her new boss continued, “I figure you’ll last through tonight. But come start of business tomorrow, round about noon, when you face off with an actual, real-live man taking off his actual, real-live pants…”
Rose tried not to blush, faint or otherwise embarrass herself as Miss Arlotta finished up with, “Then, at just about one minute after twelve, I reckon you’ll run screaming for the door.”
“You know, I have seen a man without his trousers,” she said quickly, trying hard not to let her voice tremble.
A man, to be precise. One. But thank goodness she had tonight to gather her wits before she saw another one. And then, on Monday, she would come face-to-face with her new profession as a shameless hussy.
“Right now, you might want to find something else to wear. A lot less, for starters.” Her employer puffed up a little when she added, “I hired a photographer to come by this evening to make a tintype of all of my girls, something pretty for the parlor, to help gents make a choice.”
Would anyone choose her? Was her lingerie scandalous enough?
Rose had never been in this kind of competition before.
“Oh, and what name should we call you?” the older woman asked. “We like our girls to go by something a little more fancy here.”
A new name? It made her feel mysterious and exciting, to have a nom de plume. Or nom de harlot, anyway.
“Name?” Miss Arlotta prompted.
“Let’s see…”
Trying to think of a pseudonym, Rose suddenly remembered her favorite dime novel, stowed safely in her suitcase with her other most-prized possessions. Little Rosebud’s Lovers by Miss Laura Jean Libbey. The heroine of the book had also found herself ruined and abandoned. Of course, she’d come to a terrible end, it being fiction, but still…It was perfect.
“Rosebud,” she announced with a smile. “You can call me Rosebud.”
“That’ll do fine. Welcome to my establishment, Rosebud,” the boss lady said with a wink. She picked up her shot glass and tossed back the whiskey. “I’ll lay you ten to one you’ll be out of here before you get a chance to try out your new name. But maybe you will surprise me.”
“I’ll be here longer than that, I assure you, Miss Arlotta.”
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
Rose lifted her chin. How hard could it be?
1
A Monday in July
Maiden Falls, Colorado, 2004
“ROSEBUD? Get up here! We got a live one for you!”
Secure in her hidey-hole tucked under the eaves in the attic, Rosebud concentrated on page 203 of East of Eden, pretending she had not heard the ghostly call to arms from Miss Arlotta. She had no desire for an assignment, no matter how “live” it was.
“Troubled couple on the road to bedroom bliss, blah, blah, blah,” she muttered. It wasn’t her fault that the entire group of scarlet women—once so good at helping men stray—had been roped into service as celestial matchmakers for honeymooners too pathetic to know how to pleasure each other.
After all, she hadn’t even spent one day as a soiled dove herself. What did she know about pleasure? On her very first night in Miss Arlotta’s establishment, just hours after choosing her nom de harlot, she had passed into the afterlife with all the rest of them. Nobody knew exactly what happened, although the Maiden Falls Gazette had claimed it was due to a gas leak, offering the smug opinion that it was exactly what Miss Arlotta deserved for having airs above her station and making her tawdry social club the first place in Colorado outside Denver with gaslights. Whatever the cause, every girl in the place, plus Miss Arlotta and the beau who’d been visiting her that Sunday night, had ended up as dead as cold mackerel, most still tucked into their beds.
As for Rosebud…She’d just been caught in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time.
Of course, that argument had not swayed anyone in this household. Judge Hangen, Miss Arlotta’s gentleman friend, had shot back that he, too, had been erroneously stuck in Bordello Purgatory by virtue of bad timing, that there was no leniency provision for girls who hadn’t technically had the opportunity for harlotry, and Rosebud was going to have to play by the same rules as the rest of them. Case closed.
“It’s completely unfair!” she said angrily, slapping down her book, unable to concentrate when she thought about the terrible injustice of her predicament.
She’d only managed to make it through the 109 years since all their mortal lives had ended by keeping her nose firmly stuck in her books. She’d started with Little Rosebud’s Lovers and Lady Audley’s Secret, which she’d been in the process of unpacking from her valise when she passed over the threshold into the spirit world on that fateful night. But she’d tired of reading and rereading just those two, so she’d quickly learned to steal (or borrow, as she preferred to call it) interesting items from visitors to the Inn at Maiden Falls.
In the first dark years, she’d had to depend upon newspapers and the occasional dime novel left by the workmen and ruffians who’d wandered through. Thank goodness the old brothel had been turned into a gaming house, a speakeasy, a saloon, then completely restored and polished up into a high-class honeymoon hotel. The clientele and the reading material had picked up nicely.
Years ago, someone had discarded Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she quite adored. The naughty bits in that one always cheered her up. Not to mention East of Eden, and more recently several issues of Entertainment Weekly and a DVD called Buffy the Vampire Slayer that was really quite extraordinary. Things had become so much more interesting since her day!
She used to have to sneak into empty guest rooms to use the televisions, but then one day she’d tripped over something in the Inn’s business office called a computer. Which was connected to another bizarre concept called the Internet. Which opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a smart girl who found the modern world quite fascinating.
No one seemed bothered by the assortment of packages from strange and exotic merchants that arrived at the Inn at Maiden Falls. They always thought the mysterious electronic devices, movies, books and music had been ordered by the proper people at the Inn. Rosebud was very careful to fill out all the proper paperwork and purchase orders on the Accounting Department’s computers. It wasn’t stealing if she charged it to the Inn. Exactly.
“Well, I do bargain shop. And I return every book and movie that isn’t an absolute necessity, right back into the Inn’s library,” Rosebud noted as she slipped East of Eden onto her bookshelf next to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. “Besides, how else was a girl supposed to keep herself entertained for 109 years?”
“Rosebud?” Miss Arlotta’s voice barked. “Get your pretty behind up here! Where are you, anyway?”
She sounded perturbed, and Rosebud knew she was going to have to show up just so the boss didn’t figure out how it was possible for her to be missing and unaccounted for. As far as Rosebud knew, no one else had figured out how to master the fine art of slipping under Miss A’s radar, which was just one of her singular skills.
