Chapter Two
While Average changed out of her rennie bridesmaid’s outfit, David explored the second floor of the hotel. A grand ballroom with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fireplace took up half the floor. It was here that Jake and Rachel’s wedding was scheduled to be held. As David noted that the ballroom was right over the top of the dining room and lounge in which the convention was going to be held, he was glad that he wasn’t in charge of ironing out that little detail.
A storage room filled with tables, chairs and audio visual equipment was located between the elevator and the fire exit. The entire north wing held an unfinished coffee bar and a gift shop. Here massive Victorian armchairs with scrollwork and lions’ feet were shoved in one corner and covered by dust sheets.
By the time Average found him, he had mostly gotten his sarcastic impulses under control. He trailed her back to the ballroom. Then he took her things like a pack mule and let her lead him downstairs past a couple of Mr. Spock look-alikes back to his car. They stored her bridesmaid dress, and then Average linked arms with him and steered him back to the front desk.
The lobby of the hotel was more of the same décor: pink fuzzy wallpaper, red and gold carpet, brass fixtures and wood trim polished to a high shine. A desk clerk could be summoned by ringing a brass bell, which Average did.
Almost instantly, a lady in a high-necked Victorian dress and Gibson-Girl hairstyle emerged from the back room.
“Hi Average! What can I do for you?” she greeted Average enthusiastically.
“Sarah?” Average giggled. “Sarah Heile? I hardly recognized you!”
“It’s the hair, isn’t it?” Sarah touched her hair and gave Average a sheepish grin. “I know it’s kind of weird looking. But the owner, Mr. Wilson, said that it lends atmosphere to the hotel.” She trailed off as she glared past them. “Hey, you!”
David turned to see that she was yelling at the Elvis impersonator. A lit cigarette dangled in his hand. David glanced at the man’s pompadour and noticed that the rhinestone-bedecked singer was also wearing a set of Spock ears.
Does that make him an elvish Elvis? he wondered, glad he hadn’t said it out loud. The impersonator looked around, as if Sarah might be talking to someone else. Seeing that there was no one else in the lobby at the moment, he pointed to himself and lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah, you!” Sarah said. “No smoking in the lobby. I don’t care if you are The King of Rock and Roll. Take it outside!”
Elvis shrugged and strolled out the door.
“Thankayaverramuch!” she called after him.
Average laughed.
“Sorry about that. It’s been a crazy week, what with the convention, the wedding and the TV show they’re filming.”
“What TV show?” David asked.
“You didn’t know about that?” Sarah asked. “I figured it would be the talk of the town by now!”
“Well I bet it will be tonight,” David said while glancing at Average out of the corner of his eye. “What’s going on?”
“The History Channel called us. They want to do an episode of that crazy Ghost Chasers show about Hotel Des Portiers. So they’ll be in and out of rooms all week.”
“Why is everything booked at once?” David narrowed his eyes.
“There was a breakdown in communications,” Sarah said with a huff. “Mr. Wilson booked the TV show to drum up publicity for the hotel. But he neglected to tell us about it until they arrived. At the same time, Mr. Prunella booked the convention. Then, the wedding planner booked the hotel with Mr. Wilson.”
“That would explain how the no government employee clause got worked into the contract,” David said.
“Oh, it gets much better.” Sarah chuckled bitterly. “The GhostChasers aren’t happy about being here the same weekend as the UFO conference. They keep saying that the presence of so many True Believers is messing with their equipment. But they refused to reschedule. Instead they want to extend their stay a second week. And they want us to pay them to cleanse the hotel of negative psychic energy.” Sarah shook her head. “All I know is that it’s made for some really stressful work hours. So what can I do for you?”
“We’re about to head back to town,” Average said. “But we wondered if we could arrange for a tour of the hotel first.”
“Oh, sure,” Sarah said. “Let me just make sure that the front desk is covered and I’ll give it to you personally.”
After Sarah had gone, David looked at Average with a raised eyebrow. “Well, she was nice.”
“And by nice you mean?”
“I mean nice!” David said defensively. “Not everything I say has to be interpreted with sarcasm.”
“Just most of it,” Average said. “Be nice to Sarah. I know that she’s a bit of a dictator; she was like that even in high school. But she means well. Bless her little heart.”
Everyone around here seemed to have some version of that phrase. As far as he could tell, you could get away with saying nearly anything about someone as long as you tacked on some variation of bless her, or bless her heart at the end of it. Isn’t that the ugliest baby? Bless its little heart. Rachel is nuttier than twosquirrels in a hollow tree, bless her. David ducked his head to hide a smile. He classified thoughts like those as things that should not be spoken out loud.
His movement must have dislodged the ferret. Until now she’d been so still that he forgot she was perched on his shoulder. But now a set of fuzzy feet scrabbled for purchase on his neck in an unpleasant reminder that he had a passenger.
