Heather Graham - The Unseen

To contemplate a life here, in Texas, was just…strange.

Nothing wrong with Texas, of course.

But she had it all figured out. It was the water. In San Antonio, there was no coast. There was the river, though.

She glanced at her watch. Two hours until her meeting.

When she looked out the window again, she nearly jumped. In those few seconds, a massive crow had landed on the outer sill. The damned thing seemed to be staring at her. She waved a hand at it.

The bird didn’t fly away. It continued to stare.

Then it pecked the window.

She almost stepped back, then didn’t. She scowled at the bird. “I’m a United States Marshal, and I will not be intimated by a bird!” she said aloud.

“What’s that?”

Kelsey swung around. Sandy Holly had come breezing into the kitchen.

“You have really big, aggressive birds around here,” Kelsey said.

“We do?”

“Yeah, look!”

When she turned to the window again, the crow was gone. It bothered Kelsey to realize that the bird disturbed her. Ah, well, she had discovered earlier that one of the men she’d be meeting was Agent Crow. Maybe that knowledge had made the bird’s appearance seem like something more—like some kind of omen, for good or…

Sandy smiled, raising her eyebrows. “Anyone would think you were trying not to like Texas,” she said.

“No, no, I love Texas. Texas is great,” Kelsey told her.

“Maybe you’re just a little nervous. This is the big day, right?”

“This is it,” Kelsey agreed. Sandy Holly was proving to be a true friend. Kelsey had gotten to know her almost twenty years ago, when they’d been a pair of awkward eight-year-olds at the West Texas dude ranch Kelsey’s parents had been sure she’d want to attend. But she’d been terrified of horses, while Sandy was terrified of being alone. Sandy had ridden before, even at five, because…because she was a Texan from San Antonio. Texans rode horses and wore big hats. So, at eight, Kelsey had toughened up enough to tell Sandy she didn’t need to be homesick, and Sandy had promised Kelsey she’d learn to love horses. She did, Kelsey mused. Thanks to Sandy, she’d become an excellent rider. And, thanks to Sandy, she’d known where she wanted to stay when she came to San Antonio. The Longhorn Inn and Saloon.

It wasn’t as if they’d seen each other frequently. After a few years, they had skipped camps of any kind. But they’d met with other friends in Vegas to celebrate their respective twenty-first birthdays and kept up with each other through Facebook and email. When she’d first talked about applying to be a U.S. Marshal, Sandy had encouraged her.

Kelsey was particularly glad to be here because Sandy wasn’t in great shape at the moment—taking over the old inn had proven to be a monumental task, and there were problems Sandy had hinted about that Kelsey didn’t entirely understand. They hadn’t really had a chance to sit down and talk, since Sandy was running a business, which meant her time was limited. It was even more limited because she’d lost a manager the week before—the young man simply hadn’t shown up for work—and while Sandy had a great housekeeping staff of three, the organizational and hostessing duties had all fallen to her. Of course, as Kelsey well knew, Sandy could be high-strung, and she wondered if working for her friend wasn’t a little stressful. On the plus side, Sandy did like to hire college guys who needed a break on a résumé. None of them seemed to last too long, however.

Sandy walked over to some controls on the kitchen wall and squinted as she looked at them. “Hmm. I’m going to hope this turns on the music and doesn’t open the storm windows,” she said, twisting the dial.

Country rock filled the air.

“I think you got it,” Kelsey told her.

“How about some coffee?”

“You can actually sit for a few minutes?” Kelsey asked. “And tell me what’s up?”

Sandy poured coffee into cups and set them on the table, shrugging. “There’s nothing really wrong. The past few days around here have been tense, that’s all. People are so ridiculous!”

“Okay, explain, will you?”

Sandy let out a long sigh. “It’s just this haunted thing about the inn. I sometimes wonder if I was crazy or what to get involved with it, even though I like a ghost story as much as anyone. Well, you know I’ve wanted this place for years. I’ve always been fascinated by the history—especially what happened to Rose Langley.”

“The poor girl who was killed right before the fall of the Alamo?” Kelsey asked.

Sandy nodded. “Rose was killed by her lover—or pimp, depending on how you want to look at it—in Room 207. It’s a sad story about a good girl gone wrong. She took off from her parents’ home because she was madly in love with Taylor Grant, and when they were in Galveston, she ended up being more or less kidnapped by a notorious bad guy named Matt Meyer, who wounded Grant. She might have fought Meyer and gained time for help, but she seems to have been afraid he’d finish Grant off if she didn’t go with him. So, the revolution was about to begin, and Meyer wanted to fight for Texas. They came here, and apparently, Rose and Matt Meyer got into a terrible fight, and he murdered her. He’d been known to kill, so it wasn’t a surprise. We wouldn’t just consider him a criminal today, we’d consider him to be as sick and perverted as the most heinous killer out there. Oh—and, of course, he took off before the battle of the Alamo, or before anything resembling the law could catch up with him. But…”

“But?”

“I don’t know how much of this you remember from my emails,” Sandy said. “I had just bought the place—money down, no way out—when all of a sudden there were problems. I was already in here, deciding what to do about renovating a week or so before the closing, when a girl named Sierra Monte disappeared.”

“Of course I remember. But remind me what she was doing here, when the inn was in the middle of changing owners,” Kelsey said.

“Peter Ghent, the last owner, still had the place until closing. That’s how it works. I’d gotten a deal because there was no return on the down payment if anything went wrong. Anything. Ghent had some of the rooms rented, but he was like an absentee landlord. Sierra came here, apparently, because she wanted Room 207. Go figure. The rooms were super-cheap, even though it was a historic property, because Ghent wasn’t running it well. The bar sucked! It was all falling apart and I’d just started to renovate. But Sierra Monte insisted on staying. Anyway, she disappeared. A maid found blood everywhere and then the cops came in—but there was no body. And, of course, she disappeared from Room 207, so the legend continued to grow. I closed down for a bit when I took over to get the renovations finished. And then I didn’t rent out the room at all afterward but the mystery of the place encourages people to come in. You know how that goes. Now people are clamoring for 207. I’m careful who I give it to, though, because I’m afraid of some idiot freaking out in the middle of the night and jumping out the window or something! It’s hard to read people over the phone or through the internet, but, like I said, I’m careful. It’s rented out now—only because I have a big ol’ rodeo cowboy staying in it.”

Kelsey winced. “I know what you’re saying. At the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida, people vie for the room where Anna Nicole Smith died. And people book way ahead for the ‘murder room’ at the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts.”

“Exactly!” Sandy said. “But now, the stories about Room 207 are scaring people away from the inn, not bringing them in!”

As if to confirm Sandy’s words, a high-pitched scream pierced the hum of easy-listening music. Kelsey had just picked up her mug, but the earsplitting cry of terror startled her so badly that coffee sloshed over the brim. She leaped to her feet, staring at Sandy.