Rachel ducked behind a lodgepole pine pillar designed to look like a totem pole, not wanting to see this, knowing she wasn’t supposed to see this, not sure she was allowed to see this. Laurie was confused, but she followed Rachel’s example, and the two of them watched as the men passed by. Part of her wanted to jump out and confront the bully, call him on his reprehensible behavior and unjustifiable actions. This was no way to treat even the world’s worst employee. But Rachel recalled the terrified cries of the girl through the wall and that final sickening thud, and she was afraid to confront the man, afraid of what might happen if he even knew she was a witness to this.
A few feet past them, the two men stopped. Like a child hiding from her parents, Rachel moved around the pillar in an effort to remain undetected, Laurie moving with her. Peeking around the side of the column, she saw that the bearded man was still holding the beaten waiter with one hand and using the other to unlock a door with a key. The door opened, and for a brief second she saw inside. There was no office furniture, no wall hangings, no windows, only a room, its walls and floor and ceiling painted red, with a rusted metal cage in the middle approximately the size of a refrigerator box. Then the waiter was shoved through the doorway with the order, “Get in there!”
“No!” the young man screamed, as primal a cry of anguish and terror as Rachel had ever heard.
And the heavy door slammed shut, cutting off all sound.
The corridor was quiet.
At the far end of the hallway, two guests, a man and a woman, strolled casually around the corner, oblivious to what had just occurred.
Rachel’s heart was pounding crazily and she was breathing audibly through her mouth. Someone had to do something! A man was being tortured in there. She looked wildly back toward the lobby, but knew that she could say nothing to anyone there. This wasn’t an isolated incident or the actions of a rogue sadist. The resort’s management knew about this. They either looked the other way or it was part of their policy.
She could call the police or sheriff’s department, but by the time they arrived at this godforsaken location from wherever they were, the crime would have been committed and all trace of it covered up.
In a movie, she would rush forward, fling open the door, expose the dastardly deeds to the light of day and order the couple walking arm in arm down the hall to get some help. They’d rally the guests and the other employees, and the bearded man and any of his accomplices would be apprehended, awaiting the arrival of law enforcement. But this wasn’t a movie, and all she could do was stare at the closed door, taunted by the fake silence, and try not to hyperventilate.
“Did you see that?” Rachel asked, barely able to speak.
“I can’t believe it.” Laurie did not seem nearly as shocked, exhibiting only a mild intellectual outrage miles removed from Rachel’s gut-level emotional response, and Rachel recalled that the other woman had not been shocked by the chef’s shaved desert rat diorama, either. Looking into Laurie’s eyes, she saw a deadened expression that for some reason made her think of the emotional numbness produced by Brave New World’s soma.
Rachel looked down the wide hallway at the unmarked doors between the clearly marked banquet rooms and wondered what was going on behind their soundproofed façades. She imagined dozens of men who looked like the manager sadistically torturing low-level employees who had reported to work a few minutes late or accidentally committed some minor error. She tried to remember the face of the waiter so she would be able to spot him if she saw him again by the pool, but his features were a blur in her mind. What she remembered most were the fingers digging into his flesh, his whimpering cries of terror.
The first thing they had to do was get out of here.
“Let’s go,” Rachel said, moving out from behind the column. Laurie followed her as though there was nothing unusual about two grown women hiding in back of a totem pole pillar in an expensive resort in the middle of the day. The two of them headed back toward the lobby.
“Well, thanks for your help picking out Fredrich’s T-shirt,” Laurie said with a wave as she walked over to the front desk. “I’m going to sort out my bill since I’m here. It was nice meeting you.”
Rachel was stunned. She’d expected that at least some of the indignation from the abuse they’d witnessed to remain; she hadn’t thought all trace of it would be wiped immediately from Laurie’s mind. But apparently it had. She felt some of her own outrage unaccountably dissipating, and though she vowed to hold on to it, by the time she walked back to the room to meet Lowell for lunch, the anger and fear she’d felt had faded and was gone.
Nineteen
It was early afternoon, the hottest part of the day, and though they’d told their parents they’d be spending the next couple of hours before the volleyball tournament in David’s room with a PlayStation, they decided instead to hike up the Antelope Canyon trail and check out the hot springs.
Surprisingly, the hike was Ryan’s idea. They were lounging around, trying to come up with something they could do—after two days even a resort this nice was starting to feel claustrophobic—when Ryan reminded them about the tour they’d taken when they first arrived. “Weren’t there supposed to be hiking trails?” he asked.
Owen thought there was something a little too innocent about the way his brother asked. He’d known Ryan since birth, and that sort of casual purity just wasn’t in the boy’s playbook. But he had to admit, the idea had merit. Their mom had given them explicit instructions that they were to stay out of direct sunlight in this, the hottest part of the day, and they’d been chafing under those restrictions as they contemplated what to do. Ryan’s suggestion was out of the box. Besides, if they got caught, they could always blame it on him.
Curtis clapped Ryan on the back—a little too hard, making his brother wince—and announced, “Pack up some Cokes, boys. We’re heading out.”
Brenda came with them.
