That last thump had been loud.
She flushed the toilet, then ran out of the bathroom as quickly as she could, not bothering to wash her hands. She sprinted past conference room doors and through the wide corridor, then out through a side exit, avoiding the front lobby.
Outside, the gardener was clipping dead buds from a drought-resistant flowering plant. He looked up at her as she passed by.
And smiled knowingly.
“That’s what I heard,” Rachel insisted. She eyed Lowell suspiciously. He was questioning her story as she knew he would—as he should—but there was no conviction behind it. His inquiry was perfunctory; as though he knew what she said was true and had some sort of inside knowledge he was loath to reveal, which, if anything, made her more perplexed than would have simple disbelief.
He nodded, acknowledging that he’d heard what she said but giving no indication that he had an opinion one way or the other.
“I just want you to come in there with me so we can figure out what room is behind that wall. I’m not going to make a scene, I just . . . want to know.” She lowered her voice so they wouldn’t be overheard by the other guests at the pool. “If someone really was hurt, it would be wrong of me to just ignore it.”
He sighed. “And there’s the psycho gardener . . .”
“You don’t believe me? I’ll show him to you!”
But he did believe her. She could see that. She just didn’t know why. There was something going on here to which she was not privy, and it left her feeling off-balance and uneasy. This wasn’t like him. This wasn’t like them. But she said nothing, did not challenge him, did not acknowledge that his behavior was at all unusual.
Which wasn’t like her.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go. Curtis!” she called. “Owen! You guys stay out of the pool until we get back. And watch Ryan!”
Curtis ignored him, but Owen gave a dismissive wave of acknowledgement and Ryan shouted, “Where you going?”
“To the lobby!” he responded, and added loudly, “Did you hear me, Curtis Thurman?”
“I heard!” Curtis said quickly, attempting to ward off future embarrassment.
Lowell looked at her, smiling. “Lead on.”
They walked up the stairs and into the lobby. Rachel felt out of place in her bathing suit amid such formal surroundings. Before, she’d had such a desperate need to go to the bathroom that she hadn’t noticed, but this time the discrepancy between their attire and the environs seemed glaringly obvious, and she was embarrassed to be parading past uniformed members of The Reata’s staff in her bikini while down the wide corridor at the far end of the lobby, business-suited men with drinks in hand and white name tags affixed to their lapels wandered in and out of a conference room.
She led Lowell to the restroom doors, explained where the stall was located, and then the two of them backtracked through the building until they found the room that would seem to be behind the appropriate wall. “It must be here,” Rachel said, stopping, and there were goose bumps on her arms. Lowell had suddenly gone quiet.
The plaque on the door read: MANAGER.
“What do we do now?” Rachel whispered.
Lowell was about to answer when the door to the office opened, and it was only the grounding of his hand instantly grabbing her wrist that kept her from screaming aloud. Instead, she merely let out a quick hard gasp as the manager stepped out. A rotund man in a beige suit, with a thick beard and a jolly face, he smiled at them. “Hello,” he said. “May I be of assistance?”
“No,” Lowell said, and she was surprised by the calmness of his voice. “We’re just wandering around.”
The manager chuckled. “Enjoy yourselves.” He strode away from them, turning the corner and heading toward the front desk.
“I didn’t see anything in there. Did you?” Lowell looked at her.
She’d been so rattled and startled that she hadn’t had the presence of mind to peek inside the office before the door swung shut. “I didn’t look,” she admitted.
“So what do you want to do?” They were both whispering, as if afraid of being overheard, and she realized that he had caught her fear. He made a move toward the door, and she grabbed his arm, holding him back, not afraid that he would find something incriminating in there—a blood-stained wall
—but that he would be caught trespassing.
And beaten.
“We’ll just take a quick peek inside.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“But what if you’re right? What if someone was injured? Or worse?”
She pulled on his arm, looking toward the corner where the manager had disappeared. “Let’s get out of here.”
He peered into her eyes, and for a second she thought she was going to get one of his moralistic lectures about Doing the Right Thing. But then he allowed himself to be led away, and the two of them walked in silence around the corner, past the front desk and through the lobby, absurdly conspicuous in their bathing suits. At the concierge’s station near the door, the manager stood talking to the elderly man behind the desk. He smiled at them as they passed by. “Enjoy your stay,” he told them.
As they stepped outside into the blinding sunlight, Rachel tried to imagine what the manager would sound like if he were yelling angrily, attempting to determine whether he could be the one she heard from inside the bathroom.
And tried to forget the panicked, terrified cries of the girl.
And the thump of her body against the wall.
Nine
Gloria Pedwin stared out the dusty windshield of the car at the uninhabited wasteland before them. This was, without a doubt, the worst and most depressing vacation they’d ever taken.
And she blamed Ralph.
For the past three years, they’d spent their summer break in Southern California at a resort in Laguna Beach that overlooked the ocean and gave them breathtaking views of the sunsets. But this year Ralph had read an article in an inflight magazine about the “Indian Loop,” a historic and supposedly spectacular trip that triangulated between the scenic wonders of Arizona’s Navajo nation and the Grand Canyon. He’d been so excited and enthusiastic that, against her better judgment, she’d allowed him to prevail in his choice of vacation destination.
