Destiny’s Demise

-1-

 Huntersville, Louisiana. Of all the destinations Daniel Myers could have programmed into the green sedan's navigation system, he had to pick that one. Outskirts of New Orleans, my ass, he thought as the GPS told him to turn right in one hundred yards. Any further south and they would need to swap the car for a boat. Yawning as he turned down the country road, Daniel glanced across to the passenger seat as his wife, Elodie, stirred, turned to the window, and continued to snooze. He hardly blamed her; the long drive on top of a late evening flight had him struggling to keep his eyes open. At least her gentle snoring had stopped.

Another right and the house appeared ahead of them, surrounded by trees and silhouetted by the sun as it sunk below the horizon. The only house in Huntersville. Another bust most likely. At least it would give him time to make the edits his publisher requested. After the exposé he wrote on that Texan charlatan, who was secretly drugging young girls in the congregation and claiming they were possessed, made it onto national television, interest in his book had skyrocketed. The only problem was, the publishers wanted more scandal. Luckily, not every story about a haunting ended with the discovery and incarceration of a serial child rapist. Sometimes, it was just somebody looking to make an extra buck off a spooky old property. To Daniel, that was a good thing.

Elodie stirred again as the car slowed, crunching over the gravel driveway in front of the house. Daniel turned to her as he slipped the transmission into park and unclipped his safety belt, wondering what he did to deserve such a wonderful woman. When they met, he was a nobody. A scruffy-haired, penniless cynic, bouncing around hotels and restaurants, who scraped by from one week to the next writing trash articles on his experiences. One of those articles was on the Lindberg Hotel in North Carolina.

The Lindberg Hotel was what Daniel called a bonus round. While fishing for work, Daniel discovered that Karl Lindberg was looking for secret reviewers to stay at his hotel and provide feedback on how he could improve the quality of service. Standard enough work for Daniel until he discovered the hotel was haunted by a teenage girl, killed by her father in the house that once stood where the hotel was built.

The haunting was a bust. Reports of lines of light appearing on the doors were easily explained away by poor workmanship and gaps in the joinery allowing light between the panels. The flickering lights were the usual result of a less than ideal local power grid. The rattling of doorknobs went unexplained because, during the five days Daniel spent at the hotel, Daniel's doorknob did not rattle once. Not ideal, but the history of the hotel was interesting enough to fill a few more pages in his collection of haunted house investigations.

The hotel itself was pleasant enough, with its rustic charm and colonial aesthetic. It would have been easy, and no doubt tempting, to build a modern, sterile hotel, but Daniel felt it would have lost its character in doing so. He liked the ‘old-school America’ vibe the hotel, and the nearby town, provided. The modern architectural fascination with steel and glass held no appeal for Daniel, and it reflected in his review.

With his write-up submitted, Daniel thought nothing more of the Lindberg Hotel until he received an email asking him to return and review the restaurant a second time. He almost declined. It had been three weeks, but the memory of the less than pleasant food remained. Seeing Elodie's greyish-blue eyes flutter open as she shook off the last vestiges of sleep made Daniel immeasurably happy that he had risked another overcooked lasagne.

Elodie Myers was the youngest daughter of Karl and Eva Lindberg, and Daniel would never forget the first time he saw her. Returning to the Lindberg Hotel, he was met with the most radiant vision, a goddess among mortals. From her short, blonde hair to the scar on her chin, which he later found out was the result of a field hockey injury, everything about her set Daniel's heart racing. Discovering she was also a talented cellist and composer made his heart sink. There was no way a talented, beautiful woman from a wealthy family would look twice at a wannabe writer from a broken home. Yet, here they were, three years later.

‘Was I out long?’ she asked, running her hand over the side of her face as she blinked away her tiredness and unclipped her safety belt.

‘Not long,’ Daniel lied as he stepped out into the breeze sweeping in from the gulf. Elodie had nodded off within minutes of leaving the airport, leaving Daniel with Beethoven’s fifth symphony for company on the nearly two-hour-long drive.

