Black Raven Inn: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 6) (19 page)

“
So
what
do you need from
me
?” Matt asked.

“Research,” Taryn answered. “I want you to read anything you can about Parker Brown’s early life and then jump to the events on the night he died. I want to try to understand the psychology behind the drug use and figure out if anything happened that night that might have been missed.”

“You think it wasn’t an overdose?” Matt asked. “From what you’ve told me, it sure sounds like it was.”

“If that’s him hanging around the motel, then there’s a reason,” Taryn said. “I want to know what that reason is.”

“Could just be that it was an accidental overdose, he didn’t mean to die, and he’s not ready to leave. That he thinks his life is still going on,” Matt reasoned.

“Could be, could be. And it could be something else. Let’s cover our bases.”

“Do you really think that Parker’s disgruntled spirit is making you manic, though? And messing with you by banging the door shut, knocking things over, and stuff? That doesn’t sound like a ghost that wants something from you. Not anything good, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Taryn replied. “I guess if he’s upset that he can’t move on, and mad that’s dead to begin with, then he could have some rage built up in him. Death does strange thing to the living–just think of what it might be doing to the dead.”

“Now there’s a book,” Matt mused thoughtfully. “
The Five Stages of Grief for the Dead: How to Enjoy Your Afterlife without Bugging the Living
.”

“I’d start carrying copies around with me.”

W
ith the courtyard completed
, Taryn meant to get started on the lobby next.

Her last experience with Room #5 had been a little too exciting for her taste. She was trying to learn to distance herself emotionally from some of the things that happened to her but, the truth was, she couldn’t. She took everything personally. The fear she’d initially experienced of the paranormal inviting itself into her life wasn’t quite as consuming as it has been in the beginning but she was still only human; she still got frightened, still had trouble sleeping after something unsettled her, and looked over her shoulder a lot to ensure nothing was behind her.

Even more than the fear was the sensitivity she felt to the emotions the experiences brought about. She’d yet to meet a jolly, happy spirit. Just like the living, they dragged their baggage with them and she was more or less their luggage handler on the connecting flight.

Sometimes the sadness, fear, and anger became too much for her. After Jekyll Island she’d learned to take breaks, cool herself down a little.

Distance herself.

She’d planned on doing that with Room #5.

It wasn’t quite working.

Instead, it just pulled out the big guns.

It
took
a lot of creative energy, and more than a few hours researching hotels constructed in the same time period, to recreate the lobby. Considering the sorry shape it was now in, even Taryn was having trouble seeing past the ruin to what it must have once looked like.

It couldn’t have always been that bad. Right?

She’d once worked on a lodge out west for six weeks. It was once of those places built for a state park, back when families used to load everyone up in the car and take them on grand tours of the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, stopping at every state line to file the tired kids out one by one and position them in front of the “welcome” sign to pose for the sake of posterity. Back before roadside motor lodges and pancakes were replaced by Disney cruises and all-you-can eat buffets.

The lodge in question was run down and neglected and, though not without hope, a far cry from the spit and polish high rises of nearby Las Vegas–those overwhelming monstrosities that took up ten acres of land and had you worn out from their colorful, dizziness-inspiring carpets and two-mile hike to the exit before you even made it out to the blistering heat rising from the pavement of the Strip.

She’d been hired to paint the lobby. At one time the lobby had sported an Art Deco style, somewhat out of place in the desert’s simple coarseness but architecturally pleasing just the same. Bits of that Art Deco still existed in a few of the light fixtures that managed to hide from the multiple renovations throughout the years, but, for the most part, by the time Taryn got to it, the lobby was a mishmash of clashing colors, styles, and textures. It looked like ten contestants with over-inflated egos from “Design Star” had all drawn ten different time periods out of a box and were instructed to use nothing but items found in a landfill.

And… go!

“The heat here gets to a lot of people,” the hotel’s general manager had warned her. “Between it and the glare of the sun, some people find they have a lot of trouble this time of year.”

