by Donna Fasano
Gone and done it.
She’d done a horrible, terrible, despicable thing. Guilt and regret made her knees wobble. Whatever the punishment was, she deserved it.
Except, she couldn’t go to prison. She had her four-year-old twin sisters to take care of. She was Mia and Daisy’s sole guardian.
Luanne drew air in big, gulping breaths to wrestle down the shock and nausea. Get moving. One foot in front of the other. She couldn’t stand there and stare all morning. She had to find a way to get away with murder.
~*~
Twelve hours earlier, Mushroom Mile Motel, Broslin, Pennsylvania
Luanne Mayfair stopped her cleaning cart in front of room #44 and glanced at her list. One occupant, not checking out today. Only a quick cleanup then; she wouldn’t have to change the sheets. On the other hand, no tips. Most guests only tipped on their last day.
She knocked on the door, hoping the room was empty so she wouldn’t have to come back later. She was almost done, ready to get off work. Finish the last two rooms. Catch Earl. Pick up check. Then she was free. “Housekeeping.”
After some rustling inside, the door opened, a blurry-eyed man filling the gap. He looked her over, then stepped back to open the door wider. His wrinkled wife-beater shirt was stained under the arms, his blond mullet dangling to the middle of his back, his wide face covered in stubble. “Come on in, darlin’.”
Luanne flashed an apologetic look. “I’ll come back later.”
“I’m stayin’ in all day. Catchin’ up on sleep. My rig’s gettin’ fixed. Now’s as good a time as any.” His smile showed cigarette-stained teeth.
He’d better not smoke in here.
Scents clung to wallpaper, heavy drapery, carpet, and the comforter that wasn’t changed from guest to guest. More work for her. More trouble too. If she took too long in a room, she’d be blamed for being too slow, be accused of stretching her hours for extra pay, would likely be docked some time as discipline.
And if the smell of smoke lingered, the next guest would complain and wouldn’t leave a tip.
Not all the guests were truckers, although the Mushroom Mile Motel had its fair share. The small town of Broslin—the mushroom capital of the US—shipped fungi to the four corners of the country. The truckers mostly slept in their rigs if they were in town overnight. Except if their rigs had problems, or if the air conditioner quit on them in the middle of summer, or if they hooked up with someone and wanted room to entertain.
“Who’s fixing the rig?” Luanne watched the guy’s eyes and measured him up. Being in a room alone with a male guest could turn into trouble in a hurry, but she had to at least give him fresh towels.
“Company sent a guy.” He blinked slowly. Yawned. Looked half-asleep still.
In and out in a minute. She grabbed a set of towels from the cart, added a small soap, her spray bottle of universal cleaner, and hurried in by him, holding her breath against the smell of sweat and beer.
She stepped into the bathroom and set out the fresh supplies, even though he hadn’t used anything yet. Didn’t look—or smell—like he’d taken a shower when he’d gotten in.
Towels done. Countertop neat. She grabbed the extra washcloth and wiped off a few errant water drops.
“Would you like me to clean?” she asked on her way out, glancing into the room.
Judging by the dent in the middle of the comforter, the guy had been sleeping on top of the covers. Nothing else seemed out of place.
“I’m good.” He leaned forward, crowding her in the doorway. His grin widened, his small, watery green eyes focused on her body.
She moved around him, swinging abruptly to the left when she felt his meaty hand on her butt. Oh, for heaven’s sake.
“What if I’m hungry?” His voice dripped with innuendo as he tried to cop another feel.
She laughed off the attempt, shifting away. “We’re not that kind of a motel.”
She wouldn’t let the smile slide off her face. Tips were more important than smacking grabby men over the head with her spray bottle. Although, someday, when she was ready to quit—she didn’t plan to scrub toilets for the rest of her life—one of the jerks was going to get it.
