“Yes,” Hailey agreed.
“Okay, well there’s a dead rabbit,” Howie said. “On the north side of the hotel. Let’s get that cleaned up.”
Jesus. He obviously hadn’t forgotten Hailey turned him down when he asked her out all those months ago. It was before Dru had come onboard, but Hailey had told her all about it.
Hailey’s face went slack. Despite her embrace of the darker side of fashion, Dru knew that Hailey was pretty squeamish when it came to actual dead things. Dru once had to come all the way downstairs to remove a fly that had keeled over too close to the computer for Hailey to use it. She said she knew the dead fly was looking at her.
“I’ll get it,” Dru volunteered.
“Thank you, Dru,” Hailey said, sounding relieved.
“Anytime,” Dru said. “I’ll probably head back up for a bit after, so I’ll see you at shift change.”
Hailey gave her that look that clearly said, you’re not really leaving me down here with Howie, are you? And Dru returned the look with one of her own that said, that’s what you get for making me clean up dead stuff. Plus, I really need to get some work done on my book.
At least she hoped that’s what it said. It was a lot to fit into one look.
Dru grabbed a black trash bag from under the front desk, and her coat from the hooks by the main doors, and headed out with a final wave over her shoulder, but Howie was already busy explaining to Hailey how she would have to really bring her “A” game for the busy weekend ahead.
The door closed behind her, cutting off the sound, and Dru stopped for a moment to take a deep breath of the crisp air and let her eyes adjust to the relative dark. There were outside lights, that cast overlapping yellow circles around the building itself. But beyond that, the woods were just an inky black void. After a few years in the city, she’d almost forgotten what real darkness was.
Crunching through the inch of fresh snow in the shadow of the famous hemlock, Dru passed the abandoned wing of the hotel to the north side. She glanced up at the old turret with the arched windows and the horror writer in her half-expected to spot a shadowy figure staring back. As usual, she was disappointed to find only a single black crow, who took flight with a scolding squawk as she passed by.
There were tall tales that the thief’s ghost haunted that wing. But it didn’t take a detective to figure out that it was really shut down because of deferred maintenance. A few of the windows were boarded up, and the roof sloped at the center like a sway-backed pony. Paint curled off the shutters, as if it were trying to get away.
An ounce of maintenance saves a fortune in repairs. Dru’s step-dad had announced this motto cheerfully on so many otherwise pleasant Saturdays when Dru found herself helping him clean the gutters or paint the porch deck instead of chilling out like a normal teenager. Back then, she hadn’t appreciated the merits of being raised to be handy.
It was clear the Pembroke family could have used a couple of Saturdays with Stan Holloway.
She followed Howie’s footprints through the new snow, and thought again about how easy it was to ruin something beautiful just by leaving your mark on it.
It was early for this much snow, but at least they wouldn’t get pounded anytime soon. The blizzards in this part of Pennsylvania mainly came after the new year.
She sighed, and even that small sound seemed loud in the empty space.
Compared to her sublet in Philly, this place was silent, except for the birds and the sound of the wind in the trees. It wasn’t so far away, but sometimes it seemed like it was on a different planet. The air even tasted cleaner here.
She turned the corner, and sure enough there was the tiny body of a rabbit laid out in the snow.
Howie’s footsteps ended about where hers were now, so the poor animal was alone on a blanket of undisturbed white. The soft gray fur and long tender ears were sprayed with blood, which painted the snow around it in a Jackson Pollack-style splatter.
Dru wasn’t the squeamish type, but something about the bright contrast of garish scarlet against the alabaster snow made her feel momentarily dizzy.
She took a deep breath and walked over, using the trash bag to quickly grab the unfortunate creature before she could get too skeeved out, and then turning the trash bag inside out around it.
The rabbit was so light it almost didn’t seem possible. It must have been all fur and bones before meeting its untimely death.
She wondered vaguely how much a soul weighed as she carried the bag around to the back of the hotel. She had held the class rabbit in elementary school and was pretty sure it weighed more than this. Though she had been smaller then.
It was a mercy that it wasn’t heavy. But it was also odd that it wasn’t eaten. It wasn’t terribly unusual to find a few feathers or bones, indicating a small predator had been enjoying a meal. There were plenty of hawks in the area, as well as foxes, and even the occasional bear. But what kind of animal killed a rabbit and then just left it?
She headed around to the back of the building and used her skeleton key to open the hatch to the basement.
Hemlock House sat atop a warren of underground tunnels. The local history held that the place had been part of the Underground Railroad, and then used again by the mob during Prohibition.
Howie had told them that a lot of them had been sealed off before he was born, and no one even knew where all the tunnels were anymore.
Now, the ones they still used were mainly just for storage. It seemed a little anticlimactic, after such a storied history, but Dru supposed it was for the best that they weren’t really needed for anything important anymore.
She made it down the wooden steps and pulled the chain for the bare bulb that hung overhead. It flickered to life like it was angry that she disturbed it. Once she was sure it was going to stay on, she rounded the corner to the tunnel where they kept the trash. The bears and raccoons would get into anything that wasn’t nailed down, so the tunnels came in handy for that, at least.
Her boots rang out on the hard-packed floor, and the air tasted stale and faintly musty.
She hurried through her task, tossing the bag with what used to be a rabbit into a large bin, and then jogging back to the stairs leading outside.
There was a way to get back to the lobby from the tunnels, but it was narrow, and Dru had always been a little claustrophobic. The idea of getting lost in the catacombs was unbearable.
She turned off the light and stepped outside, where the wind had begun to blow in earnest. She closed and locked the door to the basement, then headed across the back of the hotel to the servants’ wing.
Lights were on in the solarium, making the glassy walls and roof look almost like a UFO with the yellow glow coming through a dusting of snow.
She walked across the sweeping brick patio and past the old Smoking Lounge for Gentlemen, now used as a Sitting Room for everyone.
At last, she reached the back door to the servants’ wing and unlocked it. She jogged up the stairs and down the hall to her room. Hopefully, she could get a few words in before it was time to report for duty.
As the door closed behind her, she remembered that she had left her soda back in the lobby.
She grabbed another out of her mini-fridge. The one downstairs would keep until her shift. She cracked it open and took a long sip, letting the bubbles and fake sugar dance on her tongue for a moment before she swallowed, then sat down to face off with the typewriter.