“What should I do with the ferret while we’re on this tour?”
David asked.
“Leave her here.”
“What? On the desk?”
“Lili’s a smart animal. She can find her own way back to Rachel’s room.”
“If you say so,” David said. He pulled the ferret from his shoulder and placed her on the desk. Immediately, she shook herself and then crawled up into a cubbyhole, curled into a ball and fell asleep.
“Yeah, she looks intrepid,” David said.
“I didn’t say she’d go right away,” Average said. Abruptly, Sarah emerged from the office behind the desk. David sealed his lips and glared at Average for nearly getting them caught while turning a pet loose at the front desk. She shrugged in response.
“Okay, Rosa is going to watch the desk for a while,” Sarah said.
“I’ve got the keys; how would you guys like to start with the morgue?”
“Sounds great,” David muttered. “Why do they even have a morgue in the basement?”
“The place used to be a sanatorium, back in the day,” Sarah said.
“I thought it was a hotel.”
“It’s been a lot of things,” Sarah said. “It started as a hotel for vacationers on the railroad. Then the Coin family built the Gold Standard resort down in the valley, which took a lot of the guests away. They had more amenities, plus an amphitheater. I suppose that it was all very glamorous. So why come up here when you could stay there?”
“I didn’t know there was another hotel in the area,” David said.
“There hasn’t been for a long time,” Average said. “It was covered up when the lake went in. But by then it was out of business anyway.”
“That all happened when the highway bypassed the town.” As Sarah led them across the lobby, she gesticulated wildly. “Tranquility used to be a lot bigger. Back then, people thought that it was going to be such a progressive place that it would grow to be what Branson is: this big entertainment tourist town. But after the highway, people weren’t that interested in stopping in Tranquility. Not when they could drive a few hours north and go to Fayetteville.
“But getting back to the Hotel Des Portiers. For a while it shut down. Then, in the twenties, a doctor from Kansas named Dr. William Williamson came in. He bought out the owners’ interests and planned on turning it into a sanitarium, like the kind in Battle Creek, Michigan.”
“I could see this place as a sanitarium,” David said. “It’s quiet here.”
Average glared at him.
“Well, I’m sure it is when there aren’t any UFO Geeks and weddings and TV crews,” David said. As they walked down the hall past the kitchen, they heard a scream behind them, followed by a string of unintelligible Spanish. Rosamust have found Lili, he thought. Ahead of him, Average grasped Sarah’s arm and propelled her forward. He continued talking to distract Sarah from the scream. “And it seems like a nice place. I’m sure it made a very elegant retreat.”
“It would have been, if Dr. Bill hadn’t been a deranged quack,”
Sarah said. “Before long, he was running the place as a sanatorium for TB instead of a sanitarium.”
“What’s the difference?” Average asked.
“A sanitarium is a health resort,” David clarified. “A sanatorium is a hospital for long-term TB patients.” They stopped at a juncture in the hallway. Off to the south, sandwiched between the guest office and the kitchen stood a narrow, dark passage with few doors. This far away from the communal areas the decorations were sparse and much of the Victorian embellishment was missing.
“This hall allows the kitchen staff into the dining room without having to carry food through the lobby,” Sarah explained. “It runs behind the elevator. But it’s also got an entrance to the secret passage.”
David nodded at that. A creepy Victorian hotel with a deranged doctor wouldn’t be complete without secret passageways. “When you say that Dr. Williamson was deranged...”
“I mean that he wasn’t a real doctor; he just thought of himself as one,” Sarah said. “He was actually a sleight-of-hand magician and a con artist from the vaudeville circuit. He started going by Dr. Bill Williamson during his medicine show days. And by the time he worked up to buying the Hotel Des Portiers, he was already wanted in three states for fraud in connection with selling a mixture of fermented corn cobs and sugarcane as Wild Bill’s Never-Fail Snake Oil.”
“A con man,” David said flatly.
“A charming one.” Sarah nodded. “He secured a pardon in Arkansas by charming the governor’s wife. She and her society friends popularized the Hotel Des Portiers as a sanitarium before he branched out to treating TB patients.”
“And while he had all these folks flocking to the hotel for treatment, he wasn’t above experimenting on his patients to try and find a cure for TB.” By now they’d come to a smooth wooden door that had been painted to match the surrounding hallway. There was no knob, just a place to insert a key and a shallow impression for a finger grip. Sarah produced a brass skeleton key and unlocked the door. Then she let it swing open and reached around and pulled a chain to switch on an old-fashioned, bare bulb light fixture. The light came on, revealing a set of stone stairs that wound away into the darkness.
