The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  “Thanks.” My glasses fogged as I walked back inside, and when I pulled my hat off my hair probably looked comical. I continued to make an excellent impression on Nick Harkness in my campaign for seduction.

  “Hey,” I said, picking up the receiver he’d left on the desk. It was sort of a thrill, using an old-style telephone. It felt like it weighed five pounds.

  “Okay,” Heather said on the other end of the line. “I’ve been researching the Bannisters for the last hour and I’ll tell you what I’ve found: nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I pawed at my hair with my free hand, trying to pat the flyaways back down. I heard Nick sit, though I couldn’t see him through the fog.

  “I mean nothing,” Heather said. “There’s a mention of a Steven Bannister winning a high school high jump contest in 1964, and that’s it. I have no idea if it’s even the right person. No other mentions of either husband or wife at all. And they’re not in the Fell phone book.”

  The frustrations of tracking people who didn’t live their lives online. “Okay. It was a long shot anyway that either of them would have met Viv. What about the man Mrs. Bannister was cheating with?”

  “Aha,” Heather said. “Now you’ll see how clever I am. Because I truly am fiendishly clever.”

  “Fiendishly?” My glasses cleared, and I glanced over to see Nick sitting in one of the office chairs, leaning it back with his feet pressed against the desk. He was wearing jeans and his black zip-up hoodie, his hair pushed back from his forehead as if he’d pushed it with his fingers. He had Marnie Clark’s photo negatives in his hand and was looking at a strip in the overhead light, squinting a little, his body balanced easily. Even in that pose he looked awesome, scruff on his jaw and all.

  “Yes, fiendishly,” Heather said as I watched Nick put down one strip and pick up another. “I talked to a guy online who can do DMV lookups. Those photos of Marnie’s have license plates in them. It cost me seventy bucks, but now I know who owned the cars in those pictures.”

  “You’re right—that is fiendish.”

  “I know. So here goes: The Thunderbird in the photos belonged to none other than Steven Bannister, high school high jump star. He moved to Florida in 1984 and dropped off the map. The second car belonged to a Robert White, who died in 2002. He would have been forty-one in ’82, so that probably makes him Mrs. Bannister’s lover.”

  “Okay,” I said. Nick started to lower his chair, so I stopped staring at him and moved my gaze to a spot on the wall.

  “There’s a third car, too. That one belonged to a fellow named Simon Hess. Here’s where it gets interesting.”

  “Go on.”

  Heather paused, purely because she loved the anticipation. “Two things about Simon Hess. First, he worked as a traveling salesman.”

  That made a bell ring deep, somewhere in my brain. “Where did I read about a traveling salesman?”

  “When you read about Betty Graham,” Heather said. “She was last seen letting one into her house.”

  Now the back of my neck went cold. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “It gets better,” Heather said. “I looked up old Simon Hess to see if he was dead yet. And I found something interesting. It seems he left on a sales trip sometime in late 1982 and he never came home.”

  “What? That makes no sense. What do you mean he never came home?”

  Nick was sitting up and watching me now, trying to follow the conversation. I wished like hell this ancient phone had a speakerphone option, but I’d just have to tell him everything after I hung up. How did anyone before 1999 do anything at all?

  “He just left and never returned,” Heather said. “And get this. His wife didn’t even call the police. She eventually declared him dead five years later, when she tried to claim his life insurance money. She said she thought he’d abandoned her for another woman, but eventually she figured he might have died, so she wanted to sell their house and get the money.”

  “Could she just do that?”

  “It seems like it. There’s a time period someone has to be missing before they can be declared dead. In New York it’s three years. I couldn’t access the file, but they must have investigated it and decided that Simon Hess was dead and Mrs. Hess got her money.”

  I rifled through the pile of photos with my free hand, pulling out the one that had Hess’s car in it. “So his wife said he went missing sometime in 1982, but she didn’t know when?”

  “She last saw him in November.”

  “These photos are from October. So he was still around.” I brushed my finger along the edge of the photo, then picked up the next one in the sequence, which showed my aunt Viv walking along the walkway from the AMENITIES room to the office. It was the shot Marnie had cropped and sold to the newspapers, showing Viv’s face. Hess’s car was in the corner of the frame.

  “What are the odds that we have two people who went missing around the same time in one photograph?” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Heather said. “And if Simon Hess was Betty’s killer, then I’d say it isn’t a coincidence at all.”

  “So he killed Viv and fled town.”

  Nick was listening, but he leaned his chair back again, balanced it, and picked up another negative, looking at it through the light. For the first time, I wondered what he was looking for.

  “You have to admit, it’s a pretty great theory,” Heather said. “But Simon Hess seems like a dead end. No one’s seen him since 1982 and he’s legally dead.”

  “Maybe Alma Trent can help.”

  “She isn’t a cop anymore. Do you think we should go to the cops with this?”

  I was starting to think so. This was looking less and less like an amateur attempt to satisfy my curiosity and more like something the police could actually use.

  I thought of Betty as I’d seen her, tormented and terrifying and somehow still beautiful. Her body dumped here at the Sun Down. Simon Hess’s car here. Simon Hess vanishing. Did he leave town before he could be arrested for murder?

