The Inn on Ravenna Road

Chapter 1

It’s funny what a fluid thing time can be. You’d think that nine years is a sufficient amount of time for anyone’s brain to bury an unpleasant memory, but Callie had figured out long ago that something as simple as a smell, or sound, or touch could bring it all back as easily as though it happened yesterday.

She tried to concentrate on the blue patch of sky visible through the sliver of a window near the ceiling in the dank, sunken room in which she sat. Pushing her ponytail of dark brown hair out of the way, Callie rubbed at the back of her neck to relieve the mounting tension. But the distant sounds of clacking heels on polished floors, the muted typing on keyboards, and incessant ringing of telephones made it too hard for her not to remember sitting in a similar room, nine years ago.

“You really don’t remember anything else?” The voice of the detective, even so many years later, was still fresh.

“I’ve told you everything I know.” Callie’s voice, once vibrant, sounded hollow and tired against the cinder block walls of the room. The skin underneath the cast on her leg itched and she imagined the luxury of scratching it until her skin bled.

Blood.

Blood was everywhere she looked now. On her hands, though she had committed no crime. On her clothes, though all the bleach in the world would never get it out. And in Callie’s mind it dripped over her consciousness like the slick icing of a cake, oozing slowly down over layer upon layer of horror.

Callie was finding it hard to imagine that she was the same naive girl who’d come to New York City from small town Connecticut intent on art school and a completely different sort of life, throwing herself into it with the conviction that only teenagers have. It had been just as fabulous and exciting as she’d dreamed, being at the Art Institute of New York during that perfectly crisp and colorful autumn that was the start of what would eventually change her life forever.

“Miss,” the detective said, trying to regain Callie’s attention. “Can you go over it one more time? When you left the bar, you don’t remember anyone following you?”

Callie shook her head. “It’s not that I don’t remember. I know for a fact that no one was following us.”

“That you saw anyway.”

Did this woman interview victims with eyes in the back of their head or something? “I guess. I suppose I don’t generally look out for those sorts of things, I’m not usually that paranoid.”

“Well, you should,” the woman chastised, as though Callie wasn’t sitting there with a cast on her leg, two black eyes, a broken nose, and stitches running the length of her upper arm.

Her father leaned in then, his voice clipped with anger. “I don’t think we’re here to discuss what could have been, correct officer?”

Chagrined, the detective cleared her throat but did not apologize. “Okay, Callie. Can you just tell me again, what happened after you turned the corner at the end of the block?”

Laughter and stumbling was what Callie remembered. After a few beers, she’d always felt closer to Lucy, like they had a connection that other best friends didn’t have. She seemed prettier that night too, she’d done something different to her short blonde hair and Callie remembered complimenting her about it more than once. Something about alcohol always made her want to hand out excessive compliments, deserved or not.

They had met in their Drawing 111 class the second semester of school. Both had thought that they didn’t need the developmental course that their advisor had suggested and both had been incredibly wrong. It had been a mutually humbling experience to admit that they perhaps didn’t know as much as they had previously thought, and Callie and Lucy had bonded over it. They’d started getting lunch after class, then dinner sometimes. Lucy had melded herself into Callie’s life so seamlessly it felt as though they’d always been friends.