The Winslow Incident (34 page)

“You, Daisy, especially,” Hazel
continued, “stay put no matter how spooked you get.” Daisy usually came out of
hiding as soon as she sensed anyone near her spot, the fear of getting caught
by surprise (you’re it!) evidently worse than flat-out losing the game. Gently,
Hazel took the little girl by the chin. “No matter what, okay?”

“Yes, Hazel.” Daisy was more
solemn than any five-year-old in the history of Winslow. She ran her tiny fingers
across the raised pattern on the yellow bedspread. “I’ll stay put.”

“Good girl.” Hazel placed a hand
against her cheek. Then she looked at Violet. “I’m counting on you.” She felt
terrible placing such a heavy burden on her—a mere seven-year-old. It
wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

“Should we hide in the tower?”
Violet had accepted the responsibility, brave girl.

“No!” Aaron said.

“No,” Hazel agreed. “Somewhere
away from here, someplace you know better than anyone else.”

Violet cupped her hand around Aaron’s
ear and whispered.

“Where’s it going to be?” Hazel
asked.

“Can’t tell,” Violet said. “That’s
not hide-and-go-seek.”

Hazel smiled. “Fair enough. But
stay in town, all right? I have to be able to find you. Is it a good place?”

“It is,” Violet said and Aaron
nodded in agreement.

Daisy and Boo continued to stare
at each other.

“Good. Okay, then . . .” Hazel
went to the door and opened it a bit, poking her head out. The hallway was
empty. Not allowing herself any more time to think about it, any chance to
change her mind or chicken out, she flung the door wide open and told the
children, “Now. Go now!” She gestured with her hand,
hurry hurry
, then
brought a finger to her lips,
sshhh.

Violet was fighting with Boo, who
had dug his nails into the rug when she tried to drag him out from underneath
the vanity.

“Leave the cat,” Hazel said.

“I can’t!” Violet despaired. “He’s
counting on me!”

“Okay okay, but hurry up!”

Violet finally got the better of
the cat and gripped him tight in both arms as she led Daisy and Aaron out into
the hall.

Aaron stopped just outside the
door and looked back at Hazel, his eyes filled with panic. “Aren’t you coming
with us?”

“No—now go!” And he started
to cry when she scooted him away with a couple of pats to the behind. She
watched them run the length of the hallway and then bob up and down the servants’
staircase until their tiny heads finally disappeared.

Hazel had to sit down. She was going
to be sick or faint or something similarly unpleasant. So she sat where she had
stood in the doorway and cradled her head in her hand and worried,
Are they going
to be okay? Please, please let them be okay.

And she still had no idea what had
happened to her grandmother.

She rose to her feet and returned
to the fireplace, where she carefully lifted the oil lamp and placed it back in
its usual position on the mantle next to the photograph of Anabel holding Hazel
on her lap, smiling at her baby while Hazel ogles the photographer (her dad,
she’d been told.) Turning the knob on the base of the lamp, Hazel extinguished
the image.

Feeling altogether alone, she
dragged herself down the hallway on legs heavy with fatigue . . . past
photographs of the hotel through the decades that had been knocked crooked
along the wall, past upset furniture, past Samuel Adair snoring loud enough it
was audible through closed doors.

Rather than descend the staircase
as the children had, she walked up the creaky bare wood steps, the air
surprisingly cool in the dim stairwell, until she reached the top floor of the
tower—or Ghost HQ, as Aaron called it, as if all The Winslow’s lost spirits
regularly congregated here to conjure up new ways to spook him.

“Friendly ghosts,” she addressed
the round room when she entered. Was she trying to convince them or herself?
Both
,
she concluded. She’d never been afraid like this before. Now it was the only
emotion operating. “Friendly ghosts . . . Casper and Friends.”

Why are there no ghost animals?
she wondered as she continued into the room. Perhaps there
are those who linger, not understanding they’re dead. She hoped that Jinx
wasn’t one of them. That if he were gone, he’d already passed on to a happy
place with a steady supply of hotdogs and unstingy girls who love him without
reservation.

The crystal glass remained on the
floor where it had bounced to rest after Patience threw it against the window
last night. “I tried to warn you,” Patience said then, “and now look. I’m sick,
everybody’s sick.”

For once
, Hazel marveled,
you were right.
For
once—incredibly—her morbid imaginings had proven true.

She wondered where Patience was
now. In fact, she didn’t know where
anybody
was and wished Winslow had a
loud bell or siren to call everyone together at a predetermined location in
case of emergency.

She walked to the arched window,
touched the chip in the red glass, and looked out over downtown Winslow.
Taillights receded down the hotel driveway and a few vehicles made their way
along Fortune Way. Otherwise, the town was still and dark. Figuring she must be
a strange sight standing at the floor-to-ceiling window, she raised her left
hand in a claw and opened her mouth in a silent screech for the benefit of anyone
who happened to be gazing up.

A click issued behind her.

“Grandma?” She hoped.

Then she turned and stepped on the
crystal glass, skidding on it for a moment until it cracked beneath her tennis
shoe against the hardwood floor. When she regained her balance she thought,
That
can’t be good luck.
Patience would freak.

She bent her leg to inspect the
bottom of her shoe, relieved to see that no shards of glass had punctured the
sole.

Eyes searching the room, she
asked, “Are you here, Grandma?”

Silence. Except in shadow, there
was nowhere in the tower to hide.

Click.

Though not an especially loud or
threatening noise, it disturbed Hazel enough to convince her to hightail it out
of there. She had to recross the length of the tower to reach the stairway and
was sure that whatever was clicking would reach out from the shadows and grab
her by the hair and yank her back into its dark corner and do disagreeable
things to her.

