Property of Chaos

Sadie Marsh is six years old, sitting on the third stair from the top of the basement steps, watching her mother feed a leather-bound ledger page by page into a furnace that has been dead since before Sadie was born. *Evidence*, her mother says, when Sadie asks what it is. Then she pulls her coat off the hook, tells her daughter *Remember that the truth doesn't burn*, and steps out into the fog over Shadow Island, and the fog eats her shape. Twenty-six years later Sadie comes back on the ferry from Anacortes with her sister Delilah and a deed gone soft at the creases. Her grandmother Eleanor died six weeks ago and left her the Rutherford Hotel, known on the island as the Chaos Hotel: *a Victorian skeleton with broken windows and a turret that listed three degrees to port.* The bank has given her three months to sell it or assume its debt. Seventy-two hours of that are left. Then she reads page three. The hotel cannot be sold without a majority vote from the Shadow Island Town Council. Sadie shoots photo spreads for a Seattle weekly. She is not an innkeeper, and the island has opinions about that building. Captain Tom Hale, thirty-two years on the ferry run, tells her the third owner was Charles Vance, her grandmother's brother, who walked into the hotel library one night in 1994 and never walked out. *They don't disappear from inside a locked room with a single exit.* In the lobby she finds a man at the fireplace holding the only key to the place. He has burn tissue shiny and tight across his knuckles, a limp he leans away from, and the other name on the original deed: *Landon Croft.* His family was granted salvage rights in 1996. He has come for his dead brother's journal and for whatever Charles Vance was hiding. They both grab for the key. It snaps clean in half. So neither of them can lock the other out, which is precisely the situation Jasper Hale strolls into, smiling, calling it convenient. Beneath all of it sit a man called Silas Vance, a journal in the handwriting of someone who is supposed to be dead, and a tape that opens in her mother's voice: *If you're hearing this, I'm dead.* A closed-door small-town romance built on an inherited wreck, a family that burned its own records, and two people who cannot get rid of each other.