For years, the hotel had kept journals that guests could fill out, brief notes or paragraphs about their stay. It was an old tradition, until Uncle Charlie had stopped it a few years back. The journals made him uneasy. He didn’t like the idea of the Copper Star being described as haunted.
But he hadn’t tossed out the journals.
Sitting at her desk, she tried to recall where her uncle had stashed them, rose from her chair, and walked over to the old wooden cupboard against the wall. Drawers formed the lower half. Two wide doors closed the top half of the cabinet. Jenny opened the double doors to see stacks of old papers, faded hotel notepads, and bookkeeping ledgers from fifty years back, stuff she still needed to sort through.
She found the leather-covered journals stacked on a shelf beneath a pile of yellowed newspapers.
Jenny opened the journal on top, saw the date finely scrolled in blue ink, quickly opened each of the journals in the stack, and began putting them in order by year. From the dates, it was apparent the guest-book tradition had started after the Copper Star had been remodeled in the late 1990s.
In the years before that, what had been a luxury hotel back in Jerome’s heyday wasn’t much more than a flophouse where rooms could be rented by the hour, day, week, or month.
Since the town’s rebirth in the 1960s, legends of ghostly hauntings had been growing, attracting visitors, a way to get the struggling community back on its feet.
The journals helped grow the legends. People enjoyed writing down their experiences. Whether they were true or not didn’t seem to matter. For years, the journals had been kept in the hotel lobby, to be added onto or read by visitors.
Jenny thought of the man who had been killed in the room upstairs. When guests recorded their eerie experiences, they often mentioned the room number in which they had spent the night. She started skimming the pages, looking for descriptions of paranormal phenomena, particularly happenings in what was now the new section, the rooms Uncle Charlie had closed off.
Specifically room 10.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CAIN ARRIVED AT THECOPPERSTAR A LITTLE EARLY. HE COULDuse a beer, and after spending the day indoors, working with Jake Fellows and his construction crew, then going over last-minute changes with Millicent Beauchamp, he was way past ready to escape.
He settled himself on a barstool, and Troy Layton, the bartender, approached.
“What’ll it be?” Troy asked.
“Sam Adams. Draft.”
“Coming right up.”
Troy’s wheat-blond hair gleamed in the light of the neon beer signs behind the bar. He was tall and lanky, good-looking and clearly in good physical condition. He acted as if he was God’s gift to the women who hung around the bar. As long as he did a good job for Jenny, Cain didn’t care.
As Troy drew him a beer, Cain glanced around but didn’t see Jenny. He took a long swallow of the ice-cold beer.
Troy stood a few feet away, mopping a spill on top of the bar. “If you’re looking for Jenny, she’s in the kitchen.”
Cain made no reply, just quietly sipped his drink, enjoying a moment of end-of-the-day relaxation. When a blood-curdling scream came from the kitchen, he was on his feet and striding in that direction.
Troy was just ahead of him. “What’s going on?” Troy demanded of the cook, who was hurrying toward a set of stairs in the back of the room.
“Where’s Jenny?” Cain asked, as the cook rushed past.
“She went down to the basement.”
Worry tightened the muscles across his shoulders. Cain started toward the stairs just as he spotted Jenny’s head coming up. He breathed a sigh of relief. Until he saw the bleached color of her face.
“What the hell happened?”
She looked up at him. “Snakes.”
“Holy shit,” Troy said.
As she reached him, Cain gripped her arm. “Are you hurt? Did you get bitten?” He could feel her trembling, but Jenny shook her head.
“I’m okay, but there’s a nest of rattlesnakes under the stairs. I can’t imagine how they got there.”
Unease trickled through him. Neither could he. Cain took her hand and led her a few feet away. “You sure you’re not hurt?”