‘What’s the story with this one?’ she asked, leaning on the car door and staring up at the roof of the house and the dark clouds gathering above it. ‘Reminds me of home.’

Despite having lived in North Carolina all her life, home, for Elodie, was Sweden. More specifically, her mother’s home town of Eskilstuna. Daniel did not care for the place, but they did choose to honeymoon there in the middle of January. He could only assume it was a nicer place when summer arrived and everything was not covered in snow. Freezing winters was one of the things that drove him south from Illinois.

‘Can’t see this place getting buried under a foot of snow,’ Daniel replied as he retrieved their bags from the trunk.

‘You know what I meant.’

He did. The three-storey house was built to resist the elements. The wooden slats that lined the building masked the solid, stone walls that had weathered many a storm. The paint was faded and chipped, making the white look grey and grubby, but it had that hardy look that Daniel remembered from his two weeks in Sweden. Inside, the house was no better. A layer of dust had settled over everything, necessitating a good clean before they unpacked.

‘Beef jerky?’ Elodie asked as she ran a finger through the dust on the kitchen counter, knowing full well that Daniel never went anywhere without a pack or two. He had travelled often enough to know a proper meal was never guaranteed.

‘Got a choice of original,’ Daniel replied opening the front pocket of the larger of his three cases, ‘original, or original.’

‘Original,’ Elodie replied as she turned on the faucet, pipes clanging as the water spluttered through before becoming a consistent stream. ‘No, wait. Original.’

Daniel smiled as he tore open the first bag. He remembered thinking that beef jerky was the most uninteresting food there was. A life spent on the road, buying food at gas stations, had turned him into an addict. Some people were connoisseurs of wine or whisky; Daniel could identify beef jerky brands blindfolded. For some reason, that was less impressive at parties than pretending you could pick out which variety of oak the barrel was made from or how many times the farmer had touched the grapes before pressing them.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Elodie, popping a piece of jerky into her mouth before taking a cloth from her bag and rinsing it under the water, ‘lunch in town. I fancy Italian and don’t want to cook. How far away is town?’

Daniel could not resist a chuckle as Elodie squeezed the cloth and wiped it over the counter, turning the cloth a murky brown colour with a single stroke.

‘I think our next-door neighbour was about ten miles back,’ he said as he pulled out the pack of beers he bought at the gas station in New Orleans. ‘Town was probably the same again after that.’

‘So, walking distance?’ Elodie replied, taking the proffered beer. ‘You got a bottle opener, genius?’

‘Always,’ said Daniel, levering the top off his bottle with the car key before holding it out to Elodie.

After being on the road, that first drop of beer on Daniel’s lips was almost as sweet as one of Elodie’s kisses, but nowhere near as intoxicating.

‘So, what’s the story with this place?’ Elodie asked as she took another piece of jerky.

‘Pamela Stewart,’ Daniel replied as he opened a second pack of jerky, ‘CFO of Leyland Watari Dynamics. Bought this house back in 1998. Turns out, she paid for it with money embezzled from her company’s pension scheme. Somebody didn’t take too kindly to the not guilty verdict at her trial in 2002. She was butchered right here in this kitchen. Police have yet to find her head.’

‘Headless ghost?’ asked Elodie, raising her bottle as she emptied the first pack of jerky.

Daniel clinked his bottle against the base of hers to indicate she was spot on. ‘The house went to the bank when she died, and they want me to prove there’s no ghost so they can sell the damn thing. House has been on the market for three years.’

‘I can tell,’ said Elodie, running a finger through the dust and holding it up. ‘We should head upstairs to the bedroom.’

‘Not going to disagree with you on that one,’ Daniel replied with a cheeky grin.

‘And get it cleaned before you fall asleep,’ said Elodie, emptying her beer and giving him a peck on the cheek. ‘The rest can wait. You’re dead on your feet.’

Daniel was not about to deny that one. If Pamela’s ghost was walking the halls, she would have to wait until tomorrow.