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that Hess had come to the motel sometime in October 1982. But what was he doing here?

  I smelled cigarette smoke and glanced at Nick again. He wasn’t smoking, of course. He was still looking at Marnie’s negatives, but now he was frowning at them, pulling the strip in his hand closer to see it better.

  “I’m going to call Alma tomorrow,” I decided. “I’ll tell her what we have. She’ll know what to do.”

  I hung up and dropped into the office chair. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said to Nick.

  He righted his chair again and raised his eyebrows at me. “I’ve been here for weeks. I’ll believe a lot of things. Including the idea that the smoking guy is around somewhere right now.”

  I met his gaze. It was strange, so strange to have someone share your crazy delusion. Someone who saw the same ghosts you did.

  “This is even weirder than that,” I said.

  “Hit me.”

  I told him everything. Nick did what he always did, no matter how crazy the story: listened without judging, laughing, or scoffing. All he said at the end was: “Interesting.”

  “Interesting? That’s it?”

  “Yes. If he killed Betty and dumped her here, then he was familiar with this place. Maybe, once it was built, he stayed here on his sales trips. Maybe he’d seen Viv and was watching her. Planning.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, his gaze moving past me to look at nothing. “They said my father snapped the day he killed my brother, that he went crazy all of a sudden. But it wasn’t true. He planned it.”

  I held my breath and waited, listening.

  “He’d had the gun for over a week,” Nick said. “He’d never owned a gun before. He went through the process of getting it legally. He spent some time figuring out what he was going to do and p
utting the plan into motion. He’d even called our high school and said we were taking a family vacation, so both of his sons would be out of school for a while.” His blue gaze was remote. “The only reason Eli was home at all was because his basketball practice had been canceled. He called Dad at work and asked him where he kept the stash of gas money, because he needed to put gas in his car. So Dad knew we were both home. He gave Eli an answer, then left work and came home to kill us.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He said at the trial that he heard voices telling him to do it. But my father was a lawyer. He may have been trying for an insanity defense. I don’t know whether he was lying about the voices or not. In any case, the defense didn’t work.” He looked at me calmly, holding my gaze. “I got asked a lot if I was really in the bedroom when it happened. I was.”

  I dropped my gaze to the desk in front of me.

  “I spent a lot of time wondering if I should have stayed. If I could have gotten past Dad without being killed, gone downstairs and helped Eli. But he died so fast, and no ambulance could have saved him. I think, deep down, that I knew that. Dad had been quiet in the last few weeks, so quiet. He wasn’t a violent person, but somehow, when I heard the shots and the screaming, I knew. I knew that Dad had shot Eli, and that it would be over in minutes if I didn’t run. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I think I expected it.”

  “You had a gut feeling,” I said. “An instinct.”

  Nick pressed his fingertips to his forehead and rubbed it tiredly, his eyes closing for a minute. “Maybe. But if I had an instinct, then why didn’t I act on it? Why didn’t I say something? Do something? I know I was a fourteen-year-old kid, but this is the kind of thing that goes through your head when your dad tried to kill you. It’s why I don’t sleep.”

  “I bet you could sleep in the right place,” I said. “Not just at the motel. You can’t spend the rest of your life here. I bet you could sleep if you were in a place that made you happy. Where you knew you’d wake up to something good.”

  He gave me half a smile. “You think that place exists?”

  “Sure it does. There are good places, Nick. They’re different for everyone. I think you’ll find yours.”

  “You’re way too nice to me,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I have ulterior motives. I have to sit at this desk all night and I have no one to talk to.”

  “Maybe, but your theory doesn’t explain the fact that I can sleep in this shitty motel out of all the places on Earth. Because this is definitely not a good place.”

  “No. The Sun Down is not a good place. But you can sleep in it because it suits you—at least right now. I know because it suits me, too.”

  Nick frowned. “That’s truly messed up.”

  I held up the book I’d brought to read tonight—Ann Rule’s classic The Stranger Beside Me. I’d read it so many times it was falling apart. “Have you met me?”

  He laughed, which gave me a rush of pleasure. Which I tried to ignore. “So what do we do next?” he said.

  I put the book down. “We talk to Alma tomorrow about whether any of this should be turned over to the Fell PD. And we try to find out everything we can about Simon Hess. He could be my aunt’s killer. And we know he crossed paths with her at least once.” I slid the photo across the desk that showed Viv at the motel with Hess’s car in the corner of the frame. “He disappeared around the same time she did. I think if we know why, we can solve what happened to her.”

  “I have another question to add to the pile.” Nick put the strips of negatives he’d been looking at on the desk. “Why do we have more negatives than we have prints?”

  I sat up straighter. “We do?”

  “Yes. I’ve been looking at the negatives, matching them up. There are four photos in the negatives that we don’t have prints of.” He pointed to them, though lying on the desk they just looked like splotches of nitrate. “It looks like some kind of outdoor shot—trees or something. What is it, and where are those photos, and why didn’t Marnie Clark give them to you?”

  I looked at the strip of negative and bit my lip. “I guess I’ll get out the phone book. There must be somewhere in town that develops old negatives. After all, this is Fell.”