They’d flown into Phoenix and rented a car, a comfortable Cadillac, and for a few brief moments she thought everything was going to turn out well. But the vacation went straight downhill from there. Canyon de Chelly had been windy and outrageously hot, and the adjoining town, Chinle, was a poverty-stricken nightmare where the only restaurant was an overcrowded Taco Bell and theirs were the sole white faces in sight. Monument Valley was more of the same, and while the accommodations at the Grand Canyon were much nicer, the place was overrun with tourists: obnoxious Germans and Japanese who insisted on shoving their way through crowds of mild-mannered Americans to photograph the same stationary geologic formations that their countrymen had been capturing on film for decades.
Thank God she’d had the good sense to insist that Ralph book a week at The Reata. It was quite far out of their way, down in the southern portion of the state, but she’d read about it in Sunset magazine’s “Great Hotels of the Southwest” issue and had instantly been captivated by the contrast between the barren desert landscape and the opulent accommodations plunked right down in the middle of it. The Reata was a luxury resort catering to wintertime visitors from the East, and in the summer months rates were discounted tremendously, as no civilized people would dare brave the heat. Of course, she used both the lowered price and the exoticism of the desert’s outrageous summer temperatures to entice Ralph into agreeing to a five-night stay—although she’d been more than prepared to battle it out and insist that since he’d gotten to choose the first half of their trip, she should choose the second.
But where was The Reata? Ralph had been mumbling to himself for the past half hour, and this rough primitive road hardly seemed like the way to a luxury resort. They were cle
arly lost, but Ralph had gotten them into this and he could damn well get them out. Gloria lifted the folded newspaper from her lap and began perusing the front page. At a lobby shop in the Grand Canyon’s El Tovar, she’d picked up several of the most prominent papers from around the country—including her own beloved New York Times—in order to have something to read on the long trip south, and she’d been parcelling the sections out over the past six hours. She was now on the Los Angeles Times, and she frowned in disapproval as she read an article that described an event taking place several years prior as occurring “back in the day.” She was astounded that a newspaper of record allowed its reporters to incorporate slang into legitimate news articles, particularly such an ungrammatical phrase as “back in the day.” Hadn’t newspapers at one time been the bastions of linguistic correctness, holding the fort against the storming hordes of nonsensical vulgarisms that threatened to overwhelm the English language?
Of course, what did one expect from a California newspaper?
“I think that’s it,” Ralph said, nodding at the windshield. She looked up from the paper, followed his gaze and saw a sight for sore eyes: a beautiful oasis of lush green vegetation and welcoming Southwest buildings set against the monochromatic brown rock of a low desert mountain. This was the exotic vacation getaway she had seen in her Sunset magazine, and she supposed the difficult access was needed to weed out the riffraff and the lookiloos. Some guests, she seemed to remember from the article, coptered in and landed at the resort’s heliport. Maybe that’s what they should have done. It didn’t matter now, though. They were finally here; that was the important thing.
The cracked potholed asphalt turned to smooth new pavement as they pulled next to a guardhouse adjacent to a gate that blocked the road. Already she was feeling better, and while Ralph paid the parking attendant or showed his confirmation letter or did whatever it was he had to do, Gloria scanned the rows of vehicles, feeling vaguely reassured by the sight of so many high-end sedans and SUVs. The gate opened, and they drove up to the lobby entrance, stopping beneath a shaded overhang. A smartly dressed valet opened her door and helped her out while another attendant took the keys from Ralph to park the car.
They stepped into the lobby, past the two handsome young men who held open the double doors . . . and it was as if the whole first half of their trip had never taken place. The memory of those five wretched days was erased as they stepped into the posh regional furnishings of the air-conditioned lobby. This was what a vacation was supposed to be. She relaxed into the familiar arms of comfort. A very helpful young woman behind the massive front desk checked them in, and a team of bellboys and attendants unloaded their luggage and drove them in a golf cart to their deluxe suite overlooking a desert that no longer seemed quite so barren and ugly but, through the picture window of their well-appointed, climate-controlled bedroom, looked almost pretty.
Gloria availed herself of a mineral water from the minibar and leaned back on the love seat to rest. The suitcases still needed to be unpacked—Ralph refused to have hired help do that for them—but the unpacking could wait. It had been a hellishly long trip, and she deserved a little me time. She picked up a magazine from the coffee table while Ralph went into the bathroom.
“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed seconds later, and she heard him gagging.
Gloria jumped up from the love seat and hurried into the bathroom. “What is it?”
“Stay out!” he ordered, but it was too late. The toilet seat was up, and in the bowl she could see spattered blood and what looked like a clotted clump of dark tissue floating in the stained water.
A fetus?
The mess in the toilet certainly did not resemble anything even remotely human. But the image of a young woman forcefully expelling fetal tissue in a spontaneous miscarriage was forefront in her mind, and she backed away in shock.
“Gloria?” Ralph said.
