by Cesare, Adam
Or they could have been stabbed fifty times with ceremonial knives while Ms. Brant chanted “Hail Satan”, Silverfish thought.
A woman that Claire didn’t recognize opened the door, at the same time allaying her fears and scaring the shit out of her.
“Hello,” the woman said. She looked terrible and her breath stank of stale wine. “We’ve got the sign on,” she said, glancing at the cart beyond Claire.
“Hi, I didn’t mean to wake you,” Claire said. “Is Christine there?”
“Excuse me?” The meek woman seemed to gain some fight when Claire mentioned Christine.
Christine came to the door, zipping up a sweatshirt over what looked like bare flesh. She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
This must be her wife.
Even with no makeup and dark tearstained circles under the woman’s eyes, Claire could see that Christine had married up. The dark-haired woman was a foot taller than Christine, all of it in the legs. She had smooth, delicate features and even though she was well over forty, was quite beautiful.
“Hello, Claire, this is Jane,” Christine said, she lowered her voice to a whisper and addressed her wife, “go back to bed, okay?”
Jane nodded to Claire, then did a comatose about-face and shuffled back into the room. Christine closed the door behind herself and stepped into the hallway.
This was not the place to have a heart-to-heart and Claire felt herself getting nervous that Ms. Brant or Daisy was going to come bounding up the stairs. She couldn’t think of a good reason for either of them to be patrolling the third floor at this time, but that didn’t make her feel any better.
“We got the news last night from your friend Daisy, so Jane’s having a lost weekend,” Christine said. “I’m joining her.” Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked like she’d been partying just as hard as anyone in the woods ever had.
“The news? What news?” Claire asked. Unsure what Daisy could have told Christine, but sure it wasn’t the truth.
“That Bert had been found down the street. Squished to a pulp,” Christine said. Her voice was flat, but Claire got the feeling that it was from exhaustion instead of callousness towards Jane.
Claire didn’t speak, needed a moment to think. She was going to say something, she didn’t know what. She took the same approach that one takes to pulling off a Band-Aid.
Claire said what she wanted to, as fast as she could.
“You and Jane need to leave. I can’t give you a refund, but believe me, just get in your car and drive. Don’t tell anyone else that you’re going. Leaving your bags would be the best case scenario.”
Christine’s expression wasn’t as confused as Claire had anticipated. She took a few deep breaths in with her nose.
Claire changed her appraisal of the woman from hungover to still-drunk. She wondered how much of this conversation she understood and how much she would retain after she’d crawled back into bed with her wife and a bottle of red.
Before Claire had a chance to elaborate any further, the older woman spoke.
“You’re right. This is no place for us. We’ll get out soon,” Christine said. Claire was surprised. Even through the apparent haze of booze, there was a depth of knowledge to the answer.
But there was sadness to the understanding that Claire realized she could be misinterpreting.
Did Christine think that she and her wife were being run out of town by the bigoted manager of the hotel? It didn’t matter. Let her think that Brant was hateful—she was—as long as it got them to safety.
“Now, not soon. Can Jane drive?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be gone soon,” Christine said, putting a reassuring hand on Claire’s shoulder. It was unclear if the hand wasn’t also there to stabilize Christine. She wavered slightly and Claire felt more weight than necessary press against her clavicle.
“You’re not safe here,” Claire whispered. She was unsure if Christine could hear her, even in the silent hallway. She spoke up, “Travel safe.”
“We will,” Christine said, removing her hand. Her eyelids drooped to three-quarters closed and then shot back open. “Thank you, Claire.”
Christine turned and tried to open the door. Claire leaned in and used her keycard to unlock it for her. There was the sweaty rush of warm air and the subdued acidic stink of wine vomit in the room. Claire tried not to breathe through her nose, held the door and let Christine pass her.
The older woman grunted another thanks. Before letting the door swing past her hip, she’d unzipped her sweatshirt and let it fall to the floor.
The last Claire saw of Christine was her naked back, pale and fleshy in the shuttered half-light of the honeymoon suite.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Do you enjoy working here?”
The question seemed hand-picked to do maximum damage. It went so deep that Claire heard it hit bone.
It was a managerial line that Claire knew intimately. She’d heard it twice before: once while she was still in high school and once while she was working at Sunrise Cantina. Neither time had hearing it been a pleasurable experience.
When she was seventeen, she was asked this same question by a pudgy man wearing wrinkled khakis, three lanyards and a soul patch.
“If you’re going to be an effective saleswoman, you’re going to have to learn the art of the pre-sale,” Greg, the manager of Funcosoft, had said. “What’s not important is what game you’re ringing up for a customer—they’ve already made that decision—but what game is going to get them back in the store.”
He was speaking straight from the employee training video that she’d watched a week earlier.
Working at Funcosoft seemed like a natural fit for Claire. Silverfish had loved video games and found herself adored by the burnout boys for it.
Turned out that one week into her new job, she was receiving the then-unknown to her “Do you enjoy working here?” line. Greg with the soul patch was teaching her a valuable lesson, though not the one he thought. He had instilled upon her a healthy disgust of the question “Do you enjoy working here?”