  “You’re right, there is,” Nick said. “You don’t need the phone book. I know where it is. And guess what? It’s open twenty-four hours.”

  Fell, New York

  November 1982

  VIV

  Maybe this was how the police did it. Viv had no idea—no movie or TV show she’d ever seen showed her how the police really worked. It was all car chases and shootouts with a background of sexy music. Whereas Viv had a choir list, a yearbook, and her trusty telephone.

  She went down the list of names of the girls in the choir, looking each of them up in the yearbook. The seventh girl was the one: The face in the yearbook was that of the girl she’d seen pedaling away on her bicycle, the traveling salesman watching her. The girl’s name was Tracy Waters, and she was a senior.

  Viv didn’t have a Plainsview phone book, so she called directory assistance and asked for the number for Plainsview High School. The operator gave her the number for the main office, and Viv dialed it and listened to it ring as she flipped the page in the yearbook, looking for a likely name.

  She got a secretary and asked to please speak to the principal. “Who may I say is calling?” the secretary asked.

  Viv put her finger on a face in the yearbook—an unattractive girl with a bad perm and glasses that seemed to take up most of her face. CAROL PENTON, the name said. “I am Carol Penton’s mother,” Viv said, making her voice sound older, lower, slightly aggrieved. “I have a concern about my daughter’s security.”

  To her surprise, after a few minutes of holding she was put through to a man who sounded about sixty. “How can I help you, Mrs. Penton?”

  “I was at Choir Night last night,” Viv said, “and I saw a strange man there. He was looking at the girls.”

  “Excuse me? Looking at the girls?”

  “Yes. He was there alone.” She described Simon Hess. “He was just standing there by himself—he didn’t have a wife or a child that I saw. I thought it was strange. And when the show was over and everyone was leaving, I saw him again in the hallway. Just standing by himself. He was staring. The look in his eyes when he looked at those girls—I didn’t like it one bit. If any man looked at my daughter that way, I’d call the police.”

  “Well.” The principal sounded flustered. “That’s certainly a concern, Mrs. Penton. Though perhaps he was an uncle or a distant relative of one of the girls. I’m sure he meant no harm.”

  Viv ground her teeth together. How are you sure? How? “I thought Carol was attending a school that took the students’ safety seriously.”

  “We do, we do.” Now he was placating. “Let me look into the matter. See if anyone knew who this fellow was.”

  “He was staring at Tracy Waters,” Viv said. “She walked past and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.” She said it so convincingly that she could see the imaginary scene in her head. “Tracy was with her parents, and none of them acknowledged him. He certainly wasn’t a relative.”

  The principal sighed. “Mrs. Penton, what would you have me do?”

  “Pay attention,” Viv said, tempted to shout. “Look out for your students, especially the girls. Tell your staff to keep their eyes open. Tell them to look out for Tracy especially. She might be in danger.”

  “Mrs. Penton, I’m sure you’re overreacting. We haven’t had a complaint from Tracy’s family. He was likely an innocent fellow who means well.”

  No. He is a hunter. There is a hunter after one of your students, you fool. “If anything happens to Tracy, it’s your fault.” Viv hung up the phone.

  She sat for a minute, fuming. She wouldn’t be overreacting i
f she were a cop. If she were a man.

  She was so limited, sitting here trying to warn people over the phone. No one would listen. She needed to warn Tracy, and she had to do it right.

  She switched tactics, pulled out her stationery, and picked up a pen to write.

  * * *

  • • •

  At midnight that night, she sat in a chair in the Fell police station, trying not to stare. She’d never been in a police station before. From what she could see, it was an open space with a few scarred desks and telephones. They were all unoccupied in the middle of the night except for Alma Trent’s. At the front was a desk facing the door, where presumably a cop usually sat to direct people who walked in. There was no one there, either. The entire space was dim and empty except for Alma at her desk, the circle of light from her desk lamp, and Viv herself.

  Alma turned the page in Viv’s notebook, reading. Viv wanted to get on the phone and call all of these sleeping cops, get them out of bed. There’s a man named Simon Hess who is going to kill a girl named Tracy Waters. Why is everyone sleeping?

  But she had to wait. She chewed her lip and tried not to jiggle her knee in impatience as Alma read her notes.

  “Okay, wait,” Alma said, pointing to a page. “What’s this about Cathy Caldwell and door locks?”

  “Cathy and her husband bought door locks before she died. From a door-to-door salesman.”

  Alma looked up, her face pale. “You can verify this?”

  “I don’t know the exact date, but Cathy’s mother remembers it. The locks were bought from Westlake Lock Systems.” She reached over the desk and turned the page. “Westlake Lock Systems also had a salesman scheduled on Peacemaker Avenue, which is Victoria Lee’s street. He was scheduled to make calls there in August of last year.”

  “This can’t be,” Alma said, almost to herself. “It isn’t possible.”

  “It’s very possible,” Viv said, trying not to sound impatient. “When I asked the Westlake scheduling service what the salesman’s name was, she said it had been erased from the scheduling book. He’s covering his tracks. That means he knows there’s at least a possibility that someone is onto him.”