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“What if whatever’s going on during the solstice…” she jammed her finger onto the photo. “He caused it.”
Fourteen
The two men stared back at Kara while she chewed her eggs. For a long while, neither of them said anything.
“So you’re saying Northrop did something,” said Logan. “Right here, on the day of this photograph.”
“Yup.”
“During the winter solstice.”
“One hundred years ago exactly,” she said. “Give or take a few days.”
Jeremy actually looked thoughtful, but also a bit frustrated. It was obviously an idea that hadn’t occurred to him. And if Kara knew anything about Jeremy, that bothered the hell out of him.
“The hotel does have a few scattered reports of activity before 1918,” he said. “But it’s all word of mouth stuff. It’s entirely possible they were hearsay.”
“Like you said,” Kara continued, “people jumped at their own shadow back then. They believed more. When exactly was the hotel built?”
“Twenty years before that.”
Kara shrugged. “Maybe the original owners wanted to ward off spirits ahead of time? Or at least make it look that way. So they hire this guy to perform a preemptive ceremony. They take his picture. Hang it up on the wall, to ease people’s minds. Show all the guests that the Averoigne has been cleansed or suppressed. You gonna finish this?”
Without waiting for an answer Kara reached out and grabbed Logan’s coffee. She dumped some more sugar into it before continuing.
“So lets say this guy is for real. And his ritual — or whatever it was that he did — ends up making the hotel more susceptible to the paranormal instead of less.”
“So now they’re actually haunted,” Jeremy reasons. His eyes seemed to lose focus as he ran mentally through a whole field of possibilities. “And this would make sense because the activity takes place every year, right around the time he performed the ceremony.”
Kara finished eating and dropped her fork. “Voila.”
Fuck you Xiomara, she thought smugly. See? I could’ve done this all alone.
“Wait a minute,” protested Logan. “We don’t know any of this for sure. All we’re doing here is speculating.”
Kara wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “I’d say more like deductive reasoning,” she said. “But yeah. Sure.”
A waitress came over and cleared their plates. Logan picked up the first photo and shook it between two fingers. “We don’t even know for sure if any of this took place in this hotel
. Even Jerry here—”
Her other lover cleared his throat. “Jeremy.”
“Yeah, whatever. Even Jeremy said he couldn’t pinpoint any of the stuff in the background, much less—”
THUD.
The sound came with an abrupt whoosh of air as Jeremy reached into his briefcase and slammed something down in front of them. Kara and Logan sat gaping at it from across the table.
It was the book. The exact book from the photo.
Logan’s mouth was stopped open mid-sentence. He closed it.
“Well, shit.”
Kara stared at the object for several moments, her eyes shifting from the book, to the picture, and then back again. In the faded old photograph, it was nothing more than a big book. But seeing it here on the table… in the flesh, so to speak? It made everything strangely real. As if Jeremy had cemented the book’s reality by pulling it forward, a whole century through time.
“Found it in the hotel library,” Jeremy said at last. “Which by the way, is now the hotel lounge.”
