As she moved closer, she saw that one of the sheets of plywood barring the entry had been unscrewed from the wall. Someone, she realized with a start, had already broken in.
She cautiously stepped through the opening to try the door to the back hallway. Unlocked. The realization that any number of people could have gotten into the hotel over the past two years and destroyed everything inside had her heart pounding again. What if the family items her grandmother had begged her to save were already gone?
For all she knew, teens had vandalized the place with drunken parties. She feared what she would find, unable to bear the thought of her grandmother’s hotel being defaced. It was one thing to raze it; it was another to desecrate it.
She hurried down the hall and stopped abruptly, her heart in her throat. The massive main lounge was just as she’d remembered it. The plush inviting furniture, the huge rock fireplace with its dizzying rise up past the mezzanine and beyond. The registration desk with its beautiful mahogany wood inlay, the antique key boxes, the handcrafted wood cubbies and the period wallpaper.
She looked around the huge lobby and main lounge with its stone pillars and high-arched, stained-glass windows, its marble floors and expensive Persian rugs. The lamps and chandeliers were all original from the time the hotel had been built in the late 1800s, as were most of the fixtures. She’d forgotten how beautiful the place was.
Casey felt tears rush to her eyes. Relief swamped her, making her knees go weak. Nothing had been destroyed. She felt the irony soul-deep. She’d desperately wanted—needed—the hotel to be intact and not defaced and pillaged.
But as she looked around, she felt such a sense of history that it filled her with remorse at what she was about to do to it. The quiet took on an eerie feel. She was used to the main lounge being alive with staff and tourists. Not that the hotel hadn’t seen hard times before. One year, a wing had been closed and less staff hired as the accommodation lost its allure to the traveling public—until people began sensing the ghosts.
Word had quickly spread, and before long, the Crenshaw was listed among haunted hotels. That was even before people began seeing Megan Broadhurst’s ghost—a beautiful blonde in a white dress stained with blood. When the stories were picked up by a San Francisco newspaper and traveled across the region, the hotel was again filled with guests who wanted to spend the night in a haunted hotel in the middle of Montana.
Before her death, Megan had been one of the staff. Anna often hired students from across the country, along with some older full-time staff. Young people had jumped at a chance to spend the summer in Montana with room and board and a job. Plus, they’d loved that the hotel was haunted—and that there were hiking trails up into the pine-covered mountains practically out the back door, and summer street dances where they could meet other young people.
Like Casey, Megan had come all the way from San Francisco to work at the hotel that summer. Casey pushed the memory away as she had for years and headed to the registration desk. As she did, she noticed that the Old Girl had seen better days but was still in remarkably good shape. Yet it could never again be the luxury hotel that had hosted the rich and famous. Not even if Megan’s ghost and others were drifting through the hallways, patiently waiting for guests to arrive.
Casey shivered at the thought. Why hadn’t she sold the place without setting foot on the marble floors again? Because she’d promised her grandmother. But she would have promised anything seeing how distraught Anna had been the night she died—and she had. She’d made the two promises that night to keep her grandmother from getting even more upset. The first seemed easy enough. She would return and collect some family items Anna wanted her to have.
The second promise, an impossible one, she’d made on the elderly woman’s deathbed and had been broken the moment the words had left Casey’s lips. But when she’d finally agreed, her grandmother’s expression had softened. She’d released Casey’s hand and closed her eyes. Anna Crenshaw never opened them again.
Now, forcing away that memory as well, Casey retrieved her key for her room from the antique boxes behind the registration desk and headed for the grand staircase. There’d been a time as a girl when she’d dreamed of coming down these steps in her wedding gown to join her waiting groom. Childish dreams, she thought now as she climbed. Her footfalls echoed around her in the empty vastness.
She fought the urge to look over her shoulder. No one was following her up the steps because there was no one here but her. She told herself not to buy into any of her grandmother’s stories of Megan’s ghost. Anna clearly hadn’t been in her right mind the night she died. Why else would she swear that she’d seen Megan? Why else would she force Casey into a promise she couldn’t keep?
Yet as Casey reached the landing, a chill curled around her neck as if something had only just swept past. She cringed at her own foolishness. Even as she did, she was glad that in a few days’ time she would be finished here, the hotel also finished, taking Megan’s ghost and her unsolved murder with it.
Casey’s room had always been the first one down the mezzanine-level wing. Her grandmother
