Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [5]
Those spiky spires had looked threatening in pictures taken during the day. By night, awash with lightning, they looked capable of supporting the heads of Henry VIII’s murdered wives.
“Enough,” I snapped out loud, trying to stop myself from going down that imaginative path. “Just look.”
So I did. I sat there and I looked, letting my visual impressions mesh with what I already knew about Seaton House.
First impressions are usually the best ones, and, after a few moments, I realized what I really thought about the hotel. It was mysterious.
Not terrifying.
My heart stopped thudding and my hands stopped shaking. Now, confronted with the actual place, my irrational fears began to quiet and this became just another building. A business establishment with fading white lines striping its parking lot, with a sign pointing to a delivery entrance, and another toward the scenic overlook.
Just an old house turned hotel.
I wanted to sigh in relief. I settled for easing the car back into Drive and creeping closer, studying the place all the while.
Obviously, the millionaire who’d built it had had delusions of grandeur. The presentation of the house—its location near the edge of a cliff, as if taunting everyone below to look up and not tremble—said as much about its builder as its dramatic design. From his broad, two-hundred-foot verandah, he could have looked out over everything he surveyed and felt like a king.
His delusions hadn’t been enough to save him a few decades later. He’d supposedly taken a swan dive off his own cliff in 1929 after losing all his money in the stock market crash.
That’s when Zangara had stepped in. He’d been an Italian immigrant—supposedly a minor prince. And right away he’d become known for the interest he showed in the pretty young women living in the town at the foot of his mountain. A number of whom had disappeared during his time in residence.
“Zangara,” I murmured, instantly picturing the one grainy black-and-white photograph I’d seen of the man. Dark and handsome with a boyish face, thick black hair and deep-set, soulful brown eyes. He’d looked anything but ruthless. In fact, if I disregarded his long, handlebar mustache, I’d have to describe him as a total Hottie McHotHot. How any young girl from Trouble would have been able to resist him if he’d quirked a finger in her direction, I had no idea.
That was probably why he’d been able to get away with it for so long. The man had been charming and handsome, a prince. He’d been sought after by every single woman in town even though he was married. And when he’d brought in a partner and transformed his palace into a public hotel—providing jobs for a lot of the destitute people in the town below—he’d become a savior.
Who’d have suspected he was behind the disappearance of a slew of chambermaids and shop girls during the depression?
Zangara was, obviously, the one I’d come here to learn more about, at Professor Tyler’s request. Having been accused and convicted of killing fifteen women—and suspected of more—the man was surprisingly unknown. Never mentioned in the annals of the most horrible murderers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Tyler wanted to know why. And it wasn’t just my ambitions in research journalism that made me want to know why, too. I was, to put it bluntly, fascinated and wanted to learn more.
Curiosity. It killed the cat. But hopefully not the girl.
Okay. Cool. I was ready for this. I felt calm and collected. Zangara was long gone—electrocuted and buried. Everything would be fine.
Even as I told myself I was ready for my stay in hotel hell, I couldn’t help noticing—and worrying about