Hotel Nigh

Chapter 04

A Missing Child and Secret Articles

"What's the best thing to have for lunch then?" I asked Danny once he'd shown me to a table in a dining room which was completely vacant.

Danny was still grinning when he answered with, "The burger and fries are great." He didn't even give me a chance to express my opinion on what I thought about having a burger and fries for lunch, because he strolled across the length of the dining room to the door to the kitchen. Guess that was what I was having for lunch; not that I was bothered.

The dining room surprisingly was quite posh in juxtaposition with the rest of the hotel. Portraits suspended on the walls, and I figured they were old employees of the hotel until I saw the name Mr. Wellington and recognised it as the hotel manager thirty years ago when the shooting transpired. Danny arrived back at my table too quickly after the discovery of the portrait. He sat down in the seat opposite me.

"The chef will bring it out herself considering we're quite dead at the moment. It shouldn't take long to be cooked. We normally get busy around one-ish. Being bang-on time, it's normally quiet."

After some mindless chitchat exchanged between Danny and I, who was giving me the roundup of gossip from what other students from high school we knew were doing. Some were getting married to other people, one had even died, and others shipped themselves off to another country for a various amount of reasons. And of course, more than enough already had a child.

A woman emerged out of the kitchen area wearing a white coat and trousers, her hair trapped in a netted hat. She held a plate of a burger and fries with a little salad on the side and placed it in front of me. It smelt delicious. Then she frowned and asked, "Danny, did you get him a drink?"

Danny turned to me casually and asked, "You want a drink, McCann?"

"Sure. Just a Coke please. How long have you been working here?" I asked the chef. "I've just booked into the hotel today."

Danny left a moment later.

"Been working here twenty years now," she said, smiling. "My name's Rose Siren."

"Jason McCann," I answered indirectly, picking up my fork and ignoring the stare she was giving me. It was one that wasn't too dissimilar from how Mr. Perry looked at me when I announced my name to him. People knew. Even out here in Feyreburg where it's several towns over from Burnmeadow where it actually happened. "What's it like here?"

She shrugged, plastering her polite smile back on her face. She wasn't a large woman, but she wasn't small either. Her hair looked like it was all tied up in the netted hat, and she was either devoid of makeup or wore very little. I wasn't an expert when it came to makeup and nor was in it even floating somewhere in my realm of expertise... not even a little bit.

"In high season it's busy, but just as an average week it's average." Her smile broadened. "I thought this week would be an average week, especially for an autumn storm, but it seems we only have one room spare, and someone phoned in to book that in advance because they need a place to stay to avoid the storm. It's just a coincidence that it's a family coming to stay and the only room free is a family room."

"That's lucky," I said.

Someone else was beginning to feel peckish, and when I turned around, it was Melina, the girl staying in DAWN. She saw me, ushered for Danny to vacate his seat who had just deposited a glass of Coke and ice in front of me, and once he did, she plonked herself down in it. Then she turned to the chef, pointed at my own meal I was digging into now and said, "I'll have the same please."

Rose shooed Danny away to make him stand outside or go in the kitchen. He opted to go in the kitchen which is hardly surprising because if I remember him from high school, he used to eat his weight in food and barely ever retain it with all of the exercise he did; he was still slim now. But Rose shuffled out of the kitchen roughly five minutes later with a burger and fries, and placed it in front of Melina before asking if she wanted a drink. Maybe Danny wasn't so good at his job, I thought, once Rose came back with a glass of water for Melina.