Return to The Quarry

Chapter Nine

In the safe, golden glow of the ballroom chandelier, Abi took her sandals off and drew her feet up onto a barrel chair she found beneath a sheet in the corner and studied the stonework.

Not totally Frank Lloyd Wright, she thought. Not quartzite, so not stone taken from the build site. But Prairie Style, kind of.

Kaitlyn saw Abi's bare feet and dragged a chair over next to her. Dropping down onto it, she kicked off the ecru stilettos and reached into her purse, pulling out a pair of slip on canvas tennis shoes.

Abi smiled. "Does it ever get old, being prepared for everything?"

Kaitlyn shrugged. "It's how I roll." She sighed heavily and reclined against the back of the chair. "God, hell of a way to spend your evening, right?"

Abi shuddered. "Yeah. Somehow, I don't think this is the way anyone hoped coming back here would go."

Not expecting to find much, Kaitlyn glanced at her phone. "Still no signal. You'd think with the people who came and partied at this place, they'd at least have better cell service."

"That is weird." Abi looked over to the patch of wall across the room where Grace had projected the old silent film. "Although, not as weird as seeing a woman from a hundred years ago run right past you. Was this place so creepy all along and we never noticed it?"

"Maybe the Hacketts knew what they were doing in the cover-up department. But a full on ghost or whatever. Can you imagine the chaos if someone kicked that off when we had kids camped out all over the place?"

They allowed themselves the guilty pleasure of laughing at the mental image. "It would make Ryan's ghost stories seem like webtoons," Abi admitted. "God, that woman looked so sad. I mean, yeah. She was in a panic and running for her life from something, but you could see she was just heartbroken." She fell silent for a moment. "I wonder what she was carrying in that little suitcase thing. The way she held it to her as she ran it just seemed important."

"Do you think there's other places on the property where someone could, I dunno. Make things appear?"

"I wonder. But how would you ever know what conditions to get just right?"

Jacob slid into the doors of the ballroom. Behind him out in the hallway, everything was dark. He had made sure the lights were off in the lobby, and that everyone was secured in the ballroom. As he came in, Nick saw him check his phone.

"Any luck?" he asked.

Jacob shook his head. "None. But I think we're okay."

Laura looked up from where she had settled into a stray chair. "What's the plan?"

"Right now, since the place is dark and all locked up, hunker down and wait for daylight."

"Eerily familiar." Ryan murmured.

"In the meantime," Jacob continued, "we'll keep trying to get some sort of signal on our phones or locate a landline. I'm going to keep an eye on the lobby because it's our most vulnerable point being all glass. If someone is out there, they'd have the advantage over us if we just wandered out into the dark."

As if on queue, the lights cut out, to yelps of horror. The faint hum of the fans in the air conditioner went silent, and in the distance of what was probably the kitchen, some alarm began to beep. The auxiliary emergency lights clicked on, dimly lighting the area.

"That's perfect," Dylan groaned.

Instinctively, everyone began to drift with Jacob toward the door, though what they planned to do from there was anyone's guess.