Jacaranda (6 page)

Sister Eileen looked up at the ceiling, as if she’d meant to check the sky—but was surprised to find herself indoors. “I need to leave. Immediately. With my regrets, of course. Will you see to her?” She nodded down at the cooling corpse of Constance Fields in the chaise.

He wanted to complain, to ask why both remaining women must flee and leave him to clean up. But instead he said, “Yes, I’ll see to her.” He didn’t believe that Mrs. Fields had been Catholic, but he’d say his prayers out of principle. “Go on, and do what you must.”

The nun vanished, as fast as the flicker of gold that sometimes sparked in her eyes. For a moment, the padre wondered if her sudden disappearance hadn’t been a trick—or if she hadn’t been some small, peculiar specter all along.

But no, he could hear her footsteps, light and fast.

(
Too fast
, he thought.
And too far away already
.)

He rose to his feet, and went to the office door. “Sarah?” He knocked, and he said her name again with his firmest voice. “Sarah, I need your help.”

After half a minute’s silence, she opened the door. Her eyes were glassy and red with tears, and her nose was pink from having been rubbed with a handkerchief. She whispered, “I’m not strong.”

He knew that already, but he didn’t say so.

“I don’t need strength. I need a sheet or a blanket, and a shovel. Also, some information: Is there any church nearby? Her own, or anyone else’s?”

“No sir. Not until you reach the far side of the Strand.”

“A garden, then? Perhaps out behind the courtyard? We must put her
some
place, and we’d better do it before the rain begins in earnest—or before the other guests awaken, and wonder what’s occurred.”

Sarah furrowed her brow. “But what about the police? Should we call them?”

“They must be tired of hearing from you, by now—and whatever occurs here, it occurs outside the Rangers’ authority. Besides, they’ve made it rather clear they aren’t coming. We’ll see to Mrs. Fields ourselves,” he concluded firmly.

“You’re right, I know you’re right. I don’t know why I even suggested it. I should…I should clean this up.”

“First, you must help me. There’s a groundskeeper’s shed, isn’t there?”

“Tim’s not there,” she murmured, her gaze darting restlessly between the body, the mosaic, the doors—which still trembled ever so slightly in their frames. She hugged her own shoulders. “If he was, he’d help you dig. But I can…I can get some sheets. You want me to wrap her up?”

He did his best to remain patient. “Please cover her, at the very least. I can take care of the rest. And never mind the shed,” he said under his breath. “I’ll find it on my own.”

The shed was locked when he finally stumbled upon it, but that did not stop him for long; and it was dark inside, but the lamps in the nearby courtyard cast enough light to show him what he needed. In stark outlines he saw a row of rakes, hoes, and shears; he ran his hands over shelves and found buckets, trowels, burlap bags, pouches of seeds, paint brushes, and other things he couldn’t quite identify by touch. And there, in the backmost corner, he found three shovels of varying sizes.

He chose the largest, and while he was at it, he grabbed a hoe with sharp metal tines.

Back inside the lobby, Sarah had found some sheets, a bucket and mop, and a length of rope—and one of these sheets was tucked around Mrs. Fields.

Juan Rios told her she’d done a good job, and while the girl occupied herself with the cleaning supplies, he lifted the corpse and swaddled it—using the rope to secure the wrappings around her waist, feet, and neck. He put her over his shoulder, where she hung as angular and lifeless as a sack of sticks.

Wet sticks
, he thought, as dampness seeped through his sleeve, and smeared against his neck.

And he set out to dig a grave.

Behind the fountain, between the shrubbery and the cold-brick wall of the hotel itself…he lifted the sharp-tined hoe and used all his weight to slam it into the ground. Over the years, and over too many graves, he’d learned efficiency.

Don’t start with the shovel. Start with the hoe. Better leverage. Easier on the back.

He brought the hoe down again, rocked it back and forth, and lifted forth a chunk of turf the size of a dinner plate.

Rain still came down in fits and starts, speckling his black cassock. But the night air was mild enough that he could remove it, and he did—giving his shoulders and elbows better range to swing, again and again, until there was a long, shallow hole.

And now it was time for the shovel.

Scoop after scoop, alone in the dark, naked from the waist up. He dug until there was enough depth and enough width, that if he folded Mrs. Fields’s knees up to her chest, she’d still be eighteen inches deep.

He would’ve preferred the traditional six feet, but it was dark, and he was tired, and there was still so much work to be done.

