The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  “You don’t have anyone else to do it?”

  “I just said my guy quit, didn’t I? I’m the owner, so I should know. Either you sit at this desk all night or I do. I already know which one I’d rather it be.”

  Viv blew out a breath. The work itself didn’t bother her; she’d worked plenty of service jobs back in Illinois. But the idea of staying awake all night didn’t sound very fun.

  Still, if she did it she held on to her twenty. Which meant she could eat something.

  She glanced around the office, looking for a signal that there was a catch, but all she saw was bland walls, a desk, a few shelves, and the window on the office door. There was the muffled sound of a car going by on the road, and the sky was getting darker. Surprisingly, Viv smelled the faint tang of cigarette smoke from somewhere. It was sharp and burning, not the old-smoke smell that could come from the woman’s clothes. Someone was smoking a cigarette nearby.

  For some reason, that made her feel a little better. There was obviously someone in this place, even if she couldn’t see them.

  “Sure,” she told the woman. “I’ll work the night shift.”

  “Good,” the woman said, opening the desk drawer and tossing a key on the desk. “Room one-oh-four is yours. Wash up, have a nap, and come see me at eleven. What’s your name?”

  That smell of smoke again, like whoever it was had just taken a drag and exhaled. “Vivian Delaney. Viv.”

  “Well, Viv,” the woman said, “I’m Janice. This is the Sun Down. Looks like you’ve found yourself somewhere to stay.”

  “Thank you,” Viv said, but Janice had already gone back to Tom Selleck, putting her boots on the desk again.

  She picked up the key and her twenty and left, pushing open the office door and stepping onto the walkway. She expected to see the smoker somewhere out here, maybe a guest having a smoke in the evening air, but there was no one. She walked out onto the gravel lot, turned in a circle, looking. In the lowering light of dusk the motel looked shuttered, no light coming from any of the rooms. The trees behind the place made a hushing sound in the wind. There was the soft sound of a shoe scraping on the gravel in the unlit corner of the lot.

  “Hello?” Viv called, thinking of the man who’d put his hand on her leg.

  Nothing.

  She stood in the lowering darkness, listening to the wind and her own breathing.

  Then she went to room 104, took a hot shower, and lay on the bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at the blank ceiling, feeling the rough comforter against the skin of her shoulders. She listened for the sounds you usually heard in hotels—footsteps coming and going, strangers’ voices passing outside your door. Human sounds. There were none. There was no sound at all.

  What kind of motel was this? If it was this deserted, how did it stay open? And why did they need a night clerk at all? At the movie theater, the manager had sent everyone home at ten because he didn’t want to pay them after that.

  She wasn’t getting paid, not exactly. But it would still be easier for Janice to turn the lights out, lock the office door, and go home instead of trying to find someone to sit there all night.

  Her feet ached, and her body relaxed slowly into the bed. Lonely or not, this was still better than hitching on that dark highway, hoping for another stranger to pick her up. She started to hope there was a vending machine somewhere in the Sun Down, preferably one with a Snickers bar in it.

  The man in the yellow collared shirt had put his hand on her thigh like it belonged, like they had an agreement because she was in his car. He’d curled his fingers gently toward the inside of her thigh before she pulled away. She felt that jolt in her gut again, the fear. She’d never felt fear like that before. Anger, yes. And she’d slept a lot since her parents’ divorce, sometimes until one or two in the afternoon, another thing that made her mother yell at her.

  But the fear she’d felt today had been deep and sudden, almost like a numbing blow. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her how erasable she was. How it could all be over in an instant. Vivian Delaney could vanish. She would simply be gone.

  I’m afraid, she thought.

  Then: This seems like the right place for it.

  She was asleep before she could think anything else.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  Greville Street was barely three blocks long, a street of low-rise apartments ending in a dead end covered by a warped chain-link fence. The buildings looked like they were made from children’s blocks stacked on angles, a boxy style in concrete and vinyl siding that had gone out of favor sometime around 1971. I drove slowly past the short, squat driveways to each building, looking for number twenty-seven.

  I parked next to a dusky gray Volvo with a rounded rear and balding tires, feeling a little like a time traveler. I’d come here to see where my aunt had lived, maybe get a glimpse into what her life had been, but I hadn’t expected to stand on a street that looked almost unchanged from 1982. If the address was correct, she’d stood exactly where I did now, looking at the same landscape.

  There was no one around except for two kids riding bikes up and down the street, ringing the bells on their handlebars and laughing. I walked to the front door of number twenty-seven and found that it was unlocked, so I went in.

  There was a short hallway lined with tenants’ mailboxes and a set of stairs. The mailbox to apartment C said ATKINS, H. I had poked my head around the edge of the stairwell, looking up and wondering how not to look like a stalker, when a girl appeared in the upstairs hallway.

  She was about my age, with a slight, firm build and dark blond hair that fell straight to her chin. She had taken the front hank of her hair and pinned it back from her forehead in a single bobby pin, and she looked at me with eyes that were clear and intelligent in an expressive face. She was wearing a large knitted poncho, basically a square placed over her shoulders with a hole for the head.

