Page 25 of The Magical Bed & Breakfast

This woman, from the set of her shoulders in her designer clothes to the self-important way she brandished her Prada bag, set Kate’s teeth on edge. Kate had traveled to Rhode Island to get away from the crazies in the city, away from the crazies that had plagued his father’s clients. Kate hated that life. Had it somehow followed her here?

She frowned. Usually those types, the hangers-on, were only attracted to celebrities, and Hazard was decidedly low on celebrities…which was why Kate liked it. Celebrities brought drama, scandal, and a persistent need for others to solve their dilemmas for them. It had been Kate’s job for eight years working as a PR consultant for her father to peel off the hangers-on from her clients and clean up bad press. She was so done with that life. Her dad could keep it!

Blondie’s lips twisted in an unflattering smirk. “Of course you would open forhim. I mean, who wouldn’t?” She gave a little sigh. “If he is staying here, then I can stay here too.”

“Excuse me?” The woman’s sense of privilege rubbed Kate wrong.

“Him. I saw him. Rory Rollins. Atyourinn. I saw him carry all that furniture in. So your “no furniture” excuse was lame, because you had a delivery coming. And thenhecarried it in while you drooled over his body. Not that I blame you for that. But really!”

“I’m sorry. What are you talking about?”

“YourguestRory Rollins.”

Kate shook her head, even as alarm bells began to clang in it. She knew that name from somewhere.

Roryhadseemed familiar.

The woman dropped her hand from her hip. “Wait, you really don’t know who he is?”

Kate took a long breath and willed herself not to lose her patience. “You need to leave. I’m not open for business. Rory is a friend.”

The women’s eyes narrowed, gleaming with malevolence.

Kate barely controlled the shiver up her spine but refused to give any impression of weakness for this woman to exploit. She’d met this type before. Never lacking for confidence when dealing with difficult people, Kate met the woman’s stare with a stolid one of her own.

With a sniff, blondie spun on her heels and stomped down the steps. Kate was actually surprised she didn’t fake a fall in those boots and blame it on Kate. But she left and crossed to the green. Kate shut the door firmly, then dashed to the front window and watched from the parlor until the woman was out of sight, even as she pondered her words.

Chapter Eleven

Rory took histime in the tunnels. He’d heard voices from the past when he came through with Kate but had shoved them aside in his mind. He didn’t need to succumb to their allure when he was with her, when she needed him to be strong for her. He knew she had been scared in the tunnels and was, frankly, impressed by her bravery.

But now that he was alone, he opened his mind and saw into Hazard’s remarkable history. It was like dropping from a great height and hovering in the air as if hang gliding, wind rushing past. For a moment he experienced a slight nausea and disorientation. As a youth, this process had petrified him. He hadn’t understood. Now he steeled himself, willing his mind to just let it happen.

Before his eyes in the dimness, two men in colonial rebel garb materialized. He pressed his back to the wall as they shuffled by, weighed down with contraband. They stumbled under the weight of the wooden barrel they carried. One spoke, “Careful, lad, ’tis gunpowder. Captain’ll have our hides if we blow the passage to kingdom come.” The younger soldier had some choice epithets about the Captain that Rory couldn’t quite make out but got the gist of. Even from the low tones in which they spoke, it was clear he was grumbling about their commander. As they disappeared into the tunnels and faded from his sight, Rory grinned. Some things never change. All throughout time, everyone complains about the boss.

He watched as the pair rounded the bend into the inn’s basement. Ah, so there was the destination of the smuggled items. Franklin Worthywassmuggling ammunition in the fight against the British. He shook his head a little and continued on.

He remained baffled that he could see into the past. Why him? It only happened at the inn and here in the tunnels. He had left Hazard, troubled by his experience of being trapped in the inn’s basement as a teen. Right after it had happened, he’d tried to share what he saw, but everyone in town had assumed he’d hit his head and had a dream, or that he was high and had hallucinated it.

Neither was true. But a rational mind could not explain what he saw.

He took a deep breath. He hadn’t hit his head today, and he certainly wasn’t high. He also wasn’t seeing ghosts, not exactly. Despite telling Kate her inn was haunted, that description didn’t feel accurate. Haunting implied an active effort by the dead to affect the living. What he saw were not the dead. No, what he was seeing was a projection of the past. For some reason he was attuned to history, attuned to the past as if the division between then and now thinned down here beneath the inn. Perhaps when people saw ghosts, like he did, they were simply seeing into the past.

Did fleeting images of history rate as a kind of haunting?

It was too philosophical a thought to dwell on, at least for now. Rory took his phone out to follow along with the GPS. He needed to keep track of where he was below the town. At Camellia and Suffrage, he halted. Another branch of tunnel veered off, but it was barricaded by a pile of rubble. Impassable.

Circumstance? Or had someone created this intentionally?

Rory moved further on. He halted before a soldier carrying an armful of American long rifles. Rory slid into an alcove to watch. Another soldier trailed behind with two muskets. “I prefer the Brown Bess to these,” he was saying as they passed by together. Distracted by the scene from the past, Rory plowed into a spider web hanging down in the alcove. He wiped it off his face and then jumped, slapping at the large, dark spider crawling on his arm. It escaped and scurried away, no doubt to build a new web for tomorrow. He shivered at the common house spider. It wasn’t dangerous, but Kate would not have enjoyed this. He needed to come through with a broom. He had cleared out most of the webs yesterday, but these were some determined spiders, because he was having to sweep them out again less than twenty-four hours later.

It wasn’t long before he reached the underground entrance to Agate Point. It mystified him. The mansion hadn’t been built until the early twentieth century. Of Art Deco design, it had been constructed in the 1920s. This tunnel must have led to whatever was here before. And that was information his granddad ought to know.

If he was willing to share the information.

Rory stepped into the wine cellar at Agate Point and made his way up the stairs, only to discover that the door was locked. He shook it. It appeared to be not just locked but bolted.

That presented a problem. Now what? Knock and scare the dickens out of his granddad? Rory frowned. He took out his phone and rang Seymour. He heard the jaunty tune he’d programmed into his granddad’s phone just for his calls play directly over on the other side of the door.

---