Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [4]
“It’s just a building,” I whispered, needing to hear something over and above the wicked crash of thunder and the hammering of rain on the roof of the car.
I didn’t grab the radio dial, however, and not only because the reception had fizzled out when I’d started slowly climbing up this mountain. I also didn’t need the distraction.
For some reason that made me think of how I used to laugh at the way my dad would automatically reach out to turn the radio down when driving in a thunderstorm. Like he was saying, “Shh, I can’t see with all that noise.” Never got that.
Now I do. I needed every ounce of concentration to focus on the unexpected curves and the washed-out shoulders—guess they never heard of yellow hazard signs around here. If a deer decided to do a rain dance on the road in front of me, I’d be toast. I could easily picture my pretty little car and my pretty little self flying off the edge of a cliff and landing in the river about a thousand miles below.
“It’s okay,” I whispered again, “almost there, almost there.”
After nine hours in the car, I damn well should be almost there. That useless Internet map I’d dug up had predicted six or seven hours on the road. Of course, it couldn’t have predicted the wicked storm that had been dumping water by the trailer load on my windshield since I hit the Pennsylvania line. Or the mountain that seemed to go straight up at a ninety-degree angle.
Or the vision of hell waiting for me at the top of that mountain, which was probably why my foot had been much more on the feather side of the scale than the lead one with every additional foot of altitude.
“Don’t be a chicken,” I told myself, thinking of how utterly humiliating it would be if Mark or Nick—the twins, who were the next up from me in family hierarchy—found out I was scared of some old house. Just because it looked like something out of a Wes Craven movie. Well, that and because a convicted serial killer—Josef Zangara—had lived there in the 1930s. Turning his mansion into an exclusive hotel, he and his business partner had been very successful. But it hadn’t been enough for Zangara, who’d gotten his real kicks out of kidnapping and murdering unsuspecting victims from the town below.
It was a wonder the hotel run by the infamous murderer hadn’t been torched by an angry mob when its owner’s crimes had been discovered. From what I’d learned, his partner—who’d bought out the killer’s widow and taken over Seaton House after Zangara had been tried and executed—had hired armed guards to watch the place for the first few years after the crimes.
Good thing, because if it had been destroyed, I wouldn’t have this job. My professor was paying me to get information for his book on lesser-known serial killers, ones who’d somehow flown under the radar of most of the history texts. And Zangara was included.
The money had sounded great. The idea of getting out of Chicago until the end of the month was even better. Though, honestly, I was glad I’d be going home on Halloween day. I sure couldn’t see spending that night in Seaton House.
Actually, I couldn’t see spending any night there. I’d never pictured myself chugging up this mountain scared out of my mind well after dark on a stormy night. I’d hoped to arrive here on a nice, sunny fall afternoon so I could pretend everything was okeydokey. Why had I thought this research assistant thing was a good idea again?
I didn’t have time to wonder because suddenly, as if my car had driven into another dimension, I rounded a curve and saw the huge, hulking shape of the hotel directly in front of me.
“Holy shit,” I muttered, immediately reaching for my chest, where my heart was pounding like crazy.
Braking hard and throwing the car into Park, I sat there at the edge of the driveway. I peered through the rain-splashed windshield at the dark, enormous building crouched against the stormy night sky. And gulped.
Seaton House was three stories tall, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot