CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At the entrance to the Mid-Night’s parking lot, I braked and let my car shudder and buck under me as I gazed over the dark, empty expanse. Billy’s rusted beater took up a space as always—except it wasn’t as always. This time of night, the bar should have been lit up and hopping. Either the police had come to put Yvonne’s side business on ice, or everyone who’d wanted a good look had already been to visit.
I took the spot next to Billy’s but couldn’t go around the alcove end of the building. I went around to the breezeway instead, past the vending machines. The courtyard was blacker than I’d ever seen it, all the rooms and overhead lights dark. I felt my way around the walk to his door and knocked hard. I rubbed at my cold arms, then pounded at the door again. Nothing.
The night was quiet except for the whir of cars racing past on the interstate. I stepped back and peered up at the door of Maddy’s room. It was still barricaded by crime-scene tape.
I folded my arms around myself and walked toward the office. I’d had to arrive at the Mid-Night early, in the dark of winter many times, and I’d had to leave late, but this was different. The empty lot and the shadowy courtyard gave me a sour-stomach feeling.
My foot hit a patch of something and slid. I fell on my butt, scraping my palms against the pavement. I held my hands aloft. In the dim light, they were slick and wet.
Not blood. Please. Anything but blood.
I smelled my hands, then wiped them gently on my pants, looking around until I traced the puddle under me to the underside of the ice machine.
Back around the corner, the office was dark except for the “No Vacancy” neon. No Billy, no sign of anyone.
I went back to my car, then instead of getting inside, kept going. I didn’t want to be there or to go where I was going, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I passed under the stairs and edged up to the corner of the building and the alcove. Here, the interstate roared with cars racing by. People had places to be, futures full of promise to get started. I braced myself and turned the corner to face the garbage bin and the railing above.
Some punishing part of my brain expected Maddy to be hanging there still. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
And then something whistled near my ear, flicking my ponytail. I swatted at it—June bugs were a terrible Indiana affliction—just as one arm then the other were nipped by mosquitos. But then the mosquitos weren’t mosquitos, but something rough against my skin and tightening across my chest.
I couldn’t think what was happening but then grabbed enough air to make some noise. I fell, tangled, my arms tight to my sides and only stopped screaming to gather more air. I couldn’t breathe. A rope. A pair of boots appeared next to my head. I clawed at the ground, my scream now hoarse. “Sure, sure, you scream your head off,” said a man’s voice.
A figure stood over me, backlit by the bare bulb over the garbage bin. I located a shadow on the ground, in time to catch the shadow raise his arm and run his fingers through his hair.
One, two, three times.
“Billy?” My voice was strange. I coughed. The rope. A thousand thoughts came at once. The rope. Maddy. Billy. “Jesus, Billy, please—”
“Jules? Is that you? What the hell are you doing tiptoeing around here?” In a split second, he wasn’t the murderer stringing up another victim, but just Billy, gazing stupidly at me. Even in the dark, I knew one of his eyes would be wink-wink-winking at me.
“Billy, untie me this second—” I coughed and hacked, struggling at the rope.
Billy loosened it and untangled me. I sat on my knees, choking until I caught my breath, then punched at Billy’s nearby knee. “What the hell, Billy? Who’s tiptoeing? I knocked on your door about fifty times.” My voice still wasn’t right. “What are you doing with that rope?”
“I’m on guard, like,” he said. “They’ve been after the railings, like I told you they would be.”
“Who? Who’s been after the—you mean suicides? Really? Did you catch anyone trying to do it?” My heart was still thudding. I pawed at a spot on my arm that the rope had burned. It had broken the skin. The blood was staining the sleeve of my shirt. After a minute, I stood up and dusted myself off, feeling like a fool, even if I was a slightly smaller fool than the one in front me. In the bare light, I could see a furtive look on his face.
“Well, no,” he said. “Not suicides, anyways. Some kids, probably, poking around. Some asshole came out and was taking flash pictures, if you can believe that.” He gestured at the highway. The cars zipping by serving as the insulted audience. “That’s not the kind of thing we need happening here.”
“A couple of photos surely won’t ruin this murder we have going on,” I said. “Look, Billy, I need to ask—what did you hear that night?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He turned his face into the shadows, where I couldn’t see his eye going crazy. Or any expression at all. “I don’t know if that’s something to talk about in polite company.”
What was with everyone being polite all of a sudden? It wasn’t polite to hang people from banisters, but here we were. “Go ahead and be rude, Billy. I want to hear the awful, messy, impolite truth.”
“They were giving each other what-for up there.” He looked embarrassed. “Real loud.”
“Like … passionate sounds?” I tried not to imagine any passionate sounds that Billy might know of—or make. I felt my neck and cheeks going hot and was glad of the dark. We worked side by side in a cheap motel, but we’d never talked this directly about what must go on in the occupied rooms. “Like, moaning and, um, stuff?”
