At seven minutes past three, Matthew picked up the phone and pressed the button for the night desk.
“Good evening, night desk.”
“Miss Ellis,” he said.
“On your first night, you told me you’d taken the night desk because you liked the peace of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d like some of that peace myself, please. Silence.”
There was a short pause on the line, the first he had ever heard from her.
“Certainly, sir.”
“The lamp is settling in nicely, by the way.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”
He hung up, rather pleased with himself.
He had been looking forward to that call all evening, which was new for him.
After the reindeer, he had spent days trying to think of something she couldn’t simply order from somewhere, and silence had seemed the best choice.
A hotel was never quiet, least of all the Glasshouse, where the old pipes that had once kept the orange trees warm knocked and hissed all night long.
He didn’t see what even Miss Ellis could do about that.
A few minutes later, everything in the Glasshouse went off at once.
The lights died, along with the lamp from the sale, and the pipes stopped knocking.
Outside, the seven stars of the hotel’s sign were still burning, because they ran on their own timer in the basement.
Inside, for the first time in years, he couldn’t hear anything at all.
It took him a moment to understand what she had done.
She had cut the power to the Glasshouse, which meant the heating had gone off as well.
He sat there in the dark and laughed, since she had given him exactly what he’d asked for.
In the morning he would have to call down and ask for the power back, which meant admitting she had won again.
He decided he could live with that.
He found the box of candles under the sink and lit a few of them, then put on his coat, as the room was already getting cold.
There was nothing else to do, so he painted.
He went back to the picture he always returned to on nights like this.
It showed the night desk from behind, with a woman bent over the logbook in the light of the desk lamp, while the lobby lay dark beyond her.
It was Sabine, as he remembered her.
When he was a boy, he used to sit on the floor behind the desk with his sketchbook while she worked, so he had mostly seen her from the back.
She fed him toast from the kitchen and let him stay as long as he kept quiet.
Nobody upstairs ever came looking for him.
He had been sixteen when she disappeared, and over the years her face had gone blurry in his memory.
Her back at the desk was what he remembered best, so that was what he painted.
He had painted that picture more times than he could count and had never shown it to anyone, which was why those canvases always stayed turned toward the glass.
Tonight, though, it wouldn’t come right.
The woman at the desk kept coming out stiffer than Sabine had ever been, sitting as straight as Miss Ellis stood whenever she called him sir.
He realized he had been thinking about Miss Ellis rather than Sabine.
It bothered him a little, because this picture belonged to Sabine.
The truth was that he had been thinking about Miss Ellis ever since the bus.
He had been sure she hated him, yet she had stayed with him that afternoon without a word of complaint.
Strangely enough, that had pleased him more than he would have expected.
He put the brush down.
The receipt from the ring box lay on the table where he had left it a week ago, with Room 707 at the top and *Thursdays* written along the bottom.
He had gone to Vidal’s sale hoping to learn more about the Thursday man, and to find out whether he had owned anything else from the Empty Case downstairs.
Unfortunately though, all he had come home with was a lamp nobody else wanted and the news about Coco’s comb.
But at least he now knew where the comb would be on New Year’s Eve.
He still didn’t know why Miss Ellis had been there too.
He had thought about asking her, but then he would have had to explain what he’d been doing there himself, so he let it go.
That left the room itself.
It was one floor below him, and as far as he knew, nobody had been inside since the old man died.
With the Glasshouse cold and dark anyway, tonight seemed as good a night as any to look.
He blew out the candles and went down the back stairs without a light.
Sabine had shown him these stairs when he was eight, and she had turned them into a game, timing how fast he could cross the hotel without a single guest seeing him.
He had been terribly proud the first time he managed it.
He still used them most nights, though he doubted Sabine would have approved of where they took him now.
On the seventh floor, he stopped at the door from the stairs.
At the far end of the hallway, light showed under the tall doors of his father’s office.
His father was back, and apparently still awake.
Matthew waited a moment longer.
He hadn’t spoken to his father since the board meeting, and he had no intention of having their next conversation here, in the middle of the night, outside that room.
If his father found him, he would want to know why, and Matthew couldn’t think of a single answer he could give him.
He kept to the thick carpet, which swallowed every step, until he reached 707.
The DO NOT DISTURB sign still hung from the handle.
The lock was old brass, like every lock on this floor, and Sabine had taught him to open that kind when he was a boy.
He had picked plenty of locks in other people’s houses since then, but it felt strange to do it here, in his own family’s hotel.
It took him less than a minute.
Inside, he switched on the light of his phone.
He assumed the room looked exactly as Vidal had left it a month ago.
The bed was made, an overcoat hung on the back of the door, and dust lay over everything.
He was careful not to touch anything, since the dust would show it.
On the table by the window, a game of chess had been left in the middle, with the old man’s leather chess case open beside the board.
There were two chairs, one on each side.
Matthew had watched his father play often enough as a boy and he quickly realized the game had never been finished.
He wondered who had sat in the other chair every Thursday.
In all the years Vidal had come to the Voss, Matthew had never seen anyone go up with him.
The room safe stood open in the corner, and it was empty.
Whatever Vidal had kept in it was gone.
Then he noticed the floor.
There were footprints in the dust that weren’t his, going straight from the door to the safe and back.
They were too clear to have been there long.
Vidal had been dead for a month, so someone else had been in this room, and recently.
Matthew didn’t like that at all.
Whoever it was had come looking for something, and they had gotten here first.
He wondered whether they had found it.
He was standing by the safe when a key scraped in the lock.
It could be his father, from the end of the hall, or whoever had left those footprints.
Either way, Matthew had no good reason to be in that room at that hour.
He switched off his light and stepped into the wardrobe among the old man’s coats, pulling the door shut behind him.