Raven's Rest (5 page)

Slowly, I got to my feet with Lonnie’s help. He had a worried look on his face. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look awfully pale.”

I took a deep breath and looked around me in wonder. The room was vastly different now. The bed was larger, perfectly made, and was against the other wall. There was a gas fireplace, much like the one in my room, that hadn’t been there when I’d entered. No posters adorned the walls, just the sort of paintings one expects to see in hotel rooms. Even the carpeting was different. The closet had different doors and was firmly shut, but I knew that it now contained no shirts, no basketball shoes. And of Cole and Bryan, nothing remained.

Nothing except a faint whiff of cologne. No, patchouli. I’d smelled it earlier as well. Either Cole or Bryan had been doused with it. Now just the barest trace remained in the air.

“Do you smell that?” I asked Lonnie, who was still looking at me like he thought I might tumble back to the floor at any moment.

“Smell what?”

“Patchouli oil.”

Lonnie sniffed the air. “I do smell something. Like a really musky perfume.”

“One of them had been wearing it, or maybe they had been burning incense.” I kept gazing about the room, expecting it to revert to the state it had been in when I’d first entered. Somehow this pristine room didn’t seem as real as the one in my vision, which had been loved and lived in.

“Who?” Lonnie asked. He shook his head. “No one’s renting this room right now, Mr. Cook. No one is staying here.”

“There were two young men,” I said, pointing at a spot now occupied by some chairs, “on a bed there. They were making love. One of them looked just like me.”

Lonnie touched my elbow gently. He didn’t want to alarm me. Didn’t want to set off the crazy person. “We’d better get you back to your room, Mr. Cook. How did you get in here, anyway? Was the door left open?”

My headache was rapidly fading, and I was starting to feel more like myself. I rubbed my neck, working out some tension. “Lonnie, I’m pretty sure I’ve just been visited by a few of the ghosts you say have been haunting the inn. One of them was Coleman Hollis, the young man in the photo you showed me.”

At first Lonnie seemed like he was going to dismiss my claim, but he examined my face carefully and sniffed the air again. The patchouli was still hanging in the air, barely detectable but there.

“Fuck,” Lonnie said.

I had to agree with him. Fuck, indeed.

TREY LIT
up a cigarette and took a deep drag from it, savoring the flavor.

I hadn’t realized he smoked. That was a point against him. Was it enough to put me off? Probably not. Besides, he was only a fantasy potential boyfriend. I was sure he wouldn’t be interested in dating. Although I seemed to have caught him looking at me in a thoughtful way several times, but that was probably just my imagination. Or me being hopeful. Or maybe I had something stuck in my teeth.

It had been his suggestion that we take a walk around town after my first shift working at the coffee shop, ostensibly to show me the sights, not that there were many. We were wandering down Orchard Avenue, a residential street, only because it had a sidewalk and there was a small park at the end of the road. “Just some grass and a bench or two,” Trey said, “but it’s a park.”

Trey must have spotted something in my manner when he lit up. “What?” he asked, not belligerently. “Yeah, it’s a bad habit, I know. Still, I gave up murder and robbing old ladies. Can’t completely change overnight, you know.”

I smiled. “You say that a lot.”

“What?”

“You know. I know. You know?”

Trey grinned and took another puff. “Well, everyone’s got to have a trademark, you know. I’m guessing yours are those bigass glasses.”

It seemed like we’d been walking and talking for hours, although it could only have been about twenty minutes. As we approached West Park, which, as Trey promised, wasn’t much more than some picnic tables and a swing set, I decided it was time to get back to the subject we’d been discussing on and off all day.

“So what do you think about my experience? You haven’t said.”

He let out some smoke. “It’s trippy.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m sure something happened to you. I just don’t think I’m ready to jump on the ghost bandwagon.”

“What else could it have been?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve got some kind of mental link with the inn, and you were seeing a scene from the past played out before your eyes. A kind of visual regression, if you will.” Trey grinned wickedly. “You know?”

“Visual regression. You just made that up.”

“Yup. I’m copyrighting it in the morning.”

