The Ice Cradle Read Online Free PDF Page A

backyard.
    “The reservations aren’t exactly pouring in. The place has a—reputation,” she finally said.
    “Let me guess,” I offered. “People think it’s haunted.”
    She wheeled around. “How’d
you
know?”
    “Just a hunch,” I said. “A historic inn on an island? Come on, it’s right out of Agatha Christie.”
    Lauren grinned. “I suppose it is. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. You’re not going to want to stay here.”
    “I don’t have a problem with ghosts,” I said.
    “Really?”
    “Really. My grandmother was kind of—psychic.”
    Lauren nodded but looked unconvinced. “It goes way, way back,” she said. “There was a novelist who used to come here every summer, a guy named Antony Wicklow. This was back when Eva owned the place. He was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who lived in New York during the winters and came here every summer. He always stayed in the same room, that back room on the second floor.”
    “The one with the green wallpaper?”
    “Yeah. Anyway, he became convinced that the room was haunted.”
    “By whom?”
    “Who convinced him?” Lauren asked.
    “No,” I answered. “Who was supposedly haunting it?”
    “The ghost of a man in his fifties, who apparently lookedlike Abraham Lincoln, and the spirit of a woman in her late thirties or early forties. Her hands were always pressed to her ears. Wicklow claimed to see them night after night, often at the foot of his bed. And he wrote a bestseller about it, a pretty spooky novel in which the ghosts end up smothering a couple of the boarders.
    “People figured out that this was the place described in the book and nobody wanted to come here anymore. And at just about that time, a storm brought down one of the chimneys, which some people took as evidence.”
    “Of what?”
    “I don’t know, bad supernatural karma. Eva was hanging on by a thread, and some of her regulars, folks who usually came here for the full season, just up and cancelled. It really put the nails in the coffin.”
    “Of the boardinghouse.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What was the name of the book?” I asked.
    “Inn
of Phantoms.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “There’s a copy around here somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”
    I paused and took a deep breath. “And what do
you
think? Do you believe there are ghosts?”
    “I really don’t know. Some weird things have happened, in that room and one other. Mark thinks I’m off my rocker, or at least in a highly suggestible state, but I swear I can feel something in there. The air seems charged, like it’s full of electricity, and when we were doing the work on those rooms, we kept having problems with the simplest things. I know it sounds crazy, but it was like someone
—
some
thing
—didn’t want the room to change.”
    “You’re not crazy,” I said, trying to make her feel better. “They definitely exist.”
    “Ghosts? You think so?”
    “I know so.”
    “On account of your grandmother?”
    “Yeah.” The time might come for me to level with Lauren about my own experiences and skills, but first I wanted to do a little private investigating. The ghosts that inspired the novel might be long gone by now. I certainly hadn’t encountered them. The little ghost girl would be gone soon, too. I would see to that as soon as I learned a little more about Henry’s relationship with the supernatural world.
    “But that book was written so long ago,” I said. “You’d think it would be forgotten by now.”
    “I wish. And we did something really stupid.”
    “What was that?”
    Lauren let out a deep sigh and rolled her eyes. “Mark got a call from
The Ghost Detectives.”
    “The TV show? Oh, no!” The “ghost detectives” were two Australian guys who hosted a reality show on haunted buildings and spaces. They came in after dark with infrared cameras and never failed to “prove” the presence of spirits, usually “evil” spirits. I had seen the show a number of times—we don’t have