The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  “They don’t think the same man did these,” Viv said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Not even close. It’s a small police department. It isn’t like the movies, with a staff of detectives to look at this stuff. Betty and Cathy didn’t travel in the same circles or know any of the same men. And Victoria’s boyfriend was convicted of her murder, so they don’t include her at all.”

  She pulled away from the curb and drove slowly forward, her wipers going in the rain. “What if they’re right?” Viv asked her. “What if these girls all got killed by different men for different reasons?”

  “Then we don’t have a killer in Fell,” Marnie said. “We have more than one. Which one gives you the best odds, honey?”

  * * *

  • • •

  The jogging path where Victoria Lee was murdered was nearly dark in the rain, the last dead leaves drooping wetly from the trees, the ground thick with soaked mulch. The entrance was off a side street, blocked by a small guardrail that everyone obviously stepped over. There was no sign.

  “Victoria’s house is that way,” Marnie said, pointing to a row of the backs of houses visible on a rise behind a line of fence. “She would have come around the end of the road and up the street here toward the trail.”

  “This is wide open,” Viv commented, looking around. “Anyone could have walked by.”

  “Not that day,” Marnie said. “It was raining, just like it is today. A thunderstorm, actually. No one uses the path in the rain.”

  Viv swung her leg over the guardrail and walked onto the jogging path, her hood up, the rain soaking the fabric. “She went running in the rain.”

  “After an argument.” Marnie followed Viv over the guardrail. She didn’t bother with the fiction of a hood; she just got wet, let the water run down the jacket she wore. “She didn’t get far. Her body was found about thirty feet down the path.”

  The sound of the rain was quieter under the trees, hushed in the thick carpet of brush along the path. Water dripped and trickled onto Viv’s forehead, and her shoes squelched in the mud. She pushed her hood back and looked around. It was like a cathedral in here, dark and silent and scary. You couldn’t see the place where the trees cleared and the yards and houses beyond, even though it wasn’t far away. Standing here felt like being in a forest that went for miles. “Where does the path lead?” she asked Marnie.

  “It runs just over a mile. It’s old city land that was supposed to be used for a railroad that was never built. That was probably a century ago. The land sat for a long time while the city argued over it, and in the end they just left it, because it’s long and narrow and they can’t use it for much else. In the meantime the people who live around here made a path. It ends just behind the Bank and Trust building on Eastern Road.”

  Viv walked farther down the path. “The newspapers didn’t say that Victoria was an athlete,” she said. They’d only said that Victoria got in a lot of trouble in school, as if that might be a reason her boyfriend had grabbed her and strangled her. As if somehow she deserved it. They didn’t say it outright, but Viv could read it between the lines—any girl could. If you’re bad, if you’re slutty, this could happen to you. Even the articles about saintly, married Cathy Caldwell speculated whether her killer could be a secret boyfriend. Sneak around behind your husband’s back, and this could happen to you. Viv wondered what the newspapers would say if Helen the cheating wife died.

  “She wasn’t a runner,” Marnie said. “She was just trying to keep slim. You know, for all those guys she supposedly dated.”

  So a girl no one had really liked had come down this path, running in the rain because she was angry and needed to move. Viv left the path and fought her way through the brush, which was wet and darkened the knees of her jeans. Her shoes were hopelessly wet now, her socks soaked through.

  He did it quick, she thought. Victoria was running, angry. She wasn’t sweet or pliant. He’d have to physically jump her, grab her, stop her. Get her on the ground. Get her quiet. His hand over her mouth, on her throat. Maybe he had a knife or a gun.

  Would Victoria have fought? She could have at least tried to scream—there were houses not far away, including her own. There was a good chance there were people in hearing range. All it would have taken was one scream.

  But if the man who grabbed her was her boyfriend, someone familiar, would she have screamed?

  Viv turned in a circle, the thoughts going inescapably through her mind: What would I have done? Because this could have been her, storming out of the house at eighteen after a fight with her mother. Or leaving work. Doing what women did every day.