  “Are you here for the ad?” she asked me.

  “I—”

  “There’s only one person coming,” she said. “The roommate for apartment C.”

  That gave me pause. “Apartment C?”

  “Sure. Come on up.”

  I didn’t even think of turning around.

  Instead I followed Poncho Girl up another set of stairs and through a door. The apartment inside was surprisingly big, with a linoleum-floored kitchen, a TV room, and two bedroom doors opening from opposite ends.

  “I’m Heather,” the poncho girl said as she closed the door behind me. She stuck out her hand from beneath the folds of wool. It was a slender hand, porcelain white, and when I shook it, it gave my skin a little chill.

  “Carly,” I said.

  “I’ll give you a tour.”

  The next thing I knew it was ten minutes later and I had seen every room. I knew that the hot water was fussy and the Wi-Fi reception was unreliable and the rent was two hundred per month. I also knew I was a bit of a jerk, because I still hadn’t told Heather the truth.

  “Two hundred a month isn’t very much money,” I pointed out.

  Heather rubbed a hand on the back of her neck. She had faint purple circles beneath her eyes, as if she were very tired, but she still gave off a tight vitality that was hard to look away from. “Okay, I can’t lie,” she said, the words in a rush. “I don’t really need the money. My father pays for this place while I’m at Fell.”

  “At Fell?”

  “Fell College,” she said. “It’s weird, I know. A local girl going to a local college, moved out into an apartment paid for by her parents. Right?” She tilted her chin like she wanted me to answer, but she kept talking without giving me the chance. “I needed the experience, or so the parental units tell me. To feed myself and fend for myself, something like that. And I like it, I do. But I’m alone all the time, and this apartment makes noise
s. And there’s no one to talk to. I’m a night owl and I don’t sleep at night. I think I posted the ad for a roommate just so I can have someone here. It isn’t the money really. You know?”

  “Okay,” I said, because she seemed really nice. “I’ve never heard of Fell College.”

  “No one has,” Heather said, shrugging her thin shoulders beneath her poncho. “It’s a local place. Not a college in the usual sense, really. It’s obscure, and we locals go there. Makes us feel like we’re going to college without leaving town.”

  “Isn’t the point of college to leave town?”

  “The point of college is to go to college,” Heather said with utter logic. “And I’m surprised you aren’t one of us. I took you for a fellow student.”

  I looked down at myself: worn jeans, old boots that laced up the ankles, black T-shirt that said BOOKS ARE MY LIFE beneath a stretched-out hoodie, messenger bag. Add my dark-rimmed glasses and ponytail and I was pretty much a cliché. “I am a student, actually. But not at Fell College. I’m . . .” I looked around, cleared my throat. “Okay, I can’t lie, either. I didn’t actually come here about the roommate thing. You just assumed.”

  Heather’s eyes widened. “Then why are you here?”

  “Um, because I like grim Soviet Bloc architecture?”

  She clapped her hands once, the motion making the poncho ripple. Her eyes sparkled. “I like you! Okay, then! Tell me why you’re really here. The details.” She closed her eyes tight, then opened them again. “You’re mooning over an ex-boyfriend. There’s a guy who lived in B who wasn’t bad, but he moved out last week.”

  “No,” I said. “No mooning.”

  “Curses. Okay. You’re an archaeology student, and on a dig you found a map that led you here and you want to know why.”

  I stared at her. “That’s actually sort of close, but my reason is weirder.”

  “I live for weird,” Heather said.

  I stared at her again, because she meant it. No one in Illinois lived for weird. No one I’d met, anyway.

  “My aunt lived here, I think,” I told her. “She disappeared in 1982. My mother died and never told me about her, and I left school, and I’m here to find out what happened.” It didn’t sound stupid. In this apartment, telling this particular girl, it didn’t sound stupid at all.

  Heather didn’t even blink. “Um, 1982,” she said, thinking. “What was her name?”

  “Viv Delaney.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t ring a bell. But then again, there are so many.”

  “So many what?”

  “Dead girls. There are lots. But you said she wasn’t dead, right? She disappeared.”

  “Y—yes.”

  “And she lived here, in this apartment?” Heather looked around at the apartment, as if picturing it like I was.

  “Yes, I think she did.”

  “Have you found the tenant records?”

  “Do you think I could?”

  Heather looked thoughtful. “The landlord is a friend of my dad’s. I could probably ask him if he has any records from 1982. And the archives in the Fell Central Library might have something. Nothing is digitized here. We’re stuck in a time warp.”

  “I’m looking for people who might have known my aunt,” I said. “I have her roommate’s name. According to Google, she might still live in town. I want to find her and talk to her. And my aunt worked at the Sun Down Motel. Maybe someone there remembers her.”

  Heather nodded, as if all of this were not at all strange. “I can help you. I’ve lived in Fell all my life. True crime is kind of a hobby of mine.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. “Me, too.”

  Her smile wasn’t exactly even, but I still liked it. “Gosh, that settles it. Don’t you think?”

  “Settles what?”

  “I think you should stay here,” she said. “It’s fate. Come stay here for as long as you need to, and I’ll help you look for your aunt.”