They met her outside the gate of the tennis courts, where she’d apparently been playing with her father. Although only a junior, she was on the varsity tennis team, she said, and her dad wanted her to keep practicing even on vacation.
She was hot and sweaty and to Owen looked absolutely gorgeous. “Where’s your racket?” he asked.
“My dad’s taking it back. Do you like tennis?”
“I like Anna Kournikova,” Curtis offered.
“Highly overrated,” Brenda said earnestly. “She’s never even won a major tournament.”
“We don’t watch tennis,” Ryan announced.
“But I like to play,” Owen added quickly. She smiled at him, and he stared down at his shoes, reddening. “Although I’m probably not in your league.”
“We could still volley. It would be fun.”
It would be fun, and he imagined the two of them hitting the ball back and forth over the net for a while, then her coming over to his side to give him some pointers, standing behind him, her hands over his on the racket, her body pressed tightly against him, breasts flattened against his back. His snake was sneaking out through the elastic leg-band of his underwear, and he moved his hand to cover it, mashing the cold Coke can against his growing erection to keep it down. He wanted to suggest that the two of them stay behind and play while the others went hiking, but she was probably tired of it, and, besides, her dad was here.
Brenda tapped his shoulder lightly, playfully, then her hand slid down and held his as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Their fingers intertwined comfortably, and he gave her hand a soft small squeeze, gratified to feel one in return.
He had never felt this way about a girl before. Of course, no girl had ever shown this much interest in him before, so part of it was opportunity, but there seemed to be a real connection between them, a deep instant bonding that went beyond mere physical attraction, and it made him feel stupid and smart and happy and expansive and reserved all at the same time. He wanted everyone to see them together and wanted no one to see them, wanted it to be a pri
vate affair just between the two of them.
Curtis had seen, however, and it seemed to make him annoyed. “Are we going to stand here all damn day?” he asked. “Let’s get going.”
They followed the gravel path around the tennis courts and the periphery of the outlying buildings, along the edge of the rocky bluff until they came to a breach in the low mountain range. The pathway split, the left fork circling back to the resort, the right winding into the mountains. ANTELOPE CANYON TRAIL 500 YARDS, a small sign announced.
They took the right fork.
After passing over a dry wash and up a slight slope between some giant cactuses, they reached the trailhead. They’d been walking nonstop for the past ten minutes, but they paused for a second at the beginning of the trail, all of them experiencing a sort of collective hesitation. There were two weathered posts to either side of the dirt track. On one of them was a new white-on-reflective-green metal sign: PLEASE STAY ON THE PATH. On the other was a wood and plastic box stuffed with trail guides.
Owen looked at the sign.
PLEASE STAY ON THE PATH.
It seemed more warning than request, he thought. In fact, it sounded almost like a religious message, and he found that a little creepy. He was starting to get the same feeling about this as he had about the exercise pool and that section of the big pool by the waterfall where he and Curtis had seen the body: a fearful apprehension.
Then they were walking, Brenda now in the lead, towing him along while the others followed. He barely had time to think his thoughts let alone articulate them, before they were tramping up the path toward a narrow gorge that looked like one of those places where novice hikers were washed away in flash floods.
“Cool,” Ryan said, but it was the only word spoken by any of them. Although they weren’t exactly climbing up the cliff, the path was on an incline, and the combination of increasing heat and altitude left them sweaty and winded. They passed through the constricted ravine, which, although twisting, was much shorter than Owen had thought, maybe half the length of a football field. Then the sides of the two cliffs separated, stretching out, and the path wound through an increasingly wide canyon, the rocky mountainsides sloping upward at a gentle angle, the sandy bottom home to an oasis of green bushes and tall trees.
“Pretty bitchin’,” Owen admitted.
David had been unusually quiet since they’d met him after lunch, and for no reason, he suddenly blurted out, “I think there’s something wrong with my parents.”
They stopped walking.
“They’re not normal.”
No duh, Owen was tempted to say, but instead met Curtis’s quizzical eyes with a confused shrug.
“Why?” Curtis asked.
“I saw something. Back at the resort. They have this golf course, not eighteen holes, but one of those places where you practice hitting the ball—”
“A driving range,” Brenda offered.
“Yeah. Anyway, there’s a sign that no one under eighteen can be admitted, but I snuck in anyway. My dad was playing golf and . . .” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“What?” Curtis prodded.
“It sounds crazy . . .”
“What?” Owen and Curtis shouted in unison.
“There were women tied up at the other end of the lawn, to poles, and the men were trying to nail them with golf balls. One of them was my mom. I know this sounds like I made it up, but I watched while my dad whacked a ball and it hit her in the stomach. She just sort of . . . slumped forward or crouched over a little, like she’d been punched. But she couldn’t fall down or move out of the way or anything because she was tied to the stake. Her face was all scrunched up in pain, but she didn’t cry or make any noise. It was like she couldn’t, like it wasn’t allowed, like it wasn’t part of the game and she’d lose or be disqualified or something if she did.” David’s voice had grown lower, more grim, and the rest of them were completely silent, stunned.
“The woman next to her was hit in the head,” he said quietly. “There was a lot of blood.”
