Page 43 of Room Serviced
“Nighttime in Spookytown,” Max read, once he had the object in his hands: a board book for kids. There was an illustration of a gothic mansion surrounded by spooky trees on the front and a row of buttons down the side slathered in peanut butter. He pushed one with a gloved finger.
A wolf howled, long and tinny and familiar. Next to the button, in a thin layer of peanut butter, was something that looked like a tiny four-fingered handprint.
“You know,” Sloane said, staring, “if you gave me a hundred guesses, I still wouldn’t have gotten it right.”
“I almost don’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble,” Max said. “They might be a genius.”
Sloane reached out, pushed a button with a wrought-iron gate on it, and was rewarded with a long creaking sound. “I got haunted by rats.”
“It’s kind of brilliant,” Max said. “We’re in a city. There’s always rats around. Leave out some peanut butter and Nighttime in Spookytown, and bam. Ghosts.”
“There were rats. In my air conditioning.”
“They didn’t get into your room,” Max pointed out.
“You know about the Black Death, right?”
“We have antibiotics now! Look, if you come down with the bubonic plague, I’ll drive to LA and make you chicken soup until you’re better, okay? Since it’ll be my fault and all.”
Sloane looked at the board book and thought about it: Max at the stove in her kitchen, carefully tasting spoonfuls of soup with a tea towel slung over one shoulder. The two of them, sitting down together at her table, talking about their day.
“I should get the plague just so you have to,” she said, instead of That sounds nice, actually.
“You would,” Max said, smiling and sunlit.
In the end, Sloane didn’t call the San Diego County health inspector. After she and Max wiped it clean of peanut butter and put the cover back on, she did call the hotel’s maintenance staff about a hole in her air conditioning. The woman who came to her room to check it out took one very professional look, declared it had been tampered with, and made a call. She apologized to Sloane for the strange noises but explained it had probably been birds or something.
No one said the word rats, even though Sloane knew they were all thinking it.
When Sloane and Max left their rooms, the woman from maintenance was at the end of the hall, talking on her phone and gesturing furiously.
“You disappointed?” Sloane asked. They were strolling along the pathway that led to the poison garden, past the thousand-dollar-per-night bungalows. Palm trees waved overhead and birds of paradise lined the walk.
“God, no,” Max said. He looked taken aback, then glanced at her, and said, “About what?”
“All the trickery? The laundry-symbol pentagram and the rats in the air conditioning?”
“Oh,” he said, and now Sloane really wanted to know what he’d thought she’d meant. “Nah, that’s part of the gig. People like to try shit. They think that if some guy on YouTube says that their place is definitely, for real haunted, they’ll get flooded with tourist dollars.”
“Are the fakes usually this bad?”
“Absolutely.” He shrugged. He didn’t look at her again, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, gaze straight ahead. “And what people don’t realize is that the internet is full of videos where people swear up and down that every ghost they try to find is completely, one hundred percent real, and no one is flocking to most of those places.”
“So you’re never getting invited back to make a sequel?” she asked. It was a little past one in the afternoon. They’d checked out two hours ago, then decided to have lunch at the taco joint by the pool, then mutually agreed that they should probably take one last spin around the outside of the hotel just to make sure that no spooky shit had been missed. Now they were on the opposite end of the property from their cars, and traffic was going to be stupid by the time they got to Los Angeles.
“Why, you need another vacation?”
“I’m asking out of polite curiosity, not because I’m angling for an invite.” It actually hadn’t occurred to her. It did now, though.
“So you’d turn it down.”
“I didn’t say that,” Sloane told him. They turned a corner around a bungalow, and the breeze off the ocean—still a thousand feet away—ruffled the brim of her giant hat, so she held it down. “We had a pretty good time.”
“Even if there were no ghosts and someone lured rats into your AC, I made the hotel look pretty good,” Max agreed. “Well, except for the rats. But there are plenty of shots of it looking like the lovely, relaxing resort that it is. Plus, a hot girl in a bathing suit.”
Sloane turned so fast she nearly fell over.
“What, you think I mean you?” Max was standing in the middle of the path, grinning, because above all else he was a shithead who liked getting under her skin.
