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The moment Gera stepped into her room, she knew someone had been there.
Every light in her suite was burning. Every overhead fixture, every lamp, every night light. Even the light inside the microwave was on.
Nothing of hers was disturbed, nothing was out of place. Everything was just as she had left it, including the limited but scattered cosmetics on the vanity. Other than the glowing lights, fresh towels, and the neatly made bed, there was only one other indication that someone had entered the suite.
A small red ball and a set of jacks rested in the middle of her mattress.
Gera picked up the telephone to ring the front desk, but she hung up before anyone answered. This was just a publicity stunt, she was certain of it. A gimmick to make her believe in ghosts.
It would take more than a few lights and a toy to sway her.
Determined not to give the stunt any more attention than warranted, she stalked to the bathroom. After a day spent roaming the town, she needed a quick shower and a change of clothes. She had plans for the evening. Those plans included a delicious meal, a nice glass of wine, and plenty of time to scour her notes and reflect on all she had learned today.
Which, she admitted as she turned on the shower, wasn’t much.
She was ready within thirty minutes. Her short haircut made styling a breeze, and a solitary dinner required minimal makeup.
Gera heard the voices before she stepped off the elevator, a half dozen or so chattering with excitement. To her surprise, a small group of people gathered in the lobby, the most she had seen so far at the hotel. Leah stood among them, holding a clipboard and trying to be heard above their noisy din.
“Okay, guys, the tour is about to get started. This is your last chance to back out. Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”
“Are you kidding?” a young man said, drawing a giggle from the girl draped across his arm. Both sported purple streaks in their hair. “Bring on the ghosts, baby!”
Leah spotted Gera as she exited the elevator car. “Miss Stapleton? There’s room for one more if you’d like to join us. We’re about to do a ghost tour of the hotel.”
Gera hesitated for only a moment. She had booked a tour with Anise for tomorrow night, but Loretta had recommended this hotel tour, too. “Uh, yeah, sure. Why not?”
“That’s the spirit!” purple-haired guy said, pumping his fist into the air.
“Spirit,” his girlfriend echoed with a giggle. “Get it?”
Biting back a groan, Gera forced herself forward. She hoped she didn’t regret her hasty decision.
“Your host will be with you in just a moment,” Leah assured them, working her way from their midst. As she passed Gera, she said, “I’ll put the tour on your tab. You get a discount for being a guest of the hotel.”
“Thanks,” Gera murmured.
She watched as an older gentleman appeared from out of seemingly nowhere. Tall and gaunt, his back was crooked into a permanent arc, reminding Gera of a life-sized question mark. The top of his head was completely bald, fringed by a band of unruly white fuzz. Swimming in waves of wrinkles, even the pigment of his skin had faded away. His features suggested he was, in part, of African descent, but his skin was now pale and thin.
“Good evening to you,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong. “Welcome to The Dove Hotel. We’re about to embark on a journey into the spirit world. What you may see or hear isn’t for the faint of heart. If you have any doubts, any fears, please say so now.”
A low murmur rippled through the crowd, but no one moved aside.
“Very well. My name is Leo, and I will be your spirit guide this evening. Please, follow me.”
There was something compelling about his voice. The way it reverberated within his chest drew people to him, made them listen. The weight of that rumble settled deep, giving him an inexplicable air of credibility.
Gera fell into line behind the others. It crossed her mind that they all followed him blindly, like lambs to slaughter, but she shook the unwanted thought away. They weren’t headed to slaughter. They were headed to a steep, narrow stairway, shuttered away at the back of the great room.
“Watch your step,” Leo cautioned as he led the way. “The stairs are steep and the lighting dim. We’ll begin our tour in the basement.”
They trudged down the stairs, single file, which emptied into a small storeroom of sorts. A dozen folding chairs were set into a semi-circle. With bare concrete beneath their feet and thick walls made of clay, the dimly lit room was cool. Sounds echoed.
Leo encouraged the small group to find a seat and get comfortable. He turned away to fidget with an array of gadgets scattered across a small table in the corner. The small group murmured amongst themselves, speaking in low tones and nervous giggles. No one knew what to expect.
Leo gave them time enough to settle, then dawdled long enough to give them time to squirm. He was a master at building suspense, Gera realized. By the time he turned and spoke in a quiet voice, the room fell silent and his audience hung upon every word.
“Tonight, we will explore the world of spirits and the possibility that ghosts do, indeed, walk among us. That life doesn’t always end with death. That perhaps there is more to life than the naked eye can see.” His weak eyes traveled around the room, settling upon on each of his guests. “Again, I say to you, if you have any doubts, now is the time to leave.”
One man shifted in his seat, but his wife stabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. His grunt was the only sound in the room.
“Very well then,” Leo continued, taking a chair of his own. “First, I wish to tell you a bit about The Dove, and how the hotel came to be.”
