The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  I told the 911 dispatcher what had happened: that I’d been followed, that I’d been assaulted and pushed into an empty pool by a man named Callum MacRae, that my friend Nick had taken off after my assailant. The dispatcher asked if I was injured, and I said, “Probably,” as pain ran up and down my spine. He asked if I could stay on the line as he sent police and an ambulance, and as he spoke the words I heard footsteps walking up the corridor toward the office.

  The air went icy cold and I smelled pungent cigarette smoke.

  “Miss Kirk?” the dispatcher said. “Are you still there?”

  The footsteps came closer. Paced, measured. Not a soft tennis shoe or a woman’s high heel. A man.

  I could see a plume of my own breath in the air.

  “Miss Kirk?” the dispatcher said again.

  “I can’t stay on the line,” I said, feeling bad about it. He was being so nice to me. “I really have to go.”

  I hadn’t closed the office door behind me, and as I hung up the phone a man walked in.

  He was wearing dress pants and a long, dark wool coat. His shoes were shined. He was a white man of about thirty-five, with dark hair neatly combed and a clean shave. An average face with even features. I could see the knot of his tie where it disappeared into his buttoned-up coat. He was carrying a small, old-fashioned suitcase.

  And something about him scared me so much I almost screamed.

  He looked at me for a moment. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes—gray, perhaps, or brown. All of the details of him—the composition of his face, the exact color of his clothes—seemed to roll off, to not quite take, like water that has been dropped onto a pool of oil. I blinked and my eyes watered. My stomach clenched in terror. My fingers were numb with cold. The smell of smoke was heavy and sharp.

  “I need a room, please,” the man said.

  His voice was like water on oil, too—what exactly did it sound like? I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even say if I had really heard it or if it was only in my head.

  And somehow, I knew it: I was looking at Simon Hess.

  Should I run? Was he a figment of my imagination? I had to get past him to get out the door. If I came close to him, would he vanish into nothingness, or—worse—would I feel something, as if he had some kind of corporeal body? I couldn’t get near him. So I stood there frozen as he looked at me. And he saw me—I was sure of it.

  “May I have a room?” he asked me again. He held out a hand, palm up.

  A key. He was asking for a key. I didn’t even think as I reached down and opened the key drawer. I picked a key without looking, the leather icy in my cold hand. I was too afraid to circle the desk and hand it to him, so I put the key on the desk, pushing it all the way to the edge farthest from me.

  Simon Hess stood there for another moment, his hand held out. Then he dropped it to his side again. “Room two-oh-nine,” he said in that voice that was real and yet not real. “Home sweet home.”

  I glanced down and saw the number 209 on the leather tab of the key on the desk.

  “Thank you,” Hess said. He turned and left the room.

  I heard his footsteps walk away down the corridor toward the stairs.

  The office door blew shut with a loud slam, making me jump. A terrified whimper left my throat. And the lights went out.

  Somewhere in the dark, in the office, a man coughed.

  Outside the office door, I saw the sign go out.

  Betty, I thought.

  She was here. And so was her killer. I’d just given him a room.

  I circled the desk, making my legs work as fast as they could. Something brushed me as I ran for the door, the feeling faint and cobweblike. I was too busy escaping to scream.

  The doorknob wouldn’t turn under my hand. “No,” I moaned, jerking it and shoving at it, trying to force the door open. “No, Betty, no, no, no . . .”

  Behind me, in the dark office, the desk phone rang, the sound shrill and screaming. I jerked the doorknob again and this time it turned. I burst out onto the walkway, my breath sawing in my lungs. I ran for my car.

  Upstairs, the motel doors banged open one by one. The lights went out. The phone shrilled behind me. And when I got to my car, I realized I didn’t have my keys. They were back in the office.

  “No,” I said again. I couldn’t stop saying it; it was the only word that would leave my throat. “No, no.” I wrenched at the car door handle and the door opened. I’d left the car unlocked, but I had no way to start it and get out of here.