“Well, no, not exactly. More like … rough stuff.” He turned away from me again. “I thought we had some more of them dominatrix types.”
A group of them had passed through on their way to a convention once, and Billy hadn’t been the same since. They’d actually been very neat, cleaning up after themselves, but apparently they’d made a great deal of noise.
“It sounded like rough stuff,” I repeated. “It sounded like someone was getting hurt?”
“I think that’s what they’re into—”
“Not the dominatrix night. The night Maddy was killed. It sounded like someone was slapping someone else around? Like someone was getting hurt?”
“That’s not what I thought—”
“Because you would have called for help, right?” I said. “You would have stopped him?”
“I’ve been running this place for a long time, Jules,” Billy said. “You hear a lot of things. You don’t know where the line is, sometimes.”
“Like, screaming?” Billy made sure his face was turned into the shadows again. I swallowed hard. “We didn’t check in any black leather that night. All you had to do was check the cards. One minivan of Bargains, the dead—the guy who stayed in all night, and Maddy. Nice car, single occupant. You could have checked. You could have knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right.”
“Hell, Juliet, I don’t know,” Billy said, pleading. “Who knows what they’ll do when the time comes? None of us knows how much of a chickenshit we are until we have the chance to show it.”
He could have said hero. He could have said that none of us knew to what heights we might rise if we were given the opportunity.
“Billy, I think we know how much of a coward you could be,” I said. “It’s your greatest natural talent.”
“No reason to get nasty with me, little lady. I didn’t have anything to do with your friend getting herself—”
“No,” I snapped. He stepped back from me. “She didn’t get herself anything. Someone did this to her, and if you had the chance to help her and you didn’t, well, I hope you don’t believe in heaven and hell, because you’ve made your choice.”
“Well, I made that choice a long time ago, didn’t I, when I moved into this place.” His fingers raced through his hair, three, four times until I thought he would pull out a handful. He’d never said a bad word about the Mid-N
ight. I didn’t know how to ask why he thought worse of his low-rent palace tonight. “You’re making the mistake of thinking you know everything about me, Juliet, but you don’t. You see my eye twitching and m-m-my—my—” The stutter only came out in dire situations. “P-problems, and you think you know all about it. I guess you go around thinking you know it all. You’re smarter than the rest of us, aren’t you? I got news for you—”
Billy stopped and turned his head. I’d heard it, too. In a moment in between cars on the highway, somewhere along the back of the motel’s south wing and its empty rooms, a branch had snapped.
He held a finger up to his mouth, as though I needed a reminder, and crept away, his rope over his arm like a lasso. A Bugs Bunny cartoon. I was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Or a horror movie.
I clung to the corner of the building and braced myself for a chance to run. Like Billy so gallantly had put it: We didn’t know how chickenshit we could be until we got the chance. I’d had too many chances already for one week.
Billy’s dark figure melted into the shadows. I waited, all senses tuned to hear anything I could under the highway noise and my own blood pounding in my ears. Waiting in the dark reminded me of lying in bed at night as a kid, knowing something was under the bed or in the closet.
As a child I had a reoccurring dream of getting separated from my parents in a busy crowd. A mall, an amusement park. Even places I knew in real life stretched into vast seas of strangers and confusion in my sleep. My school, the IGA, the park. In my nightmares, any place I went with my family was a place I could lose them. Come daylight, I didn’t worry about such things—but of course daylight is when it happened. The dark didn’t seem as frightening, once you grew up, once you realized how many ways there were to lose someone.
Billy had been gone a long time when I started to wonder if he’d left me to fend for myself. I slid around the corner into the courtyard and looked around, trying to see anything or anyone, then worked myself around to the breezeway. I could one-up Billy in cowardice. I could slip through to the parking lot here and drive away. Never come back. I had never had more reason to walk away from the Mid-Night Inn.
But I couldn’t.
Maddy’s death should have made me want to run, but this was where she was. Here and the high school, but the best I could hope for there was a dumpy blue uniform and late nights with the industrial laundry machines.
I could work here for the rest of my life. What choice did I have? Maddy would be here, reminding me, making me wonder what kind of coward I was. I would have to see this to the end. And there might not be an end.
I kept going, following the perimeter of the motel until I was around the end of the south wing and could see the far end of the empty parking lot.
But then a strange sound came from behind me. A yelp. A wounded-bird cry, half swallowed.
I turned and was flooded by a bright light. Through my fingers, I could see the dark outline of someone on the other side of a flashlight and the glint of a gun. A gun, pointed in my direction.
“Let me see your hands,” a woman’s voice said.
“Courtney? Oh, God, OK, oh, good. I didn’t know—”
“Put your hands up, I said.”
I did as I was told. She approached, the light filling my vision until I couldn’t see anything but shine. She nudged my arms higher, and then patted at my hips. “You’re still wearing those ridiculous jogging pants?”
