Asking for Trouble Read online

  LESLIE KELLY

  Asking for Trouble

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  To my aunt, Harriet Day, who instilled in me

  a love of reading and an appreciation for

  great literature. Thanks for hiding my

  Nancy Drew books and making me read

  The Scarlet Letter and Brave New World in

  fifth grade. You are an utter inspiration.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Coming Next Month

  Prologue

  Simon

  ON NIGHTS LIKE THIS, Simon Lebeaux wondered if Seaton House truly was haunted.

  The power had gone out again and the cold October wind roared through the cracks in the window moldings to extinguish any unattended candles. At least, he presumed it was the wind.

  Though cracking with rage in the stormy sky overhead, the thunder couldn’t quite drown out the creaks of the old floorboards just above his head…as if someone were walking back and forth, up and down the second-floor corridor. Slowly, deliberately, with weary, fatalistic repetition.

  Yet he was the only one in the place. And had been for months.

  An hour ago, hearing loud banging coming from even farther above, he’d gone to the third floor to investigate. He’d found the previously locked doors to several of the former guest rooms mysteriously standing open. Inside them, each long unslept-in bed suddenly bore the rumpled indentation of a human form, as if several of the hotel’s long departed guests had just awakened from their deep, restless sleep.

  The keys to those rooms remained undisturbed, locked away. Both before he’d gone upstairs, and after he’d come back.

  “And the air,” he murmured. It tasted so strange—of cloves and citrus. Of secrets and age.

  He was not a superstitious man. Yet in the three months he’d lived here—since inheriting the place from his uncle Roger and deciding it would provide the perfect location to recover from his injuries—he’d experienced things that made him wonder. Things that even made him doubt his own senses.

  Objects moving from one spot to another. Scratches and whispery noises in the walls. Frigid air trickling in from nowhere as he prowled the house, unable to sleep, trying to walk off the pain. And those smells…

  “It’s the headaches,” he muttered as he sat in his office that evening, working on his laptop for as long as its battery charge lasted. He’d become accustomed to the unreliable electrical service here on his stark, private mountain above the town of Trouble, Pennsylvania, and therefore had backups for his backups. Not only had he made sure he had extra battery packs, he’d even purchased a second computer. He always kept one fully charged in case he ran out of power during the small number of productive hours he managed to find each day. And so he would never run the risk of an unexpected power outage frying his hard drive—causing him to lose the few precious pages he’d been able to eke out since returning to work.

  He could have used the generator out back, but on the two occasions he’d tried it, the thing had caused the lights in the old hotel to surge and ebb. On the first occasion, he’d been struck by the strange rhythm of it—a steady pulse—as though the building itself had a giant beating heart hidden somewhere in its depths.

  Fanciful…ridiculous. In actuality, he was quite sure the wiring in the hundred-year-old mansion simply disliked such a modern intervention and chose to thwart it.

  His own thoughts startled him. When, he wondered, had he begun to think of Seaton House as a living entity, capable of choice…of vengeance?

  Lifting his fingers from his keys, he brought his hands to his face and rubbed wearily at his temples. Because his own pulse had suddenly begun to beat harder. A subtle increase in pressure instantly had him on alert. “No. Not tonight,” he said with a groan as he lifted the computer from his lap and set it on the coffee table.

  Shifting around on the tired leather couch, Simon lay back, leaning his head against the arm and closing his eyes. He needed to relax. To let go of his anger and his concern that it was starting all over again.

  Hopefully the subtle throbbing meant nothing. It would pass. It had to pass.

  The doctors had said the migraines would eventually go away, as, hopefully, would the memories of what had happened that June night in Charleston. Since the pain was often severe, he sincerely hoped the experts were right.

  But in his darkest nighttime hours, when the cloying weight of the hotel and the vivid images in his brain pressed down on him with unbearable pressure, he knew he’d rather live with the headaches than with the memories. If he could banish one or the other forever, he would choose to endure the physical agony and end the still-frame snapshots of memory that tormented him.

  The images replayed night after night in his head like a never-ending horror movie. The fear. The pain. The screams. The blood.

  The crushed and broken body.

  He tried deep-breathing and focused relaxation techniques. Clench, then release, he reminded himself. The fingers—tight, then limp. The wrists—flaccid. Every muscle in the arm going slack, then the shoulders, the neck.

  Calm. Breathe. Float over the waves of memory crashing in your skull rather than letting them wash over you.

  Amazingly it began to work. The pulse slowed. The throbbing dulled. Eventually, after a few long moments, he felt confident of his success in battling off one of the headaches that, at times, left him nearly incapacitated. So confident, he opened his eyes and slowly sat up, almost smiling at that small victory. One he hadn’t even been able to imagine when last in the grip of the demonizing pain.

