Yesternight (26 page)

The door rattled behind us. We both jumped.

“What was that?” I asked.

Michael detached my fingernails from his arm. “Just the wind.”

“I'm not so sure . . .”

“Listen to it howling outside. It's bound to slip through all the cracks in this drafty old place.”

I stared down that thin wooden door and couldn't stop imagining an eye blinking on the other side of the keyhole, watching us, wondering when we'd strip down naked and finish the deed.

“I'll leave so you can dress.” Michael got to his feet. “I think we both ought to have some food and a drink.”

“Stand in front of the door while I change, will you?”

“How's that?”

“Block the view from outside.”

Michael looked to the door and then back at me.

“Please, Michael. I really do feel as though someone is out there. I know it makes me sound like a paranoid ninny, but I can't shake the fear that someone wants to watch us.”

His face paled at those words. He rubbed the side of his neck, and despite previously blaming the wind for the noises, he did as I asked with his own eyes locked upon the keyhole.

A
nother door in the house perturbed me even more than the one in the bedroom.

The front door.

Michael had gone downstairs to fetch his coat while I remained upstairs to arrange my hair, and on my way down the wooden steps, the air in front of me blurred like rippling waves of heat. I saw the door's black wood and oval glass pane through the ethereal haze of a dream. The music of a nearby piano muted into a distant hum, and I imagined a man kicking the door down and blasting me in the chest with a bullet that burned through my flesh.

“Oh, good,” said Michael, ducking out of the front parlor in his freshly pressed coat. “I thought I heard you coming downstairs.”

“Yes,” I said—a sound that escaped my lips as a flutter of air.

He joined me at the bottom of the stairs and took my hand. “Mr. Harkey has been serenading me with a depressing private concert in there. All I've wanted to do is run back upstairs and be with you.”

I pulled my attention away from the door. “Are you all right? Are you feeling depressed?”

His eyes moistened, but he mustered a smile. “I don't want to talk about any of that right now.”

“Are you certain?”

“Come along. I've heard drinks are on the way.”

Inside the parlor, upon an upright piano, Mr. Harkey was playing “The Coventry Carol”—a song that inevitably set my skin awash in chills, no matter where I heard the somber melody or whatever frame of mind in which I happened to be listening to it. Thick green drapes sealed off our view of the outside world, and candles and kerosene wall lamps provided scant light. Shadows darted to and fro across the plaster ceiling—monstrous movements. Playful demons.

“Hot toddies are coming soon,” called Mr. Harkey from over his music.

“Yes, so I heard; thank you,” I called back, and I joined Michael in front of the fire, where we warmed our hands, our fingers rigid, our breathing shallow.

Footsteps rounded the corner. I glanced behind us and found Mrs. Harkey traipsing our way with two glass mugs of a golden beverage that, indeed, smelled like hot apple toddies, minus the kick of whiskey.

“Your drinks,” she said, handing us the mugs, for which we thanked her.

“I hope you're not going to too much trouble over us,” I said, and I forced myself to meet her eyes, still petrified she had viewed me with my legs spread wide open.

“No, it's no trouble at all.” She wiped her palms on the apron tied around her waist. “Is Al's music too much for you? It's a little grim for Christmas Eve, isn't it?”

“A little,” admitted Michael.

“Al!” she called over the piano.

Her husband ceased playing and raised his face. “What is it?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Lind aren't here for the ghosts, remember? Stop filling the parlor with atmosphere.”

“Oh, come now,” he said, and the lowest keys rumbled beneath his fingers. “They seem like good sports.” He winked and embarked upon Beethoven's melancholy “Moonlight Sonata.”

Mrs. Harkey tightened her apron strings. “I'm sorry. He gets a little carried away for my tastes sometimes. I hope it doesn't spoil your stay.”

“No,” I said. “Don't worry about us.”

“I'll be back straightaway with the appetizers.”

Before we could thank her, she dashed out of the room.

Michael and I blew on our steaming toddies, and a potpourri of nutmeg and sweet apples flooded my nose. Once again, homesickness for Mother's holiday cooking assailed me. The entire family must have been wondering where I'd gone by that point. It wasn't like me to disappear.

“Shall we sit down?” asked Michael.