She held up her hands, shook her head, continued backing off.
A fetus.
She knew exactly why she’d thought of such a scenario. Her mother. Her mother had had a miscarriage, although by the time she learned of it Gloria was an adult and her mother was practically on her deathbed. It had been a girl, three years before Gloria had been born, and she’d felt sadness and also anger at her mother for depriving her of a sister with whom she could have grown up and shared secrets, and whose advice she could have sought during those troubled teen years. She knew intellectually that it was not her mother’s fault, that her mother had no doubt felt far worse about it than she did, but the anger was still there, and the only way to dissipate it was for her to imagine the gruesome circumstances of the miscarriage. Gloria had received no details from her mother—she had not asked for any—but she’d invented a whole mental tableau to which she had returned repeatedly over the years.
And the end result always looked like the scene in their bathroom: a blood-spattered toilet.
Ralph seemed confused. “What should I do, do you think? Flush it?”
His indecision brought back her resolve, and Gloria was suddenly able to function again. “Don’t touch anything,” she snapped. “It might be a crime scene for all we know.”
“Then—”
“Call the lobby and tell them to send someone over here right now. Then help me with our bags. We are not staying in this room another second.”
“I’m very sorry,” the girl at the front desk was saying. She was obviously extremely dismayed. Her face was red, the space above her upper lip wet with sweat, but Gloria didn’t care. Something like this should not occur in a Howard Johnson’s, let alone The Reata. It was inexcusable.
“I want to speak to the manager,” she said coldly.
“Right away, ma’am.” The girl picked up a phone hidden just below their sight line and pushed a button. “Mr. Cabot? We have a guest emergency. Could you come immediately to the front desk?” She hung up the phone. “The manager will be right here.”
Seconds later, a portly bearded man of obvious breeding strode around the corner and into the lobby, greeting Ralph with an outstretched hand and offering Gloria a courtly bow. He immediately looked familiar, though it took her a moment to place him.
Mr. Cabot?
He looked just like Sebastian Cabot, the actor who had played a butler on that god-awful television show Family Affair.
For a brief instant, she thought that this might be the actor’s son or brother, but then a more sinister idea came to mind, and she was suddenly certain that this man was a fake and a phony, modeling himself after Sebastian Cabot and even going so far as to steal the man’s name. But why and for what purpose? Imitating a long-dead character actor was hardly the way to earn the trust of staff and customers. The feeling persisted that the manager was not what he seemed, and the banality of his disguise unnerved her, putting her on the defensive when she had come to excoriate The Reata’s staff for that horror back in her suite.
“What seems to be the trouble?” the manager—
Mr. Cabot
—asked.
Ralph looked to her, and she shoved her unfounded concerns aside to angrily describe what they’d found in their bathroom and demand to know how such a thing could have gone undetected in a resort that was supposed to have such a sterling reputation. She pointed to their suitcases, piled high on a luggage cart. “This is completely unacceptable. There is no reason my husband and I should have to vacate our room, particularly not for something as outrageous as this.”
“I understand completely,” the manager said in a smooth reassuring voice, “and I can assure you that a full investigation will be conducted not only to determine how this occurred but how it could have gone unnoticed by our cleaning staff.”
“Someone had a miscarriage or performed an abortion in our bathroom. How could this happen without anyone noticing?”
“I would like to know the answer to that question just as much as you do, Mrs. Pedwin. Believe me.”
Ralph chimed in. “What happens if
there’s some sort of medical emergency here? The Reata is very far from the nearest city.”
“We have our own medical staff: a doctor and two nurses on-site and on call at all times. In the event of an extreme accident or medical exigency, there’s also a helicopter to take guests to Desert Regional Hospital in Tucson. We are, I daresay, prepared for every eventuality.”
The reassurances were logical, proper and should have made her feel better, but Gloria still didn’t trust the manager and found that his pat answers made her very uneasy. There was nothing specific to which she could point, nothing he said that was wrong or even unusual. But he himself was unusual, and that colored everything he said.
They were transferred to another suite, this one inspected by Mr. Cabot himself before they entered, and though it was clean and well-appointed, in her mind it carried the taint of their previous room. This first night’s stay was free, comped as a result of what they’d experienced, and the manager assured them that for the rest of their visit, they would receive a free night for each night paid. Originally, their plan was to remain at The Reata for five days, but now she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay more than one. She had a bad feeling about this place, and while she wasn’t some young New Age nitwit or superstitious old hippie, she would definitely feel a lot more confident if they finished out their vacation at another resort.
Why couldn’t they have just gone to Laguna Beach the way they usually did?
They unpacked, settled in, waited to find out the verdict on that bloody mass from the toilet, but when Gloria hadn’t heard back from anyone on staff after an hour, she dialed the front desk, irritated. “This is Mrs. Pedwin,” she said in a voice meant to convey her dissatisfaction. “My husband and I—”
“Mrs. Pedwin! I’m glad you called.” She recognized the voice of the unhelpful girl behind the front desk. “We just got a report from Dr. Randolph.” There was a long pause.
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