  It could still be her now. It could be her tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. It could be Marnie, it could be Helen. It could be Viv’s sister back home in Illinois. This was the reality: It wasn’t just these girls. It could always, always be her or someone she knew.

  She looked back at the path. Would I scream? She didn’t think so. She would have been so terrified, so horribly afraid, that she would have done whatever the man said. Don’t speak. Don’t make a sound. Come over here. Lie down. And when he heard someone coming and put his hands on her neck, it would all be over.

  “You think the boyfriend didn’t do it?” Marnie called to her from the path.

  “I don’t know,” Viv answered honestly. “It’s like you said. If he did it, then there’s more than one killer in Fell.”

  “You’re ignoring the possibility that he did Betty Graham and Cathy Caldwell. Maybe it’s Victoria’s boyfriend who is the serial killer.”

  Viv closed her eyes as water dripped through the trees. It was possible, she had to admit. The timeline worked. “So he started with strange women, then killed his girlfriend.”

  “And he hasn’t killed anyone since. Because the cops caught the right man.”

  The rain was cold on Viv’s skin, but she welcomed it. She felt hot, her blood pumping hard. “Victoria was eighteen when she was killed. Was her boyfriend older?”

  “He was twenty.”

  “Still, it puts him in high school when Betty was killed. He would have had to pull off posing as a salesman.”

  “If the salesman actually did it. Which no one knows.”

  It was possible. Victoria’s boyfriend could have spent years as a monster in secret, killing a teacher and a young mother before he was twenty. Viv kept her eyes closed. “You don’t think that’s true,” she said to Marnie. “If you did, you wouldn’t have brought me to all of these places. You think there’s a killer still on the loose.”

  Marnie was quiet for a minute. “All I know is I’d like to leave this damn jogging path. It’s giving me the creeps.”

  Viv opened her eyes again and walked farther into the brush. It was true—this was likely a fool’s errand. Victoria’s killer was in prison. There was no mystery here. Except there was. How did Victoria’s boyfriend know where she was? She wasn’t an athlete or even a habitual runner. Why had he come here to this place? If he jumped her at the beginning of the path, was he waiting for her? If so, how did he know where she would go?

  She kept walking until she hit the edge of the trees. She looked out onto a rain-soaked stretch of scrub with fences and houses beyond it. These were the same houses that Marnie had pointed out as being Victoria’s street.

  She peered through the rain. The stretch of backyard fences was broken in only one place: a narrow laneway, a shortcut from the street, so that people didn’t have to walk all the way to the end of the street and around if they didn’t want to. Viv pressed forward, leaving the trees and heading for the laneway.

  She heard footsteps behind her, Marnie’s voice. “Hey! Where are you going? It’s wet out here.”

  The laneway was a dirt path leading between two yards. Weedy but well used. A shortcut the locals took when they wanted to come to the jogging path.

  And from it, while she s
tood out of sight, she could see the street. A short suburban lane, maybe fifteen houses packed in a row.

  Viv was still staring at the street when Marnie caught up to her and stood at her shoulder. “What the hell?” she said.

  “Look,” Viv said.

  Marnie was quiet.

  “Which house is Victoria’s?” Viv asked her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet it was one of these,” Viv said, pointing to the row of houses in view. “I bet that’s how he knew when she left the house, where she was going. He stood right where we are now. And if she went around the end of the street and back . . .”

  “Then he could take this shortcut and beat her there,” Marnie said.

  Maybe. Maybe. So many maybes. But if Victoria’s boyfriend had killed her, then he must have had a way to head her off at the jogging path.

  And if her boyfriend could have stood here and watched the house, then so could a stranger.

  Viv pulled her notebook from her pocket and made notes, bowing over the page so the letters wouldn’t get wet. She wrote addresses, names. She made a map. She made a list of what she had to do next, because she knew. Marnie waited, no longer complaining about the rain.

  When she finished, Viv put the notebook away and turned to Marnie again. “Okay, I’m finished. Can we look at your pictures now?”

