So was it Megan’s ghost Casey Crenshaw wanted to get rid of? Or was destroying the hotel about covering up Megan’s murder?
He’d come here looking for answers, but now he wondered if he was really ready to know the truth about this place—let alone the new owner. Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he bent down and shone his flashlight into the hole. There was nothing more in the space.
Rising, he considered the notebook. He felt like an archaeologist who’d dug for days to discover nothing. Just this morning, he’d been telling himself what a waste of time this had been. But time was something he had plenty of, wasn’t it?
He flipped open the notebook, hopeful, but was quickly disappointed. All there appeared to be were blank pages. Finn let out a curse. He was covered with dust and grime and had gone to all that trouble for nothing. He started to fling it away when his gaze caught on a page with scrawled words. He squinted to read the cramped handwriting.
I’m not a psychopath. I’m just sick. It’s not my fault that I kill them.
Finn felt his pulse jump. What the hell was this?
I shouldn’t write this down. I’m not supposed to tell anyone or they will put me away. But when I’m dead, no one will understand. They’ll blame me. It’s this hotel. There’s evil here, and sometimes it makes me do things I don’t want to do. I shouldn’t keep a list of their names, but I do anyway because they shouldn’t be forgotten.
I know other people don’t feel like this. But I can’t control it.
There is something wrong with me, and I have to hide it. She tells me to bury it deep so no one can ever know what I’ve done. But I can feel it building again, and it scares me.
I don’t want to do it again. Someone, please help me.
Please don’t make me do it again.
He examined the notebook, looking for a date, a name, anything else.
There was nothing. Just the one page, the writing becoming smaller and less legible toward the end. He told himself it could be nothing more than someone’s imagination on paper.
But he didn’t believe that. He could almost feel the author’s pain and his own because it confirmed what he’d come to suspect.
The Crenshaw Hotel had a killer—and Megan Broadhurst wasn’t the only victim.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SPRING SUN beat down on the compact convertible, but Casey Crenshaw refused to put the top up. For miles she’d let her hair blow back in a flame-red wave as she’d enjoyed the freedom and pretended she didn’t have a care in the world.
Once she’d hit the Montana border, though, the pretending got harder. She was going back to her grandmother’s hotel without her after all these years. And she couldn’t keep pretending that she wasn’t about to do something terrible to the town of Buckhorn to save herself.
As the massive, historic Crenshaw Hotel materialized on the horizon ahead, she let up on the gas. The hotel was just as it had been in her nightmares, ghost stories and all. Constructed of wood and native stone, it dominated the skyline. With seven stories, two wings and a tower, it was still the largest and tallest building in Buckhorn. It rose up against a backdrop of mountains and pines and Montana spring sky.
Casey felt that familiar jolt of mixed emotions, trepidation being the strongest. There’d been a time when she couldn’t wait to come here to spend the summer with her grandmother. She’d always been filled with excitement. Then, at sixteen, all that had changed. Megan Broadhurst had been murdered, and for the next ten years the Crenshaw Hotel was the last place on earth Casey wanted to be. It had meant not spending summers with her grandmother, something she deeply regretted. Especially now her grandmother was gone.
If Anna Crenshaw hadn’t died and left her the hotel and land, Casey wouldn’t be here now, she thought. But she’d promised her grandmother that she would return one last time to collect a few family items before the place was sold and demolished.
Casey concentrated on the feel of the sun baking her fair, freckled skin from the perfect blue sky overhead. But even her sunburn did little to distract her from the growing knot of dread roiling in her stomach. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and saw that her shoulders were as red as her hair. She would pay for not putting the top up miles ago. Even as a girl she’d always burned worse in Montana because of the altitude. Today would be no different, she thought as she slowed at the edge of town, turned onto the dirt road and drove into the huge, empty parking lot behind the hotel.
She purposely parked back here at the edge of the pines with the mountain looming over her and the hotel. The townspeople would find out soon enough that she was here. By now, most would have heard what she planned to do with the property. She could well imagine the uproar. Not that it would change anything. With luck, the hotel would be demolished by the end of the month.
She tried not to think about that or the impact the developer’s proposed truck stop, motel, gift shop and restaurant would have on the tiny Western town miles from anywhere. Or how it would change the character of Buckhorn, which sat on a two-lane highway that sliced across Montana and was tucked into picturesque, evergreen-covered mountains.
Heart pounding, she concentrated on just breathing in the pine-scented air. She’d forgotten how amazing it smelled. Or how blue the sapphire sky was. It was
