'He knows what time it is. He is choosing to avoid us,” said Anna Henckel, who believed in stating the obvious.
'I wonder why,” Elliott Fisk said dryly, slicing a one-by-two-inch rectangle from his cinnamon roll and facing carefully away from Shirley, lest she think he was speaking to her.
'Well, he's going to have to come out and face us sooner or later,” Walter Judd said with a happy grin. He buttered another couple of biscuits to go with his three-egg, fresh-salmon omelet. “And when he does, he's going to have a few questions to answer.'
'He sure is,” Pratt agreed equably, working steadily on a plate of steak and eggs.
'If I knew his room number I'd go get him myself,” Fisk grumbled.
Anna glanced at him, eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Room 50.'
'Oh?” Fisk paused in his dissection of the bun. “Yes, well, I'll give him fifteen more minutes. Until 8:45.'
* * * *
Doris Boileau placed the small paper-wrapped bar of Camay on the bathroom counter, put a larger one on the recessed shelf of the shower stall, and took a final practiced look around. Satisfied, she closed the door to the room behind her and checked her watch. Only a little after eight-thirty and here she was already done with Room 48, way ahead of schedule. It certainly was a help when people got up and about their business early.
She took off one of her plastic gloves, glanced cautiously about, and had a restorative bite from the glazed cinnamon bun she'd been hauling around on her cart. She stuffed it all the way in with a pinky, then washed it down with a couple of swallows of heavily sweetened tea from a pint-sized insulated cup, while having another prudent look around. Mr. Granle didn't care for them snacking on the job, and she was in no mood to stir him up, especially after the snit he'd gotten into yesterday when she couldn't find her passkey at the end of her shift.
And all over nothing. Hadn't the key turned up this morning in the bottom of the linen cart? Really, it could have happened to anyone.
She put her glove back on and pushed the cart along the wooden walkway to Room 50, chewing reflectively. The extra four hundred dollars she was earning this week was going to come in handy. For the dozenth time she cast luxuriously about in her mind for spending alternatives. Maybe a trip to visit Flo in Victoria next February when she couldn't stand the gray days anymore. Maybe even a shopping trip to Seattle, if she could find somebody to share expenses with. But not with Nadine again. No, that was more than a soul could be expected to bear.
She knocked briskly at the door to Room 50. “Service!” she shouted, but she was already inserting the key in the lock. M. Audley Tremaine would be long gone, having breakfast with his group. Just once, she thought wishfully, it'd be nice if he
As she was to tell it for the rest of her life, it was her sixth sense, which she'd inherited directly from her Grandmother Strankman—a mysterious tingling across her cheeks, just below her eyes—that told her something was wrong even before she got the door all the way open. This, Doris ardently believed. Actually it was a combination of things, none of them consciously noticed at first, and none of them mysterious, but all of them different from the way things had been on previous mornings.
First, the drapes were still closed, the room dim. Second, the bed had been made up. Now why would he do that? And third, there was the smell. God knows, she had encountered plenty of peculiar smells after two decades of opening hotel-room doors first thing in the morning, but this was different; not a smell so much as a thickness in the air, cloying and gamy.
She stood in the doorway for a few seconds. “Professor Tremaine?” she called uncertainly.
No answer. Now she noticed the pint bottle of brandy on the near nightstand, and the empty glass next to it, caught in the shaft of light from the open door. Next to it was another glass with—my Lord, with a set of dentures soaking in pale blue liquid. M. Audley Tremaine with false teeth? She stared at it, shocked and embarrassed. The morning light illuminated rows of bright bubbles, clinging like beads of quicksilver to the crevices between the teeth.
'Professor Tremaine?” she called again.
She entered tentatively. From the partially open bathroom door light flooded onto the burlap-covered partition between bathroom and bedroom. She walked slowly toward the door, breathing shallowly through her mouth, her heart sinking with each step. Her ears hummed.
'Professor?'
Trembling and ready to bolt, she pushed the bathroom door all the way open. Her teeth were bared, her breath stopped in her throat. There were used towels tossed all over the shower door, paper wrappers from the drinking glasses crumpled and dropped onto the counter, a blow dryer with its cord neatly coiled. The hum was coming from the ceiling fan.
No M. Audley Tremaine.
She exhaled sharply, dizzy with relief, and switched off the fan. Just what had she expected to find, for God's sake? M. Audley Tremaine, crumpled in a heap on the floor in front of the toilet, the way Sheila had once found that poor old man when she was working at the Prospector in Ketchikan? Heart attack while at his stool was the official verdict. What a thing.
'Well, now, let's just get a little light in here,” she said aloud, pert and businesslike. She rubbed her plastic- gloved hands together to prove she was herself again. “And air.'
She rounded the burlap-covered partition, heading for the windows. Doris Boileau was a hefty woman, and when she moved forcefully she built up considerable momentum. By the time she realized that the shadowed, hanging mass she was about to brush against was not a bundle of clothes draped over the partition, it was too late to stop. Her right shoulder plowed into it, sending it swinging slowly away from her. Her eyes clamped themselves shut, but not before she had seen those dangling, naked feet, white and horrible. She stood paralyzed and empty- minded, her flesh crawling. Noiselessly the body swung back with nightmare slowness to bump against her, weirdly heavy, its silk bathrobe smooth and cool. She began to edge backwards, her eyes still pressed shut, the skin of her scalp cold and jumping. Don't look. Don't think. Just—
A man's voice sounded behind her. “What's—'
