“Yes,” she said, smiling, the kiss still warm on her lips, branded in her memory as the best kiss ever. “Anything is better than ghosts.” Even as she said it, she knew that wasn’t true. A killer would be worse. A killer pretending to be a ghost.
WORKING LATE AT night alone in the underbelly of the hotel was taking too long. The explosives were set, but laying the electrical detonator fuse, which was just a long length of electrical wire, took precision if the explosives were to go off as planned.
Guessing at how much fuse to put between the various bombs was the tricky part. The idea was to cause them to go off one after another in a chain reaction.
Just being down here with all this dynamite was so dangerous that a person often had to wipe the sweat away. A hand trembled at even the thought of what could happen with just a wrong move as the fuses were connected to each bomb.
But the alternative would be much worse. The fallout too much to bear.
The coil of wire was hefted, and the fuse was strung from one support spot to the next. So close now, working only at night, when no one would think of coming down to investigate the noise. It was almost done.
Once all the wire was laid, all that was needed was a battery. When it was time, the electrical current would be sent through the wire, causing it to heat up and ignite the flammable substance on the detonator end, which in turn set off the primer charge, which would trigger the main explosives.
Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Oh, how the Crenshaw would fall! But before it did, if anyone got to snooping around and came down into the underground maze of tunnels below the hotel... Well, that couldn’t happen. It wasn’t quite ready yet. There was one thing that had to be done first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sunday
JASON HAD NEVER had trouble sleeping. Usually he’d had enough to drink after work—he used the term work loosely since he sat behind a desk in his beautiful corner office to do the ridiculously easy jobs his father thought he couldn’t screw up.
Everyone in the company was aware that he couldn’t be trusted to follow through. In his boredom, he often missed deadlines, did a sloppy job or totally blew off the menial assignments. He was a joke. A bad joke.
He pushed that thought away as he stood at the window looking out at the darkness. He’d only taken the job here at the Crenshaw that summer because he’d put off applying anywhere else. When his father lost it, threatening to find him a job if he didn’t, he’d been desperate and had taken the first thing that came up on his computer.
There had been one opening left. It was the perfect job—cleaning hotel rooms and serving guests for tips. It was exactly the kind of summer job that would piss off his father. And it had.
He’d actually enjoyed the work, though, because he was good with the guests. He knew rich people. He’d grown up around them his whole life and knew what made them happy. He’d been great at it.
Megan had struggled, since she’d always been on the other end that made the demands—not satisfying them. She’d hated the job from day one.
He laughed to himself now as he remembered how she’d struggled even to make her first bed. “Have you really never made a bed in your entire life?” he’d asked, laughing.
“We have help for that.”
“Well, now you’re the help,” he’d said and showed her. Not that he had any experience, but he’d had a crush on one of his family’s younger housekeepers, and he used to love watching her make beds, especially the way she did the tight corners.
That poignant memory of that first day with Megan hurt more than he’d thought it would. For a while, they’d been close. She’d liked him; he was sure of it. Until she didn’t.
He stepped away from the window thinking he would try to get some sleep, since Patience had gone back to her room to pack. She was planning to leave. She’d had enough. Unless he could convince her to stay. He just needed to shut down his thoughts for a few hours. Otherwise, he would return to the night Megan died and those shadowy dark woods. If a tree fell in the woods, did it make a sound if you weren’t there to hear it? What about a rock to the back of a skull?
CASEY HAD AWAKENED early and, avoiding the kitchen, had finished up her grandmother’s tasks. Most of the items were small and would fit in the convertible. A couple of larger items she took down to Vi to have them shipped.
Basically, she was done once she found one more item that hadn’t been on the list. It was one of the first books her grandmother had ever read to her here at the hotel. She thought she’d seen it in one of the garden rooms. She headed there now, wishing she’d picked it up earlier. Unfortunately, her mind had been on other things at the time.
She was looking in one of the garden rooms on the ground level when she noticed that someone had been playing Scrabble. The board was laid out on a small table between two chairs. She wondered if it had been one of the last guests. She couldn’t imagine that any of the reunion staff had been down here playing.
Without thinking, she began picking up pieces to put the board away when she heard someone enter the room.
“I’m glad I found you,” Finn said as he joined her. She stopped what she’d been doing to smile at him. He returned that smile with an amazing one of his own. The man was so beautiful, inside and out, she thought with a rush of emotion.
“Are you winning?” he asked, grinning
