“If you fall through the ceiling and break your leg and your skull and god knows what else, you’ll never prove me wrong about the ghosts.”
Sloane looked at him for a long moment. She could feel sweat sliding down her spine and between her boobs to soak into her bra, which was one of her least favorite sensations.
“You can’t prove a negative,” she pointed out.
“You can’t prove anything if you die falling out of an attic,” he said. “Come on. We’ll be out in two minutes.”
Sloane wanted to snarl. She wanted to shout that he was dumb, and his hand was stupid, and he looked like an idiot right now, and he was a moron for believing in ghosts even a little bit, and that he should go back into the room and lock himself in and lie there on the floor until a demon finally came and ate him, but she didn’t. Instead, she made herself step off the trapdoor, take his hand, and grab her own flashlight off the floor.
“If you’re wrong or if this takes more than five minutes, I’m smashing through the hotel ceiling.”
“Oh, I know.” Max’s hand was firm around hers as he pulled out the iPad.
“So not only did they wind up swapping husbands, Caroline sold the sculpture through some kind of art dealer, and guess who bought it,” Max was saying.
“Um,” Sloane answered. She was walking carefully, flashlight beam on the floor directly in front of her, trying not to think about how long they’d been walking. It had probably been two minutes, and she knew that. But it didn’t feel like two minutes.
“Shirley and Harold,” Max said, like Sloane was making conversation and not occasionally grunting at him. “Who put this big, ugly bronze thing that kinda looks like a vagina up in their front yard, where Shirley knows Caroline will have to see it all the time.”
Sloane came to a T-intersection and stopped, shining her flashlight a little way along the hallway to their left.
“Keep going straight,” Max said. “Should be about twenty more feet.”
“Shirley slept with Harold and bought an ugly sculpture just to get back at Caroline for letting her dog dig up her rose bushes?” Sloane finally asked. She felt like her brain was responding to Max’s Last Chance gossip on a three-second delay.
“In fairness, they both slept with each other’s husbands,” Max said. “I mean, that part worked out for everyone, sounds like. Except maybe their adult kids. But only one of them lives in town anymore.”
As soon as Sloane had agreed to not stomp her way through the ceiling, Max had led her off and started the epic tale of Caroline, Shirley, Harold, and the sculpture. It had been…soothing, actually.
“Next time you visit your parents, I’ll take you to go see it,” he said. “Okay, I think we’re just about there.”
They weren’t. They were at another blank wall because Max didn’t know what he was doing, couldn’t read a map, was going to?—
She took another step and realized there was a doorway on the right, with stairs leading down. They were narrow and dark and dusty, but when Max shone his light down them, the wall at the bottom had a handle and a lock. Sloane felt lightheaded with relief as they descended the stairs.
“Can you put your light on this?” Max asked when they’d reached the bottom. The space behind the door was shallow, only a few feet deep, and she was standing a few steps up. This staircase was even narrower than the halls had been, cobwebs and dead bugs and god knew what else collected in the corners of the steps?—
“Fuck,” Max muttered.
Sloane closed her eyes. “What happened?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, and she could hear that he was using that voice again. That voice was probably supposed to be soothing and nice and make people trust him when he said that monsters were real and the exit was this way.
“You need help?” she asked, totally calm, keeping her eyes closed.
“I don’t think this is a two-person—” There was a metallic clunk and Max swore under this breath. “Shit. Okay. The map says this lets us out into…” The door rattled as he pulled on the handle. Max swore some more.
“Let me know if there’s anything,” Sloane said, her eyes still closed, still standing a few steps up, still not touching either wall.
“Can you shine that around and see if there’s anything else on the door?” Max asked, tugging again. “Maybe I missed a latch or?—”
The door opened inward with a shudder and a creak straight out of a horror movie, and it knocked Max onto his ass on the step below Sloan. But none of that mattered because it opened, and so did her eyes, and she could see a floor and a railing and walls that were at least ten feet away, and suddenly tears were pricking at her eyeballs.
“Okay, so this is the library,” Max said, standing up and opening the door as wide as it would go before walking through it.
Sloane was through the opening so fast she nearly knocked him over by running into his back when he stopped five feet outside the door to look around.
“Sorry,” she said. Fuck, she was trying not to cry? And her skin felt weird? At least it was dark in the library. All the lights were off, no one around except books and desks and the glow of the exit signs at either end of the two-story room. “Sorry, sorry.”
