“Busy over there?”
“At the inn? It’s been crazy. Here, not so much.”
Sam had noticed the slightly musty smell of the Windward as he’d walked across the worn linoleum to reach the front desk. He assumed that the only thing keeping the old hotel in business was the persistence of its owner. Now that he was gone, he doubted the Windward would stay open for a year.
Sam knew most of the year-round residents of Kennewick, at least by sight, if not by name, but he knew Clara particularly well because she’d shadowed him for a couple of days about eight years ago, back when she’d been a reporter on the Kennewick High School newspaper her senior year. He knew she’d gone to Boston University to study journalism, but a couple of years ago she’d returned to town and gotten work first at the Windward and then as a waitress at the Kennewick Harbor Inn. Rumor was that she’d come back to Kennewick because of Brad Romer, another local who was nowhere near good enough for her.
“Clara, do you think I could take a look at Frank’s office? I’m sure the state police have been through it, but I thought I’d take a look-see myself.”
She shrugged. “It’s fine with me. You know where it is, right? I don’t think it’ll be locked.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Sam began to walk in the direction of the hallway that led to Frank’s back office, but stopped, and said, “Any gossip around here? About Frank’s death?”
Clara frowned while she thought about the question, and Frank thought how much she looked like her mother, June, one of the circle of Kennewick residents who took turns being the town’s problematic drunk. “You mean, like who might have wanted to kill him?”
“That’s a good place to start.”
“No one, I think. Everyone liked Frank.”
“Okay,” Sam said.
Clara looked as though she were still thinking, so Sam said, “What about romances?”
“Frank?” she said and grimaced a little. “I don’t think so. He had a crush on Shelly, but that was a one-way affair, for sure. No, sorry, Sam, I don’t think I can help you.”
“You’ll let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will, but the only rumors that go around aren’t ones you’d be interested in.”
“What do you mean?” Sam said.
“Oh, the big rumor is that the Windward is haunted. You didn’t know that.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s what the staff says. There’s phantom smells up on the second floor of the annex, you know where I’m talking about, and apparently two of the cleaning ladies claim there’s a ghost in the old ballroom.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be too interested,” Clara said. She was now leaning back in the high swivel chair behind the desk. Her face looked a little puffy, Sam thought.
“What do these ghost rumors have to do with Frank getting killed on the beach?”
“Do you know Milana? She’s one of the cleaners. She said he was haunted by the ghosts and they made him go down there and drown himself.” Clara did some approximation of an Eastern European accent.
“Not unless that ghost grabbed him from behind and pushed him into the water.”
Clara grimaced again, and Sam apologized before making his way down to Frank’s office.
It was a tiny space, made more cramped by the piled-up boxes against every wall. There was one desk, and one chair, the desk weighed down with paperwork. Not knowing where to start, Sam decided to sit down in the upholstered office chair, where Frank had sat all those years. Sam opened the middle drawer, crammed with old invoices and mini bottles of brandy, most empty, some still sealed. The other drawers were crammed with paperwork as well, all of it seemingly related to the running of the hotel. Sam, not even officially on this case, did not quite have the energy to go through all the piles. He did pull out one rubber-banded stack of thick creamy paper jammed down the side of the largest drawer; the rubber band, completely dried out, crumbled when he pulled at it, and he was looking at a bunch of yellowed menus from a Christmas Eve dinner in 1986. Shrimp cocktail, then beef Wellington. Sam was hit with a wave of sadness at the passage of time, wondering if anyone even remembered this particular dinner. Had anything significant happened? Love affairs? Breakups? How many of its guests were still alive?
He put the menus back where he’d found them and stared straight ahead. There was a bulletin board leaning on top of the desk and against the wall. Like everything else in this office it was crammed with hotel business: old receipts; Post-it Notes; job applications. Most were layered on top of one another, but there was one photograph pinned into the bulletin board, and although it was partially covered up along its edges, it was clear that Frank hadn’t wanted to entirely cover it. Sam plucked it off the board. It was a family photograph, black and white and slightly faded. It showed a youngish couple, the man in a suit and a hat, the woman in a summer dress with polka dots. Between them were two children, a girl who was maybe twelve, and a younger boy, around eight. The boy was scowling slightly, as though he’d had to pose just a little too long for this particular photo. It was clearly Frank, his face hadn’t changed much in all his years, and these were clearly his parents, the original owners of the hotel. They stood in front of the main entrance to the Windward, the carved wooden sign unchanged.