  His triumph didn’t last for long, because when he caught sight of his computer screen, he knew he had not won the battle at all. He’d merely fallen asleep again. Fallen into that strange place where his dreams and his memories met up and tortured him.

  Shaking his head, Simon silently yelled at himself to wake up and end this nightmare. Yes, it was only a nightmare. It couldn’t be real—he could not be seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  On the laptop screen where only letters, words and paragraphs had existed a few minutes before, there was now one large, horrifying, bloody image. An image he saw in his mind every single day…but one he’d certainly never expected to see on his computer screen.

  He reached toward the horrible picture, covering it with his palm, spreading his fingers apart in an effort to block it out of sight—out of existence. But despite the size of his hand, it could not hide everything. Especially not when each brutal detail was so very, very familiar.

  “Wake up, man,” he told himself. In his dream, he leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes as he felt that throbbing begin again.

  Remembering his therapy, he counted backwards from ten, willing himself to rise toward consciousness as if ascending a long flight of stairs. Going from darkness into light. From nightmare into reality.

  When he reached one, he slowly opened his eyes and looked around.

  “Thank God,” he murmured. Because on the screen in front of him he saw letters. And words. And paragraphs. “A dream. Just a dream,” he whispered.
r />   Then he saw something else and his heart clenched tight in his chest. Slowly fading from sight on the screen of his laptop was a shape…the shape of a hand.

  His hand.

  It hadn’t been a dream. A hallucination? Christ, was he doomed to be reminded of his past by everything—even his computer, his only connection with the outside world?

  He wouldn’t be able to stand it. He couldn’t live like this, with the pain and the solitude and the grief coming at him from every angle. He’d lose his mind, if he hadn’t already.

  Because, Simon knew he would go insane if everywhere he looked he saw the image of her.

  The woman he’d killed.

  1

  Lottie

  THE NEXT PERSON who tells me how great it must be to have five older brothers is going to feel my fist in his or her face. Because, believe me, being the youngest child—and the only one without a penis—in a big Italian Catholic family from Chicago, I can personally attest to the fact that it bites.

  I would have been better off being left as a baby on the doorstep of some nunnery in the mountains of Austria. At least I might have had a little action from a cute shepherd passing by with his herd once I grew up.

  I’m definitely hotter than a sheep.

  Lottie Santori, that’s me, the hotter-than-a-sheep girl. Yes, before you ask, I’m one of those Santoris—the big family who owns that great pizza joint on Taylor Avenue. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of my brothers. Either because of the way they plowed across the football field at St. Raphael’s or the way they plowed through every girl at St. Raphael’s. Most of my friends included.

  And yes, before you ask the next question, I have a dirty mind and a big mouth and I don’t take much crap off anybody.

  My brothers, however, still haven’t gotten that through their thick skulls. They’ve been ordering me around, trying to control who I talk to, where I go, what I do and who I do, for my entire life. Tried being the key word there.

  Wish I could say they’d failed completely. Unfortunately for me—and my sex life—they succeeded in keeping me about as celibate as a twenty-five-year-old grad student can be.

  Oh, sure, I’ve snuck in a few affairs, but there aren’t many men I meet who don’t know—or know of—my family. And I swear, the big jerks are like bloodhounds. Because the minute I do find some guy who is mercifully ignorant about the thousand pounds of male aggression acting as the defensive line on my virtue, one of them finds out and scares the crap out of him.

  I kid you not, when I started ninth grade, they put out the word that if their sister didn’t graduate a virgin, they would ban every person from my high school from ever having another slice of my pop’s famous deep dish pizza. Anyone from Chicago knows that’s about as dire a threat as you can make.

  Can you believe it worked? They had all my friends making sure my legs stayed shut, and their friends, too. Which really sucked since a lot of those guys were really hot. I ask you, what is the point of having older brothers if you don’t even have the benefit of having a built-in supply of potential boyfriends?

  Thank God I’d spent a college semester in an exchange program at New York University, where I’d met Chuck. And Dave. Then…umm…Will. Man, had that guy had staying power, especially in comparison to the other twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds I dated.

  I’d probably been thought of as the easiest exchange student NYU had ever known, but I knew I was potentially cramming a lifetime full of sex into those three months. Damned if I wasn’t going to make the most of them.

  Of course, from what I’ve learned about sex since that time, I know I didn’t scratch the surface of what can be done. Big sigh, there.

  No, I didn’t learn about it firsthand. But having come home a sex maniac, then being forced to peek longingly over my big brothers’ shoulders at any nice piece of male ass—never getting any of it—had left me a little frustrated. Frustrated enough to take things into my own hands. Literally. And since my imagination only went so far—pretty much meat and potatoes on the sex scale, me being the potatoes—I’d had to do some research.

  I like research. I’m good at it. Good enough that I’m doing it to pay the bills while I finish my masters degree in journalism.

