Out of This World

“A little dirt never hurt anyone,” he said in way-too-kind voice.

And how pathetic was it that I actually wanted to believe him? I tried not to fall apart. “You think we can apply the thirty-second rule?” I asked in a weak voice. “You know, if we pick it up within thirty seconds, it’s like no-harm- no-foul?”

“I do,” he said solemnly.

“Good. Because we can’t just leave it all here, right? I mean, we might attract those bears Jack mentioned, and he did say don’t feed them. Right?”

“Right,” he said dryly as we reached for the fallen meats, dirt and all. “That’s what you’re most concerned about: the bears eating your steak.”

See, this was the problem with good friends. They knew you too well.

We shuffled the contents of the boxes around-meaning Kellan gave me an easier load.

“You know what I don’t get?” I asked, again breathless after only one minute, and also boggled by my thought. “Guests pay to come here. As in, they pull out their checkbooks and pay.”

“Maybe they like the great outdoors.”

“And kamikaze squirrels?”

“And kamikaze squirrels.”

I still didn’t get it. “Are you telling me they all walk this same trail?”

Kellan lifted a shoulder. “Maybe besides a love for the outdoors and kamikaze squirrels, they also get a thrill out of killer bees.”

I laughed. I always laughed with him, I realized, even when things sucked. “You’d think they’d have put that on their Web site. Warning: Alaska is not for sissies.”

“I’m pretty sure most people know that already,” he pointed out. “Besides, you saw the Web site. It’s… lacking.”

Yet another concern on my mind. Hideaway B &B was mine now-assets and liabilities and all. I had no idea how good or bad things were financially, but one thing I did know: Whatever state the place was in, I was responsible for it, for the people who worked for it, for the bills, for still making a living back in L.A.

Yikes, I was going to have to be a real grownup here, not just the farce of a grownup I’d been up until now.

Scary stuff.

And funny, considering I’d never so much as bothered with the responsibility of anything more troublesome than fish, and yet now I owned a business.

A business I knew too little about. From the outdated Web site, it’d been difficult, if not impossible, to get a sense of what I was up against. There’d been only two pictures of the tall, mysterious inn: one in summer, one in winter.

The summer pic had been taken at dusk and had been too dark to be effective, not showing any of the inn’s distinguishing features, nor anything of its surroundings. The winter shot revealed snow up to the windows, and had been taken at night.

Snow.

Up to the windows.

During a night so dark, it gave a whole new meaning to the color black.

Boggling.

The site did boast that Hideaway was a hundred years old, and as we turned a corner and suddenly came to the clearing in which the inn sat, I could believe it. It looked just like the pictures, though I don’t know why that surprised me. The place was bigger than I’d expected, and it looked a bit like an old Victorian, but without the warmth and charm. Four stories high, it had a sharply slanted roof, myriad dark windows and eaves that made it look…foreboding. No, that had to be my imagination, because not only was the sun out but, despite it being early afternoon, smoke was coming from the chimney. Those should both be calming, right? So why did I suddenly have goose bumps?

My mom had warned me many times that Great-Great-Aunt Gertrude had been somewhat of a loony toons, and that no doubt her staff would be just as crazy. But coming from my mother, that had been, like, Hello, Mrs. Pot, I’m Black…

“At least someone’s here,” Kellan murmured, and nudged me up the walk with the big load in his arms, reminding me of the weight we were carrying. Or that he mostly carried. “Hopefully they’re expecting us. You did call ahead, right?”

“I called,” I said, the front porch creaking ominously beneath our feet. I looked at the hanging sign that read HIDEAWAY B &B. “But no one answered, not even an answering machine.”

“Is that code for ‘I didn’t really call because I forgot to think ahead’?”

“No,” I said a bit defensively. “My inability to organize or make plans and keep them has nothing to do with this. I really did try.”

It’d been frustrating and a little unnerving. This was a business, right? My business. “I e-mailed the contact from the Web site, too. Nothing.” We set down our boxes and bags on the front porch, and knocked.

No one answered.

I stepped off the porch, and looked up.

And up.

Wow, the place was tall. The chimney still had smoke coming out, so someone had to be here. Then I blinked because I thought I saw something. There, on the top floor, one of the windows…glowed, as if someone had walked past it with a flashlight or candle. But it was gone so quickly, I couldn’t be sure. “That’s odd,” I said in a normal voice that belied the way my heart had skipped a beat.

It got odder, when, in that same high-up window, I suddenly saw two faces, a young blond woman and a guy who looked like a twenty-something Harry Potter, their foreheads pressed to the glass as they stared down at me the same way I stared up at them.

And yet, in the very next blink, they were gone.

Vanished.

“Did you see them?” I asked Kellan hoarsely, because my voice had nearly gone, along with all the air in my lungs. I tugged on his sleeve. “There, in the window.”

“What did I miss?” He craned his neck and looked up in pretend horror. “Another squirrel tea party?”

“Ha ha, you’re a laugh a minute.”

But I couldn’t take my gaze off the window. Real or Memorex? Hard to tell. “Kellan.”

At the serious tone in my voice, he looked at me, amusement fading. “So what did you see?”

I shook my head. It sounded kind of crazy. “Never mind. It was nothing.”

Kellan knocked again, but we still got no answer.

Which meant I’d definitely imagined the couple. Oh boy. And they said losing touch with reality was the first symptom…

Kellan tried the doorknob. We stared at each other, both jumping a little when the door creaked as he pushed it open.

From inside came nothing but a big yawning silence.

“Hello?” I called out.

Nothing. Not a single sound. It was like the entire inn was holding its breath, and something cold and creepily foreboding danced down the back of my neck.

And then, from somewhere far upstairs, a door shut with a definitive click.

Kellan glanced at me, face unreadable. “Was that nothing, too?”

Thank God, I thought. He’d heard it. I wasn’t losing my mind.

At least, not completely.

Strange how much comfort I found in that one small fact. Still, I was feeling sorry-extremely sorry-that I’d so hastily jumped on a plane and hightailed it up here without more details. Honest to God, one of these days I was going to get it together and think things through.