The Weekend Was Murder

FICTION

A Candidate for Murder
The Dark and Deadly Pool
Don’t Scream
The Ghosts of Now
Ghost Town: Seven Ghostly Stories
The Haunting
In the Face of Danger
The Island of Dangerous Dreams
The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore
Laugh Till You Cry
Murdered, My Sweet
The Name of the Game Was Murder
Nightmare
Nobody’s There
The Other Side of Dark
Playing for Keeps
Search for the Shadowman
Secret, Silent Screams
Shadowmaker
The Specter
Spirit Seeker
The Stalker
The Trap
The Weekend Was
Murder
!
Whispers from the Dead
Who Are You?

NONFICTION

The Making of a Writer

A chilling silence filled the nineteenth floor of the Ridley Hotel as Tina Martinez and I stepped from the elevator into the hallway. Mutely lighted, the dark-paneled walls seemed to breathe inward, as though someone had suddenly stopped talking to listen intently. Tina nervously glanced to the right and the left and gave a little shiver.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Tina whispered, and the whisper sounded so scary, the hair on my arms rose and began to tickle. I stared down the long, dim hallway behind us, wondering what she’d seen that I couldn’t see.

Tina, who works in hotel security, tiptoed down the hall to the second door on the right. She raised a hand to knock, but stopped, turned, and stared at me with the same terrified expression on her face that I’d seen the week before when we went to a horror movie together.

“Tina, what’s the matter with you?” I asked. Chills wiggled up and down my backbone.

“Never mind,” she mumbled.

Never mind? What kind of an answer was that? And what was the matter with me that I’d let my imagination lead me from the beautiful Ridley Hotel into a make-believe house of horrors? I took a deep breath, threw back my shoulders, and stood as straight as I could, which is enough for most people to take notice of, since I’m five feet, ten inches tall.

Mary Elizabeth Rafferty
, I told myself,
don’t be a nincompoop. Even though Tina is behaving like a refugee from a Godzilla commercial, there is nothing to be afraid of here. Nothing
.

“Tina,” I said in a normal voice, which seemed to boom and echo down the empty hallway, making me shudder, “this is weird. It’s ten o’clock at night, I’m going off duty in the health club, and you rush in and practically beg me to come up to the nineteenth floor with you. So I do, and now you act like Frankenstein’s monster is on the other side of that door. What are we doing up here, anyway?”

She struggled to get a grip on herself before she answered. “Security got another complaint about noise and loud music in room nineteen twenty-seven,” she said. “Any time we get a complaint we have to check it out, and this time it was my turn.”

What noise and loud music? I listened intently to the silence and looked at the number on the door to make sure we were on the right floor.

“I know,” Tina said before I had a chance to ask another question. “You don’t hear anything. We never do.”

“Maybe whoever’s staying in nineteen twenty-seven heard us coming and turned down the television.”

Tina shook her head. “Nobody’s staying there. The desk rarely assigns this room to a hotel guest—only when the Ridley’s overbooked and someone with a reservation gets angry and starts making threats.” She paused and looked nervously at the door of nineteen twenty-seven before she added, “And then we get a different kind of complaint.”

“I don’t get it. Complaint about what?”

“About the ghost,” she said. “The Ridley tries to keep it quiet, but room nineteen twenty-seven is haunted. The maids won’t set foot inside to clean unless they’ve got company, and the one who does bed turn-downs and leaves chocolate mints on pillows around nine o’clock each night wouldn’t be caught dead inside nineteen twenty-seven when it’s occupied.”

I flattened myself against the wall—the opposite wall—and tried to make myself believe it wasn’t holding me up. “Aw, come on,” I said.

Tina, who is nineteen—three years older than I am—plans on becoming a psychiatrist someday. She’s usually very levelheaded, even though she likes to point out our psychological hang-ups and offer a lot more advice than anyone wants, and this suddenly trembling excuse for a security guard didn’t fit. “It’s a gag, right?” I asked. “You’re trying to scare me with some crazy story about ghosts.”

“No, Liz. Honest, it’s true,” Tina insisted.

“There’s really a ghost in that room? How many people have seen it?”

“No one’s ever really seen it. They’ve just felt it, and things … well, peculiar things have happened.”

Tina looked sincere, but I couldn’t go along with this ghost thing too easily. Trying not to show how frightened I was, I asked, “Whoever heard of a psychiatrist who believes in ghosts?”

Tina didn’t react the way I thought she would. Her face grew red and she got a little huffy. “Obviously, you’ve never heard of parapsychology and the many recorded instances of officially observed ectoplasm,” she told me. “And then there’s the theory of the electrically charged photographic imprint brought on by a violent death, and—”