The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  But the woman replied with, “I suppose they’re fine. I remember when Andrew and Cathy bought them. They didn’t want to spend the money, but your salesman convinced them. With Andrew gone so much, they thought it would make Cathy safer. It didn’t work.”

  Viv’s hand was shaking as she put a checkmark next to Cathy’s name. “Ma’am, I think—”

  “You’re one of those ghouls, aren’t you?” the woman said. “You aren’t from the lock company at all. Then again, I wonder how you knew about the locks Cathy put in. You’re likely not going to tell me. So let me tell you something instead.”

  “Ma’am?” Viv said.

  “You think we haven’t had dozens of phone calls at this house? Hundreds? I moved in after Cathy died because my grandson was left without a mother. Andrew is deployed again so it’s just my boy and me. And I’m the one who answers the damn phone calls. They’ve tapered off over the past two years, but we still get them. I can tell a ghoul from the first minute I answer the phone.”

  Viv was silent.

  The woman didn’t need an answer. “I’ve heard everything,” she continued. “Cathy was a slut, Cathy was a saint. Cathy was targeted by Communists or Satanists. Cathy was killed by a black man, a Mexican. Cathy was having a lesbian affair. Cathy got what she deserved because she had left the path of God. I’ve told Andrew to unlist the number, but he won’t do it. You ghouls have all the answers, except one: You can’t tell me who the hell killed my daughter.”

  The woman’s voice was raw with pain and anger. It came through the phone line like a miasma. Viv still couldn’t speak.

  “It’s never going to happen,” the woman said. “Finding him. Arresting him. Letting me watch him fry. I thought for a long time that I would get that chance. But it’s been two years, and they still don’t know who took my girl. Who stripped her, put a knife in her, and dumped her. A sweet girl who wanted to earn her next paycheck and raise her baby. Do you know who killed her? Can you end this for me?”

  The words were right there. Sitting in her throat. His name is Simon Hess. But something stopped her; maybe it was the knowledge that saying it wouldn’t end this woman’s pain. “I—”

  “Of course you don’t know,” Cathy’s mother said. She sounded angry and tired, so tired. “None of you people ever know.”

  “He won’t get away forever.” Viv’s voice was hoarse with her own emotion—anger and a different kind of exhaustion. She was tired, too, though she couldn’t imagine how tired Cathy’s mother must be. “He can’t. He’ll make a mistake. He’ll come into the light. There will be justice, I swear.”

  “No,” Cathy’s mother said. “There won’t. I’m going to die not knowing who killed my baby. He’s going to walk free.”

  There was a click as she hung up.

  Viv sat silent for a long time after she put the phone down. She wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then she got up to get dressed.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Thank you for meeting me,” Marnie said to Viv the next day as they sat on a bench in a park in downtown Fell. “During the day, no less.”

  Viv picked at the French fries she’d bought from a fast-food counter on her way here. Vaguely, she realized that she didn’t eat real meals anymore; she snacked on crackers and coffee during the day and ate bologna sandwiches at night. She couldn’t remember when she’d last slept eight hours.

  “You look terrible,” Marnie said, reading her mind.

  Viv shrugged. “I feel fine.” It was the truth. She had pushed past tiredness some time ago and now existed on a plane of exhaustion that floated her through the day.

  Marnie did not look terrible. She looked great. She wore khaki pants with a pleated waist and a navy blue blouse beneath her wool pea coat, and she had a matching navy knit cap on her head. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and a few of the people passing through the park looked twice at the black woman and the white woman sitting together.

  “Okay, I came to tell you two things,” Marnie said, leaning back on the bench next to Viv. “The first is that I had some downtime today, so I followed your salesman. He’s in Plainsview again.”

  Viv straightened. Plainsview, where she’d seen him watching the girl. “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now. I followed him to the exit, and then I kept going. Because if I follow him too close and too often, he’ll see me. Which leads me to the other thing I want to say. I quit.”

  “What do you mean, you quit?”

  “All of this,” Marnie said, waving between the two of them. “The intrigue we have going on. I’m quitting. I’m done. I’m not following this man anymore. I’m not even sure he’s a murderer.”

  Viv blinked at her. “There was a salesman from Westlake Lock Systems going door-to-door on Victoria Lee’s street the month she was killed. And Cathy Caldwell and her husband bought locks from a Westlake salesman before she was killed, too.”

  Marnie’s lips parted. She looked like someone had slapped her. “Oh, honey,” she said in a rough voice, and Viv thought she was going to say You’re crazy or It doesn’t prove anything, but instead she said, “You need to stop before you get yourself killed.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m investigating him,” Viv said.

  “The hell he doesn’t. A man does crimes like this, he’s looking over his shoulder. Covering his tracks. Waiting for someone to come up behind him.”

  Viv thought of the name erased from the Westlake schedule book and didn’t reply.

  “You’re going to get hurt,” Marnie said. “I know you think you won’t, but you will. If he can hurt those girls, then he can hurt you. You need to talk to the police and tell them what you’ve found.”

  Viv licked her dry, chapped lips and ate a cold French fry.