Or probably not. With her luck, she’d probably be booked for assault. As satisfying as fighting back against a slimy guest would have been, even just once, the grief she’d get wouldn’t be worth it. The twins needed her, had nobody but her. So Luanne kept a tight rein over her violent fantasies.
She kept right on smiling as she said, “Broslin Diner on Main Street is having a free dessert special.”
A disappointed, semiannoyed look crossed the man’s face. No doubt he’d expected a different kind of answer. Tough tooties.
He grunted, giving up for the moment. “What’s the nearest place I can get some smokes?”
“Gas station on Main Street. It’s just a few blocks from here,” she said. “All our rooms are nonsmoking, but we have a nice spot out on the back patio of the main building to sit.” He’d better not smoke in the room. Not cigarettes, and nothing else either.
The motel had a certain…history. Until recently, the locals had been calling it the Magic Mushroom Motel. Before the current owners, the place had been pothead heaven. The previous night clerk had been a dealer. But all that was in the past now, and the motel did good business with tourists who came for the Mushroom Festival, the Chadds Ford Days, the Hot Air Balloon Festival, or Longwood Gardens.
Convenient and inexpensive for the guests, steady employment for Luanne. She just had to keep the occasional jerk from getting under her skin.
“Will that be all?” Her cheeks were beginning to hurt, but she kept her smile in place. She was going to have a good day. A great day. She had a date tonight, for the first time in ages. She had to keep focused on that. Friday night, baby.
“Maybe you can bring me the paper later.” The trucker stared at her breasts, an oily grin spreading on his face. His mouth opened to say something she knew she was going to hate, so she turned on her heels and walked away.
“No problem,” she called over her shoulder. She could bring the paper and leave it outside the door for him.
She skipped room #45—unoccupied, according to her list—stopped in front of room #46. Two occupants, checking out. She knocked on the door. “Housekeeping.”
No response.
She opened the door with her master key, called “Housekeeping” again before she stepped in. She didn’t want to catch anyone in the middle of anything. She’d seen enough on this job to sometimes wish she could wash her eyeballs with bleach.
No guests. The room stood empty.
She hurried to the dresser first and could have cried when she looked at the tip, a dollar and change. For cleaning after two people for nearly a week.
Luanne did her best to work herself into a grateful spirit as she changed the sheets. She had her health. She had the twins. She had a place to live. She had food to eat. She had a job. She was so much better off than a great many people in the country. She was grateful, truly grateful for everything.
But another truth was that deep down she was bone tired. She was exhausted from dancing on the sharp edge of barely making it. No security net. Nothing to catch her if she fell. Making rent was a monthly challenge. If she lost the rental, social services would take Mia and Daisy away.
She had no close family left save her twin sisters. She swore she was going to raise them if she had to eat broken glass and walk through fire. So she worked hard and worked fast, and never complained about the guests. She desperately needed the job; that was the truth of it.
When she finished with the room, she moved on to the bathroom. All the toiletries were gone, even the toilet paper and the box of tissue. She grabbed the garbage and went out to her cart. No more tissue boxes. She pulled the door of the room closed and hurried down the hallway back to the supply room, pushing her cart. She was in the main building, so she didn’t have to go outside.
Four separate bu
ildings made up the motel, nothing fancy, but all clean and trim. The smallest building housed the main office, its roof crafted by Amish carpenters to resemble a mushroom cap. The giant round cap was visible from the highway, free advertisement. Good location too, on the Mushroom Mile—over a dozen mushroom producers lined up on Route 1, one after the other, along with specialty stores that sold fresh local mushrooms and other produce.
Earl Cosgrove, the manager, stood behind the check-in counter, avoiding her eyes, mumbling something under his breath as if calculating something important, completely absorbed in the task. Do not disturb, his body language transmitted.
He didn’t normally spend a lot of time out in the open on paydays. She’d expected to have to track him down in some distant corner of the place to receive her money.
She parked her cart by the wall and waited. Then she waited some more. Then she finally said, in a voice as undemanding as possible, “Any chance I could pick up my check? If it’s ready.”
