Get out.
—and could not help thinking that the blood in their food had been placed there intentionally, and that it was connected to that dog fetus in their toilet.
There was entirely too much blood on this vacation.
If the attempt was to frighten her or cow her, the individuals behind this grotesque act had severely miscalculated. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became, and when she reflected on the fact that she had been humiliated in front of the entire restaurant, made to dash out of the dining room in order to vomit in a toilet stall, it made her furious.
They’d picked on the wrong woman.
Gloria straightened, fixed her face and looked herself in the eye, satisfied by the firm resolve she saw there. She returned to the dining room and scanned the sea of diners’ faces for Phillip Emmons but he was nowhere to be found. A glance toward the waiting area showed only a young couple and a family of four.
Maybe he’d gotten fed up with the wait and left, opting for room service.
The dishes were gone when she returned to the table. “I told them to take everything back and cook us a new meal,” Ralph said angrily. “What do you think that was? Blood? It looked like blood to me.”
Gloria remained standing. “Waiter!” she called out at the top of her voice.
All eyes in the restaurant turned to her, and their waiter came hurrying over. “I’m very sorry,” he said in a voice filled with apologetic subservience. “I don’t know how such a thing could have happened . . .”
“I want to speak to the manager!” Gloria demanded.
The waiter started to say something, speaking softly in a vain attempt to get her to keep her voice down, but the manager had heard and was already there, apologizing profusely, assuring them that such a thing would never happen again, that he didn’t know how it had occurred this time.
“I want that chef fired,” she commanded. “There is absolutely no excuse for something like this. It’s not only a health code violation, it’s an affront to human decency.”
“I understand, madam.”
“There was blood in our food!”
“We’re still not sure if—”
“Blood!”
“Yes, madam,” the manager said.
“Naturally, I do not expect to be charged for this meal, not after the horrific ordeal your restaurant put us through.”
“Of course not,” the manager agreed. “And rest assured, whoever is responsible for this prank—”
“It’s a little more serious than a prank!” Ralph said.
“Quite so, sir. Quite so. But I just want you to know that the person or persons responsible will be held accountable.”
Once again, the words were right, but there seemed something wrong with their delivery. As with Mr. Cabot, the intent behind the manager’s placating promises was suspect, and despite her outward bravery and bluster, inwardly Gloria felt off balance and strangely scared. Beneath the surface normalcy were dark currents she could neither see nor understand but which she nonetheless knew were there.
“Please enjoy the rest of your meal,” the manager said, as the waiter nodded solemnly next to him. “And once again please accept our heartfelt apologies for this unfortunate incident.”
Gloria sat down, looked at Ralph, and the two of them waited in silence. There was nothing to say, and Gloria felt increasingly uncomfortable as the minutes dragged by. Around them, other diners ate their food and carried on casual conversations. To their left, a couple and their teenaged daughter got up and left, two elderly women taking their seats after the tablecloth had been replaced and the dishes and silverware replenished. Gloria kept glancing toward the waiting area by the entrance, hoping to spot Phillip Emmons—
Get out.
—but the writer was nowhere to be seen, and she found herself wondering exactly what the writer knew about The Reata, what he had learned in his research that made him want to get away from here so quickly.
Finally the food arrived, brought by their waiter and accompanied by the apologetic manager. Full plates and glasses were arranged on the table in front of them before the two men discreetly disappeared. A hush seemed to fall over the dining room, and though people kept talking, waiters kept waiting, hostesses kept seating customers, everything was lower, slower, quieter, and the rest of the restaurant seemed to fade into the background. Gloria remembered last year when a friend of hers had taken her to a concert of so-called “New Music,” which for some pretentious and inexplicable reason was spelled “Nu Music” on the program. One piece had been titled “Expectant Silence” and consisted of a man sitting at the piano, playing nothing. Every once in a while he would extend his hands, place his fingers above the keyboard and look as though he were about to play something. Only he never did. Those moments when he seemed poised to play, however, did find her waiting for the advent of music, and against her will, she felt the difference in the type of silence in the concert hall.
Expectant silence.
It was what she felt here, now, and she understood that everyone in the dining room was waiting to see whether they would eat their dinner.
Why?
She could think of no answer to that question that did not make her feel profoundly discomfited. It was as though everyone but themselves was in on a joke—and they were the brunt of it. Gloria swiveled her head around. No one would meet her gaze, but no one exactly turned away either. All attention was upon them.
She and Ralph looked at the food, then looked at each other, afraid to eat. The imported beer suddenly looked an awful lot like urine, the soup was busy enough to hide gobs of saliva. A smear of artistically rendered white sauce on the blue-and-red corn enchiladas could have easily been ejaculate.
Suddenly Gloria was no longer hungry, and with a queasy stomach, she pushed her chair back from the table. Ralph followed suit. “Let’s go,” he said, and arm in arm, eyes straight ahead, they headed across the crowded restaurant toward the exit, as around them the other diners returned to their meals and conversations.
