The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  She circled the car. If someone came by right now, she would be in plain view. The neighbor across the street could likely see her if he was looking out his window. The house across the street was dark with no car in the driveway. Still, she had to be fast.

  The passenger seat had a few pieces of paper on it. Viv tried the passenger door and when it opened, unlocked, her blood went hot and pounding in her veins. She reached in and picked up the papers.

  It was a schedule, typed up and run through a ditto machine. The ink smelled like school, and for a second Viv was dizzy with memories of class. Then she focused on what she was reading. It was a schedule, the words typed neatly.

  Monday: Mr. Alan Leckie, 52 Farnham Rd., Poughkeepsie.

  Wednesday: Terra Systems, Bank Street, Rochester.

  Thursday: Monthly meeting at head office.

  Viv almost laughed. This was from the salesman’s actual scheduling department, the one she’d pretended to be a few hours ago. She flipped back and saw the schedule for the previous week, and the week before that. How long did they keep records? She wondered.

  The schedule pages had letterhead, a contact name, a phone number. Viv slid the bottom page from the pile—maybe he wouldn’t notice the bottom page gone?—and folded it into her pocket. She was just pushing the door shut when she looked up and saw the face in the living room window.

  It was a girl, about ten, with long, straight hair tucked behind her ears. She was watching Viv with no expression.

  Viv started. There had been no sign of kids anywhere. She should run, but instead she followed an impulse and met the girl’s eyes through the window. She put a finger to her lips. Be quiet, okay?

  The girl gave no indication of agreeing or not. Instead she lifted a hand and pointed silently in the direction of the front door. He’s coming.

  Adrenaline spiked straight through Viv’s body, up the back of her neck and down into her gut. She ducked down the driveway and jogged to her car, trying to look casual in case anyone was looking—I belong here! I’m just trotting down this street, no problem! She got to her car and slid into the driver’s seat as the front door of the salesman’s house opened. She flattened herself down on the seat, trying to make the car look empty.

  After a few seconds she dared a peek through the window. The salesman—Simon Hess—was standing in the driveway where she had just been, looking back and forth up the street. He was still wearing the pants and rolled-up dress shirt he’d been wearing in the kitchen. His gaze hit her car and passed over it, seeing it empty. Viv held her breath.

  He turned back to his own car, circled it. He looked in the passenger window and opened the passenger door. He picked up the stack of papers.

  Did I put them back in the right place? Did I?

  He stared at the stack for a long time. Too long. Thinking, Viv knew. Trying to pin down what wasn’t quite right. Trying to think of who had been in his car in his driveway—the passenger door had thunked shut when she closed it, she knew that, and now she knew he’d heard it. He was trying to put this together with the strange phone call. Trying to think of who it could be.

  Slowly he put the papers back in the car and closed the door again. He turned and walked around the side of the house, disappearing.

  Viv straightened quickly, turned on her car, and drove away. Her hands were slick and icy on the wheel.

  Her mind raced. The salesman would see her footprints in the soft dirt of the garden at the side of the house: slim tennis-shoe prints. He would know it was either a boy or a girl who had been snooping at his house, not a large man. He’d figure a teenager. Viv’s shoes were white unisex tennis shoes, and technically they could belong to a teenage boy. The salesman was more likely to believe a boy prowler rather than a girl.

  That would work to her advantage—if the daughter didn’t give her away.

  She didn’t think the daughter would give her away.

  Still, the phone call had been from a woman. He would be suspicious, on his guard. Wondering what someone wanted from him. Because he knew, now, that someone wanted something.

  I am hunting the hunter, and he suspects it.

  The game is on.

  She was afraid. Terrified, actually. But she was just starting.

  Now she needed her next move.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  The Internet was a gold mine of information on Cathy Caldwell. Whereas I’d spent months subsisting on the few paragraphs I could find about my aunt Viv, Cathy Caldwell was a whole different ball game. Cathy Caldwell was famous.

  She hadn’t always been famous. My first search for her name brought up a list of articles from the last few years—true-crime blogs, a podcast, and a Reddit thread with dozens of posts. Google showed me a photo, a 1970s color snapshot of a pretty woman with sandy brown hair standing in a sunlit back yard somewhere, smiling with a small baby on her hip. She was wearing short shorts and a turquoise halter top, her face a little blurry the way old snapshots always are from the days of film cameras with manual focus. The picture looked like the kind that was stuck in those old photo albums with plastic film that you smoothed over each page.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Cathy Caldwell,” I said to Heather as I sat glued to my laptop after we got back from talking to Jenny Summers.

  I was half joking, but Heather answered me seriously. “I told you we have a lot of dead girls in Fell.”

  “You weren’t kidding. What was the other name she said? Victoria something?”

  “Lee.” Heather was standing in the kitchen, like she’d gone in there for something and then forgot what it was. She zipped the collar of her zip-up hoodie all the way up her neck, as if she was cold. She looked blankly at the closed door of the fridge. “That one was solved, and then it wasn’t.”

  I frowned at her, though she wasn’t looking at me. “What does that mean?”