Better grab him now, before he hid.
“Are you done?” He looked at her at last, pushing his glasses up his nose, his face without humor, his beady brown eyes narrowing with displeasure.
“Almost. I just ran back to grab some supplies.”
He scowled. “You should have a fully stocked cart. Walking back and forth is a waste of time.”
He stepped away from the computer and shuffled down the short hallway that led to his office in the back, mumbling something about ungrateful employees who cared only about money.
She followed his uneven gait into his rat’s nest of an office, stuffed to the ceiling with paperwork and supplies, and stayed standing while Earl dropped onto the ripped leather chair behind his desk that had seen better days. His hemorrhoid pillow lifted him up a few inches, making him look like an aging rooster on his perch.
“If it can’t wait…” Thinning hair in a comb-over, cheap black tie in a disorderly knot, he scowled at the schedule and counted up her hours. From the top of the hour, even though the maids were required to show up fifteen minutes early to stock their carts. The end of their workday too was usually rounded back to the nearest hour.
Luanne shifted on her feet. “I appreciate it.”
She figured she, and the other girls, could take home at least a hundred extra bucks per month if they were paid for all their time, money they all desperately needed, but Earl wouldn’t hear about that, so she tried for what she might actually receive. “I worked those five hours for Jackie.”
Jackie moonlighted as a cashier at Arnie’s gas station and she got stuck there Tuesday when the second-shift girl didn’t come in.
Earl looked up. Frowned. Patted his hair into place. “I don’t remember.”
“You can ask her.”
He made some noncommittal noises. Then he wrote a check for her regular hours with a half-mumbled promise to check into the extra time later.
The Pennsylvania minimum wage for tipped employees like waiters, hotel maids, and bartenders was $2.83 per hour. The law also required that tips and wages added up to the real minimum wage, $7.25 in PA. Since the maids at the Mushroom Mile Motel made roughly $3.50 in tips, Earl had to pay them $3.75, about which he griped, moaned, and groaned regularly.
He owed Luanne $18.75 for the five hours. A small windfall. Which he wasn’t going to pay today, or ever, if he could help it.
She stood there, disappointment washing over her.
The twins were turning four tomorrow. The real bakery in town had always been out of her reach, but she could have sprung for a grocery store cake. The girls had been begging for weeks for the ladybug cake from the grocery store’s bakery. For the first time, she planned on them having something fancy, something better than the boxed cake mix she made every year, the cake flat and square and frosted in the pan. This year, she’d planned on real candles, not the old tea lights she’d been reusing. With an extra $18.75 in her pocket, she could afford all that and ice cream.
All of which she’d stupidly promised already.
She put on her nicest smile. “Are you sure I couldn’t have the extra hours now? I wouldn’t ask.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry if I sound pushy. It’s just that I kind of promised something for the kids.”
Earl shot her a black look of disapproval. “Now’s the time to save on them. No sense wasting your money. They won’t even remember these years.”
He had five kids with three ex-wives, decades of dubious experience he doled out freely to his employees, usually to convince them that they didn’t need to get paid.
He pushed to his feet and shuffled around the table. Stopped too close to Luanne, his coffee breath hitting her face. “If you’re looking to pick up some extra, I still need someone to clean the house.” He put a hand on her arm and rubbed the inside of her elbow with his thumb.
Cold dread crawled up her spine as she held still.
Some of the more desperate maids had fallen for Earl’s trap over the years. Work at Earl’s house included hours on their knees, scrubbing floors, tub, toilet—all of which Luanne could handle—then more time on their knees in front of Earl—which she couldn’t.
She stepped back. “I wish I could. But I already clean at the library. Two jobs are all I can handle for now. I have to take care of the twins too.” She hoped she sounded appreciative of the offer and full of regret that she couldn’t take advantage of Earl’s “generosity.”
