An Unwanted Guest(33)
She remembers how he looked at her in her new negligee.
He’d known all along that he was in love with someone else.
Well, she won’t accept it. Infatuation isn’t love. He just needs time to come to his senses. This is a kind of middle-aged madness. He will come back to her. It will be fine. She must be patient, that’s all.
‘Think it through, Henry,’ she says. She slowly rises and makes her way back to her room, leaving Henry alone by the fire.
Saturday, 3:30 PM
Candice’s laptop battery is dying. She curses out loud to the empty library. She saves her work again and then decides to shut down while she still can. She needs to save some battery – in case she needs to refer back to something in her draft. She should have printed it out and brought it with her. Fuck. She won’t ever make that mistake again. From now on, she promises herself, she will always print the manuscript and bring it with her whenever she goes anywhere. She gets so little undisturbed time to work.
She looks down at the closed laptop and thinks about what to do next. She will have to write longhand, she supposes. It’s too bad her handwriting is so illegible – even she has trouble reading it. And of course she didn’t bring any paper with her. The paperless society. Ha! She looks up and scans the room around her. She gets out of her comfortable chair by the fire and approaches the desk in the corner of the room next to the door. It must be original to the hotel – the age is about right. Its surface is almost pristine – just an old-fashioned leather blotter with an elegant letter opener on its surface. She tries the top drawer. It opens easily. There is nothing inside but a single, lonely paper clip. With her frustration rising and her hopes falling in equal measure, she tries the side drawers next. My kingdom for a pen and paper she mutters under her breath. Nothing. Shit.
Then she recalls the writing desk in her room. Surely there was a folder with full-sized notepaper printed with the hotel letterhead sitting on the side of the desk. Of course! Most hotels provide notepaper, and a pen. And if she runs out of paper, she can borrow more from the other guests. No one else will be using it. She hopes she doesn’t have to rely on quill and ink in this quaint hotel.
She hastens out of the library with her laptop hugged to her chest. It’s still warm, which she appreciates. She turns to her right and starts to walk back to the lobby and the main staircase, but then she remembers that there’s a servants’ staircase near the kitchen. Curious, she turns back and finds the hall that runs along the back of the hotel. At the end of the hall, outside the closed kitchen door, is the door to the servants’ staircase. She pushes it open.
She’s shocked at how dark it is inside the stairwell. It’s like falling to the bottom of a well. She thinks about retreating, but then takes her mobile phone out of her pocket and turns on the torch, noticing with resignation that her phone, too, is almost out of battery. She climbs up the narrow, plain wooden staircase, slowly making her way to the top, feeling tense. Perhaps she would have been better off going back to the lobby and taking the main staircase, after all, sheeted corpse or not. At last she makes it to the top and opens the door onto the second floor. With relief, she finds herself in the dim corridor, lit only by the narrow window at the end. Her room, number 206, is across the hall. She hurriedly inserts the key and enters the room, not bothering to close the door – she’s planning on getting what she needs and going right back down to the fire in the library. The chill up here makes her bones ache.
Her eyes fall on the writing desk across the room nestled under the windows. She spies the folder of notepaper. She crosses the thick rug – so thick it muffles all sound – and opens the folder eagerly. It contains several sheets of creamy, good-quality A4 writing paper, and a pen. She smiles with relief.
Chapter Seventeen
Saturday, 4:00 PM
THE GUESTS START to drift down to the lobby again around four o’clock, eager for their tea. They continue to do their best to ignore the corpse at the bottom of the stairs, filing past it quickly on their way to the dining room. Matthew still does not appear. James has made scones to go with the tea and coffee, and they all agree that they are delicious.
Gwen sips the scalding tea, grateful for the warmth of the cup in her hands, and wonders if she will ever speak to David.
Henry says, ‘I suggest we all check out the ice bar. The path’s all clear, and I had a sneak peek. It’s really something.’
‘Thanks to your hard work with the snowblower,’ Bradley says.
Gwen goes with the rest of them to grab their jackets and boots at the front of the hotel and then they all follow Bradley down the back hall and into the woodshed – smelling wonderfully of freshly chopped wood – where they don their outdoor gear. Bradley opens the door and a bitter wind gusts into the woodshed. Bradley and Henry go out first, then Ian and Lauren. David goes next, and Beverly steps in front of Gwen and follows David.
Gwen goes last, behind Riley, and pulls the woodshed door shut behind her. The sky is sullen and the wind violent. Gwen can’t see much directly in front of her – just Riley’s back – as they trudge single file down the cleared path, banks of snow on either side. But she looks up to the forest beyond, where the wind is giving the trees a thrashing. Riley says something to her over her shoulder, but Gwen can’t catch the words before the wind tears them away and they are lost. The tip of her nose is already freezing. At least there are no large trees to come crashing down between the woodshed and the icehouse. Finally they stop and the path widens out into a cleared area in front of the icehouse and she can see.