Without another word, without waiting for him to open the door, I strode inside. The usually welcoming warmth of the lobby seemed stifling, its ornate beauty like an overeaten sweet. Even though the hour was late, Mr. Sylvan stood behind the desk, and given the straightforward stride he made in my direction, I knew he had been waiting for my return.
In just a few minutes hence, I would behold myself in the mirror above my bureau. My hair tousled, my cheeks and nose red from cold, my lips swollen from a thousand kisses, my dress wrinkled beyond decency. My eyes empty of hope. But before that, the two of us well out of earshot of the hotel’s less pitiful guests, Mr. Sylvan leaned close.
“Had you delayed one half hour more, Mrs. Krause, you would have returned to find your belongings on the sidewalk waiting for you. I will not have you flaunt your affairs at the expense of this establishment. Our generosity to you is beyond compare, and I promise you this: I might not roust you out like the bum that you are, but walk out of these doors again, and I will bar you from coming back.”
Throughout, his message never rose above a hiss, and had I turned to look at him, I am sure I would have seen a forked tongue darting from between his thin, shiny lips.
I went straight to bed without so much as washing my face or cleaning my teeth. When the sun rose, I willed myself to sleep until midmorning. Then I clutched my pillow and wept into it. Such plans I had here. Such hope I’d brought along with all I needed to begin life anew. I pictured Carmichael’s face. “An ugly mug,” he called it as I dotted it with kisses. “God, help me,” he’d said, wishing he didn’t love me. “God, forgive me,” he’d said when he hurt me. Now I too wished I didn’t love him. I wished I hadn’t hurt him, but my soul was too empty to call on God to forgive me. Surely these were the least of my sins.
I took a long bath, punishingly hot, and spent the next several days in seclusion. Mr. Dickens’s work was my sole companion, and I found true kinship with Mrs. Havisham, deserted by her lover and left to rot alone. Is that why Carmichael gave me this book? Because he knew my fate?
Nearly a week had passed when, willing myself invisible to the other guests, I crept down to the bar, relieved to find it empty except for Bert, as ever, in attendance.
“Mrs. Krause.” He was shocked at my appearance. The secret to my beauty has always been a healthy confidence and constitution, and at the moment I had neither.
I took myself to what I had begun to consider our booth, and in a short time Bert was there with both a cup of tea and a whiskey, not knowing which would better suit my mood.
I drank both.
“She’s ruined me, Bert. That cursed ghost. Do you know what I’ve a mind to do?”
He’d been standing in attendance at my table, then reluctantly sat at my invitation.
“I’ve a mind to have a séance. Right upstairs at the landing.”
“Oh no, Mrs. Krause. You can’t go dabblin’ in that kind of nonsense.”
“Nonsense? I haven’t heard her or seen her since that night. And I need to know why she hates me. Why she would go to such pains to ruin my life.”
“You can’t blame the ruin of your life on some poor dead woman. What do you have that she needs? It’s someone else that robbed you. Someone with flesh as warm as yours but with a darker heart.”
“Who could hate me that much?”
“There’s some people who don’t know better than to grab on to hate and hold it. But it don’t have to be someone who hates you. Could be just someone who wants what you have.”
“But I saw her,” I whispered, though we were still alone.
“I know.”
“You believe me?”
He heaved a sigh from someplace deeper than I could fathom. “I been in this hotel longer than anybody else here. Nobody knows better what’s lurkin’. Could be that your heart and your mind just conjured her better than any séance ever could. But that kind of conjurin’”—he pointed and waggled his finger, drawing an invisible bridge between those two forces of my body—“that’s good and safe. You got a smart head and a good heart. They just got messed