If it might have waited until morning, he supposed, he could’ve imposed upon Tim—he could’ve let Sarah offer directions, and allowed someone else to handle this part of Mrs. Fields’s death. In the morning, he could’ve given the strange and violent demise of the poor woman a closer examination. The light of day might have told him more than the shadows did.

But in the morning, who knew?

Maybe Sister Eileen was wrong, and the storm would bring its full force to the island sooner than expected. For all he knew, in the morning, everyone and everything might lie in pieces, murdered by the carnivorous hotel—their remains unceremoniously scattered about the lobby.

Maybe none of them would live to see the dawn, and there would be no one left to dig any graves.

He finished his task and returned the tools to the shed, closing it up behind himself. Although he’d removed his frock, he hadn’t done so in time to keep it from all of the sweat and mud. It was filthy, and so was everything else—but what could he do about it? He considered the sink in his room, but upon second thought, the hotel must have some sort of formal laundry.

Without too much difficulty, he found it down a corridor on the first floor. Lined against the wall were washing machines the size of wheelbarrows, but he didn’t know how to use them; so he was relieved to discover a huge sink of the ordinary variety. Beside the sink sat a bar of soap as big as his shoe.

He rinsed his frock and left it to dry, hanging beside a row of pillowcases clipped upon a line. He hoped it would air out quickly; he felt naked without it. But in the meantime, he borrowed a uniform shirt—something too large, something that might have been Tim’s. It was free of blood and mud, and Tim wasn’t present to object, so the padre buttoned himself inside it.

Back in the lobby, he found nothing.

No one. Just a large wet spot on the floor, and a chaise with a missing cushion. Sarah had vanished, and so had her pail and mop, and whatever rags she’d used to scrub the place.

“You should see this.”

He jumped, and turned around.

“I’m sorry,” said Sister Eileen. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

He waved her apology away. “It’s fine. I’m glad to see you again,” he confessed, and only then realized that he’d been worried for her well-being. In such a place, with such a terrible darkness swirling at its center, he was comforted to see that she was still standing. She made him feel less alone.

“I’m sorry I left you, but I was overwhelmed. Now come with me, if you don’t mind. You should see her room. You should see where it happened. You should see what it did.”

Constance Fields had been dead a little less than two hours.

In that time, she had been buried and the evidence of her death had been largely erased; and in that time, Sister Eileen had gone to the woman’s room and let herself inside. “I found it like this,” she said, nodding toward the ceiling, the walls, the bed, the curtains, and every other surface that had been splashed with blood. It was all drying to a brownish crimson, leaving the linens stiff and the floor sticky.

“It’s strange,” the nun said, and then let out an awkward little laugh. “I mean, it’s all strange, obviously—but the front of Constance’s dress didn’t have a spot of blood upon it—not until her nose began to bleed. All the damage was behind her; she must have turned her back on it, and refused to look. Isn’t that…strange? Don’t you think?”

“Not in the slightest,” the padre replied with a shrug. “If something with that kind of power attacked me, I wouldn’t want to see it either. We’re speaking of something that kills with creativity and malice, and so far, no one’s set eyes on it, and lived to tell. If it seizes a woman from behind, and uses her body to paint a room with blood, or if it grabs a couple and hangs their skin like wallpaper…there’s no pattern to it, no rules the dark force follows, as far as I can tell. None apart from strangeness.”

“And just like that, the strangeness becomes the ordinary. It’s the one thing we can predict.”

He agreed, but did not mention it—for his attention was dragged away from their conversation, yanked from detail to detail in the ruined hotel room. A broken bedpost, a long, curved arc of blood spray on the mirror. A steamer trunk half unpacked, its rumpled contents strewn across the floor—where bloody footprints were ground into the rug. “It’s a mess, that’s all. No message spelled out, no notes left behind.”

“But why Constance? What did it want with her?”

“Why
not
Constance?” he countered. “Why not any of us?”

The nun shrugged softly, uncertainly. Then she straightened and said, “Oh dear…what should we tell her husband, when he arrives?
If
he arrives,” she amended.

“Should the time come, we will tell him the truth. A gentle version…perhaps she died in some strange accident.”

“What if he wants to claim her body, and bring it home to a family plot?”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said, just a hint of crossness in his words. “She’s dead, and we don’t know why.”

“No, we don’t,” she agreed diplomatically. “And there’s a chance we never will. Do you think there’s anything to be learned from the room? Any reason we shouldn’t have Sarah clean it?”

