“You mean the one where no one gets out alive?”
“Really wasn’t necessary to say that part out loud again.”
“Sorry, I have a head wound.”
“This is real life, Mitch. If somebody wants a whole bunch of people dead they line them all up in a row and shoot them down like dogs. End of story. Norma’s death was planned ahead of time. But I still say everything that’s happened since reeks of a busted play-Ada had to die because of what she found out, and so did Les. Now did he tell you anything else? Think hard.”
“He said that the Frederick House is having financial problems. It occurred to me that maybe he intended to buy his way in with the two hundred thou Norma left him. Take Martha for his own and shove Bob Burgess out the door.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Des concurred. “Mind you, that would point the motive finger right at Bob Burgess for killing him. Too bad Bob’s not here at the present time.”
Which jarred something in Mitch’s head. Something significant that he’d forgotten. “Des, how do we know he’s not here?”
She looked at him closely. “Baby, do you need another hit of ammonia?”
“No, wait, hear me out. I just remembered something. When I got up to feed our fire in the middle of the night, I could have sworn I heard someone walking around up on the third floor. Astrid’s Castle is a huge place with millions of nooks and crannies. What if someone else has been hiding up here with us this whole time? Someone like Bob Burgess. That would explain how Les’s killer managed to slip out right under your nose-because he wasn’t under your nose. He was hiding somewhere else in the castle, waiting for his chance to kill Les. Although why Bob would want to kill Norma and Ada, too, I can’t possibly…” Mitch suddenly realized that Des was staring at him with a really strange look on her face. “You think I’ve suffered permanent head damage, don’t you?”
“Far from it. While you were outside with Les, Carly told me that she heard footsteps up on the third floor in the night.”
“Well, that settles it then,” Mitch said, gazing slowly up at the ceiling. “We’ve got company.”
“Slow down, cowboy. It’s very likely that what you two heard was nothing more than the wind.”
“Then again, it could have been Astrid.”
“You just said what to me?”
“There’s this thing they do for the tourists every year on Halloween,” Mitch explained. “Which is that Astrid, that she, you know
…”
“Mitch, believe me when I say this-I don’t know.”
“She haunts the castle. Her ghost, I mean.”
“Okay, this is your head trauma talking now,” Des said, nodding to herself. “Random gas is emitting from your person.”
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“Are you trying to tell me you do?”
“Well, I certainly don’t disbelieve in them. How can I? There are just too many things that happen in life which can’t be explained.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like us.”
She stiffened at once. “Oh, is that right?”
“I mean this in a good way, Des. Just think about it…”
“Oh, I’m thinking about it, boyfriend. I am sitting here, thinking.”
“We come from completely different worlds. We share no common experiences and have no earthly business being together, making each other so unbelievably happy. And yet we are happy. And that can’t be explained by any conventional wisdom, can it?”
She let this sink in for a moment before she swallowed and said, “Well, no, you’re not wrong about that. But, Mitch…?”
“Yes, Des?”
“We are not ghosts!”
“I know this, and I for one am very happy about it.”
“Besides which, we are no longer talking about what we need to be talking about.”
“Which is…?”
“One of us needs to take a look around upstairs. I can’t leave this hallway, because I’m still clinging to the quaint notion that our killer is a corporeal individual, as opposed to Casper, the unfriendly ghost. Do you feel well enough to nose around up there?”
“Try and stop me.”
She fished a master key from her coat pocket and tossed it to him. “You’d better take this, too,” she said, handing him her heavy black Mag-Lite flashlight. “Bang it on the floor if you need me. I’ll come running.”
He got up out of his chair and started for the stairs. “Should we establish any kind of code? Say, three knocks means trouble, two knocks means-”
“Just smack the damned floor, will you?” she growled at him. “Hold on, there’s something else I want to tell you.”
“What is it?”
She came toward him, her eyes shiny and huge, and hugged him tightly. “When I saw you coming upstairs just now, looking the way you did, all of the air went right out of my body. I thought I was going to die. I know we can’t be explained, and I don’t care. I only care about how I feel.”
“Back at you, slats,” he said, kissing her softly, then not so softly.
Then she gave him a firm shove and up the stairs he went, clutching the Mag-Lite like a billy club. When he reached the top of the stairs, he encountered locked double doors that closed off the third-floor corridor entirely. Mitch used the master key and went in, closing the door behind him.
The third floor was very much like the second. Twenty-four rooms. More photos of famous guests of yesteryear lining the walls. More floral carpeting. That same steel door to the staff stairs halfway down the hall, a “Fire Exit” sign mounted over it. The only obvious difference that struck Mitch was that there was no door out to the observation deck at the end of the hall. Just a window. The air was exceedingly still up there. Freezing cold, too. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five degrees. The room doors had all been left wide open, casting shafts of weak winter light out into the hall. Mitch stood still for a long moment, listening. He could hear his heart pounding, blood rushing in his ears. He could hear nothing else.
He began to search, the carpeted floorboards creaking under his feet. He started in the first room on his left, room twenty-five, which was directly above the room where Norma lay dead. He found a bed that had no linens on it. Just a bare mattress. He found a bathroom that had no towels, no soap, no sterilized water glasses. The bathroom door was thrown open wide and held in place with a wastebasket. So was the closet door. Something to do with ventilation, Mitch guessed. When he shone his light around in the closet, he found only empty hangers. He went across to room 26, and found it to be virtually identical.
From the third-floor windows Mitch could make out Big Sister’s lighthouse standing tall and proud down at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Mammoth tree trunks and chunks of ice were flowing out into Long Island Sound-the very stuff that he would find washed up on Big Sister’s slender beach when he made it back there. If he ever made it back there. It seemed as if his life out on Big Sister had been a million years ago. It seemed as if he’d always been here at Astrid’s Castle and he always would be here. Time had stopped. Life had stopped.
But Soave hadn’t steered Des wrong-the snow really did seem to be letting up.
As he moved on to the next empty room, Mitch thought he sensed movement behind him in the corridor. But when he turned around, there was no one and nothing. Just the deserted hallway. He was spooked, that was all. It couldn’t be anything else-anything like, say, Astrid’s spirit wafting through the air. Not a chance. No way. Mitch steadied himself, breathing in and out, and continued his search. He found more open doors, more bare mattresses, more nothing. There was no evidence that anyone was hiding up here. He was sure of this.
Until he went in room 31, that is. And once again sensed movement, heard movement-and then Mitch saw something out of the corner of his eye and he whirled and an immense pure white Maine coon cat leaped off of the dresser right into his arms, where it began to dig its front paws into Mitch’s chest and purr and purr, just as friendly as can be.