From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,3

of the view. Casey felt her eyes fill at the memory of the two of them curled up in the plush chairs up there. Her grandmother often read to her when she was very young. Later, Anna would always know where to find Casey if she disappeared for very long. She’d be up in the tower with a book, completely lost in another world.

Every June, her mother shipped her off, saying Casey was much better off in Montana than spending the summer with a paid nanny in San Francisco. Her mother was a partner in a large law firm and put in eighty hours a week. Casey seldom saw her, so she much preferred going to Buckhorn. Grandma Anna was always delighted to see her and taught her the hotel business from the ground up.

As she stared at the tower, the sun seemed to wink off the dirty glass of the windows as if the place had been waiting for her return.

She shivered in the heat and hesitated. Was she really up to staying here alone? She considered going to the Sleepy Pine, the only motel in town, two blocks away on the other side of the highway. But she wasn’t ready to face any of the locals yet. Then again, who would want to spend any time alone in an abandoned, allegedly haunted hotel? Certainly no sane person, she thought.

It was only temporary, she reminded herself. Once she signed the buy–sell agreement and fulfilled one of the promises she’d made to her grandmother, she’d be gone and so would the hotel and the bad memories along with even the good ones. Her grandmother used to tell her how strong she was. Well, she didn’t feel it right now. But it would take all of her strength to get through this, let alone to destroy this once-magnificent hotel, ghosts and all.

As Casey approached the back entrance, she regretted not calling the local handyman to remove the plywood on the boarded-up structure. What if she couldn’t get in without tools? She hadn’t called because she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was back in town yet. Telling Lars Olson would have been like putting an ad in the local newspaper—if Buckhorn had one.

She told herself that she’d figure it out. It couldn’t be that hard to get in, she thought. There might be some tools in one of the outbuildings on the other side of the parking lot if all else failed. As she glanced that way, her gaze strayed to the concrete firepit and the woods beyond where Megan Broadhurst’s body had been found. She closed her eyes for a moment, before quickly turning back to the hotel.

As she moved closer, she saw that one of the sheets of plywood barring the entry had been unscrewed from the wall. Someone, she realized with a start, had already broken in.

She cautiously stepped through the opening to try the door to the back hallway. Unlocked. The realization that any number of people could have gotten into the hotel over the past two years and destroyed everything inside had her heart pounding again. What if the family items her grandmother had begged her to save were already gone?

For all she knew, teens had vandalized the place with drunken parties. She feared what she would find, unable to bear the thought of her grandmother’s hotel being defaced. It was one thing to raze it; it was another to desecrate it.

She hurried down the hall and stopped abruptly, her heart in her throat. The massive main lounge was just as she’d remembered it. The plush inviting furniture, the huge rock fireplace with its dizzying rise up past the mezzanine and beyond. The registration desk with its beautiful mahogany wood inlay, the antique key boxes, the handcrafted wood cubbies and the period wallpaper.

She looked around the huge lobby and main lounge with its stone pillars and high-arched, stained-glass windows, its marble floors and expensive Persian rugs. The lamps and chandeliers were all original from the time the hotel had been built in the late 1800s, as were most of the fixtures. She’d forgotten how beautiful the place was.

Casey felt tears rush to her eyes. Relief swamped her, making her knees go weak. Nothing had been destroyed. She felt the irony soul-deep. She’d desperately wanted—needed—the hotel to be intact and not defaced and pillaged.

But as she looked around, she felt such a sense of history that it filled her with remorse at what she was about to