  I ducked into the car anyway. It felt safer than standing out in the open, waiting for whatever Betty Graham had planned. Or whatever Simon Hess had planned. Or both of them.

  I dropped into the driver’s seat, but when I tried to pull the door closed, something resisted. I used both hands, crying out as the motion wrenched my aching back, but I couldn’t pull the door closed.

  In the passenger seat, my cell phone rang. I jumped, my sweaty hands slipping from the door handle. It wasn’t possible; there was no reception here. Yet the phone lay faceup on the passenger seat, buzzing and ringing. The call display said NICK.

  I let go of the door and grabbed the phone, swiping at it. “Nick?” I called. “Nick?”

  There was no answer. Just a second of silence, and a click.

  “Nick!” I shouted. I tried redialing his number, but nothing happened. No signal.

  The wind gusted into the car through the open door. I had tears on my face, running down my cheeks, cold and wet. Even from here I could hear the phone ringing in the motel office, over and over, on and on. I tried to redial my phone.

  Then there was the hum of a car motor, the crackle of tires on gravel. I lowered the phone and watched as a car pulled up next to mine.

  The woman inside—I recognized her. Even thirty-five years later, her hair grown long down her back, a knit cap on her head. I knew that face. I’d looked at it so many times, I’d know it anywhere.

  My aunt Viv leaned over and opened the passenger door. “Get in, Carly,” she said. “It’s time to get the hell out of here.”

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  The night roads flew by out the window. My body throbbed with pain, and my phone was hot and silent in my hand. Vivian Delaney sat next to me, driving in silence.

  She looked older, of course. Her cheekbones had thinned and her face was harder, tougher. Her hair was grown long, the 1980s perm long gone. She wore jeans, boots, and a practical zip-up jacket, a knit cap on her head. She wore barely any makeup. She smelled faintly fruity, like cherry body wash.

  “I’m not taking you far,” she said at last. “But it’s best to get out of the Sun Down, at least for a little while.”

  “The ambulance is coming,” I said, my voice raspy. “The cops. Nick . . .”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  I made myself look at her. Really look. “You’re alive,” I said.

  Viv said nothing.

  “You’ve been alive for thirty-five years.”

  She pulled into a parking lot. I recognized the sign for Watson’s Diner. “I couldn’t go home,” she said. “I had to run.”

  I watched as she parked the car, turned off the ignition. My emotions were like blinking lights behind my eyes. Shock. Fear for Nick. Excitement. And anger. So much anger, quick and hot. “My mother died grieving for you,” I said.

  Viv froze, her jaw working, and I realized she hadn’t known her sister was dead.

  That told me everything I needed to know. I opened the door and got out.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Okay, listen,” she said, following me into the diner. “I deserved that. You can be mad at me. I had to move on and cut ties completely or I’d lose my nerve. But we have to talk about what happened tonight. What’s still happeni
ng.”

  I kept my phone tight in my hand. When I walked into the diner I saw that I had bars of service, so I called Nick. It rang, but no one answered.

  I hung up before the voicemail kicked in and sat in a booth, my legs and back groaning in complaint. Viv sat across from me as if she’d been invited, even though she hadn’t. Part of me wanted to kick her out. But another part knew she was right: We had a lot to discuss. I had been in Fell for weeks now, living her old life. The least I needed to do was get answers.

  I set my phone down on the table in front of me, faceup, in easy reach. I heard Viv order two bowls of soup from the waitress, but I barely paid attention. Nick, where are you?

  But Viv’s next words jolted me out of my stupor. “We’ll start with Betty. What set her off tonight?”

  “You’ve seen Betty,” I said.

  “I saw her in 1982, yes. Saw her, heard her.” She picked up the cup of coffee the waitress had put in front of her. “In those days, she went crazy every time Simon Hess checked into the motel. But I haven’t worked the night shift in a long time, so I don’t know what did it tonight.”

