“What happened?” I ask.
Greta clutches the sock ball in her hand, studying my face with her shrewd eyes. “It was a pretty young woman, like you. About your age. Also with blond hair. Her name was Christina Marsh. She came to stay here for a few days, but then I noticed she hadn’t come out of her room in a while.” She looks over my shoulder, at something in the distance. “It wasn’t just that though. Something was wrong. I knew it. So I told Nick to go check on her. And…”
I stare at her, not wanting to hear the rest of the story. But unable to keep from hearing it.
“She was lying in her bed, stabbed to death,” she says. “Nick found her there. The police said she’d been dead for about a day.”
I clasp my hand over my mouth. “That’s horrible. Did they ever find out who did it?”
She shakes her head slowly. “They never did, but they suspected Nick. There were no signs of forced entry, so it stood to reason whoever killed her had access to her room.”
“Oh.” I remember my first impression of Nick, and how I thought he was the sort of person who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But impressions aren’t always right. “Do you think that he…？”
Greta is silent for a moment. She stares up at me with those watery, red-veined eyes.
“No,” she says. “Nick would never do something like that. The police had it wrong. I told them as much.”
I let out a breath and my shoulders sag. I don’t know what I would have done if Greta told me she thought Nick was a murderer. But of course she wouldn’t think that. Why would she live here if she thought the owner was a killer?
“But there was another reason they thought Nick killed her,” she adds.
I raise my eyebrows. “What reason?”
Her slightly yellow tongue protrudes from her mouth and she licks her lips. “I don’t like to tell tales.”
Really? Because it seems to me she likes to tell tales very much. But I can’t say that.
She holds the socks out to me, and I take them. The material feels rough in my hands, like they haven’t been worn in decades. But they will do.
“Thank you,” I say.
She nods. “Be careful.”
I don’t know what she means by that. She’s not wrong—I am in danger. But she doesn’t know why.
As I turn, I come face-to-face with yet another mirror. Why does she have so many mirrors in her room? It’s hard to look at myself right now. My blond hair is limp and lifeless, and so short now that I don’t even recognize myself. My eyes look sunken in their sockets, and my cheeks are dark as well. If anything looks frightening in this place, it’s me.
“I love mirrors,” Greta tells me. “Mirrors are the barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind. Everyone has an inner concept of themselves, but mirrors are reality. What you see right now—that is the truth that everyone else sees.”
“Right,” I mumble.
“If you stay here,” she says, “I’ll do a reading for you tomorrow. You may find it enlightening.”
“That’s okay. I’m not staying.”
“The future may surprise you.”
If I wasn’t feeling so uneasy, I might have rolled my eyes. This woman can’t see into the future. She doesn’t even have socks in her drawer. She’s obviously trying to scare me. I bet nobody even died in room 201. She probably made the whole thing up to freak me out.
Well, it won’t work.
“Thanks for the socks,” I say. “I’ll leave them on your doorstep in the morning.”
“Keep them,” she says. “You should have an extra pair of socks.”
It’s a nice gesture, although the second I make it out of here, I’m going to buy some socks in a drugstore or something. And some hair dye.
I slip out of her room, the socks clutched in my right hand. I can’t see the future but I predict I will never see this woman again.
Chapter 9
The socks are horrific.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering what that woman’s room looked like. They are just as stiff and uncomfortable as I thought they would be, but the worst part is the pattern on them. At first, I think it’s just diamonds and ovals. But after a second, I realize what it actually is. Eyes.
The pattern on the socks is eyes.
Just as I get the eyeball socks on, I hear a knock at the door. I nearly fling it open, but then I remember Greta’s story about the woman who was murdered in her room. “Yes?”