by Taylor Storm
So much for Room Fourteen. I pushed those sheets down in the bin and finished my game plan. I’ll get those sheets in the dryer right after I finish RoomsTwelve, Fourteen and Sixteen. I’d bet a week’s pay there’s fluids in at least one of the beds. Sometimes you just have to check some of the rooms nobody ever rents to see if there’s any mice. I’ll have to check Room Twelve before anybody goes in there.
The one thing I know is that none of us are fooling God that much. Some of us are just willing to admit it. Hope he understands. That damn fool on the phone better stop calling. Well what if Mom’s gone off her rocker? Maybe she’s got some TV show or recording of Anna there and she’s the one pranking me? Oh, sure, Susan…your mother, who can’t figure out the TV remote is suddenly producing haunting audio tapes for your listening pleasure.
Well that’s it. Next time they call, I’m going to play along. I’m just going to get it all out in the open and flush them out. That way I can tell Bernie down at the station, and he can go toss them in jail. Great headlines. ”Prank psycho caller apprehended at the Skylark…slow crime day in Alexandria and we are grateful to live here.”
Well look here. Looks like we’ve got a Mr. and Mrs. Strawberry…or maybe a lemon. Hard to tell from this distance. They’re in a car, and she should’ve had some work done.
“I’ll be with you in a minute!” I yelled as they approached the office. Scuttling behind the laundry room and into the back of the office, I met them as they came to the front counter. Definitely Lemon. She looked down her Roman nose at me as if she was doing a sniff inspection. She was not going to be happy with what she finds on this carpet. Uncle Lars used to let his Irish Setter, Muffy, hang out all day with him, here. Sometimes Muffy didn’t make it outside when she needed to.
“May I help you?”
“Do you have non-smoking rooms?” Mr. Lemon asked, with a twinge of a British accent.
“Yes, sir. We have non-smoking rooms.” Usually I didn’t care enough to smile, but her twitching nostrils struck me as funny, so I was playing it up. They just missed their turn. Ten bucks said they’ll turn tail and run.
“We’ll take that one,” he said, pointing to RoomTwelve.
“I’m afraid that one will take a bit. I’m covering for the maid here, and that room is in the process of being cleaned. Would you like Room Ten or Eleven?”
“No, we can wait. How much?” He pulled out a wallet with a wad inside.
“Seventy-nine ninety-five plus tax.”
“And when will the room be ready?” the lady asked, not looking at me.
“Um…I guess I could get it finished in about an hour.”
“That will suffice. Any places to eat around here, besides fast food?”
“There’s Luigi’s down on the main strip. You can’t miss it.” The woman sniffed again.
“Come, Charles.” She flicked her finger and started for the door as he tossed me a hundred dollar bill.
“I’ll get you your…”
“Don’t bother. Just prepare the room.” He gave me kind of a creepy wave of his hand as he followed, dutifully behind Cruella Deville. Definitely, she had some work done. Maybe it was just a high-classed skank-and-ride. Doesn’t quite fit the profile. At least Uncle Lars would be happy with the generous tip.
I busied myself finishing the rooms after putting the “back in thirty minutes” sign with the little clock on it in the office door window, and locked up.
I was finishing the bed in Room Sixteen when I heard someone rattle the office door and then pound on the window. I didn’t want them to break the glass.
Chapter Nineteen
“Can I help you!” I kind of yelled to get their attention.
“My wife! Help me!” This guy’s face was covered in blood. I didn’t see a car anywhere.
“I need to get a doctor, some police, something! We were run off the road and…” I ran to the front door all freaked out and unlocked it so that he could make his phone call. Actually I was trying to calm him down and not flashback to how bloody I was during the wreck. But there was urgency in his voice and there were red stains smeared across his face.
“Please! Hurry!”
“Nine-one-one. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
“This is Susan down at the Skylark. A guy just ran into our motel and says his wife and he were run off the road.”
“You’re current address, Miss.”
“5614 South Highway 29.”
“And how far is the accident?”
“How far is the accident, sir?” he was crying and shell shocked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a quarter of a mile that way.”
“He says a quarter of a mile down the 29 to the East.”
“We’re on our way.”
“They’re on their way. Just sit here and let me get you some water,” I told him. My voice was calm, but I was totally freaked out. I pulled some towels out of the laundry and they were a little too wet, but I handed them to him to wash off his face. He just let his face stare straight ahead. He didn’t make any attempt to wash off the blood. Then he rushed out into the parking lot to see if the ambulance was coming.
“Sir! Wait!” Shit, he’s going to get hit by traffic at this rate. He stopped and turned around. I remember that look. I just needed to calm him down. “Over here, sir! Over here!” He let me put my arm around him and guide him back to the office.
“I know you feel like you are in a dream. That is how everyone feels after a carwreck. I am sure your wife is fine. We will wait for the police and you will be okay.” Susan felt like the worst liar on the planet. Even as she spoke the soft, reassuring words, she remembered the look on Bob’s face. The terrible stillness that somehow made her think of a plastic mannequin. She could not see Anna, but she had been beside Bob at the moment of impact. Susan forced herself back to the present and rubbed the weeping man on his arm. “Please sir, just one drink of water. It will make you feel better.” As the trembling man took the bottle from my hand I noticed the glint of gold on his finger for the first time. There, the same unusual ring she had seen on the salesman down at Bill’s Chevrolet.