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  Jenny Summers, who had been my aunt Viv’s roommate in 1982, worked at an old-age home in downtown Fell. It was a flat square building of burnt red brick, surrounded by low evergreen shrubs, a metal sign embedded in the front lawn: KEENAN RETIREMENT RESIDENCE. Jenny refused to talk on the phone, but she’d asked me to come to her work so we could talk on her break. I stayed awake when I was supposed to be sleeping and said yes.

  Heather came with me, her poncho and parka traded for a quilted coat because the day was slightly warmer than usual. She’d pinned her hair back from her forehead in her usual style and wore dove-gray mittens that complemented the coat. She wore a black skirt that fell to her ankles and black boots.

  “Are we Good Cop and Bad Cop?” she asked as we got out of the car. “Can I be Bad Cop?”

  “I don’t think anyone falls for that anymore,” I said, zipping up my coat and leading the way to the front door. There was hardly any traffic in the middle of the day, and the breeze smelled almost good, if chilled. Black birds wheeled in the sky overhead, calling to each other.

  “You’re probably right,” Heather admitted. “Besides, it would work better if you brought one of your men with you instead of me.”

  I made a face at her as we opened the door. “No boys. Callum is annoying, and Nick doesn’t know I’m alive.”

  She waggled her eyebrows at me, Heather’s way of trying to “get my goat,” as she put it. She was good at it when I was in a certain mood. “Callum likes you,” she said. “He keeps calling and texting you. Tell Nick about Callum and see if he gets jealous.”

  “How old are we? And boys are not your bailiwick, remember?”

  She just smiled, and I turned away. I’d given Callum my number after I’d met him at the library—he said he wanted to send me any other articles he came across—and he’d used it frequently. He texted things like I found the 1982 Greyhound bus schedule. What if Vivian took the bus out of town? or I found the ownership records for the motel at the courthouse. Here you go. It was a little weird, frankly, that a guy as attractive as Callum took such an interest in me. That wasn’t a self-confidence thing—it really was weird. I preferred to think of it as purely an intellectual interest, one geek to another.

  We asked at the front desk for Jenny Summers, and a few minutes later a woman came out to get us. She was in her late fifties, whip-thin, with blond hair in a stylish short cut. She wore burgundy scrubs, Crocs, and very little makeup. She was a woman who had obviously always been pretty, and age had served only to sharpen her features and give her a harder, I-don’t-give-a-crap expression. “Come with me,” she said.

  She led us down a hallway to a room that said PRIVATE BREAK ROOM on the door. Inside were a small fridge, a coffeemaker, a few chairs, and two sofas. The sofas had blankets folded on them, pillows on top. It was obviously used as a nap room for some of the shift workers.

  Jenny motioned us briskly to sit, then went to the coffeemaker. “Which one of you is Carly?” she asked.

  I raised my hand. “Me. This is my friend Heather.”

  Jenny nodded. “I could have guessed it. You look a little like Vivian. So you’re her niece, huh?”

  I felt a fizzle of excitement, like Alka-Seltzer in my blood. This woman, right here, had known Vivian. Talked to her. Lived in the apartment Heather and I shared right now. It was like a door back to 1982 had opened a crack, letting me peek through. “My mother was Vivian’s sister,” I said.

  “Sister!” Jenny leaned a hip against the counter as she poured her coffee. She shook her head, staring down at her cup. “She never mentioned a sister. Then again, it was so long ago.” She turned to us. “You know I might not be able to help you, right? It’s been thirty-five years.”

  “Anything you can remember,” I said. “I want to know.”

  Jenny took her coffee and sat across from me, crossing one scrub-clad leg over the other. “You weren’t even born when she disappeared, right? So you never knew her. Jesus, I’m old.”

  “What was she like?” I asked.

  She looked thoughtful. “Viv was moody. Quiet. Lonely, I thought.”

  “The papers called her vivacious.”