Twelve
The Grille was not quite what they’d been led to expect.
Lowell followed the miniskirted waitress to a table against a far wall, Rachel and the kids right behind him. In contrast to the casual classy quiet of the Saguaro Room last night, the Grille was loud, boisterous and defiantly crass. On initial inspection during daylight hours, it had appeared to be a typical burger and beer joint, albeit one slightly tonier than usual. Despite Tammy’s assertion that the place could get a little loud and raucous on Friday and Saturday nights, they had not really believed the eatery would be this rowdy.
They were wrong.
“I’ll be dipped in shit!” a drunken man yelled, and he was greeted with a chorus of wild laughter.
The odd thing was that the Grille’s patrons did not seem to be people who could afford to stay at The Reata—even with the reduced summer rate. They were certainly not people he had seen around the pool or in the lobby or walking to and from the rooms. And they obviously couldn’t be locals. There were no locals way out here. Perhaps they were part of the resort’s staff . . . only that didn’t seem right, either.
He didn’t know where these people came from.
And that bothered him.
A gaggle of young women who looked like secretaries here for a good-time weekend were gathered around the front of the bar, doing shots, while half a dozen biker types watched them from two pushed-together tables. At a corner booth, a small skinny man with a Jackie Gleason mustache was groping a tube-topped Anna Nicole Smith look-alike.
He saw the look of disapproval on Rachel’s face, saw inquisitive excitement in the expressions of the boys, but they were here, it was late, and if they wanted something for dinner they had no choice; they would just have to make the best of things and pretend this was a normal restaurant. The waitress passed out menus, then leaned forward over the table in a way that showed her implants to best advantage. “Could I start ya’ll
off with a drink? Margarita maybe?”
“Iced tea for me,” Lowell told her.
“Just water,” Rachel said shortly.
“Coke,” the boys announced, eyes wide and staring.
The waitress grinned at them. “You got it. I’ll be back in a mo for your order. If you need anything, just holler. My name’s Bambi.” She swiveled around and, with a flick of her pert miniskirted butt, was gone.
“Wow,” Curtis said.
“Keep your eyes in your head,” Lowell told him, smiling.
“You shouldn’t even be in here,” Rachel said. “If there was any other place to eat . . .” She shook her head. “Why would The Reata even have a place like this on its grounds?”
“I don’t know,” Lowell admitted.
Owen and Curtis were both grinning, but Ryan seemed subdued, a little nervous.
As they looked at their menus, there was a commotion at the opposite end of the room. Men and women were leaving their seats to stand by the small stage that had been set up to the left of the bar. A screen was lowered from the ceiling, and someone tapped a microphone. “Testing,” a man said, his voice amplified through a series of hidden speakers. “One, two, three . . .”
Bambi returned with their drinks. “Have you decided on your order?” she asked as she slid the boys’ Coke glasses across the table.
The twins knew what they wanted without even looking at the menu—they always ordered the same thing: cheeseburgers, hold the pickles—and Ryan asked for his usual grilled cheese sandwich. Rachel ordered a barbecued portobello mushroom burger. Lowell was the only one who hadn’t decided, and he quickly scanned the menu before choosing a Mexican pizza.
By the time Bambi left with their orders, one of the secretaries was on the stage and singing off-key to a prerecorded backing track, her friends egging her on. It was karaoke night, apparently; although for all he knew every night was karaoke night at the Grille. He couldn’t see the words on the screen from where they sat, but he tried to understand the lyrics. “I love the dead,” the woman sneered into the microphone, and that sounded vaguely familiar. He thought it was an Alice Cooper song his older brother used to listen to when he was a kid.
“This is great,” Curtis said, grinning.
“I don’t like this at all,” Rachel stated flatly. “Let’s just hurry up and eat and go back to our room.”
But the food did not arrive right away, and they sat there listening as a goateed, muscle-shirted man growled his way through Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” and then a buxom, overly made-up young woman did a Betty Boop version of Marilyn Manson’s “Antichrist Superstar” while around them the crowd got bigger and noisier and drunker.
The song choices seemed strange, Lowell thought, and there was something about the music the performers picked that made him uneasy. But then their food arrived and they started eating. They chatted as they ate, discussing what had happened today, what they were going to do tomorrow. In the background, the endless parade of karaoke singers continued, and when Lowell occasionally tuned in to the songs, they were not anything that he recognized.
He was looking around for the waitress in order to get a refill on his iced tea when he finally had the opportunity to listen to what the burly man on stage was singing. “Skin my daddy’s hide!” the man screamed over an industrial backing track. “Steal his toupee! Fuck my momma’s asshole! She likes it best that way!”
Bambi arrived, pitcher in hand, to pour his iced tea, but he hardly paid attention. His focus was on the man on stage and his outrageous song. “The Holocaust was a lie! Those Jews should fuckin’ die!”
Were those the words appearing on the screen?
Rachel was listening, too. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“Miss!” Lowell called in an effort to ask for the check. “Bambi!” But the waitress was walking away and could not hear him with all of the surrounding music.
