Page 24 of Shattering Dawn

“Probably not.”

Chapter Twelve

“The earthquake dida lot of structural damage,” Amelia said, “but it was the fire that gutted the central section of the hotel, where the clinic was located.”

“I can see that,” Gideon said.

He and Amelia were standing in what had once been the sweeping front drive at the entrance to the Lucent Springs Hotel. The ruins stood alone in the desert, a few miles outside the small community of Lucent Springs. The structure was a sprawling two-story monument to the 1930s Southern California architectural mash-up of Art Deco and Hollywood’s version of Spanish Colonial architecture.

Amelia had explained that the hotel had originally been built as an upscale sanatorium for wealthy patients suffering from tuberculosis. The medical theory at the time had held that the warmth of the sun and the dry air of the desert were the best therapies for the disease.

By the 1940s the hotel had been converted into a luxury resort that catered to the rich and famous. In its day it must have been an impressive destination, he thought. Nevertheless, in the end the richand famous had chosen Palm Springs, Burning Cove, and Phoenix for their winter playgrounds. Several attempts had been made to renovate the hotel in the ensuing years but they had failed.

The gardens had long since disappeared beneath cacti and tumbleweeds but some of the colonnaded walkways still stood. Most of the windows in the central structure and the two side wings were either studded with jagged shards of glass or empty entirely. The remaining room doors hung on rusted hinges. The walls were crumbled in places and badly charred in others.

The history of the hotel was interesting, but in that moment he was focused on Amelia’s reaction to the ruins. Her tension level had increased with each mile of the trip from San Diego to Lucent Springs. It had probably been a mistake to tell her about his stalker, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to explain the wedding veil.

He knew she was exerting a lot of willpower now in an attempt to appear calm and in control. He wondered if she was going to have an anxiety attack and then he wondered what he could do if she did. He had some skills, but offering comfort was not one of them. He could send her straight into a nightmare but he did not know how to pull her out of one.

And she thought she had a depressing talent.

“Walk me through everything you can remember about the day you arrived here for what you thought was a job interview,” he said.

She gave a small start, as if she had been somewhere else in her head.

“Right,” she said, recovering quickly. “Talia, Pallas, and I had never met before we arrived that afternoon. We had each received an invitation to take a contract with a hotel corporation that planned to renovate the property and turn it into a destination spa. Pallas is an interior designer. She was going to restore the interiors to theirformer glory. Talia was supposed to chronicle the history of the place with a view toward marketing. I was asked to do a series of before-and-after photographs to record the transformation.”

“How were the business arrangements handled?”

“Everything was done online until the day we met here. There was a professional website that made the hotel company look legit. The corporation claimed that it owned several luxury resorts in Asia and the South Pacific.”

“Were all the supposed holdings offshore?”

“Yes. This was supposed to be their first American property.” Amelia shook her head in disgust. “Later, of course, we realized we had been scammed. The business existed only on the internet. Afterward every trace of the company vanished. The website, the emails, the texts, the electronically signed paperwork and the drafts of the contracts simply disappeared. Our producer, Phoebe, is very good with tech. She’s trying to find whatever may be left in the way of digital tracks.”

“Has she picked up any leads?”

“Nothing we’ve been able to use,” Amelia said.

Her fury and frustration were unmistakable but so was her fierce determination. He resisted the impulse to give her a reassuring hug for two reasons. The first was that he did not have anything to offer in the way of actual reassurance. The second was that it was always bad policy to hug a client. Not as dumb as having an affair with a client but still a really, really bad idea.

“Tell me the rest of what you remember,” he said. He knew he sounded brusque and unfeeling but that seemed like the best way to handle the fraught moment.

She squared her shoulders. “I have no clear memories of what happened after we walked through the front door. Talia, Pallas, andI woke up early the next morning strapped to gurneys inside the old sanatorium clinic.”

He studied the dark entrance of the lobby. “Where is the clinic?”

“At the rear of the center section of the hotel. I’ll show you.”

She started toward one of the outdoor colonnaded walkways. He followed, interested by how confidently she moved through the ruins.

“Looks like you know your way around,” he said.

“I’ve been here a number of times in the past several months,” she said over her shoulder. “My friends think I’m obsessing on this damned hotel and they’re right. But I keep returning because I’m certain I’m overlooking something important.”

“In addition to the key?”

“Yes.”