I snapped awake and sat up, eyes scouring the room as I waited for them to adjust. I heard a wheezing, sucking sound, an asthmatic inhalation. My mind went blank with terror until I realized the sound was coming from the doors that led out onto my private patio.
One of the doors was open, just a crack, allowing the wind to hiss through.
My heart still thudding, I switched on the bedside lamp, flooding the room in yellow light. As far as I could see, I was alone. But the sound that had woken me wasn’t the wind wheezing through the crack in the door. It was the groan of a cranky floorboard. I heard the sound again as I padded across the room to peer outside, and startled when I saw an ember of light glowing in the darkness fifty feet away.
Someone was out there smoking in a garden gazebo. All I could see of her was her blond hair. She was dressed in dark clothing that blended with the night, so her hair seemed to levitate like a wig hanging from fishing line, once the gold standard in special effects.
I glanced back at the clock on the nightstand. It was two thirty in the morning, and the temperature outside had to be forty degrees, plus windchill factor. Was she that desperate to smoke, or had she been the one to open my door?
After turning on all the lights in my room and checking every conceivable hiding place, I glanced outside one more time to see if the smoker was still there. If she was, I intended to confront her. But the woman had vanished.
I rubbed my eyes. Had I imagined her? Perhaps the creak I’d heard had merely been the sound of the building settling. Perhaps the door hadn’t been closed properly, and the wind had blown it open.
To satisfy my paranoia, I picked up the room phone and called the front desk, disappointed when a woman answered instead of Porter. He must have gone home for the night.
“Hi, I’m in room nine. I was just wondering…” I trailed off, unsure what to ask. “I was wondering if my friend checked in yet. The other guest staying at the inn tonight? I tried to wait up for her, but I fell asleep.”
“Oh yes,” the woman said brightly. “Ms. Stone Maretto arrived safe and sound.”
Everything in me went still. “Ms. Stone Maretto, you said?”
“Yes. Suzanne Stone Maretto. She’s the only other guest we have on the books.”
“Could I get her room number?”
“Room ten, right next to yours. She requested it.”
“Thanks.” I slammed the phone down and covered my face with my hands.
Suzanne Stone Maretto was the character Nicole Kidman played in the 1995 film To Die For, about a fame-obsessed sociopath who enlists three teenagers to kill her husband. She was one of Gemma’s favorite characters when we were teenagers, and I guessed she still was.
Suzanne Stone Maretto was the name Gemma assumed when she checked into hotels and wanted to remain anonymous.