“It’d be better to do as Constance suggested, and burn the place to the ground.” He thought of Sarah, so fragile and nearly useless; he thought of the next guest who might occupy the room. “But leaving that option aside for now, I suggest we lock the door and leave it. There are many other rooms, ready to collect other unhappy souls.”

Sister Eileen sighed. “I have no objections to that plan—and I’d be surprised if Sarah did. Besides, it’s getting late.”

“We’re on the far side of late; we’ve nearly come around again to ‘early.’ We should rest, while there’s still time and peace enough to do so. If the storm comes tomorrow…” he wasn’t sure where he meant to take the thought.

“If the storm comes tomorrow,” the nun echoed, and the padre saw exhaustion on her face, in the shadow of her habit. “Then we’ll all be trapped inside until it’s finished. And even should the hotel stand when the worst is over, I don’t know if any of us will escape the place alive.”

“It’s only a storm. We mustn’t assume the worst.”

The padre ate breakfast alone in the oversized hall that presently passed for a dining area. It was early—far earlier than he’d prefer to be awake, given the previous night’s adventures, but he’d never been able to sleep very long past dawn. In drips and drabs, the surviving guests came and went, taking coffee and toast, fruit and milk. Some sat down at the large round tables with a newspaper for distraction, and others carried the meals back up to their rooms.

Unlike the evening before, when everyone clustered together, that morning they scarcely spoke to one another—or to Mrs. Alvarez either; and when they moved, they shuffled about like phantoms in a daze. The light made all the difference.

Their calm, passive demeanor belied the scene outside the great hall’s windows—where the clouds churned low and slow, as gray as mop water; and the trees leaned and strained, branches whipped out and leaves stripped away with the wind that rose, lifted, lilted, and hummed against the corners of the big brick building.

The storm was coming, yes. Sooner than the absent nun expected, and no one was ready. Or maybe that wasn’t right at all. Maybe they all were ready—as ready as they were going to get.

But it didn’t feel that way to the padre. It felt like a lie, one they told to themselves and each other:
Nothing is strange, and no one is dead, and no one has anything to be afraid of. The storm will come and go, and leave us all behind. We will all go on with our lives. We will all leave this place, one way or another.

And so they refused to speak any ill of their surroundings, as if lending the weight of words to the hotel’s curse would give it more power.

Or else they knew there was nothing to be done, except look away.

When the padre finished eating, he went to the lobby in search of Sarah. She wasn’t present, but one of Mrs. Alvarez’s daughters had taken up a post behind the desk. In Spanish, he asked her name because he could not remember it. She told him it was “Violetta.”

“Can you tell me, is Sarah all right? She had a late evening, I know. She helped me with a task,” he exaggerated.

“Sarah can’t be here all day, and all night too. Sometimes I stay at the desk, sometimes my sister does. Between the three of us, there’s always someone here.”

“Very good. And have you seen Sister Eileen this morning?”

She shook her head. “No, but she rises late. She often appears for lunch, and treats it like her breakfast. Some people are funny like that.”

“Indeed,” he told her. He might’ve made more small talk, except that the front doors shuddered, unfastened, and whipped open. The wind almost unmoored them, knocking them back and forth with a violence that left cracks in the plaster.

Outside the sky was sinking, and the water was rising.

But standing on the threshold of the Jacaranda Hotel was an older man, perhaps seventy, with pale gray hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache sweeping from cheek to cheek. He wore a hat and a duster, and when the wind snagged at his clothing it billowed aside, revealing a badge on his belt and a pair of guns.

He seized the doors’ handles, stepping inside and drawing them both in his wake. Securely, firmly, and with greater strength than his lanky frame suggested, he wrestled them into their jambs until the wind outside gave up, and let them remain closed.

“Hell of a storm shaping up out there,” he muttered. He adjusted his hat, and smoothed his long brown coat.

All around him the room was settling too, the curtains collapsing into their traditional folds, the leaves of the potted plants no longer quivering in the gale. The guest-book’s pages ceased their flapping, and the only motion left was the slow, steady churn of the ceiling fans on their chains.

“Hell of a storm indeed,” Juan Rios said agreeably.

“I beg your pardon, padre?” He’d retrieved the cassock from the laundry before breakfast. It gave him away.

