A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (12 page)

32. G.

The drive went more quickly than I expected. Tara was
talking almost nonstop and at first I was starting to get annoyed, but then I
realized it was just because she was nervous. Melody seemed to understand this
and kept the conversation moving along subjects not related to Spirit Boards,
credit card fraud, or prison. I was grateful for this, since I was in serious
doubt about what I was doing riding along on what seemed like a bad idea from
start to finish.

The reason was simple: Tara.
And Melody,
too, but mostly Tara.
If anything happened to her, I think I would flip
out. She was my girlfriend, true, maybe the only real girlfriend I had ever had
if you don’t count middle school (and I don’t), but it was more than that. That
big ‘L’ word was looming in the background. And damn, I’d fallen hard. From the
moment I saw her Rapunzel hair and her sky-blue eyes, I was done for. I reached
across and took her hand, folding her fingers with mine. I caressed the back of
her hand with my thumb, and just that little bit of contact was enough to
reassure me that I had done the right thing. I needed to be here.

The car came to a halt, and I realized that we were now
parked in the parking lot outside the boat launch. There were lights all around
and a security guard sitting in one of those portable towers you usually see at
the mall.

“According to my GPS,” Melody said, “This is the place.”

We got out of the car, grabbed our overnight bags from the
trunk, and walked up the wooden pier to the
Golden
Queen
. She was a big boat, and she was decorated from prow to stern with
white lights and red, white, and blue bunting.

“We’re really doing this,” said Tara.

Melody looked at her. “Yeah, it was even your idea.”

“I know. I just thought it would be easy. But at the worst,
they will just turn us away, right? And we’ll just drive home and pretend we
were never here?”

“Right,” said Melody.

I was not so confident, but I didn’t say anything. We had
come here to “stop Orla,” and Orla meant ‘golden queen’ in some Celtic
language, so we were here to at least figure out what that meant. And besides,
this might be fun, right?
Riiiight
.

We walked into the lobby and I had to admit, it was a little
intimidating. I had never been anywhere so ostentatious before, and all the
mahogany and marble and crystal chandeliers had me a little dazzled, and if I
was dazzled, then you could say that Melody and Tara were awestruck. None of us
had expected the
Golden Queen
to be
this luxurious.

“Now I know why Myrtle was so excited about coming here.
This is beautiful.”

“May I help you?” said a lady behind the check-in counter.

Melody walked over to the counter and pulled up her purse to
rummage through it. “Hi. We have a reservation. Margaret Clark?”

The lady looked at Melody for a moment and glanced at Tara
and me. Then she nodded and typed something into her computer. “May I see your
credit card?” she asked and held out a hand.

Melody pulled the card out of her wallet and handed it to
the lady. The lady took it, compared the name and number to what she was seeing
on the screen, and then handed it back. But just before Melody could take it,
the lady turned it over to look at the signature. She paused. “May I see your
ID?”

Tara’s hand tightened in mine. “Crap,” she muttered.

“Sure, just a sec,” said Melody, pulling her ID out of her
wallet. “It’s my grandmother’s card,” she said, explaining, “But you can see
that my address and her address are the same? She made the reservation but
she’s running late, so we said we would just go ahead and check in and wait for
her to get here.”

The lady scrutinized the driver’s license, the two addresses
-- one on the computer screen and one on the license -- and nodded. Then she
handed the license back to Melody. She typed something into the computer and
said blithely, “You’re aware that you must be eighteen to enter the Casino?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Melody, nodding. “We’re just here to hang
out with my Gram for a couple of days.”

“Well, I better not catch any of you in there.”

“No ma’am, you won’t.”

The woman gave Melody a tight-lipped smile and handed her
two plastic key cards in a cardboard envelope. “Your room is 244.
Up the elevator, down the hall, and all the way to the right.”

“Thank you,” said Melody in earnest.

I felt Tara give my hand a squeeze. I looked down to see her
grinning face, and caught a glimpse of some movement out of the corner of my
eye. A man in a dark suit standing at the back of the room was watching us very
intently as we headed to the elevator. I couldn’t tell if he was a con or if he
was casino security, but either way, I felt my gut clench.