I opened my mouth to agree but became distracted by the sight of a peculiar object to my right: a lone photograph, mounted on the yellow-brown wall directly across from the fireplace. It was a studio portrait of an imposing woman with blond hair pulled back from a stern face that glowered. She wore a high-collar dress with a cascade of white ruffles gushing from her throat, and she sat in a dining room-style chair, her thick hands clasped in her lap, her feet planted against the floor in high-buttoned boots. She looked as though she wanted to spring off that chair and batter a person
with a rolling pin. Her eyes conveyed the message,
I do not want to be here
.

I knew that picture.

Oh, Christ
.

“Who is that?” I asked Mr. Harkey, nodding in the direction of the image.

“That is the grande dame,” he called over his sonata. “Mrs. Cornelia Gunderson, former owner of this hotel.”

I approached the photograph, parked myself in front of it, and,
yes
, recognized it—just as Janie had reacted to the picture of Nelson Jessen standing with an arm around his bride. Without a doubt, that pose, that scowl, that lusterless fair hair yanked back from a severe forehead—
everything
about the woman struck me as familiar, even though I couldn't put my finger on the precise date and time that I'd viewed the portrait in the past. My gaze dropped down to a small metal sign, mounted below the wooden picture frame. C
ORNELIA
O
GREN
G
UNDERSON, AGE
24, it said, and my eyes latched onto another name that stood within those block letters.

“She doesn't look like she's having much fun,” said Michael, now beside me, sipping his toddy.

“Do you see it?” I asked him.

“What?”

The name seemed so obvious to me, the letters almost fatter and taller than the ones surrounding it. Annoyance entered my voice. “Don't you see it, Michael?” I pointed to the center of the name Cornelia. “It's sitting right there.
Nel.
”

He squinted and leaned forward.

“It says, ‘Nel,'” I said again. “I recognize this photograph. I've seen it before.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm absolutely positive. I'm linked to this woman—I can feel it. It would make all the sense in the world, wouldn't it? A girl, calling herself ‘Nell,' swearing she came from the Great Plains, from a place called Yesternight . . .”

Michael's face remained still, but his eyes shifted toward me.

“She's why I'm here,” I said. “I'm certain of it.”

He swallowed with so much force I could hear the ripple in his throat.

“What is it?” I asked, stepping back. “Does that idea frighten you? Or . . . or are you debating whether I've gone off my rocker?”

His eyes softened. “Alice, you're a prim and proper school psychologist. A kind woman. This battle-ax, however”—he pointed to Mrs. Gunderson—“sounds to have been a killer.”

“I am not prim and—”

I stopped myself, for Mrs. Harkey had reentered the room not more than four feet to our left. She carried two pewter trays, one smelling of oysters and catsup; the other, of eggs.

“I have oyster cocktails and ham and egg balls for everyone,” she announced, and she set the delicacies on a lace-covered table butted up against one of the chair rails.

Her husband abandoned his musical accompaniment, and for a moment, ghosts and somber carols, unnerving photographs and savage killings were all but forgotten as we assailed the food and piled small plates with towering stacks of appetizers. My stomach growled, whether from hunger or anxiety, I did not know.

Michael and I took our plates and forks to a salmon-pink settee at the center of the room, where we sat down together, side-by-side.

“I'm not simply a prim and proper school psychologist,” I whis
pered out of the corner of my mouth. “Or have you already forgotten what we just did upstairs?”

“I'm not saying that you couldn't have been Mrs. Gunderson. It's just that you don't strike me as the reincarnation of a madwoman from the prairie. But if you feel as though you might have been her . . .”

“I do.”

Not more than a minute after I'd uttered that proclamation, Mr. Harkey took a swig of his toddy and said, “Well, then, dear guests. Would you care to learn more about the bloody past of the Hotel Yesternight?”

Michael and I shared a hesitant glance.

“Yes.” I nodded and sat up straight. “Please tell us as much about the history as you can. And there's no need to embellish with theatrics. Just the plain facts will do.”

Our host broke into a smile. “You're so entertaining, Mrs. Lind.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the plain facts are far more theatrical than anything I could ever make up.”

Once again, I peeked at Mrs. Gunderson's photograph, wondering if she agreed.

Mrs. Harkey took a seat in a whitewashed rocking chair and didn't take a single bite of her oyster cocktail, which she held in her lap in its frosted glass.

Her husband strolled into the middle of the parlor with his toddy in hand, and the echoes of his black shoes volleyed across the ceiling. Something banged against the house outside—presumably from the wind—which elicited from the fellow a cunning smirk that emphasized the youthful playfulness of his dark eyes. He
looked like a Boy Scout, poised to regale us with ghost stories over a blazing campfire.

