Winter at Death's Hotel by Kenneth Cameron Read Free Book Online

it’s as cold as your stepmother’s breath out there.”
    Newcome smiled at Louisa over his aunt’s head, making her his fellow-conspirator in tolerating the old woman. Again, he bowed, said, “Mrs. Doyle, I hope we meet again,” and he went off. She tried to say, But we’re leaving soon , but the old woman was rattling on about the house detective, whom she seemed to dislike as much as Marie Corelli. Louisa excused herself and hurried toward the lift.
    Arthur, a little to her disappointment, hadn’t missed her; he was happily reading his lecture on the future of the English novel, with which he was going to entertain people all over America. He looked up when she came in, grunted, and went back to admiring his own work.
    She didn’t quite dare take the Gazette out of the wastebasket right then, but she did as soon as he’d gone off to visit his publishers. His American publishers, that is. He was published first in London, then in America. He’d never met the Americans and wanted to get on with them; as he’d reminded her before he went off, they were paying the expenses of his lecture tour. “But not mine,” she’d said, and he’d delighted her by saying, “Not yours, but those I gladly pay because I can’t do it without you. If you weren’t with me, Louisa, I’d…I don’t know what I’d do.”
    That had been very nice. It made up for his reprimand about the lobby and the Gazette , which of course she knew was trash and which of course she’d been ashamed to have the detective see her carrying, so of course Arthur had been right.
    Still, she wanted to know more about that murder.
    She and Ethel took all her clothes out of the trunks and shook them out and hung them up to get the wrinkles out, although the clothes would all have to go back the next day because they’d be leaving. She and Ethel gossiped; she told Ethel about the murder. Ethel seemed to be frightened and said she would never go out of the hotel’s doors again until they were headed to the train. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
    Louisa didn’t see what there was to be frightened of. Ethel was not, after all, a lady of the pavement, and Louisa thought uncharitably (and, she admitted to herself, perhaps inaccurately) that murderous fiends surely preyed on better-looking women than Ethel.
    ***
    Arthur had come back rather late from his luncheon with his publishers, and then he had rested (she had thought he was just a bit tipsy) and now he was working on his lecture. It appeared that the real purpose of the luncheon had been to tell him that although it was perfectly fine to talk about the future of the novel, what people really wanted to hear from him was what Sherlock Holmes ate for breakfast, so he had to spice up his talk with some Holmesiana. This had caused Arthur to wake in a foul mood and with a headache, as he looked upon Sherlock Holmes and what he called “detective stories” as an unfortunate means to the end of writing “real” books, and, very much to that point, he had killed Holmes off and hoped to have nothing more to do with him.
    Louisa got out on the pretext of taking Ethel with her to have a little walk. His last words were, “No farther west than Broadway or east than Fifth Avenue! Mind, Louisa…!”
    Now, without Ethel, she went out into the pale sunshine of Twenty-Third Street, where the noise of the city was as abrupt and surprising as a blow. Hack drivers were shouting at each other; carriages were going by; horses’ hooves and wheels hammered and ground the pavement; workmen with trash barrels on wheels were sweeping dung and trash and slamming it into their barrels; men and women were almost trotting along the pavements, their shoes clicking like watchmen’s rattles.
    She turned left, as much to go with the stream of the nearest walkers as because she had any destination that way. She