Secret of the Haunted Hotel by Shanna Swendson

Author:Shanna Swendson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shanna Swendson

Chapter Nine

“What?” Paige yelped.

“Whoa,” Rick said, his eyes widening.

The group at the table stood and they all turned to face the parlor, where Rick sat, shaking his head.

“The spirit has spoken,” Sirena intoned.

“No, it can’t be,” Paige said. “Are you sure?”

I didn’t buy that any spirit had fingered Rick, but he was high on my list of suspects. Now I wondered who was trying to set him up.

The group began moving toward the parlor, and I hoped we weren’t about to have any vigilante violence. I hurried to stand in the parlor doorway so they’d have to get past me to get to Rick, but Rick came around me to face the others.

Jordan jumped in front of Rick. “It wasn’t a spirit. It was the door,” he said. I was afraid they weren’t going to believe him, but the knock repeated while we were all still in the foyer. “See?” he added.

“The spirit could be knocking on the door to communicate with us,” Sirena said.

“That was a single knock this time,” Paige pointed out. “So it wouldn’t mean ‘yes’ anyway.”

“It’s probably someone who’s stranded on the road and looking for a safe place to wait out the storm,” Rick said, moving toward the door.

“Is that such a good idea?” Doug said. “I know it’s bad out there, but we’ve got a murder investigation going on here, and adding a stranger to the mix might only complicate things.”

“I’m not leaving anyone stuck out there in this mess,” Rick said firmly. He peered through the etched glass set into the front door. “I think it’s a cop, anyway.”

“Oh, thank God,” Paige said, her gaze going toward heaven.

“I feel safer already,” Valerie said.

We all clustered around Rick as he opened the door. It was too dark to see much of anything other than the silhouette of someone wearing a rain poncho with the hood pushed back, but then someone behind me raised a lantern and I saw that it was Wes Mosby.

I barely stopped myself from rushing toward him and throwing my arms around him. I’m not sure I was ever so glad to see someone—well, maybe except for that time he showed up while a killer was attacking me or that other time when I was trying to stop someone from killing his wife and me. Fortunately, there were several people between Wes and me, which kept me from being able to run straight to him, since I immediately had second thoughts about his presence. While it was nice that we’d have less to worry about from the killer with an actual cop among us, him being there also meant that any investigation would be taken totally out of my hands. I’d been looking forward to handing the police a solution when they arrived, and that would have given me excellent leverage in the future when Wes tried to disregard my theories in the middle of an investigation. Now he’d take over and get the credit for solving it, no matter what I did.

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