“I’d like them moved,” I say through my teeth.
“Right,” he says. “I’ll see if I can get someone down here in the morning.”
“It’s not even eleven, Paul. They can send someone right now. I know they can.” I fold my arms. “Should I call Jack Samson? He said to contact him if I needed anything.”
Paul thinks that over, then taps into his phone again. When the conversation ends, he informs me that they will send someone down in an hour or so.
I accept that for now, and I move to the next item on my list.
“Hey,” Paul offers cheerfully from the other side of the room. “People say there’s a ghost down here. And a tunnel for smugglers, apparently.”
“Smugglers?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Who says there is a ghost?”
“Guests.”
I’m not surprised. In fact, I’d be surprised if there weren’t any ghosts here. All the old places are haunted in one way or another, and the Dominion is well-known for that. Paul’s watching me, waiting for a reaction. Does he think that the mention of ghosts will scare me? I’m not afraid of a poltergeist. Not yet, anyway.
I swear I saw the ghost of a woman hanging at the top of the grand staircase at the Keg Mansion last time I was there. I hadn’t had too much to drink, either. When I asked the server if I was losing my mind, he laughed and confirmed I’d probably seen exactly that. The Keg Mansion used to belong to the famous Massey family, and after her mistress died, the maid tied a rope around her neck and dropped over the banister. The server told me there’s also supposed to be a ghost of a little boy at the bottom of those stairs, but he’d never seen him. The boy had fallen down them, and after he died, other children saw him there quite often.
Another time, I had an unnatural experience at the Winter Garden Theatre. My grandmother and I had gone to a show, and before the intermission, I had to use the bathroom. There was no one else out there, which was spooky enough, but then a waft of cold air came out of nowhere and passedover me, carrying the lingering scent of flowers. Lavender. The sense I got from that was strange enough that it sent me hurrying back into the theatre. Later, when I was doing some reading, I came across references to the Lavender Lady ghost at the Winter Garden.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, some people staying at the hotel say they hear noises at night coming up through the pipes. Like voices, maybe.”
“Which pipes?”
He points vaguely at the boiler room, at the other end of the subbasement.
“Those pipes have been checked out, I assume.”
“A hundred times. Nothing wrong with them. Weird, right?”
“Is it always voices? Or is it like a windy sound? A whistling? Or clanging, maybe?”
“They say it’s voices.”
“How long have people talked about that?”
“Way before I started working here, and I’ve been here fifteen years.”
Why is he watching me so closely? I fold my arms and stare back at him. “What doyousay?”
“I’ve heard things, but not voices, I don’t think. I’m not too sure.”
Decades of mysterious, ethereal noises suggest something deeper going on. I make a note and move along to the next point on my list.
“Ah, good,” Paul says as another man enters. “Inspector needs a little muscle, Gary.”
“What do you need?”
Gary’s younger, and from the tautness of the short sleeves on his tattooed biceps, he should have no trouble lifting these crates out of the way for me.
“Can you move some of these crates? I need to check on a vent behind them.”