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  Heather, it turned out, wasn’t lying when she said she knew a lot about Fell. “My dad is a dork,” she told me plainly. “His idea of a vacation is to drive to Americana Village and walk around. He’s a nerd about history, so I grew up learning a lot about the history of this place. Being a dork runs in the family.”

  It was hours later and we were back in apartment C. I’d retrieved my things from the hotel and put them in the second bedroom. We’d ordered pizza, and night was starting to fall, even though it was only dinnertime. I was sitting on the sofa and Heather was lying on her back on the floor, still swathed in the poncho. She’d had a bicycling accident two years ago, she said, that gave her daily back pain. “One vertebra is smushing down into the one below it,” was her explanation. “They say I have to have surgery, but I can’t do it. I’m too neurotic.” Since I’d seen the shelf of prescription pills in the bathroom when I dumped my things, I didn’t ask questions.

  “I’m talking about 1982,” I reminded her now, dropping a crust back into the pizza box. “I don’t need to know about old forts and cannons.”

  “Ha ha,” Heather said from the floor. She had her knees bent and her feet flat, her pale hands resting on her stomach as she stared at the ceiling. “Fell doesn’t have any forts or cannons. It’s a strange place. Sort of morbid, like me.”

  “I read a few things online. This place has some unsolved murders.”

  “We have plenty of them. It isn’t just the unsolved murders. It’s the solved ones, too. I don’t know the stats, but with our small population we’re probably some kind of per capita murder capital of the country. Or at least of New York.” She lifted a hand and I placed a pizza slice into it. “I can’t explain it. It’s just a weird place, that’s all. Tell me about your aunt.”

  I told her about Viv, about her disappearance in the middle of the night from the Sun Down. I gave her my two newspaper articles.

  “Hmm,” Heather said, leafing through them. “No boyfriend, no drugs. ‘Pretty and vivacious.’ Ugh. We can find the roommate in the phone book if she’s still in Fell.” She handed the articles back to me and lay staring at the ceiling again. “So she worked a night shift and disappeared. You’d be amazed how many people do that—disappear as if into thin air. They leave doors open behind them, food on the counter, their shoes by the door. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is.”

  “I know,” I said. “Do you think the cops will let me look at their records?”

  “I have no idea, but anything’s possible with a case that old, I guess. A few of the Internet sleuths have tried to get records from the Fell PD and not gotten anywhere, but this is different. You’re the victim’s family.”

  “Are you training to be a detective?” I asked, putting my folder away.

  Heather laughed. “Hardly. My anxiety couldn’t handle it. No, I’m taking medieval literature. That’s more my style.”

  “They teach medieval literature at the college in Fell?”

  “It’s practically all they teach. The school’s full name is Fell College of Classical Education. Greek literature, Latin, classic art and sculpture, Russian literature, that sort of thing. It’s a small, private college started a hundred years ago as a vanity project by the richest man in town. We only have three hundred students. I’ve never had a class that had more than ten people in it.”

  “Are you getting a degree?”

  “Pray tell,” Heather said in an amused voice, “what exactly can one do with a degree in medieval literature? Usefulness is not exactly Fell College’s forte. You should apply. I like it there.”

  “I was taking business studies,” I told her.

  “Carly.” Her voice was shocked, like I’d said I was taking porn star classes. “You can’t take business studies. You’re a Fell girl. I know it already.”
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br />   I handed her another slice. She was small under that poncho, but she could pack pizza away. “Town history, remember?”

  “Okay,” she said, lowering the slice. “The Sun Down Motel. Let me think. There was a time in the early seventies when people thought Fell would be a tourist destination, even though we don’t have lakes or mountains or anything to see. There were plans for a big amusement park that would bring thousands of people a year, so businesses got built—the Sun Down, a few other motels, some ice cream shops and restaurants. Then the amusement park plan fell through and none of it happened. Most of those old businesses are gone, but the Sun Down is still there.”

  “It didn’t go out of business?”

  “It’s pretty dodgy,” she admitted. “Maybe it gets by taking in drug dealers and such. I wouldn’t know. A few kids in high school liked to go there on weekends to drink, but my parents are prudes and never let me go.”

  I pulled my laptop toward me on the sofa and opened it, my mind working.

  “They say it’s haunted,” Heather said.

  “Really?” I asked in surprise.

  “Well, sure,” Heather said. “Isn’t every hotel haunted since The Shining? People have probably died there, I bet.”

  I looked at my Google Map of Fell, with a pin in the spot where the Sun Down was. If it was built in the 1970s, then it was still relatively new in 1982. Had it been unsavory then? Had it been haunted?

  Aside from Graham’s stupid stories and the odd scary movie, I’d never really thought about ghosts, whether they were real. But sitting in Viv’s apartment, living where she’d lived before she disappeared . . . I thought about it. I thought about ghosts and whether she was here somewhere, looking through the window or trapped in a doorway, watching us. If she’d been killed, would she come back? Would she come to this place or somewhere else? If every person who disappeared came back, wouldn’t the world be full of ghosts?