  “Promise me,” Marnie said. “You owe me, Vivian. Promise me you’ll talk to the police. That you’ll try.”

  Viv forced the words out. “I promise.” She didn’t want to, but she meant it. She promised it to Marnie, and she would do it. “Please don’t quit.”

  Marnie shook her head. “Sorry, but I am. I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too dangerous. I have a man I’m seeing, and he says he wants to marry me. I can get married and start a family instead of doing this. I’m done.”

  “But you’re the one who showed me everything,” Viv said. “You’re the one who took the photos and took me to the murder sites.”

  “I was trying to help you, because you were a clueless girl working in the middle of the night. I was trying to show you that there are predators out there. That you have to be careful.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Looks like it backfired on me. How was I supposed to know you’d start hunting the hunter?”

  “Maybe you were trying to help, but you knew all about the murders. It interested you, too.”

  “Maybe. Yes, okay. But I wasn’t interested like you are now.” Marnie leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, and looked Viv in the eye. “I’m all about survival. That’s how I work. Knowing about the girls getting killed in this town was a part of that survival. Following a killer around is not.” She pressed her lips together and sighed. “I like you. I do. But I have more to lose than you do. I’m not jeopardizing everything I have, everything I’ve worked for, my life, for something I can’t prove, that no one will believe. I’m not willing to do that and I never was. Do you understand me?”

  Viv dropped her gaze to her fries and nodded.

  There was a second of silence. “You’re going to Plainsview, aren’t you?” Marnie said.

  Viv nodded, still staring at her fries.

  “I know I can’t stop you, and you have some serious spine. But be careful, for God’s sake. At least be ready to defend yourself. Don’t be alone with him. All right?”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Damn it,” Marnie said. “If I read about you
in the papers, I’m going to be so damn mad at myself.”

  But she still rose from the bench, picked up her purse, and walked away.

  * * *

  • • •

  The trail had gone cold in Plainsview. Viv circled the streets, looking for Hess’s car. She started with the neighborhood she’d last seen him in, then widened out to the next neighborhood and the next. Plainsview wasn’t a very big place, and soon she’d covered it pretty thoroughly.

  She ended up at the town’s only high school, Plainsview High. It was a new building, and even though it was dinnertime, the parking lot was full of cars, the lights on in all the windows. Viv saw a handmade sign that said, CHOIR NIGHT TONIGHT!!

  She parked on the street and scanned the cars in her view. The girl she’d seen on her bicycle was high school age, which meant she might be here, or her hunter might come to this place. After a minute she got out of the car and looked up and down the street. He wouldn’t park in the lot, but nearby. That was what she would do.

  She shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked toward the school. Nothing moved; choir night was still happening. But when she stepped on the edge of the school’s concrete tarmac, the school doors opened and parents and students began to file out. The performance was finished.

  There was the sound of a motor, and a car pulled away in the edge of Viv’s vision. She turned and squinted. It was the same make and model as Hess’s car, but at this angle she couldn’t see the driver. She took a step forward as the car receded, trying to read the license plate, but she could only catch a nine and a seven before the car disappeared.

  Simon Hess’s license plate had a nine and a seven.

  She walked through the small crowd. She looked like someone’s big sister, or maybe even a senior, so she blended in. Moving against the flow of people leaving, she walked through the school’s open doors. On a folding table was the night’s program, now over. She picked it up.

  On the front was a list of the songs in tonight’s performance. On the back was a list of the members of the Plainsview High School Choir. There were fifteen girls.

  She folded the page in her pocket and wandered farther down the hall, passing teachers and parents chatting in knots. The school was small, and the crowd was rapidly dispersing. There were other folding tables here, advertising other things: the football team, the science fair. One of the tables had a handmade sign that said ORDER YOUR 1982–83 YEARBOOK NOW! Next to it was a copy of the 1981–82 yearbook on display.

  This is so easy, Viv thought as she picked up the yearbook, slid it in her coat, and walked back out the door with the rest of the crowd.

  * * *

  • • •

  Downtown Plainsview was closing, but a hardware store was still open.

  Viv went in, thinking of that car driving away tonight. Thinking of Marnie’s advice: At least be ready to defend yourself. And that stupid news item on safety tips for teens: Use a buddy system. Never get into a stranger’s vehicle. Consider carrying a whistle or a flashlight.

  Viv walked up one aisle of the small store, then down the other. A whistle was not much use at the Sun Down, where there was no one around for miles. If she ever used it, she’d be whistling into the wind. As for a flashlight, she pictured shining one into the traveling salesman’s face. That wouldn’t do much, either.

  “Excuse me, miss?”

  Viv turned to see a boy of about eighteen standing at the end of the aisle. He had pimples on his cheeks and a red apron on. He gave her a smile that was friendly and a little embarrassed. “We’re closing now,” he said.

  “Oh,” Viv said, looking around. “I was just—”

  “Is there something I can help you find?”

  “Maybe.” She smiled back at him. “I was just thinking that I should carry something to defend myself. Because I work nights.”

  “Jeez, sure,” the guy said. “We don’t carry Mace, though. You’d be surprised how often we get asked for it.”

