“What is this place?” I ask, sitting next to Lourdes. The stone is cold through my jeans, and I shiver at the touch. Tanya moves to sit on Joshua’s lap, her arm draped over his shoulders. Casey and Warren lounge back against the mossy fountain. Warren pulls a small, clear bottle out of his coat pocket and pours it into his glass, then hands the rest of the bottle over to Casey to swig from.
“The memorial,” Lourdes says. She sets down her drink and then turns and grabs one of the flashlights. She begins to pull back the ivy and brush moss from a section in the middle of the second tier of the fountain. “See?” She steadies the light on a small patina plaque.
IN HONOR OF THE VICTIMS OF THE 1937 FIRE—MAY YOUR WANDERING SOULS FIND PEACE.
“What the hell does that mean?” I ask, meeting Lourdes’s eyes. “Did they expect them to haunt the place? That’s a pretty creepy tribute.”
She laughs and returns the flashlight before snatching up her drink. “They didn’t put this memorial up until five years later, five or ten,” she says, like the difference doesn’t matter. “They’d been getting complaints from guests who had all manner of troubles. Broken glasses, missing objects, cold touches on their skin. People stopped wanting to stay here, so the owners put up this memorial in a place where regular guests wouldn’t find it, but where the ghosts could. They thought maybe they just wanted some recognition.”
Joshua laughs and takes a long drink. “A dilapidated fountain would certainly make me stop haunting,” he says. “Much more honorable than, say, a funeral.”
I set my drink aside, the mention of a funeral still too fresh to let it slide over me. Sickness starts to twist inside my gut. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Were there no funerals?”
“Not for everyone,” Lourdes says. “Some people didn’t have family, no one to notify. Legend says their bodies, or what was left of them, got tossed back here somewhere. They could have built this fountain right over them. Doubt that would offer them much peace.”
“They need an exorcism,” Tanya says from Joshua’s lap. “If they want to get rid of the ghosts, they need to send them on.”
The others scoff at her, sounding offended that she even mentioned it.
“What?” she asks, smiling. “Wouldn’t you rather watch some weak old men in robes toss holy water on the place? I think it’d be hilarious.”
“I wouldn’t,” Lourdes says, turning back to me. “I like the place just the way it is—ghosts and all.” She grins and then holds out her bottle to toast me. “Besides,” she adds, tossing a look back at Tanya, “we’d be out of a job if they got rid of the ghosts.”
“It’s true,” Joshua says, shaking his head. I’m starting to suspect they’re all a little drunk, and in that moment I realize I’m a little drunk too. “I’m still waiting for one of those ghosts to happen into my room at night,” Joshua mumbles. “I don’t discriminate between the living and the dead.”
“You’re disgusting,” Tanya says. She must not mean it, though, because she leans in and kisses him. Next to me, Lourdes sighs and rests her back against the fountain.
“So who should we call?” she asks, rolling her head to face me. “Last time Eli had us summon a little old lady, but she never showed.”
“Elias was here?” I ask, surprised. Lourdes bites down on her lip and then gives me a teasing smile. I may have sounded a little overeager at the mention of his name.
“When Tanya became a staff member, he came out to celebrate with us,” Lourdes says. “Really, I think he was trying to avoid Catherine. She’s a psy—”
“Psychopath?” I offer.
“Exactly. Anyway, we came down here and tried to wake the dead. Nothing happened, though, except Tanya ended up falling in the fountain and busting open her lip. That was a fun explanation when we went back inside.”
I look up to find the Ruby, a few lights on in the upper rooms. I wonder what Elias is doing right now—and if he’s doing it with Catherine. Disappointment (or is it jealousy?) starts to darken my spirits. But then I remember all the times I wished for Ryan to cheat on me, just so I’d have a reason to break up with him. Jealousy is an interesting change.
“I think we should call on Lennox,” Lourdes says definitively. “He was the desk clerk on the night of the fire. They say he actually tried to open the doors to let people out, but the other guests held him back. He ended up getting trampled.” Her expression sags. “That’s so sad, isn’t it?” She glances at me, the perfect arches of her eyebrows pulled in. “He was trying to help.”
“It’s disturbing,” I whisper, feeling all at once the mood has shifted. A prickling of cold air, a cold touch, starts to crawl up my arm. I swallow hard.