  “He checked in,” I said. I was talking about this like it was real. Because it was real. “He came into the office and asked for a room. I saw him. His voice was in my head. I put a key on the desk and he thanked me and left again.”

  Viv’s knuckles were white on her mug, and she downed half the coffee in one swig. “You checked him in?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “Well, Betty is going to be furious. Does the motel have any other guests?”

  I shook my head, thinking back to the guest book when I was in the office. It was blank. “Unless they didn’t sign the book. I haven’t exactly been there very much tonight.”

  “Then no one else will get hurt, maybe,” Viv said. “Whatever happens there, it’s going to be bad.”

  “There will be cops and EMTs there, if there aren’t already,” I said. “And my friend is there somewhere.”

  The waitress put our bowls of soup in front of us as I called Nick again. No answer. “Eat,” Viv said when I put the phone down again. “You need sustenance, trust me.”

  I put my spoon in my soup—chicken noodle, I realized. “I just saw Simon Hess,” I said. “Except he’s dead.”

  Viv took a swallow of her own soup. “Are you waiting for me to say it? Okay, I will. Simon Hess is very, very dead. I killed him in November 1982. I put a knife in his chest, and then I pulled it out and put it in his neck. Then I wrapped him in a rug, put him in the trunk of his own car, and left it in an abandoned barn.” She put her spoon in her soup again. “I did it because he was a serial killer who killed four women that I knew of. I did it because he admitted everything to me that night before I put the knife in the second time. I did it because if I hadn’t, he would have gone free and killed again. Most likely starting with me.”

  I watched as she took another swallow of soup. “You’re so casual about it.”

  “Because I’ve had thirty-five years to come to terms with it. You’re just figuring it out for the first time.” Viv pressed her napkin to her lips. “If you want to call the cops on me, I won’t stop you. I’ve had thirty-five years of freedom that I haven’t really enjoyed and that a lot of people will say I don’t deserve. I’m no danger to you, Carly.”

  This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had. I didn’t know what to do, so I ate some soup. “You didn’t do it alone,” I said. “You had Marnie and Alma.”

  “I did it alone,” Viv said.

  I shook my head. “Marnie called me. She told me about the notebook in the candy machine. It was right where she said it was.”

  “Are you sure that was Marnie?”

  I stared at her. When I thought back, Marnie hadn’t actually identified herself. The call was from an unknown number. I had recognized her voice and assumed. And then Alma: Go meet her. It’s time.

  Damn it. “That was you? Why?”

  “I haven’t been an actress in a long time, but I can still do voices,” Viv said. “You’ve met Marnie. She pretends she isn’t a force of nature, but she is. Being her was the easiest way to get you to do something. Easier than doing it as me. There would be too much to explain if I’d told you who I really was. What I wanted was for you to find the notebook.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it explains why I did what I did. It’s all in there. Everything I found about Simon Hess and those murders.”

  “That still doesn’t mean Marnie wasn’t involved that night,” I said.

  “She wasn’t. There was just me. Only me.”

  “Marnie took a photo of the dump site. I found it in her negatives.”

  “Maybe someone used her camera.”

  I gripped my spoon in frustration. “The phone records. They show that someone—you—made a call to the Fell PD that night. It would have gone through to Alma, the night duty officer. But those records were somehow never investigated.”

  “I don’t know anything about the police investigation,” Viv said calmly, finishing her bowl. “I didn’t call the police that night. Maybe Mrs. Bailey did. She was passed out in her room, or so I thought. Maybe she woke up and heard something, but nothing came of it. Alma didn’t come to the motel that night, and neither did any other cop. At least, not before I left.”

  “You were missing for four days before it was reported.” The pieces were coming together in my mind, all of them moving into place. “Your roommate reported it after she came home from a weekend away. But Marnie and Alma both knew you were gone.”