  “Right.” Viv had never actually thought about how to defend herself. Could she punch someone, kick them? Growing up in suburban Grisham, the idea was absurd. Now she glanced at the darkening windows outside and wondered exactly what she would do.

  What would you do if you ever saw real trouble? her mother had said.

  “There’s a baton thing you can carry,” the hardware guy told her. “It gives a good whack, I think. But it’s big and heavy for carrying around every day.” He turned the corner to the next aisle, and Viv followed him. “Personally, if I were a girl and I wanted to defend myself, I’d carry this.” He reached onto a shelf and put a thick leather holder into her hand.

  Viv pulled the handle. It was a knife—not the retractable switchblade kind, but a regular knife with a wooden handle and a wicked silver blade. The blade itself was about three inches long and looked like it could cut glass.

  “Wow,” Viv said.

  “I told you, we get asked a lot,” the guy replied. “This is a hunting knife, but it works for what you want. Small enough to fit in a purse. Sharp enough that you mean business.” She looked up to see that he was smiling at her. “You can even take it jogging in the park. Some pervert comes up to flash you—boom! At least, if I were a girl, that’s what I would do.”

  She blinked up at him, and she smiled at him. She watched him blush.

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  A few thin flakes of snow swirled in the air, white against the darkness. They flitted in front of the blue and yellow of the motel sign like fireflies, looking almost pretty. Thanksgiving was coming, and I’d had an email from Graham a few hours ago, asking if I wanted to spend the holiday with him and his fiancée back home.

  I pictured an awkward dinner at Graham and Hailey’s apartment, football on TV. It was the second Thanksgiving since Mom died, and my brother and I should probably spend it bonding and supporting each other. But we didn’t have particularly warm memories of the holiday—Mom always cooked a big Thanksgiving dinner, but she worked and sweated over it for days, making a meal for the three of us that didn’t matter much in the big scheme of things. By the end of it she was always too exhausted to be much fun, and if Graham and I either offered to help her or told her to keep it simple, she got defensive and angry.

  She’d even cooked Thanksgiving dinner for us when she was sick. She was still on her feet then, trying to convince herself that she could do everything she used to do. She’d waved us off, gone shopping for a load of groceries when Graham and I weren’t looking. She’d fallen asleep while the turkey was in the oven. Just thinking about it now made me sad. I had no idea what old idea buried in my mother’s psyche made her crazy at Thanksgiving, and now I would never know.

  I loved Graham. He was my big brother, my only sibling, my protector and my torturer for as long as I could remember. The one who didn’t let bullies tease me for being a dorky bookworm, but who also believed that making me watch horror movies at age nine would “toughen me up” and had snuck me my first copy of Pet Sematary. But now he was twenty-three, working in an office, and practically married. While I stood here in the parking lot of the Sun Down at three in the morning, watching the snow, it felt like Graham was on Mars.

  I held the photo in my hand out at arm’s length, matching the image to the motel. It was one of Marnie Clark’s stack of photos, taken from the parking lot of the Sun Down in 1982. This shot was taken from near where I was standing, at the edge of the parking lot, facing the motel. I moved the photo until I had it exactly matched—the real motel outside the frame, the 1982 version inside. There was almost no difference at all.

  In a weird, scary way, this place was almost magical, stuck in time.

  I lowered the photo and picked up the next one from the stack. It was taken from the same angle. There were two cars
in the parking lot in the picture, parked in front of rooms 103 and 104. They were boxy, early-1980s cars, ugly and oddly retro-attractive at the same time. A woman was getting out of one of them. She was young and dark-haired and beautiful, sexy and maybe a little mean. Or she just had resting bitch face, perhaps. This was the woman Marnie had been paid to follow and catch cheating. Bannister, Marnie had said the name was. This was Mrs. Bannister, on her way to an assignation at the Sun Down.

  I switched to the next photo. My hands were getting cold in my mittens, but I didn’t care. There was no chance that I would be needed inside the Sun Down office anytime soon, because we had no customers, and I liked looking at the photos out here, seeing where Marnie had been when she took them, the real spot where Mrs. Bannister had parked. It was like a door through time.

  The next photo showed the door to room 104 opening and a man standing in the gap. He was smiling at Mrs. Bannister. He was fortyish, with salt-and-pepper hair. Not bad-looking, I thought, but it was a mystery why a woman so young would cheat with him at a down-and-out motel. Then again, I was the last person to understand anything about sex.

  I looked more closely at the photo of Mrs. Bannister and her lover. Marnie had been at the back of the parking lot, and she’d gotten a lot of the motel into the frame. On the upper edge I could see the second level of the motel, the bottoms of the line of doors through the slats of the second-story railing. There was a dark shadow on the second floor, as if maybe someone was standing there. But then again, it could be anything.

  Inside the motel office, I heard the desk phone ring. I jogged back toward the motel, putting the photos in my coat pocket. The ringing stopped as someone picked up the phone, and then the office door opened. Nick stepped out and motioned to me. He’d been in the office going through the rest of the stack of Marnie’s photos. “It’s Heather,” he said.