Owen wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. He tried to imagine how he would feel if he’d seen something like that with his own parents but couldn’t, it was just too alien.
“Was it a game?” Curtis asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t stick around to find out.” A pause. “There’s something wrong with The Reata,” David said.
Owen looked at Curtis and before he could even gauge the expression on his brother’s face, jumped in. “There really was a body at the bottom of the pool. We saw it.”
David was still.
“It looked like a stain or something after you told us that, but at first there was definitely something there. A ghost maybe.”
Curtis remained silent.
David let out a long-held breath. “I thought I saw it, too,” he admitted. “But then it was gone, and I figured it was an optical illusion, so I decided to try and freak you guys.”
“What are you talking about?” Brenda looked at them as if they were all crazy.
“There are ghosts here,” Ryan said matter-of-factly.
Brenda ran an exasperated hand through her hair. “This is the stupidest, most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Did I hike up here with the special class? Come on, people! Our families are staying at like, one of the best resorts in the country. Millionaires, billionaires, spend their winters here. I don’t know about your rooms, but ours is amazing. And that pool? These hiking trails? All of that other stuff? I don’t know where you got these kindergarten ideas, but, trust me, there are no dead bodies floating in the water. There aren’t any ghosts, either. Or aliens. Or vampires.” She looked at David. “And, no offense, but just because you saw a golf accident doesn’t mean people have suddenly gone crazy and are now trying to kill each other with sporting goods.” She appealed to Owen. “You don’t actually believe this, do you?”
It did seem kind of stupid when you looked at it, and Owen felt embarrassed by his own gullibility and willingness to leap to conclusions. He glanced over at Curtis, who was staring at his shoes, red-faced.
“I know what I saw,” David said quietly, but even his voice didn’t have the same level of conviction.
Only Ryan held firm. “There are ghosts,” he insisted. “And they’re here.”
Brenda smiled at him as though he were a baby. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t come walking down this trail in the middle of the night. But I sure don’t think bodies are floating in a pool that dozens of people swim in every day and that’s cleaned and inspected each morning. And I don’t think golfers are going postal and attacking people for no reason whatsoever.”
“The body wasn’t floating,” Owen felt obligated to point out. “It was lying at the bottom.”
She looked at him, and he felt like the world’s biggest dummy.
“Just drop it,” Curtis suggested. “Everyone’s hot and cranky, and we sure as hell aren’t going to settle this here. Let’s just keep walking.”
“Why don’t we just head back,” David said, desultorily pulling on his earring.
They glanced up ahead to see if it was worth continuing on. Owen saw only more mountains, more trees and brush, more hot sun. He was about to suggest that they turn around when Curtis pointed. “Check it out.” Off the trail to the right, atop a small rise, was what appeared to be an old buckboard wagon, half-buried in the sand.
Please stay on the path.
Curtis stepped unhesitatingly over the line of rocks that marked the border of the trail and started across the open ground. David and Ryan followed eagerly. Owen and Brenda remained behind for a few extra seconds, then hand in hand the two of them trudged along after. Brenda obviously did not want to go, there was resistance in the tension of her muscles, but she said nothing.
The five of them stood before the downed wagon, its wood cracked and splintered from exposure to the elements, its yoke and a corner of the driver’s seat bur
ied in the sand, broken wheels lying flattened and spoke-shattered nearby. The back of the buckboard was filled with old animal bones and the rotted remnants of burlap bags. Owen wasn’t a nature boy or an animal expert by any means, but he thought he recognized among the yellowed bones a cow skull, a horse skull, and the skull of the canyon’s namesake, an antelope.
The sight was odd and disconcerting, but it was what lay just beyond the small rise that had suddenly captured their attention.
“Look,” Ryan said. “Indian ruins.”
Only they weren’t Indian ruins. Owen could see that immediately. They were ruins all right: extant sections of wall not more than a foot high that clearly delineated the floor plan of a rather large building, with a smaller roofless but otherwise intact structure built at an angle to its counterpart. But they were cement, not adobe, had traces of light blue paint on their exteriors, and resembled nothing so much as those abandoned commercial buildings they’d seen in dying towns like Wenden and Dry River that they’d passed through on their way over from California.
“It’s a ghost town,” Ryan said, and Owen could hear the excitement in his voice.
But that didn’t seem right, either. The site before them was too small to be a town, and what it reminded Owen of more than anything else was a hotel.
Yes, he realized, that was exactly what it was.
He let go of Brenda’s hand and, with his brothers, walked around the downed wagon, feeling chilled but not knowing why. They walked over the barren sand. Sure enough, he was able to make out the walls and doorways of individual sleeping quarters as they approached. The structure still standing appeared to be the hotel’s restaurant.
They reached the ruins.
There were more buildings than he’d originally thought. Or at least there had been more buildings. To the right, Owen saw the remnants of a wooden structure that had probably been a barn, and a forsaken pile of wreckage that had clearly been furniture before the sun and wind and rain had gotten hold of it. A second set of ruined rooms ran parallel to the first, and between the two blocks was an empty cement pool remarkably devoid of debris.
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