This time Mark sighed. “I’m really sorry, sweetheart.”
I shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see it. “Would you rather do lunch or dinner tomorrow since it’s Saturday?”
The cheerfulness in my voice sounded forced even to me. My mom’s visit might have been abrupt and unexpected, but at least I knew she still loved me.
“Let’s do lunch. Then we can show her around town together.”
I thanked him and pulled to a stop in The Sunburnt Arms’ parking lot, alongside my mom’s scuba-blue Audi. Even if I hadn’t recognized the car right away, the Virginia plates would have given it away.
Knowing my mom, she’d probably picked The Sunburnt Arms for its ambiance rather than because I’d stayed here before. The Sunburnt Arms was a “painted lady,” a large Victorian-style home that used a variety of colors to enhance the architectural detail. Mandy, the owner, had once told me that the house used to be the family home of her husband’s grandparents. When it became too expensive to maintain as a residence, his parents turned it into the only year-round bed-and-breakfast in Fair Haven.
The painted ladies I’d seen in San Francisco were sometimes almost garish in their color choices, but The Sunburnt Arms was a muted dusty rose offset with pale blue, white trim around the windows and partial wraparound porch, and a slate-gray roof. Mandy had taken great care to make sure the inside kept the period charm while still providing the necessary modern amenities. Now that spring had come, the front flower beds were overflowing with tulips in more colors than the house.
When I stayed here previously, I’d known it was exactly the kind of place my mom would love. I talked to her about it a few times.
I paused two steps inside the door. The front desk and the lobby were both empty. I’d thought my mom would be waiting for me—impatiently.
The breakfast room and stairway were equally empty, so I headed up the stairs. Good thing I knew my mom’s room number. Mandy’s staff seemed to have disappeared entirely.
I passed Room 1, and Mandy stumbled out of Room 2 in front of me. Her broad-shouldered form practically filled the whole narrow hall.
My smile and greeting died before they were fully formed. Mandy’s skin had the sickly gray cast of someone on the verge of passing out. “Are you—”
She grabbed my arm and dragged me behind her into Room 2. Except for the color of the décor—warm yellows and browns—the room was identical to the one I’d stayed in when I first came to Fair Haven. The king-sized bed had an ornate headboard and a Victorian-era style canopy. A vacuum rested at the end of the bed.
Nothing in the room seemed out of the ordinary, and Mandy wasn’t rubbing her hands together like a dastardly cartoon villain, so she probably hadn’t brought me in here to tell me about her latest conspiracy theory.
Maybe she was upset because I obviously didn’t have the maple syrup candy samples for her. When we’d originally discussed her switching from the chocolate mints she’d left in the rooms since before her husband passed away, she’d said I had until this weekend to convince her to switch to a Sugarwood product. After the weekend, she’d need to place her next bulk order, and we’d be past the tourist season before she used it up. I’d promised her I’d have samples for her.
I definitely didn’t want her bringing this up in front of my mom. It’d only make me seem unreliable, a huge character flaw in my parents’ opinion.
“Nancy got the flu, so I’m running a little behind, but I have her recipe. I should still have samples for you by tomorrow.” Assuming I could find time to figure the recipe out with my mom around.
Mandy wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. She pointed to the bathroom.
Okay, so the candies weren’t the problem. The thought flashed across my mind that perhaps the guest this room belonged to had died in the bathtub. Mandy was an avid mystery reader, but as far as I knew, the only real dead bodies she’d ever seen were at funerals. Corpses prepared by the funeral home looked very different from natural death.
Though why she’d insist on me taking a look rather than simply calling 911 was beyond me, so a dead guest probably wasn’t the issue. And thank God for that. I’d seen enough dead bodies. I didn’t want to add a naked one to the list.
I headed back toward the bathroom. Whatever was going on in there, the sooner I looked, the sooner I could head to my mom’s room.
My mom.
My feet went numb, and my vision blurred. What if it was my mom dead in the bathroom? Would Mandy have recognized the last name and figured out our relationship?
I swallowed hard against the burning sensation riding up into my throat. Whatever—or whoever—was in the bathroom, it couldn’t be my mom. She’d clearly said she was in Room 3, and this was Room 2.
I sucked in a deep breath and threw open the bathroom door. It banged against the counter.
The air came out of my lungs in a whoosh. The bathroom was empty. No dead body.
I slumped against the door frame. This was ridiculous. I was done with guessing. “What am I supposed to look for?”
Mandy slunk up behind me. “The toilet. Look behind the toilet.”
I leaned sideways.
On the floor behind the toilet was a large puddle of what looked like congealed blood.
2
“Do you think it’s blood?” Mandy whispered.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to tell her that all the mysteries she’d read had her mind playing tricks on her. I wanted to say that finding a puddle of blood in a room in her bed-and-breakfast was highly unlikely.
I wanted to say all that, but underneath the layer of potpourri deodorizer from the bedroom, I could still detect a whiff of something sickly sweet and rusty.
The red puddle had settled beside and behind the toilet, but a thin trail led to it from the middle of the bathroom floor, as if whatever was bleeding had lain there for a while and the blood followed the slope of the old floor. Whether it was human or animal, and whether the blood’s host could have survive losing that much, I didn’t know. At the very least, they’d have been too weak and dizzy to walk away under their own power.
Heat flooded up my throat. I turned away and pressed a hand over my mouth.
“It could be red paint, right?” Mandy said.
It could be. But it seemed more likely that I was a femme fatale super spy. I ran a shaky hand over my eyes, but the image of the blood on the floor seemed to have burned itself into my retinas, like a camera-flash blind spot that wouldn’t fade. “Why would someone have poured red paint on the floor of your bathroom?”
Mandy did a combined head shake-shrug. She rubbed her knuckles against her lips. “There’s more.”
“More blood?” I asked stupidly. She couldn’t mean anything else, but my brain couldn’t quite come to grips with the fact that this was real and not another one of my nightmares. I shouldn’t have even been here today. If my mom hadn’t decided to make a surprise visit, I’d still be at home, blissfully making pot after pot of botched maple syrup candy.
