"Hey guys, welcome back to SkepticalNate-"
"AM I IN SHOT?" Sienna mouthed from the other side of the camera.
"What? No, you're fine." Nate shook his head, "You could have asked out loud, you know."
"I don't want my voice in the video either," Sienna uncorked one of the bottles of wine that came with the room.
"It's fine, I'll just restart."
She gave him a halfhearted thumbs up and passed him a glass, then ducked as far back behind camera as she could, making sure to look out for any mirrors.
"Hey guys, welcome back to SkepticalNate. Today, I'm all the way out here in New Mexico at the Harvey Motel, the supposed final resting place of Estelle and Lucinda Davis. Estelle, a waitress from Arkansas, met Lucinda hitchhiking and the two started what was called at the time an "illicit business relationship" but which we recognize now as probably a lesbian romance. Just one that happened to involve luring rich heiresses and housewives and then robbing them blind. I mean... you go girls?"
Nate looked across the camera at Sienna for a reaction, but she just sipped her wine and gave him a halfhearted thumbs-up. He missed having somebody else to bounce off of. Being the single host of something, no matter how un-demanding, was a skill reserved for psychos.
"Are you sure you don't want to be on camera any more?" Nate leaned off-camera.
"Nate, honey, last time I did you show with you I wasn't wearing a bra and basically all of the comments were about my tits. Your fans are freaks and I want nothing to do with them." She sipped her wine, "I'm more than happy being the producer and editor."
He sighed and looked back into the camera, trying to find his place in the script again. There was a cleaner and a bawdier version of the story, and since it wasn't some horrible personal tragedy and the episode didn't seem to be that interesting on its own, he went with the slightly less appropriate version of events.
"Accounts at the time were that the pair would lure heiresses back to hotel rooms just like these where they had jobs as maids, and then hold them at gunpoint. But their own accounts in their journals and the rumors tell a different story. Apparently, the pair were known to seek out women they suspected were sexually frustrated or unfulfilled, then empty their pockets after... giving them a taste of the taboo."
Sienna shifted behind the camera. While hardly a blushing virgin, she was still sensitive enough to these things to be properly scandalized. The version she had read had mostly covered the robbing, and the violent end.
"Until eventually, the pair picked the wrong housewife. Miss Chadwick, the heiress to a wealthy estate, was apparently unafraid of word getting out that she might have been lured in by a pair of lesbians and then robbed, and she brought the law down on them. In their confessions before execution, they named every single heiress and wife they'd robbed, causing a massive scandal that rocked the socialite circles of the town to their core. It's even said that the girls' last words were each other's names." Nate straightened up and brought his hands together, "So, do we have a pair of Bonnies who haunt these halls at night, looking for their next victim? Or do we have a pair of misunderstood girls born in the wrong era who this hotel milks the legacy of to this very day? You may have your own conclusions, but I know what my money is on."
Nate's money, of course, was "on" taking out a series of overpriced gizmos, waving them around the hotel room for the next half an hour, then editing that down to a few minutes before filming a "conclusion" video at home which he basically could have copied and pasted from the past few times he'd done this. Even if ghosts were real, and that was a big if, they usually followed the rule that the better the camera nearby, the less likely they were to show any sign of it. A realistic video about ghost hunting would have been a third traveling, a few seconds of making an ass of yourself, a few minutes of sleeping badly in a hotel bed, a third traveling, and then a few minutes of editing. But it wasn't actually about ghost hunting. It was about equal parts gawking at tragedy, hanging out somewhere dark and dirty, and making things seem more interesting than they were after the fact.
One small problem, the room wasn't really dirty enough. Even when he turned off the lights and drew the curtains to make it dark enough, it was too nice. You could hardly imagine a pair of "outlaws" staying here, let alone committing crimes here. Though it had probably been a lot less nice back when they'd been doing it. In the balancing act of attracting people for the ghosts versus not driving them away with crummy rooms, the hotel had chosen to look nice. He couldn't exactly complain about staying somewhere nice for once.
"Estelle Davis, can you hear me?" He turned on the spirit box and winced as it started flicking through signals at rapid speed. "Lucinda Davis, are you here? Can you give me a sign?"
Sienna poured another glass of the wine with surprising ease in the dark.
***
"I don't know how much of that was any good and how much of that was me tripping around in the dark like a dumbass," Nate moaned between spitting out his toothpaste and taking his cup of mouthwash.
"I thought you did great," Sienna replied sleepily from behind her magazine in the huge queen bed.
Nate swirled the mouthwash and stared at her, she didn't stare back. Sienna was sitting upright with her back against the headboard and her legs under the covers like a sitcom housewife, just missing the curlers, though they probably couldn't have made her hair any curlier. She had a seemingly endless supply of magazines, which was weird because he'd never seen one in her mailbox or suitcase. They were all classy ones too, not celebrity gossip. Magazines about things, things that adults actually cared about, not ghost hunting. That was why she could afford magenta (not purple, he'd been corrected) camisole and panty sets that cost more than what his channel made in a year. That on top of funding, you know, his channel.
He spat the mouthwash out, "You don't have to be a bullshit artist for my feelings."
"I'm not," Her magazine didn't so much as budge, her face remained obscured behind it, "You asked, I answered honestly."
"Yeah, but it's also not something you care much about," Nate finished in the bathroom and stepped back out into the bedroom. "It's like me saying a new sofa or a new floor swatch looks good. You know I mean it, but you know it probably doesn't actually mean anything."
"Then it doesn't mean anything," Nate heard her set the magazine down and settle into bed as he was moving around to the other side. "But I thought you did great."
"Well, thank you."
Nate brought the blankets up around him and took a breath before turning out his light. The room didn't go completely dark, a gentle blue glow came from the TV which was on with the volume very low, just enough to cover up the gentle creaking and sounds of people in other rooms. Honestly, that made the room a little more eerie than full darkness had. But this was easy to overlook. The blankets were soft and thin in the warm night, the mattress was so comfy he felt himself already getting drowsy, and the pillows smelled like something pleasant he'd caught the scent of once as a child and then forgotten about.
"Man, what a nice bed." He murmured.
"Wuh huh..." Sienna grunted sleepily.
After a moment's pause, he smiled to himself.
"You know, it seems like a waste not to get our money's worth."