Funcosoft was run more like a pawn shop than the breezy geek hangout she imagined it to be. Most of Claire’s time was spent using a hot air gun to reapply shrink wrap to used games and sell unneeded game insurance to parents that didn’t know any better.
She’d lost that job a week later. On her way out of the store for the last time, she stuffed a copy of Ico down the waistband of her own khakis.
It was a great game, so working at Funcosoft hadn’t been a total loss.
After two years as a waitress, she’d been asked by the owner of Sunrise if she enjoyed working there. Unlike high school, Claire had an immediate Pavlovian response to the question. What began like a normal “how are things” time-killer of a conversation was suddenly a precursor to losing her job at Sunrise.
This was back when she was still attached to Mickey. Love, maybe. Young enough to buy his line of bull, but old enough to buy her own beer and know better.
“I love working here,” Claire had said.
Paul, the owner of Sunrise and its three sister restaurants had given her an incredulous look.
Only later did she realize that their conversation had been Paul’s way of gauging if Claire was a lifer.
This was the conversation he had when his employees were staring down the barrel of graduation. What he was tacitly asking was would you like to make this official? Did this romance have a future? Are you going to keep waiting tables for me ’til death do us part?
Paul was affable, but predatory. He’d bump your pay a bit, make you senior hostess, but he needed to know that he could depend on you.
She’d kept repeating how much she loved the job until it was three years after graduation. If Mickey hadn’t burned the place down, she would still be slinging veggie burgers to Suffolk students. In a way, Mickey really was her Prince Charming. He’d broken the spell of Sunrise, released her with her deal with Paul, the fry-oil-spattered Mephistopheles.
Now she found herself confronted with the question for a third time.
Ms. Brant repeated herself, rephrasing the question slightly. “Do you like working here at the hotel?”
They sat in Ms. Brant’s business office, somewhere Claire had never been before. The desk was almost tidy in its dishevelment. There were stacks of receipts and records that were tumbling over each other and knocked askew but still rubber-banded and paper clipped to their pertinent group.
Around the moulding of the room was a line of greeting cards pinned to the wall. Claire caught snippets of the personalized inscriptions in each card as her eyes flitted around, trying not to focus on Victoria Brant. Phrases like The time of our lives and Thank you and The stay of a lifetime stood out as she went around the room.
She wondered how many of the cards Ms. Brant or Daisy had filled out themselves.
“Of course I enjoy working here,” Claire said, tired of answering this question. “Why do you ask?” This time she was taking the offensive, a route she hadn’t employed with Greg or Paul.
Brant placed her hands on top of her desk, resting them next to a framed Ziggy cartoon. Did her knuckles really crack as she clenched and unclenched her fists, or was that just Claire’s imagination?
“I’ve seen things,” Brant said. As she spoke she kept her hands busy, closing up a folder on the left side of her desk and moving it into a plastic inbox at the right corner, “and heard things that make me think otherwise.”
Daisy’s face flashed into her mind. This was never a welcomed image, but especially not now.
Claire was stuck, unclear how she was supposed to be reacting. Was this pressure being applied for counter-intelligence purposes? Was she supposed to squeal?
Speaking from her gut had halfway worked with Christine, so she decided to go for it.
“Is this about Tobin?” she asked, letting a hint of attitude into her voice. Might as well sell it, she thought as she decided to go for indignant gusto. “What does my love life have to do with my employment at this hotel?”
She hated using Tobin like this, but talking about him also made the experience an easier one. She felt something for him, something she hadn’t felt since the clumsy, romantic days when Mickey didn’t seem like a complete loser.
Her heartbeat was now in her ears. She wasn’t worried about keeping her job as a guest liaison. She was wondering just what the consequences for getting caught fraternizing with Davey’s second-in-command would be.
“Your involvement with that boy does trouble me, makes me think less of you as a woman, but it’s not the problem,” Brant said. “Nice try, though.”
Claire wanted to read the Ziggy comic but it was at such an angle that she couldn’t make out the words. She tried though, because she had the irrational feeling that a little levity would defuse all the tension in the room.
“What I want to know is why two of our guests decided to checkout of the honeymoon suite two nights early.”
There it was, Christine had heeded her warning but hadn’t followed her directions. Claire thought she’d understood and that she wouldn’t try to checkout via traditional methods. Claire wanted her to put her wife in the car and drive.
“Their dog was found dead,” she didn’t add “by me, in the fridge.”
“Last night. Why did they choose to leave this afternoon?”
“I’m not quite sure I understand the question,” Claire said. She prepared to hit every range of emotion, her defense would be scattershot. “Ms. Brant, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be apologizing for. Did they blame me in any way as they left? Because I didn’t do anything!”
Her spray-and-pray sentiment that began as complete ignorance then progressed to whiny petulance and ended with an accusation. “Did they pay for the nights they booked at least?”
Brant didn’t answer any of Claire’s questions, just stared forward, hands crossed in front of her.
Claire could see them now, the cracks in the foundation. Brant’s mask of composure was slipping. Frustration, fear or anger, maybe a combination of all three, whatever the old woman was feeling it was about to bubble forth.
