6
Back at the Pendland Street Inn, Anne Ainsley stood outside room number six with a set of fresh sheets in her arms.
“Mr. Zahler?” she called as she knocked.
He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t. She’d seen him leave for downtown after breakfast.
She unlocked his bedroom door and entered.
In every one of Anne’s three marriages, she’d found herself surprised by her husbands’ lies. Genuinely, knocked-off-her-feet surprised. After her third husband cheated on her and emptied her bank account of the last of the money she’d inherited from her parents, she swore she would never allow herself to be surprised like that ever again. Men lied. She accepted that now. They couldn’t help it. It was their default position. They denied it, but that just proved her point.
Russell Zahler was lying about something. And she truly didn’t care. It actually gave her some satisfaction that Andrew was being conned. But she was curious and bored. Andrew didn’t let her have a television in her room. There wasn’t a television in the whole damn inn. It isn’t authentic to the house, Andrew would say. Sometimes she wanted to say, What about electricity, Andrew? That’s not authentic to the house, either. God, he was so much like their father sometimes. So, Anne had to find her own entertainment.
Her entertainment mostly consisted of the Internet on the front-desk computer, and spying on guests and rifling through their things when she cleaned their rooms. She never stole anything. Andrew would toss her out in a millisecond if she did that. She just liked to see what people brought from their homes, what their perfumes smelled like and what sizes they wore. She liked the stories she would make up about them.
Anne had always been a bit of a sneak. She knew that about herself. Anne and Andrew’s father had been an optometrist and their mother had run his office, but their mother had also secretly sold naughty lingerie in her spare time, mostly to the Clark women in town, who were known for their sexual prowess and always married well because of it. Their father had never known about their mother’s side business. And Andrew had been aghast when he’d found their mother’s catalogs and wares after she died.
But Anne had known all about it. She’d found the stuff when she was ten, after discovering the locked trunk in the back of her mother’s closet. She’d searched all over the house until she’d found the key to it hidden in the toilet tank.
Their parents had died on their first road trip after they retired. They’d saved a fortune and had intended to live very well into their old age. The several hundred thousand they’d left had made Anne soft in the head. That’s the only explanation she had for letting Andrew have the house. She’d been married to her first husband back then, and Andrew had still been living at home. He’d always been a prissy man. Women made him uncomfortable and he never dated, so Anne had thought she was being magnanimous by letting him have a place to live out his lonely years.
Two husbands later—two husbands and their two failed businesses, both of which Anne had funded—and Anne was broke. For the past five years, she’d been living here in her childhood home, which Andrew had turned into an inn. She’d always secretly felt it was a little creepy, like creating a shrine so people could visit their dead parents. Andrew gave her room and board (their two tiny bedrooms were now in the basement) and minimum wage, which she spent on beer, cigarettes and magazines. This was her life now. She accepted that. She was fifty-nine, so close to sixty she could taste it, and she had no expectations for her own happiness anymore.
She closed the door to Russell Zahler’s room behind her. This was officially called the Andrew Ainsely Room. It was even written on a small plaque on the door. This was Andrew’s old bedroom from when they were children. It was decorated in dark purples and aubergines, which Andrew called royal colors.
He’d named Anne’s old bedroom the Hopes and Dreams Room.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought that was a dig.
She set the sheets on the queen-sized bed and looked around. Russell Zahler had left the heat turned up and the clear glass lamp by the bed on. But he hadn’t hung anything in the closet, and there were no toiletries in the small attached bathroom. There was only his large leather suitcase on the luggage rack at the bottom of the bed. She walked over to it and clicked it open. There wasn’t much inside. Another gray suit and a white shirt, folded; a threadbare pair of pajamas; that outlandish lord-of-the-manor robe he’d worn that night he’d walked into the kitchen and scared Anne to death because she’d thought it was Andrew, catching her smoking again; socks and underwear; and a black toiletry bag containing a comb, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, a bar of soap, a razor and a bottle of aspirin.
That was it.
That wasn’t much of a story. She was a little disappointed.
She frowned as her fingers touched the bottom of the suitcase. It didn’t feel like she had reached all the way down. She tapped at it with her fingernails. It sounded hollow. She found the corners and pulled the divider up, revealing a secret space.
Ha! she almost said out loud, satisfied as she always was when she discovered something someone didn’t want found.
Inside was an old deck of tarot cards, a small white crystal on a cheap chain necklace and a thick pile of tattered office folders held together by a large rubber band.
Anne took the file folders out and slid off the rubber band. The tabs on the folders had names of people on them, each folder containing newspaper clippings and photographs and copies of public documents like land deeds and marriage certificates. She didn’t recognize any of the names until she came to the tab on the folder that read: Lorelei Waverley.
That was Claire and Sydney Waverley’s mother. Anne had been a few years younger than Lorelei. Lorelei had been odd, like all the rest of that family. But wild and sad, also. Lorelei had left town years ago and died somewhere in Tennessee, from what Anne had heard. Was that why Russell Zahler was so interested in the Waverleys? Because of Lorelei? Had he once known her? Anne looked inside the folder. There were several copies of a single old photograph. It was taken in the 1970s, judging by the pointed collars and the mustard and brown colors of the clothing. In the photo, there was Lorelei Waverley when she looked to be in her twenties, sitting next to a middle-aged Russell and another dark-haired couple with a baby. They were in one of those curved corner booths found in older bars and Pizza Huts. She glanced at the rest of the contents of the folder, which, interestingly enough, seemed to be all about Claire Waverley, not Lorelei; articles about Claire’s business, and tax documents, which she wanted to take a closer look at, but she nearly jumped out of her skin at a knock on the door.
“Anne?” her brother called. “Are you in there?”
“Yes,” she said calmly. She was about to put the file folders back when she suddenly noticed a few antique flyers, yellowed with age, that had been under the folders in the suitcase. She picked one up. It was an old advert for a traveling carnival, featuring a magician and psychic called the Great Banditi.
On the bottom right-hand side of the flyer was a circular photo of a man wearing a large turban with a jewel in the center. He had his hands out in front of him like he was going to shoot lightning out of his fingertips.
It was Russell Zahler.
Now here was a story.
“Anne!” her brother called again.
“Coming,” she said as she folded one of the flyers and put it into her pocket, then put the rest of the things back into the suitcase, exactly in the places they’d been. She snapped the case closed, then went to the door.
“What are you doing?” Andrew asked.
“I’m changing the sheets,” she said with a shrug, “like I do every day.”
He pointed to the sign hung on the doorknob. “There’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign here. We take these things very seriously.”
She hated when he referred to himself as we.
“Oh. I must have missed it.” She went back into the room and grabbed the folded sheets she’d left on the bed. “Sorry,” she said as she walked out.
“Don’t let it happen again.” Andrew glanced around the room, then firmly closed the door behind him.