We had strolled over to the swing set, and Trey sat down, even though the spot was obviously meant for someone smaller than himself. Still, his butt was small enough he fit on the wooden perch with little difficulty. He kicked out with his feet so he could get some motion going. He smoked some more before flicking the butt into the dirt. “Thing is,” he said, “I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Everyone knows the Raven’s Rest is supposed to be haunted. Everyone. Hell, I think half the people who stay there only go because of the reputation. I’ve never seen anything, though.”

“Have you ever spent the night there?”

“Well, no. But I’ve walked by it plenty of times.”

“I’m sure loads of people walk by the White House and never see the President.”

Trey nodded. “You’ve got a point there. But say we go with the ghost explanation. What do you do next?”

I looked up to the sky, as if the answers might be hanging in the clouds. “Whenever I’ve watched horror movies, I’ve always marveled at how stupid people can be. I mean, you see a ghost, you get the hell out of Dodge. Right? Leave. Go somewhere else. This is different, though. That guy, Bryan, looked like me.”

“So? Doesn’t mean you have to get the shit scared out of you.”

“I think they’re trying to tell me something.”

Trey had some momentum going now, but he suddenly vaulted off the swing and landed in a cloud of dust. He brushed off his black jeans and said, “Doesn’t mean you have to listen. News flash: if they are ghosts, they’ve been dead for some time. Even if they have something to say, it ain’t going to change the fact that they’re pushing up daisies. I say check out and get a room at the Holiday Inn.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Suddenly Trey was right in front of me, and he grabbed my chin and pulled my face close to his. Before I had a chance to react, he planted his lips firmly on mine.

My shock quickly dissipated as I gave in to the moment. God, he was a good kisser. Our faces seemed to meld into one as he gently pushed his tongue into my mouth. One of us moaned. I think it might have been me. I put my arms around him, and the rest of the town, as far as I was concerned, ceased to exist. Oh sure, there were cars still driving down Orchard, and I thought there was an older woman walking a furry dog on a leash nearby, but that was another reality. The only one for me was Trey, his warm lips on mine and his thin, wiry body in my arms. Yeah, his breath tasted slightly of cigarette smoke. More than slightly. I didn’t care.

Just as suddenly, Trey broke off the kiss and stepped back. He pulled out his pack of Marlboros and placed one between his lips. There was a mischievous gleam in his eyes as he flicked his lighter into action. “I think you’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Helping out some dead guys. Good for you.”

I stared at him as he cupped the tip of his cigarette and touched it with the flame. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“The lip-lock you just gave me.”

He pocketed his lighter with a grin. “Didn’t see you complaining.”

“Yeah, but… what the hell!”

“You wanted to kiss me, didn’t you? Or have we been giving each other the eye all morning because we had indigestion?”

I hadn’t realized I’d been that obvious. “Yes, but… well, I just thought….” What did I think?

“Thought what?”

I looked around. The lady with the dog had obviously spotted our embrace, and from the look on her face, it soured her disposition. She was several yards from us, on the sidewalk along the park, waiting while the dog found just the right spot to do his business. I figured a driver or two coming along the road had also witnessed our kiss.

“I just thought if it ever happened, it might be under more romantic circumstances,” I said.

Still being impish, Trey blew out some smoke and sidled up to me again. He placed a hand on my butt and pulled me to him. We kissed again, longer this time and even more passionately, if such a thing was possible. I almost could feel my heart melt.

Trey broke off the kiss and looked into my eyes. “Romantic enough for you?”

“It’ll do for now,” I said.

The lady with the dog
humph
ed and moved on. Her reaction seemed to please Trey. “That’s Mrs. Donovan,” he told me. “She used to be the town treasurer years ago, up until they discovered she was using money that wasn’t hers to fund her lavish cocktail parties. So she can disapprove all she wants, fucking hypocrite.”

Understanding dawned on me. “You kissed me just because she was standing there.”

Trey seemed to think this over. “Yeah, I guess that was part of it. I did want to kiss you, though. Killed two birds with one stone, as they say.”