He watched her with a calculating look. “I might have to cut hours here for some of the staff. You could pick up those hours at my place.”
She flashed one last smile, then fled the office, bumping into Jackie in the hallway.
The other maid took one look at her face and raised an eyebrow.
Luanne shook her head: You don’t want to know.
“Weatherman’s calling for a storm later this week,” Jackie, a hardworking black woman in her forties with a heart of gold, announced cheerfully.
Luanne grinned. The maids had a running joke about their hopes for lightning to strike the general manager. “Cars drive off the road every day,” she countered with her own favorite revenge fantasy. Earl lived nearby and walked to work and back since sitting—in an office chair or in his car—was hard on his hemorrhoids. He’d rather walk, even in bad weather. Plenty of chances for an inattentive driver to skip the curb.
Jackie grinned back at her. “That’s the spirit.” Then they went their separate ways.
Veronica, Earl’s third ex-wife, was back in her place by the front desk. She must have been on a break earlier. She was a Jersey girl, with Jersey girl hair from the eighties. The big hair went with her electric blue eye shadow.
Earl came out of his office and passed by Veronica, looked her over, winked. “Hey, I think I need to put my mouth where my money is.”
His standard joke for his ex. He was referring to the breast implants he’d paid for when they’d been married.
Veronica narrowed her eyes and puckered her lips in a confused-blonde look. “Are you talking about that expensive hemorrhoid surgery of yours? Honey, you ain’t that bendy.”
Luanne choked, holding back laughter.
Earl focused his displeasure on her, his eyes narrowed to threatening slits. “Are you still wasting time here? I’m not paying you to hang out in the hallways. People are waiting for their rooms to be cleaned. I’m the one who has to listen to them complain.”
“You’re right. I’m really sorry,” she said as Earl marched outside in a huff.
“Guests will gripe, no matter what. Everything’s not your fault,” Veronica said. “You know, you don’t have to apologize to Earl for everything.”
Veronica could get away with saying whatever she wanted since she was the mother of two of Earl’s boys. But Luanne knew that the rest of the staff better toe the line. “I should be getting back to work.”
Veronica rolled her eyes after her ex-husband. “Can’t tell you how many nights I spent lying awake, thinking about holding a pillow over his head.” She s
ighed. “I still can’t believe he cheated on me with Stacy Lucado. Couldn’t resist all the sweet innocence, he said.” Veronica snorted. “She had more truckers in and out of her than this motel.”
She shook her head, waving the words away with fingers tipped with the fanciest gel nails Luanne had ever seen, white and red flowers on pink. “Oh, forget I said that. Let’s just pretend I’ve been gracious and ladylike. He is paying child support. He’s terrible with women. But he’s pretty good with his kids.”
Earl Cosgrove, a complex human being. One of the mysteries of the universe, Luanne thought. She grabbed a newspaper from the counter. “Room #44,” she said, and Veronica added the charge on the computer.
Luanne dropped off the paper in front of the trucker’s door, then she finished room #46 and moved on to #47, her last one for the day. Thoroughly trashed, that one, pizza boxes on the bed, garbage everywhere, the furniture moved around, mud ground into the carpet, shampoo bottles floating in the toilet.
She had a fishnet she’d picked up at a garage sale for twenty-five cents for things like that. Live and learn was the name of the game in the hospitality industry.
She decided to leave the toilet-fishing expedition for last and headed over to the dresser, keeping fingers crossed. With a nice tip, she could still salvage some of the birthday celebration. She could at least spring for a boxed mix for the cake. Otherwise, she was going to have to frost her half box of graham crackers.
She cleared off the dresser. But under all the garbage, she found absolutely nothing.
Okay. No big deal. She closed her eyes for a second and swallowed the lump in her throat. People had more serious problems than not being able to buy a cake.
Friday. Date. Good things ahead.
She finished the room, doing the best damn job she could, then put the biggest smile on her face and went to pick up the kids from Jen.