Gone by Midnight--A Crimson Lake Novel by Candice Fox

Author:Candice Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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Amanda, being Amanda, was delighted to take a tour of the White Caps Hotel’s “bowels,” as she kept calling them. One of her more annoying eccentricities is a penchant for randomly spouting historical or scientific trivia, so she listened carefully as Dylan Hogan explained the background of the hotel, taking us through a service door behind reception and into a long, featureless labyrinth of hallways, our voices echoing off the high ceiling.

The building had originally been christened The Grand Hotel, the pet project of a retiring engineer who had come into the region to buy up surplus army equipment, building materials, and textiles left over from the Second World War. Douglas Aaronson had fallen in love with the gray pebble and white powder sand beaches of Cairns, and decided to build the hotel and live out his days in its penthouse suite overlooking the ocean. As is the experience of many people who buy businesses in which to retire, the venture was a devastating one. Aaronson overspent on the lavish, eighty-room hotel and found it difficult to recoup the cost, with Cairns tourism still growing. He underestimated the amount of work that would personally be required of him, and ended up putting in a hundred hours a week running the place, dealing with the growing pains of undertrained staff and a populace not accustomed to the hotel’s lavish look and pricey room charge.

Aaronson recruited his entire family to keep the beast he had created alive, but in 1948, just two years after The Grand’s opening, Aaronson died of a heart attack in the hotel bar and his embittered children sold the hotel to try to claw back some of their inheritance. The building stood empty for almost a decade before it was bought and re-christened the White Caps.

Dylan explained that the hotel still had many of its original finishings, as the Queensland Heritage Council forbade the new owners from ripping out a lot of the useless but historically significant equipment. There was a boiler room under the staff change rooms that didn’t operate, the fifty-square-foot space packed with rusty, ancient equipment that did little more than collect dust. Amanda and I poked our heads into the darkened space and looked around, but it was clear to me that the room had been searched extensively. There were dog footprints in the dust on the floor, and the familiar print of police-issue boots.

Dylan showed us an old dumbwaiter chute off the empty kitchen, allowing Amanda to pull the rickety wooden box down from where it had settled only feet above the iron doors accessing it. The dumbwaiter access points on every floor, he told us, had been used by the room service staff in the old days to move trays of food up and down the building, and ingredients up and down from the kitchen’s storage room one floor below. Dylan handed me a torch from his utility belt when I requested it, and I sent the box up and looked into the empty cavity beneath it.

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