Claire felt the sudden desire to push her seat away from the desk. Just a few inches would get her far enough away from Brant’s concentrated hate that her hair wouldn’t be singed, she was sure of it.
“You know full well why they left,” Brant said, her voice nearing a tea kettle shriek.
Deny, deny, deny. There was no turning back. “I don’t know why you’re so upset, or why I’m in trouble right now, but all I can say is that I’m sorry.”
Ms. Brant let out a breath that seemed to release all the built-up pressure, deflating her. The shoulders of her floral-pattern dress sank below the seatback before she pumped herself back up again. She not only changed her body language, but her expression as well. She’d lost it for a moment, but was now pulling the mask back up.
Claire watched the transformation in awe.
The lines of her face, the delicate curve of her smile, the streaks of gray in her hair: Victoria Brant had reconfigured herself back into a Norman Rockwell painting.
Although the words hit like a fastball, was completely at odds with the image she was projecting, Brant delivered what came next in monotone.
“Go clean up the honeymoon suite. It reeks of cheap wine and vaginal fluid.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cleaning the honeymoon suite was an endurance test.
The amassed trash and sweaty sheets were intimidating, but worse was the ticking of the clock. In an hour and a half she was leaving The Brant whether she was done cleaning or not. Neither Brant’s cold-blooded reptile bitch attitude or Daisy’s death-ray of sanctimoniousness was going to keep her in the hotel.
At six o’clock, Tobin was picking her up in front of the gas station and she was getting in the car and telling him to drive.
Not to the shack, but back to Boston. Civilization. She was resolved.
She only had to make it through this.
Unless they burst in here with their curvy knives and torches and bring you down into the basement, Silverfish said. Hail Satan!
The possibility seemed remote to Claire, but imminent to Silverfish.
Claire thanked herself for taking great pains to lose her imagination.
No matter how hard she’d tried to put away childish things, Silverfish persisted. So did her infantile flights of nerdy goth-girl fancy. The platinum streak was still there in front of her eyes, however faded it seemed now.
She may have sold all her kid stuff on eBay, but the baton proved that she was still capable of coveting a shiny new toy. . The baton weighed down her front pocket and she put a hand to it to feel its hardness through the fabric.
There were few things more childish than a fear of the dark, but Claire still found herself switching on every light when she entered the honeymoon suite.
The lights removed all mystery from the room, but something about that was worse. The shadows would have been preferable.
Christine and Jane had left in a hurry, taking everything but Bert’s leash and dog bed with them. The leash was looped neatly around the doorknob to the closet, Bert’s tiny pillow of a bed sitting under it.
The placement of the dog’s artifacts gave the impression of a deliberate marker. In Memoriam: Bertrum Dog III.
The room around Bert’s belongings was less orderly. There were empty wine bottles sitting on every flat surface, the coffee table, both nightstands, and one under the TV. It was more wine than it seemed possible for two women to drink over the course of two days.
They hadn’t been drinking from wineglasses either, Claire picked up a half-filled tumbler and held it up to the light. There was a ring of dried spittle on the top, the imprints left by a hundred different sips. She gathered up two bottles in her other hand and entered the bathroom, ready to toss the dregs into the sink.
The problem was that the sink was already occupied.
Cla
ire stopped, the two bottles almost slipping out of her hand as she looked down. She used her foot to lay the toilet lid down and set the bottles on top of it.
With her hands free, she inspected the sink. There was a thick red line, the thick consistency of a splatter of chocolate syrup.
That’s blood if I ever saw it, Silverfish said. But she’d never seen this much blood up close, only ever in movies. Before she knew what she was doing, drawn by some perverse desire, her fingertip was outstretched and ready to poke at the small viscous puddle. She drew up short before touching it.
That wouldn’t be smart, Claire thought and decided to assume that the blood felt like blood.
She tried to piece together where the blood came from, her vision sweeping the room as if engaged in a life-or-death game of eye spy.
Something that begins with B. She looked back to the toilet, there was a broken tumbler set down on the tank. There was a ring of dried blood around the base of the glass. The bloody tumbler was staining a pink ring into the white porcelain that would be nearly impossible to wash away.
Christine or Jane had broken their glass while holding it, cut their hand, and then drained the wound over the sink. The blood was still there either because they were too drunk to wash it away or left it to deliberately spite the hotel.
“I’ll buy that,” Claire said aloud. It beat every gory and fantastic explanation that Silverfish was hurrying to come up with.
There was a moment when it wasn’t only Silverfish who thought they weren’t getting out of the honeymoon suite alive.
But that moment passed.
After an hour of sweeping the room into passable order, Claire used her yellow dish gloves to heap a pile of blood- and wine-stained linens onto the cart.
As she wheeled the towels and sheets down the hallway, growing bolder with each step. She’d always wanted to quit a job in a spectacular fashion and this was her chance.
She pulled the cart to a stop, put the brakes on the two rear wheels and left it in the middle of the third-floor hallway.
Claire estimated that it would take less than an hour for a guest to complain about the smell.