“Down there is the basement. Half of it is dug out, but the other half is a cave. It stays a constant 68 degrees all year long. When it was first built, it was a wine cellar. Now we’re using it for storage and hotel laundry. Dr. Williamson put his sickest TB patients down here. He read about the TB hospital in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky and thought to try the same thing here. The idea was that the constant temperature and humidity would help with their recovery. And when they died, he also had his morgue down here, so that the patients on the upper levels wouldn’t see the rate at which their fellow TB sufferers were dying under their doctor’s care.”
“That’s beyond deranged, it’s inhuman,” David said. The light seemed to filter out as they descended the steps. Just when it was getting to the point that they couldn’t see very well, Sarah stopped and pulled the chain on a second light, which served to illuminate their path for another ten feet or so. As they descended, the atmosphere became noticeably cooler and damper.
“We used to hear all kinds of stories about this place,” Average said with a nervous chuckle. “They say that Dr. Williamson cut up his patients and sneaked them out in pieces to cremate them so that people wouldn’t see a bunch of bodies being buried, and that there are all kinds of remains hidden all over the hotel.”
“I think the stories are somewhat exaggerated.” Sarah laughed.
“Trust me, I talked to some of the workmen during the renovations, and there were never any fingers, toes or eyeballs in pickle jars hidden in the walls. But Mr. Wilson is encouraging the rumors. He said that if the hotel gets a reputation for a sordid past, it’s good for tourism. He’d like to be able to compete with the Crescent up in Eureka Springs for the title of Most Haunted Hotel in America.”
“And that’s good, right?” David asked slowly.
“Very good. Tourists come out in droves for ghosts,” Sarah said.
“If there is the chance that they’ll actually encounter a spirit, then they’ll pay big bucks.”
“Oh,” David said. He’d done his rotations in the ER, same as any other resident, and he’d encountered plenty of violent deaths. But he’d never seen a ghost. By his reasoning, if there was going to be a large congregation of unsettled spirits, then a hospital should be the place.
But it seemed to him that it was places like this—hotels, historic sites, opera houses and tourist traps—that always had the ghosts. The winding staircase ended with another door. Sarah opened it and switched on another overhead lamp to revel the basement. It didn’t look much like a wine cellar, a morgue, or a place for TB patients to live out their last days in agony. It seemed like a basement: filled with junk leftover from the renovation. A set of wooden stairs extended down one side of the room. Stacks of insulation and scraps of drywall lined the opposite one, copper piping and electrical wire were sorted into untidy heaps next to that. In the other corner of the room, someone had snaked electricity, water and other pipes down to a set of stacked industrial washers and dryers. Next to those, a set of employee lockers had been shoved into the corner. The remaining space had been filled with shelves of cleaning supplies and hotel linens. The walls weren’t even finished. Over half the room was a natural cave. The rest of the space showed clear signs that it had been blasted from the native bedrock.
“This place really started as a hole in the ground,” David observed.
“From humble beginnings.” Sarah nodded.
As David glanced through a hundred years worth of accumulated refuse, his eyes fell on a familiar shape. “That’s a dissection table,” he said as he pointed to a sheet-covered table that had been shoved under the stairs and behind a set of partitions.
“You have a good eye,” Sarah said.
“I have a legitimate medical license,” David replied.
“It’s actually just a kitchen table. But Dr. Williamson did use it for autopsies. What gave it away?” The hotel employee squinted at it.
“The wood blocks on the top.” David walked over to the table, and pointed them out. “Victorian doctors would work on any available surface. But they always used some kind of prop to elevate the patient that they were working on.”
“Ew.” Average’s face twisted in a frown.
“It’s just a fact,” David said. “What’s gruesome is that people came here expecting a cure, and what they got was this.” He knocked on the wooden table. “As a doctor, I find the idea repugnant.”
“How did they get the remains out of here without alerting the other patients?” Average asked.
“There was no way to hide it from the ones down here,” Sarah said. “They put up privacy screens, but I’m sure everyone down here knew the score.”
“What a miserable way to die.” Average’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Are you getting a reading?” David asked.
She grimaced. “Despair. Hopelessness.” Then she shuddered.
“I don’t want to stay here much longer.”
“We can head up,” Sarah said.
As they ascended the stairs, Sarah switched off the lights.
“The secret passage is how they got the bodies out without alerting the outside world,” Sarah explained. “It’s really just a winding staircase that goes up to the fifth floor. But it has four openings. The one we came in, one going up to Dr. Williamson’s old room—that’s where Jake and Rachel are staying—one to the dining room and one in the old carriage house.”
“Were they always here?” David asked.