The room itself was nice, even though it was small. Real
estate on a riverboat had to be hard to come by, so there was no wasted space.
Two queen-sized beds took up most of the room and a television in the corner
took up the rest. There was a small bathroom with a shower, but since we didn’t
actually plan on spending the night, none of us were worried about how large
the shower was.

“What should we do first?” asked Melody, sitting on the bed
closest to the door. “Do we scout the boat a little bit first, or do we just
pull the board out and get to work?”

“Maybe we scout the boat while we’re trying to locate the
restaurant for some food?” I
asked,
my stomach
rumbling.

“You just ate before we left,” Melody said.

“That was over two hours ago. And I’m a growing boy. I mean,
look at my muscles. Can’t keep guns like these going on just one sad little cheeseburger
a day.” I flexed my arm and Melody rolled her eyes while Tara giggled and stood
up on her tiptoes to kiss me.
That’s my
girl.
I kissed her back. And then I kissed her again because I liked the
first one so much.

“OMG, get a room, you two.”

“We’re already in a room,” said Tara, sneaking a sly glance
at Melody.
That made us all laugh
. After making sure
that I had a room key and Melody had one too, we left on our reconnaissance
mission / quest for food.

The ship was pretty big, but after walking it for a while, I
realized it wasn’t as big as we first thought. A large portion of the ship was
taken up by the Casino. The other large portion was made up of hotel rooms.
Other than that, there was a restaurant on the ground floor, a promenade deck
that went all the way around the outside of the boat, and a cocktail lounge and
ballroom on the top that we couldn’t go into because we weren’t old enough. Now
I could see why the lady at the front desk was looking at us so strangely. This
definitely was not a kid-friendly place. Luckily, we didn’t come here to enjoy
ourselves – we were on a mission.

After we ate and scavenged some pamphlets from the front
desk about the history of the boat, we headed back to the room, Styrofoam
containers filled with dessert and cups filled to the brim with soda. The girls
arranged the food on the slim table that the TV was mounted above and got out
the Spirit Board. I settled myself on the other bed and went to town on my
piece of dessert. “Just let me know when you guys are ready,” I
said,
my mouth full of cherry-covered
cheesecakey
-goodness.

“We’re ready,” said Tara. She patted a section of the bed
next to her, and I scooped the last large bit of dessert into my mouth before
settling in beside her.

Tara handed the notepad and pencil to Melody who put it off
to the side, and then we each put a hand on the planchette. It was hard to get
a good grip with us all kneeling around the bed, and finally we just decided to
sit on the bed and lean in around the board.

We exchanged looks. Tara took a breath.

“Hello, spirits of the ether, we greet you. Please commune
with us. We are looking for a spirit named Matthew. Matthew, will you please
come forward?”

I guess I thought that it would happen quickly. I mean, at
the clubhouse the planchette had started moving right away, but then I had to
remind myself, Tyler was the one driving it and Tyler wasn’t here. Also, we
didn’t actually think it would work, and now the three of us were intently
depending on Matthew’s spirit to come through. I shifted my weight on the bed
and it caused the board to rock. Melody gave me a look and I shrugged in
apology.

“Matthew, are you there?”

Long breathless silence – minutes stretched out, and there
was nothing.

Tara was about to speak again when Melody cut her off.

“Matthew? This is Melody. We’re here. We heard you. Can you
speak to us?”

I tightened my abs to make my slouching position on the bed
less uncomfortable and tried really hard not to feel either frustrated or
stupid. I looked across at Tara who was visibly disappointed and to Melody who
seemed almost as if she
were
angry.

“Come on,” she said through gritted teeth. “Matthew, if
you’re there, please
tell
us.”

There was a rustle from the other side of the room, near the
closet, and we all froze. Two sets of frightened eyes met mine and I felt that
familiar rush of adrenaline surge up my spine.

A very hard and loud pounding on the door made us all jump
practically out of our skins, and I jumped off the bed into a sort of standing
crouch – horse stance – like my kickboxing instructor had taught me.

“Hotel Security.
Open up.” The
irritated man’s voice was accompanied by another loud pounding on the door.

