The blinds were drawn, protecting me from being noticed by any other guests. Nevertheless, the knowledge that I was somewhere I wasn’t allowed to be compelled me to hunch down and creep across the floor on my tiptoes. Even in the dim light, I could tell this yurt was identical to ours. The only difference was the portrait above the bed. Where ours had a tortoiseshell cat, this one depicted a vivid green field of shamrocks.
Striker spread the toes on her white hind foot, eyes crossed as she chewed her toenails.
“Try not to get too much fur on the bed, okay?” I told her. “This is supposed to be a pet-free room, you know.”
She glanced up at me, then whipped her head toward the bathroom.
Through the open door, something moved.
I froze. Was Fred in here cleaning? Had he heard me?
My heart pounded as I debated whether to stand here until I was discovered or shuffle backward toward the door as silently as possible. I couldn’t envision grabbing Striker and getting out without being seen or heard, so I stayed where I was. With my eyes locked on the bathroom doorway and my breath locked inside immobile lungs, I waited.
A light sound—like fabric brushing across fabric—made me jump. My eyes were drying out, but I didn’t dare blink them. Then, just as my lungs clamored for fresh air, I saw it.
The shower curtain fluttered. A moment later, it quivered again.
My breath rushed out in the form of a muttered curse. I stalked angrily into the bathroom, ready to slam shut the window Fred must have left open and block the breeze from scaring me again. But the window above the toilet was closed. The air in the bathroom was still and smelled faintly of peppermint soap.
The curtain rustled again.
Tiny pinpricks marched up the backs of my shoulders and up my neck. I had always known, deep down, that something terrible would happen to me in a motel bathroom. On some level, I had even been sure it would be a serial killer who leapt out from behind a shower curtain to end my life.
Well, I wouldn’t go without a fight.
My hand shot out, and I yanked the curtain back.
Nobody waited for me in the bathtub. But there, resting on the molded plastic, was the silver-sided rolling luggage Fred had wheeled out of our yurt two days before.
I paused before hauling it out of the tub, feeling the same way I had outside the yurt’s open door. This was a turning point. I might be able to fib my way around trespassing inside an empty room, but there was absolutely no way to explain rummaging around in another woman’s luggage.
As I contemplated what I would tell Fred if he chose that moment to collect Camila Aster’s suitcase, I felt momentarily disoriented. Why had I decided to come in here? What had possessed me to think this was a good idea?
I glanced over my shoulder. Through the bathroom’s open door, I saw Striker lounging on the bed, quietly depositing her fur all over a comforter the exact same color and pattern as the one in my yurt. That’s where I should be right now—in my own room, in bed beside Graham, asleep for another half hour before our alarms went off.
My fingers uncurled from around the suitcase’s handle. I couldn’t open it.
But as I took a step back from the tub, my scalp tingled. A heartbeat later, something landed on my shoulders.
A mouse, my brain decided. A mouse just fell out of the ceiling and into my hair.
I couldn’t bring myself to raise my hand to check. Instead, I turned my head one millimeter at a time until I could see the mirror over the sink in my peripheral vision.
Nothing sat on my head. No rats, bats, or spiders.
But as I watched, a section of my hair rose into the air. It hung there for a moment, just long enough to erase any possibility of a sudden gust of wind being responsible for its movement, then fell back onto my shoulders.
“Striker,” I whispered. “Pssp, pssp, pssp. Come here.”
A pair of soft thumps behind me told me she had heard my quiet call. As she weaved between my ankles, her gentle purrs floated up to me. Most of the time, she purred when she was happy.
Sometimes, she purred when we were no longer alone.
I lifted my chin and my voice. “Camila? Camila Aster?”
The shower curtain was still. Not a single hair on my head moved.
“Once for yes, twice for no,” I said.
The curtain fluttered once. Then all was silent.
I swallowed. If I died while I was on vacation and some strange woman started poking around my luggage, I would be pretty angry. Maybe even angry enough to graduate from spirit to poltergeist.
Poltergeists could interact with the living world.
Poltergeists had a tendency to break things.
Striker hopped up onto the side of the tub and reached a paw toward the suitcase. As her claws grazed the handle, a strange thought popped into my head. Camila hadn’t lifted my hair until after I decided not to rifle through her belongings. Had she been trying to stop me from leaving before I did what I had broken into this empty room to do?
There was only one way to know for sure. I lifted her luggage out of the tub. In the space of a breath, it was open on the floor and my hands were sifting through her belongings.
I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I had originally come here to find something personal, something with a strong enough connection to her that I could use it to reach into the void between this world and the next and try to pull her back. But she was already here. And I took the lack of any crashing furniture or breaking glass to mean that I had been right and she had been telling me to open the suitcase.
This wasn’t about what I wanted to find anymore.
It was about what she needed me to see.
One at a time, I picked up and set aside her personal items—her hairbrush, a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark, a T-shirt printed with a saucer-shaped UFO. Nothing my hands touched gave me any strong feelings. Then, as I gingerly lifted her undergarments out of the case and set them onto the linoleum floor, my fingers scraped against something hard.
A wooden box, just bigger than the palm of my hand, rested on the suitcase’s fabric lining. Its hinged lid was open. Nothing sat within its red velvet interior. It was empty, but I knew what it had been designed to hold.
This was a jewelry box, sized to fit a single bracelet, pair of earrings, or other beloved bauble.
But it wasn’t the size of the thing that sent a lightning bolt of fear into my stomach. It was the fact that I had seen it before—or one very like it.
This box looked exactly like the one that had turned my life upside down weeks before. The one the psychic stalking me had sent me to find. The one that had been haunted by a malevolent spirit capable of clawing at the back of my brain from a half mile away. The one I had seen reduced to cinders in the back of a vehicle fire.
This was an exact duplicate of the box Horace had used against me.