“Actually, Dr. Williamson added them when he bought the hotel,” Sarah said. “He put it in at the same time as the elevator, so no one realized that it was here. He wanted to be able to leave his room without being seen, spy on his guests and hear their gossip in the dining room, see his patients in the basement, or leave the property without anyone being able to observe him coming or going. That’s partially how he managed to keep from being arrested for so long. Because he was careful, no one could find proof that he was actually performing illegal experiments on his patients.”
“How did they catch him?” David asked.
“Through the mail,” Sarah said. “They intercepted a couple of solicitations in which he promised a miraculous cure for TB. They shut him down on mail fraud and practicing medicine without a license.”
“What happened to the hotel after Dr. Williamson was arrested?”
David asked.
“Well, they tried operating a home for wayward girls here back before the lake project. But there were a couple of suicides. One girl supposedly hung herself in her room when she found out she was pregnant. Another threw herself off the roof when her fiancée left her for another girl. Most folks said that it was only to be expected, since this was a home for troubled girls. But the ones who lived here said that the hotel was haunted and that it was the ghosts who drove the girls to suicide.”
“Those poor girls.” Average put a hand to her mouth.
“Anyway, the state cut funding for the project and the directors pulled up stakes and moved it to Fort Smith about the time that the lake went through. The administration lounge from that time is up on the fifth floor. That’s where we put the TV crew,” Sarah said.
“After the state home closed, the hotel got run down. At least until the new owners restored it. The rumors are probably the only reason that the hotel was in enough shape to refurbish. A lot of these old buildings get burned down by squatters. But the ghost stories probably kept most transients away.”
“So have you ever seen a ghost?” Average asked.
“You want to hear my tourist stories, Av?” Sarah laughed.
“How many of them are made up?” Average slipped a hand into David’s as they came to another doorway.
“All of them. I haven’t seen any ghosts yet. But I’m keeping an open mind,” Sarah said as she brushed past David and Average to unlock the door. “This is the exit to the carriage house.”
David led Average into the carriage house. The building itself was an unfinished brick structure with a cobblestone floor and a partially-sagging roof. David eyed the roof warily and wondered if it would fall on their heads.
“Is the hotel fully renovated?” he asked Sarah.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s safe. We’re a little behind schedule on the rest of the renovations, but that’ll be done by next year.”
“But it’s not going to fall in?”
“Nah.” Sarah dismissed his question with a wave of her hand.
“They built these old buildings to last.”
“There’s the carriage that we’re going to use in Rachel’s wedding.” Average dropped David’s hand and crossed the room. David traced her path with his gaze, and saw a white, open-air buggy parked along one wall. He wasn’t sure how he missed it in the beginning. All he could assume was that he’d been too busy staring at the sagging roof.
He spared one more cautious glance up and then crossed the room to examine the coach himself. It had large white spoked wheels, a white lacquered box, a red velvet interior and a canopy that would raise and lower.
In fact, it looked exactly like the buggies he’d seen in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.
“Wasn’t she supposed to have a Renaissance theme? That is why you have to wear that ridiculous corset, isn’t it?”
“Yes?” Average drug the word out slowly, as if she were afraid of David’s next assessment.
“So why is she going to use an Amish buggy?”
Sarah and Average both glared at him. David suddenly wished that the floor would open up and swallow him whole. “Well, it is, isn’t it?”
“Don’t say that to Rachel,” Average hissed, as if afraid that her oldest and best friend might be lurking around the next corner. “Do you know how long we looked for a Cinderella coach and couldn’t find one? Do you know how long it took us to convince her that this was acceptable? Do you know how much money I slipped the wedding planner to go along with this scheme?”
“Er... No?” David took a step back in self-preservation. This was a side to his normally mild-tempered girlfriend that he wasn’t used to seeing.
“That’s right, you don’t. But I’ll tell you something, David Nye. From here on out, you say nothing about the wedding plans. You got me? Unless you are glowing, gushing or otherwise leaving positive feedback, you say nothing. Rachel is a screaming banshee, and I’m barely keeping this tulle-stuffed hand basket on track. So I won’t have you demolishing it with one careless word. Got it?”
David threw his hands up in surrender. “Got it,” he said meekly.
“Good.” With a final, decisive nod, Average turned and stalked out of the carriage house and back to the hotel. David shot an apologetic look at Sarah. She replied with a cheery smile. “Bit behind schedule.”
“Beg your pardon?” David asked.
“I was expecting a meltdown a long time before this,” Sarah said. “With most weddings I’ve been a part of, there are usually several meltdowns by this point in time. And that was actually a relatively mild one.”
“Oh,” David said. “Great.”
“Don’t let it upset you, David.” Sarah gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You’re the best man. You have it easy. Just stay out of harm’s way—and by that, I mean stay out of the bride’s way. Just make sure that the groom gets to the ceremony on time. What’s the worst that could happen?”
David sighed. “I’ll tell you after this is over.”