He sighed. “There’s something I need to show you.”
Once dressed, they went down to his room, closing the door firmly behind them. Casey had picked up on his tension. She stood in the middle of the room as Finn went to his duffel.
“I found this when I was searching the hotel for Megan’s diary.”
She couldn’t imagine what he’d found. But just the mention of the diary made her stomach roil. If he’d found something, why hadn’t he mentioned it before now?
He pulled out a small notebook in a plastic bag. He turned toward her, and she had a moment of panic. What if there had been two diaries? What if she’d taken the wrong diary? Megan and her head games. It would have been so like her to keep two.
He unzipped the bag and took out the notebook. “It’s pretty dusty. I have no idea how long it’s been hidden under the stairs.” He opened it, found the page he was looking for and handed it to her.
She stared down at what was written there, instantly relieved to see that the handwriting definitely wasn’t Megan’s. Megan had always been doodling on any and everything she could find when she was supposed to be working. Whoever had written this, it hadn’t been her.
With each word she read, her heart began to pound harder. The text sent chills through her. “Who wrote this?” He shook his head. “This can’t be real.” But she knew better. There was an authenticity to it. She could almost feel the writer’s pain as well as the darkness that surrounded the killer in him.
She quickly handed back the notebook, feeling as if just holding it connected her with the writer in some awful way.
“It just confirms what’s been bothering me since I began digging into the hotel’s history.” He put the book back into the plastic bag as if he thought it might be some sort of evidence. Then he returned it to the duffel bag and came back with a sheet of paper. He motioned for her to join him on the edge of the bed.
Sitting down beside him, she hugged herself against what else he’d discovered.
“I made a list of young women who went missing over the years after either working at the hotel or staying here,” he said.
Did she remember people going missing?
“Even before I found the notebook, I’d seen entries in your grandmother’s journal about female staff going missing. Often it would appear they had left, but they never returned home. The law assumed they had run away, I would imagine because the cases were never solved.”
Casey couldn’t believe this. “I never knew any of this.” She realized that she would have been back in California before it became evident that one of the female staff hadn’t returned home. Her grandmother had never mentioned any of this.
“I got to thinking,” Finn was saying, “Anna had a lot of return guests each summer. What if one of them was a serial killer?”
She shot to her feet. This wasn’t possible. She didn’t want to believe it, and she could see it was one reason he hadn’t mentioned it before now. “It sounds like you had too much time on your hands.”
“I tried to match up the years that young women went missing with return guests.”
She stared at him. “And?”
He shook his head. “I really thought I was on to something, but I didn’t have any luck. But these women’s disappearances were never solved. Because they were from somewhere else, they kind of fell through the gaps in the system.” He tossed the paper aside.
“How many?” The words came out high and tight. She didn’t want to believe this. Her grandmother had known; that was how Finn had found out. No wonder she’d wanted Casey to put an end to it by finding Megan’s killer.
“Eight, not including Megan since her body was found. That’s why I thought she must have been killed by one of the staff. But now...now I’m wondering if I was wrong about that. She could have been number nine, but the killer didn’t have time to move her body.”
Feeling stunned, Casey couldn’t speak. Nine young women. She’d thought it had just been Megan. But what if there had been others? She thought of the ghost sightings over the years. They’d all been young women. She swallowed, still refusing to believe in ghosts.
“I plan to turn over what I’ve discovered to the marshal,” Finn was saying. “It might not go any further than that. But I have to try. Megan said she’d discovered something dark and sinister in this hotel. I thought she was just being overly dramatic. But if true, then her killer might not have been one of the staff at all. Maybe there was someone else in those woods that night.”
Casey hugged herself tightly.
He moved to her quickly and drew her close. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” She shook her head against his strong, solid chest. “I think we could both use a glass of wine to celebrate the sale. Let’s hope your grandmother left a bottle or two in the wine cellar.”
She didn’t feel much like celebrating, but she could use a glass of wine. What she wasn’t sure she wanted to do, though, was venture down into the basement of the hotel. It had always given her the creeps.
“Are you really telling me that, in the months you’ve been here, you haven’t already looked in the wine cellar?” she asked, giving him a side-eye and a grin as she tried to hide her discomfort.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FINN PRETENDED TO be offended, then laughed. “I couldn’t find the key, remember? But I’m betting you have one. But before we go down to the dungeon, I want to go outside. There’s supposed to be a full moon