  Solving puzzles and sticking my nose into other people’s stories was something I’d excelled at since I was little and used to spy on my brothers and their girlfriends. What can I say? I love to know things. Not to exploit secrets—and I never resorted to blackmail. Well, okay, once in a while when Mark or Nick decapitated one of my stuffed toys or tied my Barbies to the tracks of their Lionel train set, I might have used my knowledge to my own advantage. Like, you know, to get them thunked in the head with a soup ladle by our mother. But not often.

  Most of the time, I didn’t even do anything with the things I figured out. I just like the process of following steps through to reach a conclusion. Seeing if the things I thought had happened really had happened.

  For someone like me—who’s been told I have a wild imagination—getting to that conclusion could be one heck of a ride. My oldest brother, Tony, once commented that if I found a dollar on the pavement, I’d concoct an entire bank robbery scenario about the thieves who’d dropped it, rather than picking the damn thing up and buying a bunch of tooth-rotting candy like any normal kid would.

  I guess he was right. Instead of the big picture, I sometimes tend to see the gargantuan one.

  So having a little glimpse of sex, you can bet I’d built up in my mind just how good it could be. Hence my research into the subject. I was very thorough. Lord help me if Mama goes over to my apartment to “help” me while I’m out of town and decides to clean out my closet. If she sees my stash of sex toys and erotica, she’s going to have a heart attack and think I’m a sex fiend.

  I’m not. I’m just frustrated. If you hadn’t been touched intimately by anyone other than the dressmaker who fitted you for your latest bridesmaid gown for the past few years, wouldn’t you be?

  Bridesmaid gowns. Getting quite a collection of those, I tell you. While I’m on the subject, does anyone in the world know why those things always look like fifties prom dresses worn by somebody named Peggy Sue or Bobbie Jean? Is there a law or something that says they have to be butt ugly?

  Okay, back to the intimate touching. You should know, the dress-fitting thing wasn’t as naughty as it sounds. The dressmaker was one of my sisters-in-law. And the only private part of my body she touched was my bra strap as she measured my chest size.

  What was it? Mind your own business. That’s a sore subject.

  So anyway, yeah, take it from me, it’s not easy bobbing around in a sea of testosterone just trying to keep your head above water. I’ve somehow managed it for twenty-five years now, but I realized a couple of months ago that if I didn’t get away for a little while, I’d drown.

  I probably could have gotten a job at the bottom rung of a paper after I graduated from college two years ago. But something held me back. Maybe the realization that I wasn’t through learning. So after saving up money by working in the family pizzeria for a year, I went back to school and fell right back into the routine of losing myself in intricate stories that I—and only I—could decipher.

  The family doesn’t get me. Pop thought that when I worked at the restaurant, it meant I’d stay there full-time, which would have suited him fine. And Mama just wants me married and pregnant.

  Uh…no. Not happening. Not anytime soon, at least.

  That’s why I decided long ago to get the hell out of Chicago for some much needed mental relaxation and, hopefully, physical stimulation. So I accepted my psychology professor’s offer to become his research assistant for an out-of-town assignment. Which is why I’m in my little car—purchased with my own money, thank you very much; otherwise, I’d be driving a yacht-sized Cadillac bought by my father—chugging up a Pennsylvania mountain toward some place called Seaton House.

  And that is why I’m about re
ady to pee my pants.

  Because, to be perfectly honest, the first time I saw the pictures of that place, I was scared to death. I felt this weird chill run down my spine. I even caught myself turning into my Grandma Rosalita, instinctively making the sign of the cross just like she did whenever one of her grandchildren made the mistake of cussing in front of her. Or criticizing Tony Bennett.

  I never knew a building could look so menacing. Sounds melodramatic, I know, but it’s true.

  When I went on to read exactly what had happened in the mansion, which had been transformed into a hotel sometime in the 1930’s, the chill had spread from my spine to every inch of my body. With its murderous history, Seaton House would have been terrifying, even if it had looked like Granny’s frigging cottage in the woods. No vivid imagination required when it came to this place—its real history was quite dramatic enough.

  “It’s just a building,” I whispered, needing to hear something over and above the wicked crash of thunder and the hammering of rain on the roof of the car.

  I didn’t grab the radio dial, however, and not only because the reception had fizzled out when I’d started slowly climbing up this mountain. I also didn’t need the distraction.

  For some reason that made me think of how I used to laugh at the way my dad would automatically reach out to turn the radio down when driving in a thunderstorm. Like he was saying, “Shh, I can’t see with all that noise.” Never got that.

  Now I do. I needed every ounce of concentration to focus on the unexpected curves and the washed-out shoulders—guess they never heard of yellow hazard signs around here. If a deer decided to do a rain dance on the road in front of me, I’d be toast. I could easily picture my pretty little car and my pretty little self flying off the edge of a cliff and landing in the river about a thousand miles below.