
LESLIE KELLY
Asking for Trouble
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDONAMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURGSTOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRIDPRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
To my aunt, Harriet Day, who instilled in mea love of reading and an appreciation forgreat literature. Thanks for hiding myNancy Drew books and making me readThe Scarlet Letter and Brave New World infifth grade. You are an utter inspiration.
Contents
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.
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.