The song ended, the crowd screamed wildly. A trashy looking young woman got up to sing, and the karaoke started again. It wasn’t only the words that were wrong now. It was the music itself—the rhythm, the melody, the harmonics—that was disconcerting, that spurred Lowell into chasing down the waitress, cornering her at the bar and demanding the check. He wrote down their room number, added an appropriate tip and signed for it, taking the carbon.
The Grille seemed to have suddenly become crazier. That maddening music was thumping in his skull as he passed a table of ugly dirty men pounding their fists on the wood in unison, shouting a phrase that he could almost—but not quite—understand. Unbelievably, Jackie Gleason and Anna Nicole were half-naked in their booth, rubbing ketchup on each other.
One of the secretaries jumped on stage and took off her top to the drunken cheers of the other patrons, her huge breasts jiggling in time to the music.
He reached their table. “We’re leaving now,” Rachel said, lips tight. He didn’t know how he could understand her amid all of the noise and chaos, but he could, and he nodded his agreement. He pulled the twins’ collars to get them out of their chairs while Rachel took Ryan’s hand and led him away from the table toward the exit. The twins, no doubt, would have liked to stay and see where this was all going—he’d been young once himself, he knew how teenaged boys thought—but there was something not just unsavory but dangerous about the mood of the crowd here tonight, and when they were finally outside and he heard a young woman scream into the microphone, “Look! I’m on my period!” he was glad that they’d left when they did.
The night air was warm but felt clean and good after the stifling atmosphere of the Grille. Curtis and Owen asked if they could join their friend David and his parents, who were swimming at the big pool, but they asked in a restrained and hesitant manner, as though they already knew the answer to their question and accepted it. An angry Rachel told them they were staying in their room tonight, that she wasn’t about to let them consort with those used pieces of white trash from the Grille, who no doubt would move their drunken revelry to the pool once they tired of karaoke.
Lowell agreed, telling the boys that they could watch TV instead, and the five of them started silently back down the path toward their suite.
Later, in bed, when the boys were in their own room and asleep, Rachel was all over Lowell, roughly yanking down his underwear and grabbing his penis, pulling on it with one hand while she cupped his balls tightly with the other. She made him erect, almost against his will, and then climbed on top of him, guiding him in.
“Fuck me,” Rachel whispered in his ear. “Fuck me hard.”
“The kids . . .” he whispered.
“Fuck me!” she ordered.
He didn’t know what had gotten into her, and while ordinarily he would have been thrilled with such a command, he found it unnerving tonight—
Look! I’m on my period!
—and it took all of his powers of concentration to maintain his erection as she thrust lustily against him, trying to drive him in deeper.
Thirteen
Patrick awoke in darkness. Ordinarily, he slept all the way through the night, not stirring from the time his head hit the pillow until the sun rose in the morning. But the racket from the room next door had penetrated even his deep slumber, and he opened his eyes and groggily searched for the blue LED numbers on his nightstand alarm clock before realizing that he was not at home, he was at a hotel. He vaguely recalled seeing a clock somewhere in the room, but he could not remember where and, swiveling his head, could not seem to find it in the pitch black space.
He could see nothing, but he could hear plenty. It sounded like a group of rock stars were having a party next door. Through the wall, he heard breaking glass and loud thumping music and peals of raucous laughter that almost drowned out the shouted conversations. A dog began barking, a big dog like a Labrador or a Saint Bernard, and it kept barking, its baritone yelps constant through the seemingly paper-thin walls.
Patrick sat up, fumbled for the switch to the wall lamp next to his bed
and turned it on. If anything, the noise from the next room seemed even louder in the light. He picked up the phone and immediately dialed the front desk. “Hello,” he said. “This is Patrick Schlaegel in room 215. The people in the room next to me are having some kind of wild party, and it’s so loud I can’t even sleep. Is there some way you can make them tone it down?”
The female desk clerk seemed singularly uninterested in being helpful. “Which room would that be, sir?”
“The one next to me.”
“I need the number.”
“I don’t know the number,” he said, exasperated. The barking seemed to have grown louder. “Do you want me to put my clothes on and go outside and check? I’m sure you know the numbers of the rooms here. Even if you don’t, wouldn’t it be easier for you to just grab one of those maps in front of you and look it up?”
The woman sounded offended. “Is the noise coming from the room to the north of you or the south?”
“North.”
“That’s 217,” she said curtly.
“Well, do you think you could tell them to knock it off? It’s”—his eyes sought the clock—“after two.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“They have a dog there, too. Are they allowed to have dogs in their room?”
“No. Pets are not allowed in rooms at The Reata,” the woman said. “We discourage guests from bringing their animals here at all, but for those who are unable to travel without their dogs or cats, we provide a pet boarding facility.”
“Well, the dog’s barking right now. Can’t you hear it?” He held the phone closer to the wall, the noise of the animal distinctly audible above the general din of the party.
“No, I can’t, sir. But as I said, I’ll see what I can do.”
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