The ambulance was there about five minutes later, and the paramedics asked him to get in the back in case they needed to know more. He rushed to the back and started babbling. Both doors slammed shut. As the sheriff and his two deputies approached her, she saw the same, anguished face she had seen on the face of her mother. I knew then that the wife was dead.
It was brutal. She must have died instantly, with the car flipping over and over. The sheriff came and interviewed me and asked if I saw any speeding cars or anything.
“No,” I answered solemnly, “but I often write when no one is in the office, so I probably would not have seen anything.” The small deputy with an attitude mumbled something about me making things easier, but I ignored him in favor of watching the old man weeping over his wife’s damaged body. “Well, tell us how long the old man has been here. Why did he come to you? Do you know his wife?” asked the portly sheriff. I looked at him and shook my head in silence.
One of the deputies was getting a little testy with my answers because they weren’t getting answers anywhere, when I finally I blurted: “When you lose your husband in the exact same kind of crash, asshole, you can ask me more questions. I don’t know shit and neither does that poor bastard who lost his wife today. Get out of here and do your damn job!”
The other sheriff pulled his buddy away, and said: “Thank you for your time, Miss. Sorry for your loss.”
In all the scrambling, I just handed Mr. and Mrs. Lemon the key to the room they asked for and went back to watching the parking lot security cameras as if I was watching six screens of Let’s Make a Deal.” The old one with Monty Hall. Not the new one with the singing black guy. He’s okay, but Monty is better. I was in a fog and daze remembering it all again. Suddenly Mr. Lemon came through the door about five o’clock that night with the key.
“We will be checking out,
m’dear,” he said with a small smirk. My glazed eyes gave him a deadpan: “Do I look like I care you got lucky?” look. I gave it to all the skank-and-rides. It was my little contribution to cleaning up the streets of Alexandria. Thinking about cheating husbands and payment for sex, I offered a thinly veiled look of disgust on my face. “Maybe if he felt guilty enough he’d…”
Chapter Twenty
“Skylark Motel. Best skyline in the America’s best little town. Can I help you?”
The wind was still blowing in the background on the phone. “Susan…?” I watched as Mrs. Lemon slowly crossed the parking lot and dropped elegantly into the passenger seat. She had high heels and one of the golden ankle bracelets that skanks wear on beaches in TV shows. The wind kept blowing on the phone.
In a low voice, my heart hollowed out by all the flashbacks and the guy from the accident that day, I responded, “What do you want…I really can’t take much more.”
The wind continued. “Susan, I’m lost.” More wind. I heard a car whiz by but wasn’t sure if it was on the phone or outside the window. Uncle Lars had come and taken the money. He even heard about the whole parking lot thing since the cops were there when he got there for the deposit. He offered to let me hang out in the studio apartment the rest of the day with him covering the desk, but I turned him down. The desk was the little bit of sanity I had left in this world. Well, at least it was until this asshole started calling me.
“I can’t find you,” I answered. More wind.
“You have to…”
“No, I don’t. You’re dead Anna.” More wind.
“Susan, don’t be like that…”
“Anna, you’re dead. Dad is dead. Bob is dead.”
“…it isn’t as easy as all of that.”
“Nope. It’s that easy. Sucks, but it’s that easy. You’ll just have to find a way to hell or heaven, or wherever you’re headed, all on your own.”
The branches in the sycamore above the back of our maintenance shed were creaking a little. Not as windy, as on the phone, but spooking me.
“Susan…did you rent room Twelve today?” Now I was awake, but didn’t want to let on.
“We rent rooms. Kind of the job of a motel.”
“But did you rent room Twelve today?”
“Shut, up. Who cares if I rented room Twelve today?”
“Did you see who checked in?” More wind.
“I’m tired of this, Anna, or Queen Latifah, or whoever you think you are acting like.”
“I need help, Susan, because we’re going to have more company, soon.” There was a scream behind the wind. “Susan, please just check with Harris of Harris Motors tomorrow.”
“Oh, stop it. There’s no way that Harris Schleting has anything to do with anything. He’s just a pudgy old bald guy in a fishing hat who thinks he needs to be on every one of his stupid commercials.” I couldn’t believe I was starting to argue with the ghost voice. “I’m hanging up now and going to live my very normal, depressing life without my husband. Good-bye.”
“Harris has Bob.” The wind continued to blow. My hurt just blasted out of my chest and I started to sob.