  “Her boyfriend was convicted, and then it was overturned a few years later. He was proven innocent.”

  “Truly?” I opened a new tab and started a new search. “That’s incredible.”

  Heather turned and looked at me, her face still set in serious lines. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  I took my hands from my laptop keys. “What?”

  “The dead girls. I spent too much time reading about them a few years ago. It put me in a bad place. I’m not supposed to read about them anymore, you know?”

  “Depression?” I asked her. “Anxiety?”

  “A mix.” She shrugged. “They go together. They bring the insomnia. And the bike accident I had—there was trauma from that.” She glanced down at her zipped-up hoodie. “I have other issues, too, I think you may have guessed. My therapist says I have to work through it, but I can’t get . . . fixated on negative things.” She glanced at me. “I guess I’m not as much help as I thought I was. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I showed up in your life and brought my problems. It’s my fault.”

  She rolled her eyes and waved her hand. “It’s fine. Just do the searches yourself. I’m going to go study. Maybe have a nap.” She walked toward her bedroom, still hunched into her sweatshirt. It was so big, and she was so small, that she looked like a young girl in it. She got to her bedroom doorway, then put her hand on the frame and looked back at me over her shoulder. “Look up Betty Graham,” she said. “And when you’re done, help yourself to my meds.” Then she went into the room and closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  • • •

  Cathy Caldwell. Young, married, mother of a baby, her husband deployed. Left work one day and never came home; her body was found under an overpass, dead of stab wounds to the neck.

  It happened in 1980. There was a sensation in the local newspapers for a while, and then, with the case ice-cold, the attenti
on dropped off. Within a few years Cathy was forgotten—until a popular true-crime podcast revived the story in 2016. Then there was a rash of attention again, a new generation of amateur sleuths trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Cathy’s baby son, now grown, did interviews, supplied photos. He talked about the unique pain of growing up knowing a monster had murdered your mother, knowing that whoever that monster was, he was still walking free.

  But for all the Internet’s attention, the case was still unsolved. There was DNA but no match in any system. There was nothing else to go back to, no other leads that new technology could magically exploit. Memories were rusty. A growing number of people, like Cathy’s husband, were now dead. The only paper-thin theory, backed by zero proof, was that the husband hired someone to do it for the life insurance money. Otherwise, nothing.

  There was less about Victoria Lee. She’d been strangled and dumped off a jogging trail in 1981, and her boyfriend was quickly arrested and convicted of the crime. Unlike the lengthy odes to pretty, sweet Cathy, there was no one to talk about how wonderful Victoria was. Instead there was a cropped, blurry photo of her face, obviously chopped from a group picture, and the caption Murder victim Victoria Lee. Cathy was a wife, a mother, beloved and kind and innocent. Victoria was just a murder victim.

  In 1988 Victoria’s boyfriend got a new legal team and won a second trial, based on a technicality in the first trial. In the new trial it came out that Victoria had been wearing a thin gold chain around her neck when she was strangled. The chain had been buried in the flesh of her neck, and whoever strangled her would have had marks on his hands. Victoria’s boyfriend had no marks on his hands. His conviction was overturned and he was set free.

  Which meant that Victoria’s murder, initially solved, was unsolved again.

  I didn’t know why I was reading this. I didn’t know what it had to do with my aunt Viv. But I couldn’t stop.

  Betty Graham was next. She had been murdered in 1978 and dumped on a construction site. Betty was a schoolteacher with no husband and no kids, and she’d kept to herself. A neighbor had seen a traveling salesman knock on Betty’s door and get let in. No one saw her alive again.

  Betty had had her own small Internet revival, though not as big as Cathy’s. A few armchair sleuths had written about her, including a well-researched long-form article on a true-crime website. The details of the murder were scarce, but they made me go cold.

  Betty had fought.

  It wasn’t released at the time, but the article’s author had dug it out of the coroner’s report decades later. Betty’s body had bruises on the arms, the back, the shoulders. Her fingernails were torn and bloody. Her knees were swollen and damaged. There were scrapes on her leg and her hip, as if she’d been dragged. Her knuckles were bloody—her own blood—and four of her fingers were broken. She was missing two teeth. The coroner posited that she had been put somewhere, likely the trunk of a car, and had fought the whole way in. Then fought to get out. Then fought some more before her killer raped her, then stabbed her five times in the chest and finally killed her.

  Then he’d dumped the body on a heap at a construction site—the site of the future Sun Down Motel.

  My head went light. The Sun Down. A woman’s body had been dumped at the Sun Down.

  I scrolled through the article and found a photo of Betty Graham. She had a conservative haircut and wore a high-necked blouse, but there was no hiding that she was a beautiful woman. She was sitting for a formal portrait photo, likely for the school where she worked, her head tilted at that specific angle they always used in old school photos, her hands folded demurely in front of her, a polite smile on her face. She was beautiful but she was closed off, her eyes and demeanor saying don’t approach. She looked like the kind of woman who could be polite and pleasant to you for years, and decades later you realize you don’t know a single personal thing about her because she’s never told you.