  Jenny shook her head. “Not the Viv I knew. Maybe she was vivacious back home in Illinois—I wouldn’t know. But here in Fell, she kept to herself. She told me her parents were divorced and she wanted to get out of her mother’s house. She only talked to her mother once or twice that I knew of, and she didn’t seem happy about it. She worked nights at the motel. No boys, no parties. We worked the same schedule because I was on nights, so I knew her social life. She didn’t go on dates. Though in the weeks at the end she was gone a lot during the day. She said she had a hard time sleeping so she’d go to the library.”

  I glanced at Heather. “What did she want at the library? Was she a big reader?”

  “Well, she never checked anything out. I remember telling the cops all of this at the time and they couldn’t even find a library card. Though a few of the librarians remembered seeing her, so she wasn’t lying. They said she liked to read in the archive room.”

  So I’d been sitting exactly where Viv had been, maybe. Somehow that didn’t surprise me anymore. “Did she go anywhere besides the library?”

  “That, I don’t know. I mean, she was gone quite a bit near the end as far as I remember. Though I can’t be sure, because I slept days. I had my first nursing home job then and I didn’t rotate off nights until the following year.” She looked around the break room. “I thought it was a temporary job to make a little money. Goes to show how much I knew. I’m retiring next year.”

  Maybe Viv would be retiring soon, if she’d lived. It was so strange to lose someone, to feel their life cut short, even if you didn’t know them. Viv had only been as old as I was now. “It’s strange, though, isn’t it? That Viv wasn’t home much in her last few weeks? She could have met someone.”

  “I suppose she could have.” Jenny shrugged. “That’s what the cops thought at the time, but they never could find anyone Viv knew. They kept asking me if she could have met some guy, like that would solve the whole thing. I kept telling them no, and they hated it. But they didn’t know how deep inside her own head Viv was. I know what a girl looks like when she’s met some new guy. I’ve been that girl. That wasn’t Viv. She didn’t look happy those last few weeks—she looked determined, maybe. Grim. I told the cops that, but they didn’t really care. Viv was twenty and good-looking. They figured she mu
st have run off with Mr. Right—or Mr. Wrong. Case closed.”

  Heather pulled her chair up next to mine. “How did they look for her?”

  “As far as I know, they asked around,” Jenny replied, sipping her coffee. “They did a search around the motel, but that only lasted a few hours. They talked to her parents. They searched her car and pulled our telephone records.”

  “Pulled telephone records?” I asked.

  Jenny looked at me. “You remind me of my daughter. You kids don’t know a damn thing. We only had a landline back then, of course. The records were kept by Ma Bell, and the cops got a big printout. Old school, as you would put it.”

  I wondered where that phone record was, and if I could get my hands on it. “She didn’t mention anyone else to you?” I asked her. “Not necessarily a man, but anyone? A hobby? An interest? Anything at all?”

  Jenny leaned forward, and I could see in her expression the weary look of a woman who had spent thirty-five years caring for people. “Honey, we weren’t really friends. We were roommates. We didn’t swap secrets or go on double dates. We just chatted while we got ready for work from time to time, that’s all.”

  I looked her in the eye. She could tell herself whatever she wanted, but the truth was the truth. “Viv was gone for four days before someone called the police,” I said, my anger humming beneath my words. “Four days.”

  Jenny closed her eyes briefly and her shoulders sagged. “I know. I went to see my parents for a few days. When I got back, I thought maybe she’d gone home for a visit. I figured wherever she was was her business. I was wrapped up in my own bullshit and drama, and I didn’t think. It’s bothered me for three and a half decades, but that’s what I did.” She sat back in her chair. “I think to myself, what if I had called the police that first night I got home? Would she be alive? I’ll never know. But it was me who called them, though I did it too late. So on other nights I lie awake thinking, what if I never called the police at all? How long would it have taken for someone to notice that Viv was gone?” She ran a hand through her short hair. “A week? Two weeks? Her stuff was in the desk drawer in the motel office, and no one who worked there gave a shit. Literally no one cared that Viv’s purse was sitting there and she was nowhere to be seen. That’s worse, you know? That’s fucking worse. Poor Vivian.”