He launched into the story of Raymond and Cordelia Luna, echoing much of the same tale Minnie relayed in the garden. Having heard the details before, Gera listened with half an ear and used the time to study her companions.
The young couple, the ones she secretly dubbed Purple One and Purple Two, grinned throughout the story. For them, the tour was one big adventure, and the perfect excuse for Purple Two to curl herself around her boyfriend. Get a room, Gera wanted to say, although she suspected they were too young to rent one.
She dubbed the other couple Mr. Grump and Mrs. Gullible. While the wife looked captivated with each word that fell from Leo’s lips, her husband sat with his arms crossed over his massive chest and a skeptical smirk upon his face. He bore an odd resemblance to a bulldog, Gera noted.
The remaining members of their group were a trio of women. They appeared to have come directly from the beauty salon, via way of an open bar. A cloud of perfume and hair spray hovered in the air around them, as surely as any spiritual entity. One of the women seemed unsteady in her high-heeled shoes and Gera detected alcohol on their exhaled breaths. The blond among them blinked in rapid secession, obviously nervous at the thought of encountering ghosts. The tallest of the three bobbed her head a lot and murmured tiny words of agreement with everything Leo said. The third woman looked torn between fascination and tears. Gera called the trio Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
She tuned back in as Leo continued his tale.
“When Miss Cordelia passed, she left the house to her one true friend and faithful employee, Minerva Cody. Minerva was her personal maid and confidant. The year was 1947, and production at the mines was beginning to slow. The war had exhausted ore deposits. A house this large was more of a burden than a blessing, and with only one son and a dozen bedrooms, Minerva and J.T. Cody opened the house to the public. It became a boarding house. And when the population fell away and less than a hundred residents remained in the town, it was Minerva’s fine cooking that kept the house afloat. Not many folks came to Jerome in those days, but the ones that were here still had to eat, and they were willing to pay. I can tell you from personal experience, Minerva Cody was an excellent cook and a fine baker. She started the restaurant here on the other side of this wall.” His voice fell with reverence, and the group leaned forward, eager to hear his words. “At night, when the house is quiet and the ovens are cold, I swear I can still hear the metal clang of her bread pans and inhale the sweet, heady aroma of her yeast rolls. Miss Minerva was a fine cook, indeed.”
The old man let his words settle among them, pressing a pleasant mental image into their minds, causing their mouths to water. Then, just as quietly, he spoke his next unsettling words.
“And later, when the clocks slow to a crawl and the wind lays low, some swear that if you listen closely, you can hear the screams. The screams of women in labor without benefit of anesthesia, of secret abortions performed in the dead of night, of mothers who never wanted their child to begin with, only to be heartbroken when that child was born without air in its lungs.”
His words shocked the group, but he continued in his purposeful voice, a master at his craft. “Some guests swear they still hear the children, crying softly in the night. They see the ghosts of children running in the hall. Mothers with swollen bellies and haunted eyes who pace the floors as they await their time, and the day they can return to the cribs and once again offer their bodies for pay. These cribs, mind you, aren’t the kind where babies lay, but where all too often, babies were made. If you take one of the tours in town, you can see the old red light district, where the majority of the soiled doves once lived and thrived. It was only the lucky few, you see, who came here to live with Miss Cordelia. Lucky ones, like my very own mother.”
Heads snapped up at that snippet of personal information. Mrs. Gullible gasped. “You mean, your mother was a—” She snapped her mouth shut, stopping just short of insulting their host.
However, old Leo wasn’t insulted. His eyes shone with pride. “Yes. My mother was a soiled dove. And I was the very last baby to be born in this house, on a hot summer day in 1939. I spent the first five years of my life here, until Miss Cordelia could no longer care for her babies, as she called us.” His old eyes misted over, but his voice remained steady. “I returned here when Miss Minerva opened her café and needed my help. Stayed on when they turned it into a hotel in the eighties. And when she passed on a few years after her husband, I took over and ran the hotel for the Cody family. They still own it to this day, and a finer family you will never know. I’m just the concierge now. The Cody family indulges me, allows me to play host now and then, and on tours such as these. Because no one knows this house better than I do,” he boasted. “I know its secrets, its strengths, and its weaknesses.”
Again his voice fell, causing an ominous air to stir about the room. A nervous rustle ran through his audience. A chill settled in, spiking the skin on their arms and ruffling the fine hairs on the backs of their necks.
“And believe me when I say,” the old man said softly, “this house has more than its share of secrets.”
He stood suddenly, moving his crooked body with more finesse than Gera thought possible. He shuffled toward the table of gadgets.
“Ghosts and spiritual beings are nothing new, but the science surrounding them has improved vastly over the years. A variety of gadgets can now detect when a ghost is in the room. I would like to introduce you to some of these electronic wonders, and encourage you to take one or more along with you on our journey tonight. We will start with this. Does anyone know what this is?”