It was true she’d gone through more than her fair share of Excedrin Migraine that summer, but the temperature and sunlight had nothing to do with it. She still couldn’t hear the phrase “mid-century modern” without being reminded of the awful uncomfortable, stained, (once) white chairs that flanked the beautiful hand-carved fireplace (painted magenta during what
had
to have been someone’s acid trip in the 1960s).

Just about every unique, original feature in that lobby had been destroyed, tainted, ruined, or removed. It had been incredibly difficult for her to see past the heinous interior design and sad neglect the lack of funds had caused. It was deteriorating at a rapid pace.

Still, the old girl had some spunk left in her and eventually, once Taryn got to know her and became familiar with her bones through the eyes of her own imagination and Miss Dixie, she’d been able to work with what she had. The result had been a glorious window into the past, a stunning recreation of a lobby that spoke not just of a style popularized in a decade known for fun and opulence, but of a more innocent time when families could still be charmed by the unpretentious entertainment provided by the simplicity of nature. When board games together in the lobby, not fast Wi-Fi, had brought everyone together in the evenings.

She could
not
see past the ugliness of Black Raven Inn’s lobby.

“It’s not you, it’s me,” she told the drab, dreary little place.

She didn’t think that anything could make it look better–nothing short of a complete overhaul and massive renovation.

The space was too small, the layout too awkward (the weird “L” shape made it cramped for the guests checking it and gave the staff little room in which to maneuver), and the lack of adequate windows made it too dark.

“I’m just going to recreate it from scratch,” she declared, scrapping her original idea of using the old photos of the motel for inspiration. “We’ll call it more of a ‘inspired by’ painting than a ‘recreation.’”

She didn’t think Ruby would mind.

With new resolution, she set off to start faintly sketching her painting with confidence. She’d make it the best darn lobby that the Black Raven Inn had ever seen.

Not that it would take much.

She’d barely drawn the outline of the perimeter, however, when the low, mournful singing began permeating the room. It drifted through the walls, soft and low at first, a man’s sweet, warbling tenor. Taryn hesitated with her charcoal held aloft, barely breathing. She hardly dared to breathe.

The singing voice was not pitch perfect; it was tentative and reedy, almost thin in some places. She listened as it strained to hit the higher notes and then fell dipped back down, catching itself in its hesitation. It probably would not have been played on today’s radio, at least not before an over-zealous producer got ahold of it with some auto pitch and made the artist suffer through endless takes.

Still, there was something soothing and beautiful about its frailty. Under the imperfections was a heavy emotional undercurrent that enraptured Taryn and threatened to lift her off the ground and carry her away. The sadness engulfed her, playing to her sensitivities, until she wanted to cry. He was singing nonsense, something about dancing and maybe even a bird or a likewise peculiar entity but she didn’t care. The beauty of the music was immeasurable.

Taryn knew it was Parker Brown. She’d listened to the three albums he’d made with the band and would have known his voice anywhere. This was not a recording, however. This was the real Parker, just him and his guitar. He was there in the room with her, singing to her, and reaching down into her heart–pulling something up from her by the strings.

For a moment Taryn closed her eyes and let herself fall. She imagined being Ruby Jane, young and falling in love with the man who created such beautiful music.

She envisioned her sitting outside with the others, or alone in a cheap motel room on the road, being serenaded by him in the middle of the night while everyone else in the world was asleep. Sitting cross-legged on the a sagging bed, motel-room refrigerator humming beside her, a bedsheet pulled up to her neck to cover her otherwise exposed chest, watching his fingers (the same fingers that had just played over her skin) strum the strings with tenderness. Knowing that while the rest of the world thought he was
theirs
, at that one moment he was
hers
, and nobody else’s. What kind of power that much have been, what kind of heat.