  “No one knew I was gone. I killed Simon Hess, I dumped him, and I ran.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  No. No way would Viv, who was a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, have been able to do everything alone—lift the body of a full-grown man into a trunk, clean up afterward, come up with the plan. Then she had to start a new life with no ID and no money. “Who are you now?” I asked her.

  “Christine Fawcett,” Viv said. “I have a driver’s license and a birth certificate. I vote in every election. I picked Christine at random, but then Stephen King wrote that book, so I figured it was fate. And Fawcett is for Farrah Fawcett, who was my idol as a teenager.”

  It struck me again how casual she was. But as she’d said, she’d had thirty-five years to get accustomed to being Christine. I hadn’t.

  “You didn’t do it alone,” I insisted. It bothered me that I had come so far, was sitting across the table from the truth, and I still wasn’t getting it. “You need resources and money to start over. To get fake ID. To get a birth certificate. You weren’t a career criminal.”

  “No, but Jamie Blaknik was.”

  I knew the name. Alma had said he was at the Sun Down the night of the murder. “He was a pot dealer.”

  “A pot dealer who knew a lot of the right kind of people, and knew how to keep his mouth shut.” Viv sat back in the booth, her eyes sad. “He died a long time ago, so nothing you do can hurt him.”

  “You cared about him,” I said, seeing it in her face.

  Viv glanced away, then nodded. “I asked a lot of him, but he never failed me. The cops questioned him as a suspect in my murder, but they couldn’t get anywhere with him. He kept my secret when he could have saved himself by turning me in. To the day he died, I knew I could never repay him. He’ll always be important to me.” The corner of her mouth quirked in the ghost of a smile. “Besides, a girl has to lose her virginity somewhere, right?”

  I gaped at her. “Are we actually talking about this right now?”

  Viv laughed softly, amused. It made her even more beautiful than she was before. “It may be a different time, but you remind me so much of me at that age. Smart, resourceful, and very, very square.”

  “I am not square.” The words leapt out in my de
fense. “Wait a minute, no one even says square anymore. And we are not talking about this.”

  “I got married once.” Viv sipped her coffee. “After Jamie. It lasted eleven months, and then he left me. He said he could never really know me, that I kept too much to myself. You’re always so far into your own head, where no one else can go. That’s what he said, and he wasn’t wrong. I liked him—loved him—but I can’t let anyone in. My life doesn’t work that way. It’s the sacrifice I made.” She looked at me speculatively. “You can choose differently, though. My sister’s girl. I think I can take some comfort in that. How did she die?”

  “Cancer,” I said, my body aching all over again.

  “It runs in the family, then. Get yourself screened, sweetheart.”

  “I know. My grandmother—your mother—died of cancer, too.” I put my hands palm-down on the diner table. “Look, I’m glad we’re having this little family heart-to-heart, but I have big problems to deal with. There are ghosts running around the Sun Down right now. My friend is out there somewhere and not answering his phone. And I got pushed into the empty pool by Simon Hess’s grandson.”

  Viv put down her mug. For the first time, she looked shocked. “You had a run-in with Callum MacRae?”

  “How do you know who Callum MacRae is if you worked alone and you haven’t been to Fell for thirty-five years?”

  “I said I ran that night,” Viv said. “I said I’ve been Christine for thirty-five years. I never said I didn’t come back to Fell.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve been looking for you all this time, and you live here?”

  “How do you think I knew you worked at the motel?” Viv bit her lip. “I couldn’t stay away. I left for a few years, and then I came back. I love this place. What can I say? Fell is home.” She shrugged. “I’m even in the old-fashioned phone book. And no, no one has ever recognized me. My disappearance didn’t get much coverage. I live in a different part of town now, and I work from home as a tutor. I barely spoke to anyone when I worked the night shift, and no one remembered me after a few years. I even passed my old roommate, Jenny, on the street one day and she didn’t look twice at me. It’s amazing how quickly people forget.”