Blynken, the nervous blonde, snapped off a series of rapid blinks and ventured a guess. “An EMF meter?”
“Yes, that is correct. An electromagnetic frequency detector. When a spirit is present, it projects energy. That energy, that electromagnetic field, can be measured by this device, and is indicated by the lights. No energy, no light.” Leo waved the gadget in the air, turning it toward them to demonstrate the ‘0’ reading. He then pulled out his cell phone and passed the meter over it. The lights blinked wildly and the number on the display suddenly spiked. “The current from my cell phone gives off electronic energy, as you can see here. To best detect the presence of energy in the room, you’ll want to use an EMF.”
He demonstrated some of his other tools. The handheld infrared thermometers measured temperature change. A sudden drop of ten or more degrees, Leo informed the group, was a good indication that a ghost was present. The radiation monitor evaluated gamma and beta particles in the air, much as a Geiger counter would do. Some might like to carry a UV flashlight to distinguish airborne particles from orb phenomena. However, perhaps the most useful of all the tools were the digital cameras with built-in flash photography. Orb activity was often spotted on digital film, even when undetectable by the human eye.
“Please, stay together. At times, the lights may be dim. Use your flashlight if necessary for safe passage. We have guests in some of the rooms, so our tour will flow around them. There will be plenty to see, plenty to explore. And we will begin in the hallway that leads to the kitchen, where a murder once took place.”
A collective gasp went up from the trio of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Purple Two moved into Purple One’s embrace. Mr. Grump frowned, while Mrs. Gullible visibly paled. Gera marveled at Leo’s ability to tell such a riveting tale, and to sound so authoritative while doing so.
With tools in hand, the small group followed Leo from the room. They crowded close upon his heels, as if his nearness alone could keep them safe.
“Careful now, the way is dim,” he cautioned, leading them into the corridor. At the far end of the hallway, bright light spilled from the commercial kitchen, but the lighting here was controlled, casting off shadows and the sense of isolation. The sounds of a busy kitchen—clattering dishes and hissing kettles, punctuated here and there by a bark of laughter or a surprised curse—mingled with muted sounds from the dining room, where guests already gathered for supper. Their voices were muffled, floating into the dimly lit space as if from a great distance, and therefore adding to the aura of secrecy.
“Right about here, in this very spot, one of the doves met her untimely death.” Leo’s distinctive voice held just the right note of mystique, just the right hint of danger. “Her name was Penelope, and it is said she was quite the beauty, with long dark hair and a creamy complexion. She was quite popular among the men, and, as you might guess, quite the thorn in many a wife’s side. The story is that she caught the eye of Peter Scot, one of the higher-ups at the copper mine. He and his wife were part of the elite here in Jerome. But it was no secret that after the fancy parties and the elegant dinners, Peter would slip down to the cribs to be with Penelope.”
They stopped in the hallway, and Leo’s theatrical voice filled the small space. “When she discovered she was with child, she asked for Miss Cordelia’s protection. She feared for her unborn child’s life, for Peter’s wife Deidre had heard of the pregnancy, and vowed no child of her husband would bear mulatto blood. Pen—”
Purple Two broke into his story. “What is mulatto blood?” the young woman asked.
Leo raised his withered brows, but answered patiently. “Mixed blood, much as my own. Like my mother, Penelope was the child of a black mother and a white father. There were still anti-miscegenation laws at the time, so such relations were illegal. Penelope feared Deidre would go to any length to keep such a union secret.”
“That’s a stupid law,” the girl insisted, pulling a face.
“Like so much in life,” Leo informed her sagely, “a law doesn’t have to make sense to exist.”
When he dropped his voice to a hushed whisper, his audience waited on bated breath.
“So one night, during a new moon that left the sky dark and no one the wiser, Deidre followed her husband, and found the two together, here in the hallway. They were discussing plans to go away together, once the baby was born. In a fit of rage, Deidre pulled a knife and plunged it deep into Penelope’s belly.” Leo’s voice shook with quiet intensity, drawing another gasp from the tour group. “The baby died, and Penelope soon after. Bled to death, right here on this very floor. Peter sent Deidre away, to a mental institution in California. Not long after, Peter was found dead in their home, hung by his own night sheets.” The group listened in stunned silence. Even the Purples were no longer smiling.
“It was the first of a long series of death and sadness here in the house. Just one of the many secrets here in The Dove,” Leo said solemnly. “If you turn on your instruments, you might find a trace of Penelope’s spirit. Often people say they see Peter’s ghost here, roaming the halls where he last held his true love in his arms.”
Even Mr. Grump was moved by the story. His arms fell to his sides, and he helped his wife adjust her EMF as she waved it through the air. When someone’s meter went off, a murmur of excitement moved through the crowd.
Gera stood back and studied them, wondering why no one else saw the theatrical aspect of Leo’s performance. The man was good. Very good.
But she still didn’t believe in ghosts.