But Violetta responded before he had a chance. “A hurricane, that’s the news from the mainland. At first, they said not to worry; but now the man in Houston sends word that all of us should leave, before we’re washed away.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard, too,” he told her, every vowel radiant with a deep Texas twang. He approached the desk, flashing a polite smile to Violetta and a raised eyebrow to the padre. “But here I am. You got any open rooms?”

“Yes sir.” The girl flipped through the guest book and found the page she wanted. She handed him a pen, and pulled a ledger out from behind the desk. She asked his name, for their records.

“Horatio Korman,” he said. “I’m here looking for—”

“Sister Eileen,” Violetta supplied. “I know. She’s been asking every day, if there’s word from Austin. Every day she asks if they’ve sent a Ranger yet.”

“Is it that obvious?”

The padre smiled with one corner of his mouth. “You may as well carry a sign. But forgive me, please—I am Juan Rios. We have the sister in common, you and I.”

“She sent for you, too?”

“That’s right.”

While the Ranger filled out the provided form, he asked, “And how long have
you
been here?”

“Since yesterday.”

He put down the pen and looked up. “Then you barely beat me.”

“I’m sure Sister Eileen will join us soon. I’m told she’s a late riser,” the padre said…but upon saying so, he felt a small flash of dread. The hotel was making him paranoid. “Then again, we should go and knock, and let her know that you’ve arrived. She’s just up the stairs, on the second floor.”

Violetta added, “Ask if she’d like some breakfast sent up; I could make her a plate. And Ranger Korman, here’s your key. You’re in room 221.”

The Ranger tipped his hat at her, and adjusted the bag he wore slung across his chest. “Thank you ma’am.” He pocketed the key. “And where exactly is the nun?”

“She’s in 203, Ranger. Just down the other wing,” she informed him with a smile. “Go left for your room, and go right for hers.”

“All right. Padre, you go on and see if she’s up. I’ll drop this off, and join you in a minute.”

The padre retraced his earlier steps to room 203, halfway down one hall that curved slightly, even though the exterior of the hotel suggested that it shouldn’t. But all the angles were strange inside. All the sharp corners, the straight pathways, rectangular rugs, and oversized fire doors still managed to somehow feel convex to the naked eye.

Now that he’d noticed it, it gave him a headache.

Before he knocked on the door, he listened closely. He heard nothing, but that meant nothing; so he knocked softly and waited. On the bed something stirred, and he was relieved—not that he’d expected anything else, but less than twenty-four hours in the hotel had taught him that anything was possible, especially if it was terrible.

Momentarily, the door opened.

Sister Eileen was fully dressed and behind her, the bed had been made. A small Bible lay there, open to some place in the middle. “Good morning, Father. I see your frock has dried, and you’re restored to your ordinary self.”

“I retrieved it this morning, good as new—and I’m glad to see I didn’t awaken you. When you didn’t appear at breakfast, I assumed you’d chosen to sleep, instead.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” she told him. “And all things being equal, I figured the time spent eating might be better devoted to prayer. Heaven knows we could use some guidance, right about now.”

“Guidance is good. But a mortal helping hand may also prove useful.”

“You’ve been very useful indeed, so far.”

He tried to give her a thankful grin, but it felt hollow. “I appreciate you saying so, but that isn’t what I meant. We have a visitor. He just arrived, and—” as he heard the sound of booted footsteps clomping up the stairs—“here he is, now.”

The Ranger joined them with a polite touch of his hat toward the nun, who greeted him with an enormous smile. “A Ranger!”

“Yes ma’am. A Ranger who’d apologize for getting you out of bed, but it seems the Father here has beaten me to it.”

“Oh, nonsense,” she beamed. “I’ve been up for an hour. Please, let me just close the room—and let’s exchange our pleasantries at the sitting area down the hall. I’ll ring Violetta for some tea.”

“Coffee?” tried the Ranger.

“I’ll ask for both.”

Violetta came summoned by the bell in Sister Eileen’s room, and ten minutes later the girl returned to the sitting area with a tray—then left them alone to acquaint themselves.

The sitting area was comfortably appointed and offered a place for everyone, with a view of a balcony that no one wished to visit. It was barely raining yet, but what drops did fall were hurled against the windows with the force of bullets; and the wind rose and fell, from frantic and wild to uncannily calm, moment to moment, while the sky turned brown, and lilac, and navy blue.

It gave their introductions a sinister backdrop, even as they sipped hot beverages and nibbled at the toast and muffins Violetta had added to the cart. But over coffee and over the sound of the wind outside, the Ranger began to explain himself.

