He gave me a tip of his hat.
“There he is,” I said.
“Who?” She turned to look and then gave the man a little wave when she saw him.
“Maybe he’s a ghost,” I said. “He died in this hotel and now he haunts all the guests.”
She smiled for just a moment, then looked out the window. We were both quiet for a while. Just as she was about to say something, the waitress appeared with a bottle of champagne.
“Compliments of the gentleman,” she said, setting up a stand with an ice bucket.
I looked back over at the old man. He was drinking something now. He raised his glass to us.
“Who is he?” I said.
“I don’t know,” the waitress said, pulling the cork. “I’ve never seen him before. But he sort of goes with the place, doesn’t he? This hotel was built in 1927, you know.”
When she had poured two glasses, Natalie picked hers up and raised it to the man across the room. He tipped his hat again.
“Veuve Clicquot,” she said, taking a sip. “This is the good stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a little edge. “We’ll have to go thank him.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Ah, it’s nothing. Like you say, he’s probably harmless.”
We drank the champagne until the waitress brought our dinners. The wind kicked up and rattled the big windows so hard we could feel it in our bones. But it was warm inside, and a full bottle of champagne was making everything look soft in the light from the chandeliers. Natalie was a little too beautiful to be true, her green eyes sparkling. The whole night seemed a little unreal.
When I looked over a few minutes later, the old man was gone.
“Guess our friend called it a night,” I said.
“I hope he’s not going outside.”
“He’s a ghost, remember? Ghosts don’t get cold.”
That’s the line that would stay with me. That’s the line I’d remember the next day, when we would find out what had happened. At that very moment, the two of us sitting there in the dining room, finishing the last of the champagne, the old man was out there. He had left the hotel. He had walked down Portage Avenue. He had taken a right onto Ashmun, and had made his way south, walking on the street lined with snowbanks and dark empty buildings on each side. It was snowing harder. He must have been walking slowly. He crossed the little bridge, over the frozen canal that cut off the downtown from the rest of Sault Ste. Marie. He made it as far as the bookstore on the right side of the road.
Was he already freezing at that moment, when I made my bad joke about ghosts not getting cold? I’ve been there myself. I know how it feels. You’re disoriented, you start talking to yourself. Things from your past come back to you. You can’t walk straight. Then finally, the ultimate irony. Or maybe the ultimate mercy. You don’t feel cold anymore. You don’t feel anything at all.
But, of course, we didn’t know. We hadn’t gone back to the elevator yet, feeling happy and full after the big meal, and still a little lightheaded from the champagne. We hadn’t kissed in the elevator and held tight to each other. We hadn’t seen the present he had left for us, on the floor in front of room 601.
I hadn’t gone back down to the lobby yet, looking for him, or asked the woman at the front desk if she had seen him. I hadn’t looked for the doorman, or gone outside myself with no coat on, to look up and down the street for some sign of the old man.
We didn’t know he was out there, the snow covering him at that very moment. Or that the snowplow would run over his frozen body early the next morning, nearly cutting him in half.
Ghosts don’t get cold. I said it, and then we finished our dinner and went upstairs. The thing was sitting there on the hallway carpet, right in front of the door. The door he had seen me go to. Whatever it was, it was covered by the big dinner napkin he’d had tucked into his collar.
I pulled the napkin off. Underneath was a hat, upside down, filled with ice and snow.
The man had apparently gone out to the sidewalk, filled his hat to the brim, and then brought it back inside to leave it here by the door. The ice and snow were already starting to melt and leak through the material, a dark stain spreading onto the carpet.
“What the hell,” I said. I bent down and picked it up.
“That’s the hat he was wearing, right? The old man downstairs?”
“It is. But why?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Is there something else inside there?”
She was right. I reached into the frozen mess and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the hotel stationery, and there were five words written in capital letters with an unsteady hand.
“What does it say?” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I just turned the piece of paper around and showed it to her.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
Chapter Four
I took the hat with me to Jackie’s place the next day. I had come home that morning to plow the road again, having spent the night with Natalie on a strange hotel bed, after finding the hat with the ice and snow in it, along with the note, after going downstairs to look for the old man and then going out into the snowy night. I had come back to the room and we had talked about it.
“Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?” she had asked.
“I’m positive,” I said. “I don’t know the man.”
“Well, he didn’t leave it for me. I told you, I’ve never even been in this town before.”
“He might be confused,” I said. “Hell, maybe he has Alzheimer’s. That’s another reason to find him.”
So I had gone downstairs again. Nobody had seen the man, or even knew who he was. There was no sign of the doorman, either. The woman at the desk seemed to think he had gone out to look for the man. But she wasn’t sure.
I came back upstairs and found Natalie already in bed. When I lay down next to her, she told me she was feeling a little strange. “Just being here,” she had said. “In this place. It feels like it’s so far away from home.”
I couldn’t blame her. “Do you want to leave?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave.” Then she proved it to me. The streetlamp below our window cast a dim light on the ceiling, just enough for me to see her face as we came together. It felt different this time, whether it was just the place and the circumstances I couldn’t say.
The next morning, we left the hotel early, going our separate ways. I didn’t even check out at the desk. I just took the bill that had been slid under the door and left.
I took the hat with me. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I thought it would help me figure out who the man was.
If we had stayed there a little longer, if we had gone downstairs and had breakfast, then we might have heard about the discovery down the street. But we didn’t. We left before they found him.
Now I sat there at the bar and looked at the hat, rotating it in my hands. It had obviously cost some money, way back when. It was gray with a slightly darker band. The lining felt like satin. The crease ran perfectly across the top. It was in excellent condition except for the new stains on it. As the stains dried, they left the pale residue of salt.
“What’s with the hat?” Jackie said. “Ashamed of that dye job you’re walking around with?”
“I told you, Jackie. I was just trying to rinse out some gray hair.”
“For this woman, I know. You did it for Natasha.”
“Her name is Natalie.”
“Let me see that hat,” he said. He looked at the label. “Borsalino, Milan and New York. This was a nice hat. What happened to it?”
I gave him the quick version of the story.