Taryn’s heart ached for the sorrow of the melody and heartbreak in the voice. She thought of her own losses, of the hole in her heart that had mended several times but continued to grow even under the scar tissue.

She began to weaken, thinking of Parker and the terrible loss Ruby must have felt, of the undeniable tragedy and senselessness his death had been.

Taryn shook her head and muttered, “
Damn
it, Parker, just a little bit more. Just a little bit longer. If you just could have made it…”

“Why did he die?” she’d asked her grandmother when she was nine, after learning a family friend had committed suicide. “Why did he use that gun?”

“Because,” her grandmother had answered unhappily, running a brush with care through Taryn’s still silky little-girl hair. They were on their way to the funeral.

“Because
why
?”

“Because he was just too sad and wanted to feel better.”

Just too sad…

The singing continued and Taryn felt the charcoal tenderly removed from her fingers and descend to the floor, where the long, thin stick broke in two. She reached down and picked half of it up just as the canvas in front of her was gently lifted and released to the ground at her feet. The wooden easel fell over in one fluid movement, the crash softened by the muddy shag carpet.

He was close to her now, whispering into her ear. She could feel him as much as she could hear him. His lips were practically on her skin, seductive and inviting. If she reached back with her hands just a little, she thought she might be able to touch him, but she didn’t try. To make something solid of it would be to spoil it. She wasn’t ready for that; curiosity beset her.

And then she was paralyzed with fear, a prisoner within her own body. To have the desire to walk, run, and cry out but yet feel as though the body couldn’t remember how to do those things…
that
was almost the most terrifying thing of all.

For Taryn, the seduction, the
gentleness
, was just as horrific as the anger and temper–perhaps even more so. The anger was madness; it was hostility. The fury and rage were, together, a volcano of heat and uninhabited pressure–the eruption of bottled-up emotions, pent-up frustration, which could not be contained.

The anger was not human, it was something wild and animalistic that could only be found in untamed, uncontrollable nature.

This, though…
this
was controlled. This was
deliberate
.

It knew what it was doing and more disturbingly, did it for a
reason
. It had a purpose and a method.

Even
more painful
, Taryn thought as the icy fear that chilled her feet and froze her hands fought with the burning heat that flooded through her chest and sent her head spinning,
even worse was that it knew what would get to her
. He’d watched her, gotten inside her mind (and worse, her heart) and knew what she was all about.

“No,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and raspy with dread.

He had her number.

When the fury and irrepressible violence had worked only to frighten her but not sway her, when the manic obsession and mental anguish of working without stopping and sleeping had not deterred her from her path, it turned to the one thing she couldn’t fight–desolation. Throw sadness at her and she weakened. Taryn’s kryptonite was grief, both her own and that of those around her. It pulled her in and drowned her every time.

The singing stopped and Taryn could breathe easier. She was shaking, but she could breathe. She wanted to call Matt. Hell, she wanted to call
David
, but she couldn’t.

This would follow her. Whatever Parker wanted from her, he wouldn’t give up until he had it. She’d already seen that.

Shaky, and still clutching the stick of charcoal, Taryn let herself out of the lobby, using the back door that led to the courtyard. Following breadcrumbs dropped by an unseen hand, she strode down the overgrown sidewalk, her sneakers flattening the thorny weeds that grabbed at her legs and tried to attach themselves to her legs.

Room #5 was soon before her, a gingerbread house made entirely of candy, the icing and gumdrops the faint guitar chords that resounded through the rickety door.

She extended the broken piece of charcoal to the door knob, Gretel with the chicken bone fooling the blind old witch.

Sparks threatened to fly from the metal but, without the contact of her skin, fizzled out.

It was all a façade, a trick to get her in the oven. There was no melancholy singer with a beautiful soul waiting for her to rescue him. There couldn’t be a deeper connection that drew her to him, something beyond either one of them.

There was only heat and fire, intent on burning her until it got what it needed.

Taryn entered the room.