Horatio Korman had not precisely been “sent” to the hotel…so much as he’d seen Sister Eileen’s plea for assistance and decided to come on his own. Officially, this was not Ranger business. But unofficially, Austin knew of his whereabouts and was watching at a distance.

“I don’t understand,” the nun frowned when he told her this.

He leaned into the floral cushioned seat, and stretched his arms to splay them atop its back. “There are only so many men to go around, and you must admit, your request was a mighty strange one. You tell us that nine people have died in the course of a month, through mysterious circumstances and no hint of a killer—at one of the finest hotels in the state. But there’s been no mention of it in the papers, save a handful of obituaries, and there have been no complaints against the hotel or its owners.”

“Ten people,” she corrected him glumly. “There was another last night.”

He appeared surprised, but not particularly stunned. “A tenth? But who? I didn’t hear anyone nattering about it downstairs in the lobby.”

The padre sighed. “No one ever natters. No one ever talks about the deaths, except for poor Sarah…and all she’ll do is cry to you about them.”

“Sarah?”

“The desk clerk,” the nun provided. “Or the manager, perhaps—for she wears many hats. She helped us last night, after poor Mrs. Fields breathed her last.”

“Where is she now?”

She looked to the padre. “I don’t know…in her quarters? Resting, I assume.”

“It was a long night,” Juan Rios mumbled around a stifled yawn. “There was a lot to clean up.”

“No one told the police? No one summoned the authorities?” the Ranger asked incredulously.

Sister Eileen answered as squarely as she could. “Well, we summoned
you
. In the past, yes, Sarah called for help; and at first, the police
did
come. But after a while…they stopped bothering, unless we asked them to take away a body to dispose of it. It’s like there’s a spell on the place, you understand? What gossip finds its way around speaks only of accidents, and unlikely tragedies with ordinary explanations—when any fool could see that’s not the case.”

“What about last night? Mrs. Fields, I think you called her.”

The padre supplied the rest. “It was very late, very bloody, and the storm…” he winced as a tree branch slammed into the window beside him; but the glass did not break, and he did not stop there. “The storm was coming for us. Sister Eileen thought it might hold off, and we would have another day to ask questions…but six hours ago, I had my doubts.”

They all kept silent for a long, uncertain moment—watching the gale whip the trees back and forth, throwing flowers and leaves, newspapers, laundry yanked from lines, and everything else that wasn’t nailed down…all of it boiling to a cauldron of mayhem, just on the other side of the glass.

“The eye of this thing will overtake us soon, that much is certain,” she said quietly. “What you see out there—it’s barely a fraction of what the weather will bring us. Have either of you ever encountered a hurricane?”

The Ranger said, “No, but I’ve heard stories,” and the padre shook his head. He’d heard stories too, but none of them reassured him. The stories he’d been told were all about destruction, death, and an uncaring swipe from the hand of God. They were stories of coastlines scrubbed clean by a surge of debris, of entire towns that vanished into the ocean in the span of an hour.

“Stories never tell the half of it, or else they’re twice the truth,” she told them. “But it’s hard to exaggerate a thing like this. I hope that most of the island has evacuated. The official order finally went out before dawn, and anyone who can’t leave—or won’t—has been urged to seek shelter.”

Horatio Korman said, “You should’ve seen it, as I was coming in yesterday: all the ferries full, coming out of Galveston. I was the only idiot headed
in
.”

The padre gave a small, short laugh that sounded like a sigh. “That’s how it was for me, too. Now you’re stuck here, with us. And with whatever…” he paused.

The Ranger spared him, and summed up quickly: “With whatever’s killing people, inside this hotel.”

“You believe us? Really, you do?” asked Sister Eileen. Relief was written all over her face, but Juan Rios couldn’t imagine
why
. Believing wasn’t going to save any of them; she knew it as well as he did.

“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t.” He pulled out a pouch of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette while he said the rest of his piece. “Look, I know the Jacaranda Hotel is strange—damn strange, if you’ll pardon the language. But I’ve seen strange things before, and even the weirdest cases have some explanation behind them. It’s not always rational, and not always something you can prove…but I’ve seen patterns, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He paused to lick the rolling paper and tap it shut. “And the way you described it all in your letters to Austin, I got the sense of another pattern. This one looks awful, and I don’t know if I can help…” For an instant, his calm concentration flickered—and the padre saw something uncertain behind his eyes. Then it was gone, and the Ranger produced a match. “But here I am, anyway.”