Friendly ghosts . . .
Claustrophobia clutched at her as she kept moving toward
the staircase that somehow grew farther away.
Friendly my ass.

Finally she reached
it—unclutched and unscathed—and ran down four flights of stairs,
her feet barely resting on each step as she hastened out in a clamor. She
didn’t stop to talk to Honey or Owen in the kitchen or Rose in the ballroom or
dancing Ivy in the lobby. Rather, she dashed out the open front door and pulled
it closed tight, relieved to shut in the horrors of the hotel behind it.

Gone was Marlene.

Instead, a man-sized shape lurked
in the deepest pocket of the porch.

“You can’t leave,” his voice
thundered and the wood slats creaked and groaned beneath his weight as he came
for her. “Nobody leaves.”

Hazel turned to run.

A lariat lay strewn at the top of
the steps. She tried to avoid it but her forward momentum was irreversible and
her feet immediately became tangled in the rope. Losing her balance, she
crashed against the porch banister. When her ribcage connected with the rail, a
fresh new pain introduced itself to her battered body.

I should’ve never come back!

She scrambled forward and then
raced through the grassy yard and down the stone steps and onto the drive,
feeling nips at her back the entire time, claws reaching for her hair.

She ran faster. Her ribs burned.

No wonder Dad’s hiding
, she thought.
The monsters in town are scarier than the
monsters in the woods.

She made a tight right turn onto
Ruby Road, glad to be off the gravel and on solid ground, and begged her screaming
legs to just get her home.

They obeyed. And dark and
unwelcoming as the house was, she tore open the front door and then slammed and
locked it shut.

She flipped on the entry light.
With her good arm she leaned against the hall-tree and tried to catch her
breath, her heart exploding in her chest.

Then she raised her head to look
in the mirror.

The agony of her throbbing elbow
and traumatized ribcage had caused her to go white. Sweat streamed from her
forehead down her cheeks; her freckles stood stark in her wan skin. Her long
hair was snarled and matted, her tank top filthy. She stared at the rainbow
spanning her chest and thought,
This shirt is ridiculous.

When she returned her gaze to the
reflection of her face, she was jolted by the look of terror in her
eyes—like the trapped raccoon her father once freed from the Mercantile’s
storeroom. The animal had been soiled in the pastel remnants of the Frankenberry
cereal he’d torn open to eat, and his eyes were beyond panic; they were without
hope.

Several long blinks did nothing to
alter her manic expression.

“What if somebody doesn’t come up
to Winslow soon?” she voiced her worst fear to her reflection.

Then she glanced at the brass
letter slot next to the front door. “What about the mail? Daryl comes on
Thursdays . . .”

Cradling her arm in the sling, she
sank to the floor—and a misery of dread spread over her like a filthy
blanket.

Will we make it till Thursday?

“
W
e’ll sneak the back way,” Violet told Aaron
and Daisy. “It’s the very best way.”

They’d left the hotel by the side
door (after Aaron tried to talk to his mommy in the kitchen but she didn’t know
him) and then hid in the trees ’cause they heard grown men out front stomping
on the porch. When the men wouldn’t leave, Violet gave up on going the front
way and took them onto the dark path through the woods. Now she was paying
attention like she knew she should ’cause she was in charge of them and
couldn’t get them lost.

Boo squirmed in Violet’s arms but
she held tight. “Be good, kitty, be good.”

They were in Hazel and the
Sheriff’s backyard now and the house looked dark and mean and the moon was fat
but not full so they walked fast through the backyard and squeezed through the
hedge separating their yard from Patience Mathers’ house.

Patience Mathers is pretty
, Violet thought.
Snow White kind of pretty.
But
there was a feeling around her that always made Violet a little nervous and she
never wanted her to babysit. Hazel was pretty too, but in a different way and
her eyes changed color depending on what mood she was in. That was what she’d
told her and Violet believed it. Hazel was what it’s like to have a big sister,
Violet decided. Somebody to look out for you, somebody who’s always on your
side.

When she glanced at her own little
sister beside her, Daisy gave her a big gummy smile.

You could use some front teeth
, Violet thought but was polite and didn’t say it out loud because
Mommy said if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Lights were on in the Mathers’
house and yellow beamed out into the backyard. Patience’s mommy Constance
worked in the yard a lot wearing her garden gloves with butterflies on them and
there were little pots of purple and blue pansies around the back porch.
Maybe
we should hide here.

No—she remembered Hazel
saying to hide someplace they knew better than anyone else could.

Stopping to think was a big
mistake because Boo spotted Patience’s cat Ajax under the porch and he growled
and cried all in the same noise and let out his claws and scratched Violet’s
arms as he jumped from them and ran after the black cat.

“Boo!” she called. “Tict tict tict,”
she clicked with her tongue.

But he was gone. It was okay; Boo
knew his way home. One time they were driving all the way down by Matherston
Cemetery and they saw Boo walking up the side of Winslow Road. She didn’t know
where he’d been or what he’d been doing but when they stopped to pick him up,
he was all wrung out, Daddy said, and he and Mommy smiled at each other like
they had an adult secret.

Now they kept going through
Patience’s flowery yard then went very fast past the back of the Ambrose house because
nobody lived there and it was dark dark dark.

It was the best way for them to
go, Violet knew, only Daisy kept stopping and saying, “Look! Look!” If she said
it again Violet was gonna sock her. She yanked Daisy’s hand, the one wearing
the red sparkly ring, and dragged her through Dr. Foster’s backyard. He was a
nice man, she remembered her mom saying, but nobody lived there anymore either
and she wanted to get outta there quick.