The girls made small cries of surprise, but my eyes had not
left the door. I thought instantly of the man in the dark suit down in the
lobby, the one I knew instinctively was watching us. I looked around for a
weapon of some kind–not sure at all what I would do once I found it—but there
was nothing. I balled my hands into fists.

The rattle of the key in the lock made a soft snick and the
door swung open, the dark shape of the man from downstairs looming in the
doorway, and another shape behind him: more feminine, with gray hair.

“Melody, how could you?”

Melody’s grandmother was standing in the hallway peering into
the room. She cast her glance around, looking each one of us in the eye. Then
her gaze slid down to the Spirit Board on the bed. “I see,” she said. “Thank
you, Mr. Lobo. I’ll take it from here.”

The man in the suit nodded at Melody’s grandmother, handed her
the key card he’d used to get into the room, and spun on his heel to retreat
down the hall.

“You have one
chance,
and one
chance only, to tell me what you three are doing here, or I will hand you over
to hotel security and let the police take you down to the station for
credit-card fraud.”

33. MELODY

I knew when Gram was bluffing. This was not one of those
times.

When she looked at the Spirit Board, I didn’t see anything
alarming in her expression – and that alone should have clued me in. I thought
of all the explanations I could try, but I couldn’t think of anything that was
any more believable than the truth. In fact, the truth, as strange as it may
be, was the most believable answer to what we were doing a couple of hours from
home, with a stolen credit card and a Spirit Board in a Riverboat Casino hotel
room.

“I can explain,” I said, holding my hand out to forestall
any ill-conceived explanations that Tara or G. might make.

“You had better,” said my grandmother.

“We were trying to contact Matthew’s ghost,” I said,
watching her expression for any sign that she was going to cart me off to the
looney bin. Somehow, I didn’t think that would be her reaction though.

She took a short, deep breath in through her nose, exhaled
and said, “And what makes you think you’d get a response?”

“Because we did it before,” I answered.

“On accident,” Tara added.

She pursed her lips and her eyes got sharp and shiny. “I
see. And why on earth would you come all the way up here to do something like
that? Surely there are cheaper hotels closer to home.”

“When we contacted Matthew’s ghost the first time, he warned
us about Orla.”

“And Orla is a Celtic name that means ‘golden queen’,” said
Tara, getting ready to gush on. She opened her mouth to continue before I could
stop her, but Gram held a hand up.

“And you thought this boat, the
Golden Queen
, was the place that Matthew warned you about?”

“Well, we did look for a person, first,” said G. speaking up
for the first time.

I nodded. “But then Tara overheard Myrtle talking about this
place, and we thought it was too big a coincidence to dismiss.”

Gram
came
the rest of the way into
the room and took a seat on the bed closest to the door. She slumped a little
bit, as if she were very tired. There was a long pause while she rubbed her face
and forehead. Then she
said,
her voice soft, “Did it
work?”

“No,” I said, suddenly sad. “Not even close.”

“Good. Using a Spirit Board in a place like this – a place
full of unsavory feelings and emotions, is just asking for trouble. The kind of
trouble you are ill-equipped to do anything about. Promise me that you all will
not try something like this again until—”

“Until?” said Tara.

“Until I can show you a little bit about
how to protect yourselves.”

I blinked. I turned to look at Tara and G., and they were
even more surprised than I was.

“Yes, ma’am,” said G. as Tara and I murmured the same.

“I’m sorry, Gram.”

Gram stood. “You think you are sorry now, but you’ll be even
sorrier tomorrow when you’re doing those extra chores I’ve been putting off.”

I almost smiled in spite of myself; I knew Gram could be
very strict when she wanted to, and I was likely going to be exhausted by
dinnertime tomorrow.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Can Tara still spend the night?
That’s where she told her mom she would be.”

Gram looked at Tara. “On one condition – Tara must never
tell her parents that I offered to show her the proper way to use the Spirit
Board. I know this isn’t Salem, Massachusetts, but sometimes people can be
quite nervous and twitchy about things like that.”

“I promise,” said Tara.

“Well, let’s get checked out of this hotel,” said Gram,
waving for me to lead the way. “I’d like to be back home and in my bed by
midnight. Your Gramps misses me, you know.” She winked; the mood dissipated
somewhat and we laughed.