“That’s not funny…please stop prank-calling me…please.” There were deep heaving sobs as I put the phone down on the hook. Tonight the exhaustion was just too much. My mom had arrived in the middle of the ambulance and police extravaganza, and it hit her worse than it did me about all the memories and losses she’d felt over the last few years. She avoided the entire thing by busting into my apartment, flipping on the lights and cleaning as if the devil had a gun to her head. I almost started to stop her, but knew that the last control-freak thing that hadn’t broken, was her cleaning phase. She always cleaned when she was stressed. She passed it down to Anna, whose apartment and later her room at Mom’s house, was clean enough you could do surgery on the kitchen table. With both of them. A doctor could have done surgery at four-thirty and they would have had it clean enough for Dad’s pot roast at six o’clock on the dot.
Dad loved his pot roast. Tried to get him to eat something else. He’d rotate to a good bass on the weekend, but past that he wanted pot roast and steaks. He and Mom would split a beef each year with her cousin, Alfred, who raised them for a pretty healthy living. He’d just charge Mom and Dad for the feed at wholesale, and they would all split the cost of the butchering. Dad was as happy as a pig in mud when he was eating his pot roast.
So Mom cleaned my entire apartment. Took me weeks to get it back to the sloppy mess it had become. She also heated up the Mexican Medley casserole with the special sausage, ground beef, and corn, in the oven. She started to chatter as I stood there watching her open and close the oven door and scrub the kitchen counter.
“I used the Lawry’s taco seasoning this time instead of the McCormick’s taco seasoning. Liz swears by the McCormick’s, but the IGA wanted a dollar twenty-nine for it today and I just couldn’t see spending the extra twenty cents on a packet of salt and paprika. I mean, if you didn’t like this so much I’d try to mix up the salt and pepper mixture I made special for your father. That was one part sea salt, one part normal iodized salt, and one part black pepper. You know, he never once asked me what made the pot roast taste so sweet. That’s because you have to use at least one can of Coke in the bottom to absorb all the juices for the gravy. I tried once to get by with using just one half can of Coke, but I could tell the difference. I knew I had to switch back when Anna was in the kitchen cleaning up with me after dinner, and mentioned that the pot roast was just a little dry. Well, she might as well have slapped your poor old mother in the face with that comment. She could be so catty when she wanted to be. Not like you. You just….well you were your father’s daughter. You two never even said boo about the pot roast. He smiled and you would smile. You would have done anything back then for that old galoot.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t you try and stop me. That’s what he was. Just a big old, dufus galoot.”
“Mom, he loved you more than the sky and…”
“Well he had a strange way of showing it.” Tears were forming in her eyes.
“And…I can’t lose you, Susan. I just can’t. Everyone else is gone. Anna, Bob, your father…The whole house up there is just full of creaking boards and clicking sounds. If I stay up there much more by myself, I’m going to start seeing ghosts or something. Susan, I don’t want to end up like Mrs. Hoover at the shelter.” Mom reached out and I hugged her.
“Mom, Mrs. Hoover had seventeen cats in a one bedroom apartment for way too many years. Like I said, Mom. This is temporary. I just need to sort out some things with the boat house and the life insurance and what not.”
“Well, honey, this place is so dangerous! You don’t know how many stories I’ve heard Lars tell about the guests that come in after hours. This is no place for a woman to be alone at night. No place. And especially tonight when that dear, dear man just lost his wife the same way you lost…”
“Mom, please stop.” I was reeling again.
“I mean it was all over the news how similar the car looked.”
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Mr. and Mrs. Lemon’s car.
“Mom…I love you. I really do. I love the casseroles. I love that you clean. I’ll be home just as soon as I can figure some things out. You want to have some Mexican Medley with me?”
“Oh, honey, you know how that gives me gas.”
“Gas is okay, Mom. Everyone has gas.”
“Susan, ladies do not have gas. They do everything in their power to uphold that tradition.”
“Sure, Mom. Well, why don’t we just hang out back here until the dust settles.”
“That would be lovely. Do you have any tea?”
I checked all the cupboards.
“Sorry, Mom. Fresh out.”
So we waited for them to all finish up. After I chewed out the deputy, Uncle Lars kind of fielded the rest of the questions and agreed that he would have me come down later if I knew anything. I ate w
hile Mom watched. She did pick off a corn chip or two, but said she was too upset to eat very much. I wrapped the rest in tin foil and tossed it in the refrigerator. Uncle Lars tried to get me to stay back in the apartment, but when he saw Mom and how certain I was I wanted to work the next day, he offered to give her a lift.
“You want to eat with Janine and I?”
“That would be lovely, Lars, but Janine doesn’t know I’m coming. That wouldn’t be polite.”
“Oh, bluster, little sister. You eat like a bird and Janine still cooks as if the boys were home. Our house it is for dinner, and then you can decide if you still want to bang around the big old mansion by yourself after that or spend the night with us.”
He didn’t mean anything by it, like as if I was supposed to feel guilty for not living with Mom. It was a huge house. It was one of the first houses in Alexandria and Dad was a bit of a big wig in his day in the city. He had the inside track on it, and even though there were only four of us, we were able to live in one of the largest old places they have. Had a huge tire swing in the back and all of the trees were at least one hundred years old. I kind of worried once and a while that the school kids were going to terrorize Mom during Halloween, but Uncle Lars bought lots of security lights and made it more difficult for kids to sneak around in the dark.