Page 6 of Cordelia Manor
Mr. James led me up the stairs and went in ahead of me. Nothing obvious swung through the doorway. I inconspicuously touched the door handle as I walked by, but there was no numbing feeling. There was no obvious explanation for why I’d been hit last night or what had hit me.
As I walked into the grand entryway, I gasped in surprise. It was truly magnificent. A central staircase led up from the middle of the room, flanked by two intensely beautiful and elaborate chandeliers. To the right, there was what must’ve been the hotel’s reception desk, and behind that was a room I assumed used to be a dining room.
To my left, another room shone brightly in the sun. It was filled with antique-looking furniture and must’ve been used as a sitting room for guests.
There was a retro feel to the place. Now that I knew Hallock had leased it since the nineteen seventies, I was sure the period renovation of the old place had occurred around that time, although I saw no gold, brown, or olive-green pieces like most furniture from that period.
“Well, son, I hate to leave you again so soon, but make yourself at home. You have Mr. Beacroft’s number if you need him.”
“No, he didn’t give it to me,” I said, distracted as I took in the grandeur of the place.
“No? How strange. Well,” he said, and shuffled through his suit jacket, coming up with a card and a pen. “This is his number.” He wrote it on the back of his card and handed it to me. “You give him a call and let him tell you all you need to know about the place. It’s not like he isn’t the expert anyway. He’s the last of the hotel staff still on the premises and knows the ins and outs of this place like the back of his hand. As I mentioned,keeping him on as caretaker during this transition was part of the agreement between Hallock and the state.”
Mr. James was just chatting idly, but it was valuable information. Looking closer, I could see a lot of deferred maintenance. The drapery was more than a little tattered. The rugs that must’ve been opulent when they’d first been put down were faded and worn.
Even the reception desk was scuffed, and I had a sudden urge to paint it to hide its shabbiness. “Well, I’m off then, don’t hesitate to contact my office if you have any questions,” Mr. James said, blessedly disappearing.
I put my luggage to the side of the front door, closed it, and locked it. I didn’t know who’d hit me last night, but now that I was inside the building, I had to assume it was someone, not something. The place was way too big to have all the locks changed, at least on my limited budget, but at least locking the front door made me feel better.
I started my tour in the giant sitting room to my left. The room was spectacular, and I had to assume at one time it must’ve been a formal ballroom since matching chandeliers to the ones in the entryway decorated the art deco ceiling.
Deferred maintenance continued in this room as well. The seating, which at one time must’ve been impressive, was worn, and some had visible holes in the upholstery. Ignoring all that, I walked through the back doors onto an enormous patio that stunned me more than anything I’d seen so far inside. The manor sat atop a hill overlooking the winding river we’d driven along as we approached the estate. In the distance, I could even see the Pacific with its wild waves crashing upon the shore. The view was something out of a fairy tale.
I would’ve spent more time staring at the view, except the wind made it bitterly cold that high up, and I’d only just begun my tour. I went back inside, but this time, I didn’t worry aboutlocking up. I would never get all the doors locked. If someone wanted to come in, there wasn’t much I could do anyway.
The dining room was beautiful and as dated as the rest. The kitchens, however, were newer. Clearly, Hallock had invested more money into that area than the rest. Maybe they were going to forgo the hotel and just keep the restaurant?
Not a bad idea, I thought. Running a hotel was like speaking French for me. I hadn’t a clue how to do it. But I’d spent most of my adult life serving and waiting tables. That I could do, provided I could find someone to take over the cooking for me.
There was a lot of great storage in the kitchen, which gave me even more hope for the idea.
Once I’d explored the first floor, which seemed to go on forever with its multiple meeting rooms, an empty indoor pool, and even a small bar area, I wandered to the upper levels. Unlike the first floor, the rooms up there were all locked tight, forcing me to go back downstairs and rummage through drawers until I finally found a ring of keys in the bottom drawer of the reception desk.
I flipped through them until I found a key that fit the first door I came to. “Oh dear,” I said as I stepped into the room. “No wonder they didn’t fight to keep the place.” Unlike the first floor, the décor was clearly designed in the seventies. Brown shag carpet and orange, stained walls lined with velvet paintings. The ensuite bathroom was just as ugly.
I tried several more rooms, and honestly, a few had been redone in what must’ve been the eighties, but they were as outdated as the first.
I felt discouraged as I came out of the rooms and found the elevator. Before going up, I noticed a door labeled maintenance. I probably shouldn’t even be worried about that since I was going to have to sell or rent the place. I doubted my tiny budget would be enough to fix the mess I’d seen thus far.
Still, I might as well see what I was up against. I had to fiddle with the keys for quite some time before I finally came to the one that opened the maintenance door.
Unlike the other rooms, when this door opened I was assaulted with a musty, closed-up smell. I stepped inside and immediately shivered from the cold. “Is there no heating in here?” I asked the empty room.
The space had been turned into a utility room with access to the elevator machinery and a few buckets scattered about. I thought it strange they hadn’t utilized the space better, considering it was larger than the bedrooms I’d seen.
I closed the room, then walked over to the elevator and pressed the button. It took a moment to open and sounded a little rickety, if I was being honest, but this was an old building and nothing indicated the elevator wasn’t safe to ride.Might as well see it all, I thought as I stepped inside and pressed three. The elevator slowly shut and ground its way up to the third floor.
I stepped off and saw three doors facing me. I opened the first one and found the same ugly décor. I didn’t even go in. Same thing when I opened the second door, and I almost decided to forgo the third one—no need to look at any more hideousness. Something compelled me, though. “I guess I need to see it through,” I said to the empty corridor. Surprisingly, as I opened the door, I found myself in a more recently updated room. Apartment might actually be a better way to describe it.
It was far from modern, predating even the past decade, but at least there was no ugly seventies or eighties décor. Instead, the room was bright from the light coming through the multitude of windows lining the walls.
There was a living room, a full kitchen, and even a king-size bed in a bedroom off to the side. “You must be the presidential suite,” I said to the room. “You will also be my home, at least for the foreseeable future.”
Since my head was still pounding, I wasted no time fetching my luggage from the lobby and rode the very slow elevator back up to the third floor to get settled.
I popped my next pain pill, moaning that I only had one left. I locked the door, hoping that since I had the keys from the reception desk, I’d be relatively safe for the time being. I lay down on the luckily clean and neatly made bed and immediately fell asleep.
I could hear voices coming from under the door, and I felt myself get up to go look. The room was different from when I’d fallen asleep. I was clearly still in the same area, I could see out the window the same view that’d been there before, but the room was tiny, and the bed appeared to be a twin.
