A Thousand Yesteryears by Mae Clair Read Free Book Online Page B

“Who did you tell?” Reaper snarled. “Damn, you, I’ll beat the shit out of you. Who did you tell?”
    “No one!” He screamed the words, though he wasn’t sure what he was screaming about. Reaper kicked him again and, for the first time, Amos started to think he might not come out of the beating alive.
    “You can have the money back,” he blubbered, uncaring that he cried like a five-year-old. Tears streaked his cheeks as fresh agony knifed through his belly with another kick. “Please! You can have the money back. I’ll give it all back. I didn’t tell no one nuthin’. I swear.”
    “I don’t believe you, parasite.”
    Reaper withdrew. Oh, thank God, he withdrew! Amos was sure his ribs were broken, and several teeth had worked loose in his mouth. Maybe that’s all the man wanted, his money back. He had to have hope. Let him get the hell out of here, and he’d lay off smacking Doreen Sue around. He’d make her work extra hours at that salon of hers until she earned enough money for him to pay back Reaper.
    Sniffling, he wiped blood and snot from his nose. He could get up now, stand up like a man and face Reaper. They’d work it out. He looked up hopefully, trying to wedge his arms beneath him.
    That was when he saw Reaper slowly and methodically pull on a pair of black gloves.
    * * * *
    She owned the place. It was a sobering thought.
    Eve parked beside the Parrish Hotel. Behind her, the high flood walls that kept Point Pleasant safe from the waters of the Ohio River were broken by a wide gap. In the event of a potential flood, that gap could be filled with concrete inserts to hold the water at bay. An unlikely event given the last devastating flood had occurred in 1948, years before she was born. As a child, she’d often heard people talk about it, others going so far as to recall the colossal damage wrought by the floods of ’37 and ’13. Chief Cornstalk’s curse in play, according to the old-timers.
    By the time she was born, the Army Corp of Engineers had constructed flood walls around the city. Seventy-three hundred feet of concrete ranging from small obstructions to fifty feet in height. The grassy banks of the Ohio River lay behind that barrier, a place where she’d enjoyed many hours fishing, hiking, and bike riding. The waterway was now regulated by a lock and dam system that kept the once flood-prone city safe. Curse or no curse, her family’s hotel was secure from the threat of overflow.
    Her hotel.
    Eve drew a breath. Three stories high with single rooms, suites, a parlor, ballroom, and café, it had been a second home while growing up. Her parents had rarely lacked lodgers thanks to Point Pleasant’s location at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers, a junction commonly referred to as Tu-Endie-Wei in the Native American tongue of Wyandotte. She’d forgotten the rich history of the town, dating back to the time of George Washington and Daniel Boone. Chief Cornstalk was buried at Tu-Endie-Wei Park, his infamous curse blamed for everything from catastrophic floods to Mothman sightings and the Silver Bridge tragedy.
    As she sat in her car staring up at the hotel with its wide front porch and bright blue awnings, an icy sensation crawled over her skin. Her great grandfather Clarence had burned to death, along with her grandparents, in a fire that took place at the hotel four years after she was born. Her great grandmother Sadie had died in the Influenza Pandemic of 1919 when she was just twenty-eight years old. Eve’s own father had perished at thirty-four in the Silver Bridge collapse, and her aunt had died of cancer at forty-nine. Maybe there was something to the curse after all.
    She shook the thoughts away. No, it was just superstition and silliness. Whatever memories lingered in Point Pleasant, they were only that— memories of the past. She had come to face the present, and that included coming to terms with the Parrish Hotel.
    Eve entered through the front door into the