  If you looked at her face, you wouldn’t see a woman who would fight and bleed to her dying breath. You saw a woman who would lead a boring spinster existence to the end of her days, not someone who scratched her nails off and crawled on her knees in an effort not to die. You wouldn’t see someone who wanted to live so badly, so desperately that she would do anything.

  Then again, maybe you might.

  Maybe you saw a woman who hated dying so much that she refused to do it all the way. Maybe you saw the woman in the flowered dress at the Sun Down Motel. Because I had. It was definitely her.

  And if I had seen Betty, then it was possible Viv had seen her, too.

  Five minutes later I was in the bathroom, sweating and gripping the counter with icy hands, hoping I wouldn’t faint.

  We had a conversation about Cathy Caldwell a few weeks before Viv died.

  The woman in the flowered dress, looking down at me from the upstairs level.

  Betty Graham, fighting and dying and getting dumped in the place where I now worked. Where Viv had worked.

  We were single girls who worked at night. Do you think we didn’t know the dangers, even back then?

  Cathy fucking Caldwell. How could I be so stupid?

  I bent over the sink and turned the cold water on. I put my hand under it, meaning to splash it on my face, but I couldn’t quite do it. I just stood there, staring down at the water going down the drain.

  This was the connection. It had to be. Viv had known about Cathy Caldwell in 1982—she had had a conversation about her with her roommate. If Viv knew about Cathy, it was entirely possible she knew about Betty Graham. Especially since Betty’s body was dumped at the Sun Down construction site. It was one of those things you’d hear about when you’d worked in a place for a while.

  If the woman in the flowered dress was Betty—and she was—then Viv had seen her. Known who she was. She could have figured it out, just like I did.

  And it had something to do with her disappearance. It had to.

  I spent too much time reading about dead girls a few years ago. It put me in a bad place.

  Viv was sad. And she was also sort of angry, especially toward the end.

  Viv had been out a lot at the end. Out pursuing something that wasn’t a man. Something that made her angry.

  The water still running, I raised my gaze to the shelf next to the medicine cabinet. I took in Heather’s line of medications, arranged just so.

  Betty, Cathy, Victoria. They were dark things, and following them led to a dark place. I could see it so easily, how you could walk through that door and never come out. How reading about the dead girls would lead to thinking about them all the time, to obsessing about them. Because after all this time, after decades and overturned convictions and reams of Internet speculation, no one knew who freaking killed them. No one at all.

  If I was going to solve this, I was going to have to go through the door.

  So I went.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  Two days later I was back in the archives room at the Fell library, going through old newspapers again. This time I bypassed the microfiche and went straight to the paper archives.

  I read every article about Betty Graham’s body being found in 1978. The murder had been the top story in Fell that year, a terrifying mystery in a town that had thought itself innocent up to then. There were anxious updates about how the police had nothing new, and the Letters to the Editor columns were filled with letters like Should we lock our doors at night? and Are our streets safe anymore? “I don’t even want to let my daughter go to the roller rink,” one woman—I pictured her in a sharp pantsuit with feathered hair, carefully hanging her macramé plant holder—complained. A man wrote, “I will not let my wife stay home alone.” I pictured his wife popping Valium, thinking, Please leave me home alone. Just for ten minutes. Another man wrote, of course, that it must have something to do with black peopl
e, because who else could it be?

  There was nothing anywhere about Betty’s injuries. The police hadn’t released that information. Was it too graphic for the public in 1978? Or did they withhold it because it was something only the killer would know about? Probably both.

  I flipped forward to 1980. That was the year of Cathy Caldwell, and for the first time I wondered if the same killer could have done both. It didn’t look like it on the surface: Cathy and Betty had been taken differently, killed differently. Cathy didn’t have injuries like Betty did. But both were pretty; both had been raped, stabbed, and dumped; and it was too much of a coincidence that a place as small as Fell would have two vicious killers. I’d seen speculation about this from the armchair sleuths on Reddit, but the Fell police had nothing to say. Besides, if the same man had done both murders, he’d either stopped or moved away after Cathy. Or died.

  Or he’d stayed, and he’d killed Viv in 1982.

  “Hey,” said a voice at my shoulder. “It’s you again.”

  I jumped and looked up. It was Callum MacRae, the guy who spent all of his time in the archives room, digitizing everything. “Hi,” I said.

  “It’s almost six,” he said, smiling at me. “The library’s about to close. They’ll do an announcement in a minute or so.”

  “Oh, right.” I looked around. “I should probably go.”

  “How’s it going?” he asked as I stood up. “The search for your aunt, I mean.”

  He was wearing jeans and a zip-up hoodie today, both of them new-looking and not cheap. He knew how to dress, even if his social life seemed to be lacking. “I haven’t found her yet,” I said. “I haven’t even gotten close.”

  “That’s too bad. Anything I can do to help?”

  I gestured to the archives behind me. “You already helped by showing me how to go through the old papers instead of relying on the microfiche. So thanks for that. I found things I wouldn’t have found otherwise.”