She’d always loved this time of year before dozens of tourists filled the streets to buy cowboy boots and hats, curios and maps, photos and artwork of mountains and streams, everyone wanting to take home a little piece of Montana.
Bessie Walker’s bakery would be selling freshly made cakes and pies, turnovers and giant cookies that melted in your mouth. Earl Ray Coffield would always be the first to try whatever Bessie brought out of the oven. Axel Mullen would be behind the counter at the general store, his wife, Vi, back in the small post office slipping mail into the wall of metal boxes.
Soon the town would be packed with motor homes, trucks and trailers, camper vans parked in front of Vi’s antiques barn and Dave’s bar at the other end of town. There would be tourists on benches along the main drag—which was the highway that passed through town. Families would be eating ice cream looking up at the mountains as their kids took selfies and texted friends how bored they were.
For a few short months, the town would be alive as the tourists lapped up that old Wild West feeling. Once the snow began to fall, though, Buckhorn would become a near ghost town. Most businesses would be boarded up for the winter, the owners hightailing it south to warmer climes, leaving only a few hearty souls behind in the frozen north.
Not that Casey would see the change of seasons. Once she completed the sale of the hotel and property and picked up the things from her grandmother’s list, she would be gone before the summer tourist season even set in. She’d never see her grandmother’s huge hotel and outbuildings destroyed. Just as she would never see the truck stop complete with rows of gas pumps or the crowded convenience store with its tacky gift shop and tasteless restaurant. She would never see what it did to the town her grandmother had loved.
“Forgive me, Grandma,” she whispered as she squinted up at the sprawling structure Anna had given her life to.
In its day, the Crenshaw had been a grand hotel with beautiful detailing inside and out. The hotel had hosted presidents, kings and queens and movie stars. There used to be a stable out back that took guests on horseback rides up into the mountains and a huge outdoor swimming pool fueled by a hot spring. It was said that the water could cure anything.
The stables and horses were gone, along with the large pool. Only a few old maintenance buildings remained in the trees at the foot of the mountains.
She blinked and saw the hotel as it was now, its doors and windows on the lower level boarded up, weeds growing high all around it, a look of abandonment in its dust-coated upper windows. Her grandmother had always called the hotel her Old Girl, and now she looked sad and empty after being closed for the past two years. Anna had planned to return as soon as she was feeling better. Her grandmother had never suspected the day she left would be the last time she would ever see her Old Girl.
Casey felt her sun-scorched skin begin to tighten uncomfortably. With a sigh, she put the top up on the convertible, climbed out and opened the trunk. She hadn’t needed much in the line of clothing since she wasn’t staying long.
Pulling out her rolling suitcase, she stopped to look up at the tower high above the hotel’s center structure. It had been her grandmother’s favorite spot because of the view. Casey felt her eyes fill at the memory of the two of them curled up in the plush chairs up there. Her grandmother often read to her when she was very young. Later, Anna would always know where to find Casey if she disappeared for very long. She’d be up in the tower with a book, completely lost in another world.
Every June, her mother shipped her off, saying Casey was much better off in Montana than spending the summer with a paid nanny in San Francisco. Her mother was a partner in a large law firm and put in eighty hours a week. Casey seldom saw her, so she much preferred going to Buckhorn. Grandma Anna was always delighted to see her and taught her the hotel business from the ground up.
As she stared at the tower, the sun seemed to wink off the dirty glass of the windows as if the place had been waiting for her return.
She shivered in the heat and hesitated. Was she really up to staying here alone? She considered going to the Sleepy Pine, the only motel in town, two blocks away on the other side of the highway. But she wasn’t ready to face any of the locals yet. Then again, who would want to spend any time alone in an abandoned, allegedly haunted hotel? Certainly no sane person, she thought.
It was only temporary, she reminded herself. Once she signed the buy–sell agreement and fulfilled one of the promises she’d made to her grandmother, she’d be gone and so would the hotel and the bad memories along with even the good ones. Her grandmother used to tell her how strong she was. Well, she didn’t feel it right now. But it would take all of her strength to get through this, let alone to destroy this once-magnificent hotel, ghosts and all.
As Casey approached the back entrance, she regretted not calling the local handyman to remove the plywood on the boarded-up structure. What if she couldn’t get in without tools? She hadn’t called because she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was back in town yet. Telling Lars Olson would have been like putting an ad in the local newspaper—if Buckhorn had one.
She told herself
