which was all completely true. She was fine! It was just an attic! It was obviously not a haunted attic! Ghosts weren’t real!
“I should warn you that there might be stuff living up here,” Max said apologetically. “Definitely spiders. Maybe rats and possums, that kind of thing. Usually they’d rather scurry off than attack.”
Sloane shrugged. “As long as they’re not plague rats.” Max made a face like maybe he hadn’t thought of that, but went first up the ladder/stairs.
They creaked a little but held, and then she could see him standing up at the top, shining his flashlight around. The walls looked…close.
“Huh, interesting.” Max’s voice sounded swallowed by the space. “It looks like this part of the attic is walled off?”
Sloane pulled a hair tie from her pocket, tied her hair back, and climbed the contraption.
Once she was at the top, Max moved a little further in, giving her space to stand. Not that there was much space: The passage they were in was maybe three feet wide by…seven feet tall? No, less. Six and a half? Sloane stopped looking at it and focused on Max instead. He’d walked a little further, floor creaking under each step. Dust floated through their flashlight beams. The air was warm and still and smelled like her grandfather’s garage. It was suddenly so quiet.
The opening for the ladder/stairs was walled in on three sides, which left nowhere to go but after Max. He was saying something while reaching out hand out to touch a wall, but Sloane couldn’t quite make it out.
She took a deep breath, tried not to cough, and followed after him.
Chapter Three
Sometimes Max thought about what it was like to be a ghost. Upsetting, probably. There weren’t a whole lot of ghost stories that featured the ghost having a good time, partying or hanging out with their loved ones or coming back just to meet a new grandchild. Whatever it was that made people stick around, it apparently wasn’t happy memories.
Besides that, it seemed frustrating. Ghosts always needed something, right? But ghostliness, as a state, meant one could never tell anyone anything. It had to get on their nerves.
Then again, going through walls seemed cool.
“Are we going somewhere in particular?” Sloane asked, from behind him. Every so often, her flashlight beamed over his shoulder into the narrow corridor laid out in front of him. Now it shone on a wall opposite what looked like an intersection.
“This part of the hotel was used as a speakeasy in the 1920s,” he said. “They stored the liquor up here. Sometimes other illicit stuff, too.”
Sloane was quiet for a moment. When they reached the T-intersection, it had just enough room for them to stand side by side.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Max admitted. “They did a good job of keeping it secret. There’s speculation that Belle offered the hotel as a safe house for women who needed somewhere to go when they left their husbands, but nothing concrete. She sure never wrote it down.”
“Smart of her.” Sloane turned to look down a hall, shining her flashlight along the walls. She still seemed tense and ready to snarl at a moment’s notice, but talking seemed to help.
“That’s the impression that I get,” Max agreed. “Her public persona was a bit…I don’t know…fluffy? Not exactly vapid, but a lot of people from the time seemed to think of her as a silly woman with too much money and an unhealthy attachment to her late husband.”
“Do a lot of silly women write wildly popular novels and oversee a resort that’s still going strong a century later?” Sloane looked over her shoulder at him.
Max grinned at her. “That’s why I said public persona. Anyone who actually talked to her knew better. Should we go that way? You want to lead, or should I?”
Sloane glanced around at the wooden plank walls and the plank floor, and her face tightened again. “You go first,” she finally said.
As best as Max could tell, the narrow corridors followed some of the walls on the second floor, but not all the walls. He wasn’t going to pretend to understand the construction of this place. It had probably made sense when it was built, but now it seemed haphazard and nonsensical.
“So,” he said, walking slowly down the corridor-like area, shining his flashlight ahead though a light haze of dust. “This is where the speakeasy was. Well, below us. I think. Like I said, they stored stuff up here, so there’s gotta be rooms here somewhere.”
“It’s been a while since then,” Sloane said from behind him. She sounded like she was breathing very, very evenly, keeping her voice perfectly controlled, and Max made sure he knew exactly which turns to take to get back to the entrance. She was grown, obviously. She could make her own choices about where to go and what to do, and for fuck’s sake Max wasn’t going to try to stop her, but—still. The exit. “Maybe they rearranged the walls,” she continued.
“There’s no record of it.”
