The guest with the complaint was Violet Walker, and I had been trying, and failing, to avoid her for the past week.
She’d arrived on a Tuesday morning, in her red Nissan Altima, bringing with her a metric ton of baggage both figuratively and literally. She’d once been a star pitcher for a women’s baseball team, and boy, she wouldn’t let a single person forget it.
The strange thing was, she was from Gossip, so why stay at the inn in the first place? I hadn’t asked for fear of being loaded up with more complaints.
“Mrs. Walker.” I smiled at her, trying for my meek “Charlotte Smith the maid” impression. “How are you today?”
“I’m unhappy.” Mrs. Walker was in her forties and liked wearing marshmallow pink sweater vests even though it was a temperate 80 degrees.
“Ah. Yeah. What seems to be the trouble?” I avoided tacking a “this time” at the end of the sentence. Gamma had insisted I keep my sassiness to myself. Besides, Lauren had doled out more than enough sass over the past few months. I didn’t blame her.
“First,” Mrs. Walker said, raising a finger, “I want to lodge a complaint about the ghost cat.”
“Beg pardon?” A habit I’d picked up from my grandmother. “I mean, excuse me? The... what now?”
“The ghost cat,” she said. “The phantom animal I keep encountering when I head up to my room after dinner.”
“Phantom cat.”
“Yeah. Am I stuttering or something, darling?” Mrs. Walker had a southern accent like most of the folks who came to stay at the inn. Apart from the groom’s family, who were from New York. “The ghost white cat that tries to attack me every time I go to my room after dinner. It runs at me from under a table then disappears.”
“It disappears?”
At the Gossip Inn, we’d had reports of murder, ghosts, and werewolves. Only the first had actually happened.
I’d have to add phantom cats to the list. But of course, there would be a rational explanation for this. Maybe it was a Halloween decoration that was weirding out Mrs. Walker?
“It disappears,” Violet said, sniffing and pressing a finger to the tip of her nose. “It disappears every time. I’m telling you, there’s a phantom cat haunting the inn. I demand you summon an exorcist to deal with it.”
“Do exorcist’s do cat hauntings?” I asked.
“Are you being facetious?”
“No, Mrs. Walker,” I lied. “I’m genuinely curious.”
“Oh. Well, that’s not my job to find out. That’s yours. I highly suggest you summon an exorcist to the inn to deal with this ghost cat. A guest might get a heart attack, and what will you do then? You’ll have the police to deal with for your negligent behavior.”
The crunch of tires on gravel distracted us from the conversation—a good thing since my sassiness was about to show—and my grandmother’s sea green Mini-Cooper rolled up to the front of the inn. She emerged from within, smiling.
Graceful as ever—Gamma reminded me of Helen Mirren in The Queen—she swayed over to us, clasping her hands together. “Good morning, Charlotte. Mrs. Walker.”
“Georgina,” Violet said, sniffily. “I was just lodging a complaint.”
“Another one?” Gamma asked. “Oh dear. What seems to be the problem?”
“A phantom cat,” I replied.
“A phantom… cat?”
“A ghost,” I said.
“A ghost,” Gamma repeated.
“Why is this so difficult to comprehend? There is a phantom cat haunting the hallway on the first floor, and it tries to attack me after dinner every evening.”
“If it tries to attack you,” Gamma said, “surely that implies that the cat is real?”
“Real? Of course it’s real. It’s a ghost.” Violet tugged on the front of her sweater vest. “Are you saying that ghosts aren’t real?”
“Heavens,” Gamma breathed. “I’ll leave Charlotte to help you with this matter, Mrs. Walker. She’ll know just what to do.” My grandmother gave me a sneaky grin. She knew exactly what she’d done. Condemned me to listening to Violet talk about ghosts.
Nothing frustrated me more than an unsolvable problem.
Gamma headed indoors, leaving me to my fate.
“As I was saying,” Violet continued, “the phantom cat. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll, uh, I’ll check it out for you, Mrs. Walker. Did you say this was a white cat?”
“Yes, a white one. Like a ghost.”
“Right, of course.” That was strange. We didn’t have a white cat staying in the cat hotel. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I hope so,” Mrs. Walker. “You certainly took your time dusting my mirror.”
She had requested that at the beginning of the week. I took offense to her insinuation that the mirror hadn’t been dust-free. I happened to be terrible at every cleaning task in the inn except for dusting.
“Do you have any other issues, Mrs. Walker?”
“Yes. The noise at night.”
I frowned. “What noise?”
“Every night at around midnight, right when I’m trying to fall asleep, I hear a commotion from downstairs.”
That was odd. “What type of noises are you hearing?”
“Talking. And thumping.”
“Have you tried to locate the source of the disturbance?”
“It’s not my job to work out what’s going on. I assumed that it was part of the impending Halloween festivities. I thought you were setting something up for the party. Keeping your guests up late at night because your organization skills are so terrible.”
“No, ma’am.” Wasn’t she just delightful? “But I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on” The phantom cat seemed like a lie, though I was always up for solving a mystery, especially during the quiet times in the inn. But the noise? That was a puzzle I would unravel tonight.
“You’ll see? Meaning you’ll leave it for days like you did the dust on my mirror?”
“I’ll find out what’s happening with both problems.”
“I should hope so,” Mrs. Walker said. “I’d hate to have to leave a bad review on TripAdvisor because of this. The last time I stayed in Gossip, I had a wonderful time. I visited the Belle-Blue Guesthouse, and it was great.”
And judging by the sweater vest you went on a golf tour while you were at it.
I forced a smile. Jessie Belle-Blue was my grandmother’s sworn enemy. And I didn’t like her much either. The pashmina queen caused trouble wherever she went.
“I’ll ensure that all your complaints are attended to swiftly.” Boy, I’d like to do something swift, all right. Maybe give her a kick in the seat of her pants?
Nope. Couldn’t do that. But the spy in me despised being diplomatic. Funny, that was probably why I’d made such a terrible spy.
“Good.” And without a “please” or a “thank you” she wandered off into the inn’s sunny grounds, occasionally fanning her face.
I frowned after her. With everything that had happened this week, I’d have bet anything that trouble was brewing. A witch’s potion in keeping with Halloween’s atmosphere.
Did I want to know what the results of the concoction would be?