“Let's begin this blustery Christmas Eve night,” he said, “by discussing precisely what happened inside these walls thirty years ago. Please steel your nerves for a tale of madness, of murders grisly and abhorrent.”

“Oh, Al,” said Mrs. Harkey under her breath with a frown of disapproval.

I lowered my fork back to the plate, for my appetite had soured, and my nose now rejected the smells of oysters, horseradish, and Worcestershire sauce, all intermingling with the sharp vinegar of the catsup. Michael crossed his legs and scooted an inch closer to me.

“Our story begins in Kansas City, Missouri,” said Mr. Harkey, his voice deeper, more serious and a little less stagy than before. He stepped in front of the fire, where the flames outlined his figure in an otherworldly orange glow. “In 1888, a Swedish-born shopkeeper named Frans Gunderson set off for Nebraska with a dream of building a hotel that would attract the merchants and businessmen traveling westward. Accompanying Frans was his young bride, Cornelia, also born in Sweden, a woman of solid build and strong character. She detested the idea of leaving behind her family, as well as the civilization of the city. But she was Frans's wife, so leave she did.” He gulped down another swig of the golden drink, as if to punctuate that last statement.

Beside me, Michael ate ham and cheese balls with tidy jabs of his fork. I myself couldn't eat one bite. I couldn't move.

Mr. Harkey swallowed and licked his lips. “Frans threw his entire life's savings into paying to have lumber hauled out to the middle of the prairie. He built a lavish inn that he named the Hotel
Yesternight, and he purchased livestock and seeds for sustenance. But very few customers arrived. Money diminished. Frans sought work elsewhere, picking crops, building railroads . . . whatever he could do to supplement what little income they gained from the hotel. Cornelia stayed here and fought to keep the dirt and the rattlesnakes out of the house, as well as the snow and the rain and the wind. She cleaned and cooked and tended the vegetable garden, and she hosted the occasional guest, completely on her own, without a man or a weapon to protect her. She lost several unborn infants because of her fatigue and malnourishment.”

I squirmed, as did Michael.

“She lost hope,” continued Mr. Harkey. “Folks say the barbarity of the conditions, the long absences of her husband, the months spent entirely on her own in the middle of these vast grasslands, turned her stark, raving mad.”

“‘Prairie madness,'” I murmured under my breath.

“Yes!” Mr. Harkey touched his nose. “Precisely. From the years 1890 to 1895, individuals who had last been seen traveling in this direction suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth. Even Frans Gunderson disappeared, around 1892 or '93. He had made trips into town for supplies every few months, but those trips abruptly stopped. People grew suspicious about the goings-on in this establishment. Sheriffs poked around the place. Cornelia kept the inn spotless, so no one ever spied even the smallest droplet of blood. She collected no records of her lodgers, so no one could link the names of the missing to the guests who had entered her hotel. No one smelled the decay of bodies or noticed odd holes dug into the ground. And yet people continued to go missing.”

Mr. Harkey peered at Michael and me through the dimming
light. Beyond him in the rocking chair, his wife's eyes shone in the firelight, while the rest of her face slipped into blackness. Wind blew down the chimney and snapped the fire about, and drafts pestered the flames in the lamps.

Mr. Harkey wrestled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his brow. “Cornelia Gunderson's downfall came in 1895 when she attempted to murder a young man by the name of Nathaniel Stone, the grown son of a former Civil War major living in Bern, Kansas. Nathaniel was the only person to ever survive one of Mrs. Gunderson's attacks. He became the sole witness to recount what happened within these walls, and I shall tell you what he said.”

I leaned forward on the settee.

“According to Nathaniel,” continued Mr. Harkey, “he checked into this hotel when traveling as a land surveyor. He found himself the only guest here, but such was the case in several other inns in which he'd lodged during his travels. He slept in a bed in one of the upstairs rooms and noted nothing out of the ordinary . . . until Mrs. Gunderson burst into his quarters with a hammer raised above her head, yelling, ‘Stop spying on me! Stop spying!'”

My eyes widened, and a cold and agonizing attack of paralysis solidified my every muscle.

“The hammer came down upon Nathaniel's head, once, twice, three times. He hollered and fought to stop her, and she whacked him yet again. Somehow, by some sort of miracle, young Nat pushed the massive woman aside, hard enough to knock her head into a wall. He ran out of this house and into the night, his skull bruised and badly bleeding.”