Bloodless

22

It was quarter past ten that evening when Constance ascended the wide central staircase of the Chandler House. The hotel’s carpeting was attractive — intertwining gold acanthus on a field of deep scarlet — but even if the stairs had been bare wood, her steps, from long experience, would have made no noise.

She paused on the fourth-floor landing to glance around. To her right was a short hallway that ended past half a dozen guest rooms. To her left the hall stretched on for a long way before making a jog.

Although the hotel had a fifth floor, the stairway ended here, on the fourth. She stood motionless, wondering where the fifth-floor staircase might be found.

Constance had spent the last hour in the suite of rooms she shared with Pendergast — Coldmoon having been banished to the third floor when he refused to stop brewing his rank and no doubt carcinogenic camp coffee. Constance had taken an interest in the Savannah Vampire legend, and so she had gone in search of the hotel’s library. Although small, it had proven to be of interest. After noting the books they had on the subject, she had indulged in a second curiosity and made her way up the floors of the hotel, one by one, until she reached the fourth — and could go no farther.

As she looked down the hallway, she could not help but admire the care, taste, and expense that had gone into renovating and remodeling the building. The small china chandeliers, the flocked wallpaper, the sporting prints and landscapes combined to create an antebellum charm that was, somehow, also fresh. Constance sensed an obsessively careful hand at work here.

She began walking silently down the hall.

Everything she’d learned about Felicity Frost increased her curiosity. Nobody knew Miss Frost’s background, or who her family was, beyond the fact that she must have come from money.

In her careful inquiries, Constance had learned a few things. When Frost first converted the building into a hotel, back in the nineties, she had run the place almost single-handedly. She affected a pearl-handled cane and wore hats with veils every Sunday, even though she never went to church. In those days she had been anything but a recluse. She had a quick tongue and was not shy in conversation. Whenever anyone inquired about her past, or her “people,” she would happily enlighten them. Every time, however, the story was different, and those stories grew more elaborate and outrageous with each telling. Her great-great-grandfather had made his fortune in the fur trade, and she’d grown up on a réserve indienne in Quebec. She was a descendant of the only child of Bonnie and Clyde, born in secret and, on reaching maturity, invested her parents’ ill-gotten gains in a young company called IBM. In her wayward youth, she had successfully hijacked a plane to Cuba and made off with a suitcase full of smuggled gemstones. She was the granddaughter of Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, who, instead of being massacred by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg in 1918, escaped to the forests of the Carpathian Mountains, taking with her three Fabergé eggs. Eventually people tired of being made fools of and stopped asking. But the curiosity and speculation never died away.

Around ten years ago, it seemed, Miss Frost — then well into her seventies — had been struck by some kind of age-related condition. It was generally believed to affect her mind as well as her body, because her behavior, always eccentric, grew markedly more extreme. She withdrew from the day-to-day work of running the hotel and became increasingly dependent on Ellerby, the manager, to attend to details. She spent more and more time in her rooms on the fifth floor, growing increasingly reclusive, until at last she kept to them entirely. She restricted access to the top floor to just a few chosen maids and Ellerby. Now and then, despite slowly increasing enervation, she was subject to fits of sudden anger. Maids could come up twice a week, to clean and to change the linens, but they had to adhere to a strict schedule; and Miss Frost was never in those rooms while the maids were present. The only other people allowed to visit were her private physician, a Dr. Phyrum — and Patrick Ellerby, by this time the hotel’s proprietor in everything but title, who brought her all her meals and visited her in the evenings. Sometimes, late at night, piano music could be heard.

This was what Constance, in careful and diligent inquiries, had been able to learn. She’d considered asking Aloysius to dig into FBI databases to find out more but found herself hesitating. The story of a woman locking herself away from the world and spending time in private pursuits struck a chord in Constance. And beyond that, the southern gothic trappings, the rumors and whispers, were too delicious to ruin with the winter wind of truth.

Naturally the talk had included speculation about the nature of the relationship between Miss Frost and Ellerby. One line of gossip was that the old lady wasn’t as feeble as she made out and had killed the younger man in a lover’s quarrel. It certainly seemed that the older she got, the more she disapproved of Ellerby’s side interest in the stock market. But Constance dismissed the more prurient of these speculations as being too obvious to be true. What fascinated her more was the idea of Felicity Winthrop Frost, feeling her strength, health, and mental faculties begin to desert her, boarding herself up — like a modern-day Miss Havisham — in her luxurious apartments.

She had nearly reached the bend in the hallway when she stopped at a door to her right. Like the others she had passed, it was closed. But something was different — there was no number on it, and the wood seemed to be of a denser, thicker variety than the others. The knob was different as well — old-fashioned, of polished brass, with an ornate lock beneath it. It was set far apart from the normal-looking hotel doors that flanked it. As she stood silently, staring at the featureless door, she thought she detected piano music — beautifully dark and dense, perhaps Brahms — coming from above. Her hand reached for the doorknob.

“Oh, miss!” came a voice from down the hall.

Constance, who was rarely startled, was surprised now. Quick as a snake, she turned toward the voice, the hand that had just been reaching for the knob darting into the pocket of her skirt that held an antique Italian stiletto.

A maid had just come around the jog in the hallway, holding a large silver platter with several steel domes upon it — evidently a room service order. Constance had been so intent on the music that she had not heard the woman approach. The speed with which she’d turned, however, had so startled the maid that she stepped back, almost dropping the tray.

“You can’t go in there, miss!” the maid said, voice trembling slightly. “That leads to Miss Frost’s apartment.”

Constance said nothing. She let her hand drop slowly to her side.

“It’s past ten... she’s likely to be waking up any moment now,” the maid continued. “I’m very sorry, but she can’t be disturbed.”

“Of course not,” Constance said in a calm voice. “I was merely wandering. Would you mind telling me where the hotel library is located?”

“On the first floor, room 104.”

“Thank you.”

The maid curtsied — a little awkwardly, given the tray she was holding — then walked past Constance. Constance watched as she knocked on a guest’s door; disappeared inside the room for a minute; then came back out again, empty-handed except for the bill. She walked past Constance again with a small, nervous smile, then went out of sight past the jog in the corridor, heading for the service elevator.

Constance stood where she was for another few minutes, gazing first in the direction the maid had taken, then at the unmarked door. Finally she turned and — silent as a cat — returned along the hallway the way she’d come and disappeared down the stairs.