It occurred to me that Trey’s motives hardly mattered. I’d enjoyed the kisses and the sensations that resulted from them. I was still semihard, and if the bulge in his jeans was any indication, so was he.

For the first time in a very long time, I felt happy.

I realized I’d hardly thought about Kevin all day. Trey had dominated my thoughts, with his black clothes and his devilish smile and his pale eyes. He tried hard to put across the image that he was the town’s bad boy, but I sensed that deep down he was a passionate, caring soul. At least I hoped he was.

He certainly wasn’t Kevin. And that was a good thing.

While we had been washing up the dishes after breakfast, we’d briefly gone over our previous boyfriends. Trey—in his version, at least—had broken the hearts of several guys in Banning. I told him about Kevin but only in general terms. I didn’t tell him that Kevin had been a controlling bastard, a verbally abusive manipulator. That was a tale that would have to wait until we were somewhere private.

Trey and I continued our walk, leaving the park and taking a bend along Orchard, past a car dealership and a women’s gym. I had no idea where we were now, not that it mattered. I was with Trey, and that was all I cared about. I wasn’t quite sure what about him I found so attractive. He was “pretty” rather than handsome, with his elfin features, and he was sometimes exasperating to talk to as he changed the subject often, then would go back to a previous topic as if we’d never left it. And he still lived with his mother, although he was twenty-three. Granted, it was a big house, and apparently there was a sister and a cousin and an aunt living there as well, one big happy family. Something I’d never had. He put on a show of being lazy and disgruntled, and he bragged a bit about drinking and getting into fights.

But he wasn’t pushy, the impromptu kiss aside. And he was always asking what I thought, as if my opinion mattered to him. That was something new.

So far, so good.

He was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped to look cool despite the chill in the air. And he had a bit of a swagger when he walked. I wondered how much of his attitude was show and how much was real. It would be fun to find out.

Trey continued to take drags off his cigarette as we strolled along. “So are you going to ask me, or what?”

“Ask you what?”

“To come by your room tonight. I want to meet these ghosts of yours.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“Not sure I do, but you do, so I’ll keep an open mind. I like that you want to help them out. Shows a good heart.”

I chuckled. “It’s weird. I feel like I’ve known you for ages, and it’s only been a couple of days.”

“Maybe we knew each other in a previous life. You’ve obviously been here before, since Coleman Hollis was fucking you back in the 1980s.”

I knew he was joking, but I wasn’t sure it was all that humorous. I was born in 1990. Could I be the reincarnation of this Bryan guy? Was it possible? I had to learn more about Coleman Hollis and his boyfriend. That much was sure.

“HEY, MR.
Cook! I’ve got something to show you.”

I had now been in Banning for several days and had adjusted to a sort of routine. Thankfully, Gloria Ramsey needed a lot of help at the Coffee Cafe, and I was spending loads of time there. True, Trey’s presence didn’t hurt, but I’d have been glad about the job even without him, as there wasn’t much to do and working there helped pass the time. I’d looked at a couple of apartments but so far hadn’t found anything to my liking. Trey had promised to have the addresses of a couple of other places that were available when I arrived for my morning shift.

Despite several entreaties from him, I’d yet to show him my room at the Raven’s Rest. And I couldn’t really explain to Trey why I didn’t invite him. I wasn’t sure I knew myself. Partly I thought it was because I was afraid Trey and the room—or more precisely, the ghosts within—would clash. And I wasn’t sure if I was afraid for Trey or if I was being protective of the spirits.

It amazed me that the thought of living in a haunted place didn’t freak me out more than it did. Rather than frightening me, though, I found the whole thing rather like a mystery. Why were they there? What were they trying to tell me? And most importantly, why did Coleman’s boyfriend look so much like me?

I was coming down the stairs from my room when Lonnie called my name and waved at me from his position behind the desk. A glance at the clock on the wall told me I had enough time for a quick chat, so I detoured over to him.

“Call me Michael,” I said. “Please. Whenever you say Mr. Cook I want to look around to see if my dad is behind me.” Which would have added to the inn’s ghost count, as my father was no longer with us.