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himself at the Jacaranda Hotel—except, perhaps, the idle lure of a holiday at an odd time of year, when the storms were cooking in the Gulf and the heat was often enough to wilt an oak.
He stuck to that story until he’d had several drinks, and then several more.
When the bottle was nearly empty, so empty he could see the table through the glass when he looked down inside it for answers, he confessed that there might have been a widow, once.
There might have been a misunderstanding, with regards to her husband’s estate. Or perhaps the misunderstanding had more to do with Vaughn himself, and his intention to marry her for the money rather than swindle it away from her. Not that he swindled a damn thing, you understand. But misunderstandings did abound, and she died not long after their union, and his subsequent abandonment. Wrists slit, lying in a bathtub, that’s what the newspapers said. Not a tidy way to go, and certainly no fault of the salesman Frederick Vaughn, so his conscience was quite clean and his time at the hotel was entirely voluntary, he wanted the Ranger and the padre to damn well know.
So the Ranger made note of it.
Since Vaughn’s arrival, he’d only heard the widow’s voice once or twice, or perhaps a handful of times—mostly at night, when the wind rubbed itself shrieking against the windows and the drafty frame let little whispers inside the room. Sometimes, they sounded like her.
Usually, they sounded like her.
Maybe always.
David and George McCoy were two brothers out of three. They were twins, though they looked little alike; and their older brother Matthew was recently deceased, so perhaps it could be said that now they were two brothers out of two.
Matthew’s death had been a tragic event, and no one was clear on the specifics. Some kind of accident—there were no untoward suspicions, not cast upon David or George, and that was a fact. No investigation, no concerns on the part of any officials, anywhere.
They wished to stress that point.
At any rate, how could they be blamed, if their grandfather had left his manufacturing company to Matthew? And how was it any fault of theirs, that Matthew was no longer alive to take possession of it?
Thank heavens for David and George, who were ready and willing to assume the responsibility. Thank heavens their grandmother had someone to rely upon, someone to manage the business and the finances. And never mind the gossips who wondered about Matthew, and some weird bargain he’d made with the twins. They declined to specify. The wounds were so fresh, you see. Two deaths in the family, so close together. Such a tragedy, but these things happen every day. Just like the tides, just like the storms.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
And sometimes down in the lobby, they thought they heard familiar footsteps coming up the stairs, just like they did at home. Just like the night that Matthew came home with the knife in his chest, and made it up to the top landing before he fell.
Eleven steps, that’s what David said. George said it was twelve.
Last of all, they spoke to the bright, quick-witted Emily Nowell with her pamphlets on suffrage and divorce laws. She wore her hair in an East Coast style, bundled and braided, and pinned beneath a big-brimmed hat that didn’t budge when she nodded her head, shook it, or otherwise expressed her shock and dismay at the Ranger’s intrusive questions.
Steadfastly she denied any secret sin, any broken vow, or any other reason she simply could not leave the hotel.
She could leave the hotel anytime she liked, thank you very much. In fact, this entire conversation upset her so badly that she’d decided to leave on the very spot, just to show them—and to allay any concerns that she was a criminal, somewhere at the bottom of her heart, in a corner no one knew about. (Or a chamber that no one could prove.)
The Ranger strictly forbade it, given the rising storm, but she stood up and bid him good-day, and added something less ladylike when he protested. There was one last ferry, according to the newspaper schedules. She would retrieve her bags, pay for her room, and depart immediately.
In the end, there was little the Ranger could do to stop her, except to apologize, beg, and warn. She ignored him at every turn. It was either let the woman leave, or hold her there at gunpoint, and as the padre said upon her leaving, “It may not matter. The storm may take her, or the hotel might. It’s no better to force her to stay, than forbid her to go.”
“But now I feel like it’s my fault!”
“No, it’s no fault of yours. She was lying, anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
The padre nodded. He’d been listening. “Whatever ties her to this place, she can’t bring herself to speak of it. Besides, it’s no business of ours—and it doesn’t matter. The pattern is already clear, for all the good it does us to see it.”
And for all the quiet horror it instilled in him, knowing that this might be the last place after all, the last case he ever investigated. This might be the reckoning—and true, anyplace could be. Any confrontation with forces dark and treacherous could mean the end of this borrowed time he occupied, and it would be fair.
It was up to the Mother now. He tried to have faith, but he’d tried to have faith in a church, too, and he’d put his trust in a pair of guns instead. His broken vow was a great one—maybe the greatest of all, if you looked at it from just the right angle, in just the right light.
***
A short blast of wind fired a tree branch scraping along a window in the great hall, where soon the Alvarez women would serve up supper to those who remained—and then the place would be secured as best as possible.
The Ranger and the padre discussed it between themselves: There would be boards, and ropes, and shutters to close; they would enlist the help of everyone still standing, and when the hurricane had passed—should any of them survive it, and survive the hotel too—they would bury Sarah, and hope there wasn’t any need to retrieve and bury Emily Nowell as well.
