He woke up hard.

It confused him almost as much as the realization that something had woken him—a crash coming from somewhere inside the room. He sat up and felt a cold dread, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up as straight as a tiny army at attention. He saw the gun first, gripped in the hand of a white woman wearing a ruffled white dress buttoned to her throat, her eyes as black as pellets of buckshot. He was so sleep-deprived that at first he thought it was Rosemary King pointing the small pistol at him. A derringer. That’s what it was. The story of Penelope Deschamps popped in his mind just as he turned on the bedside lamp and the woman vanished. He was still dreaming, wasn’t he? He had to be.

He heard a faint thud overhead, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. Darren realized now the noise that had woken him was coming from the room above his. He heard what he imagined were two bodies in a tussle and what sounded like furniture being pushed against walls, and then everything went quiet save for his own rapid breath. And then a woman’s voice, raised in pitch: Wait, he thought he heard her say. Unless it was Rape.

He grabbed his gun and ran into the hallway outside his room.

His feet were bare and the carpet was rougher than it looked. The needle above the single hotel elevator put its car on the second floor, and Darren didn’t imagine the woman who was in the room above his had time for him to wait for it. He opened a door onto an unadorned and vaguely foul-smelling stairwell. It stank of rotting flowers and urine, though neither was in evidence. The second story of the hotel had an open floor plan; it was essentially a gallery that looked down over the first-floor parlor, the lobby’s enormous crystal and brass chandelier at eye level from where Darren was standing now; it threw dagger-like prisms of color on the door to the room that was directly above his, room 207. He banged on the door, then knocked into it with his shoulder to test the sturdiness of it, wondering could he break the lock. But for all the dated elegance of the Cardinal Hotel, the lock was part of a modern key-card system; the door didn’t budge, nor did anyone open it when Darren said, “Police!” He pressed an ear to the door but heard only a soft silence that felt more ominous than the commotion that had woken him earlier. “Everything okay in there?”