“Busy day,” I said.
“Making the rounds, I heard. Except I don’t know if you’re doing Nancy Drew or worse.”
“Where’s Billy?”
The light dropped away from my eyes at last, showing me Billy’s prone body at our feet. He waved. “Thanks for your concern, Jules,” he said. “You know, ten minutes later.”
“Shut it, Twitches,” Courtney barked. “From what I heard a few minutes ago, you’re probably a few wait-and-hope-for-the-bests shy of karma helping you out of a bind. Your story sounded a little different back when I was the one asking you questions. Why are you here?” Courtney said.
Billy heaved himself to his feet and dusted off his jeans. His rope had been transferred to Courtney’s arm.
“Keep telling you people, I live here.”
“Not you,” Courtney said. “You. What are you doing here, Juliet? And don’t say you work here. We shut down the bar after last night’s shenanigans.”
It was a decent question, considering she didn’t know that I had to be here, that I couldn’t not be here until this thing was finished. Like the dark things under the bed and in the closet behind a door not pulled tight, Maddy—not a ghost, but my memories of her—peered at me from every place I looked. But I couldn’t tell Courtney Howard that. She’d only write it down. Write it down and make me feel bad for it later.
“I don’t know,” I said, finally.
The flashlight lit up my shoes. Courtney gave me a chance to think of something else to say, but I didn’t. I didn’t try. Every time I said something, I could only feel myself slipping deeper into the story she wanted to tell. Maybe the best approach was to say nothing at all.
“Trespassing at a known crime scene,” she said, her voice telling me I only had myself to blame.
“I work—” I started, and then let my mouth snap shut.
“It’s late,” she said, lowering the gun at last. “Maybe you two had a date? I did hear some talk of moaning. Rough stuff. That what you’re into?” The flashlight flicked over my face, and I flinched away.
I waited for Billy to say something he’d regret, but he was keeping a low profile. Smarter than he seemed. He knew this was about me more than it was about him, the motel, the murder, or Maddy. Where was Courtney’s police partner? I wasn’t the only one here for suspicious reasons. But I said nothing. Two roads appeared, and neither of them seemed to go anywhere I wanted to visit.
“Let me give you a ride home, Juliet,” Courtney said.
“My car is—”
“You can get it later. Right now I want to see that you get home and tucked in for the night. You must be tired of those stripes on your pants. Let’s get you home to your bunny slippers and maybe some cocoa before your head’s in bed.”
Billy and I exchanged a quick, silent glance. Heads in beds was the motto of hotel management everywhere, code for filling rooms, filling beds, making quotas, making money. And a head in a bed meant a guest asleep—a satisfied customer who wouldn’t be at the front desk at 1:30 a.m., asking when the music in the bar went off, a rested guest who got back on the road bright and early without complaints or special requests. Heads in beds was everything. And now I was the overtired traveler who needed to be put away before I became trouble.
Courtney had hit one thing square. I was exhausted. I did need to go home. I remembered the silver running man hiding out in my car and skipped the argument over who would get me home. I let Courtney lead me around the corner into the courtyard. She shined her flashlight up over the closed-off rooms.
“Wait, what about Billy?” I said.
He was still lying low, waiting for Courtney to leave before he moved a muscle. Courtney said, “You want to take him home with you?”
“No, I want him to open the office so I can clean up my arm.”
She pointed the flashlight at my arm. A dribble of blood ran down my forearm and across my elbow. There were bits of dried leaves stuck to the trail. The flashlight hit my face again. “You didn’t come here to do anything untoward to yourself, did you?”
“It’s a cut from the rope, Courtney,” I said. “Just get the keys.”
Billy came jingling. He got the lights while I borrowed the keys and opened up the supply closet. A wave of familiar scents washed over me. In a pocket in the cart, we kept a first-aid kit, almost empty. I found a bandage and retreated to the front counter to perform surgery. My skin felt hot. I could have used some ice. Billy shuffled his feet under Courtney’s watch. I had the bandage in place and was throwing out my handful o
f trash when I saw another shadow flit past the window.
Courtney turned to see what I was looking at. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Must have been—”
I stopped. I’d seen what I’d seen, but it made no sense.
“Probably one of them cats you feed,” Billy huffed. He’d forbidden us from feeding animals that showed up. But not all the strays were cats.
I hurried to the door and pushed it wide. “Jessica?” I called into the parking lot. “Billy, turn on the lights.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said, but finally reached for the panel under the desk. The Mid-Night’s front walk and parking lot flooded with light. The girl had been slinking away under the cover of blackness, but now she blinked away from the glare.
“Who is it?” Courtney said at my shoulder. “Miss? Can you come back here, please?”
“What’s a young girl like that doing out here this t-time of night?” Billy said from behind the counter, his fingers going to his hair, once, twice, three times. He cycled through a few more tics before sliding his hands into his pockets to still them. “This used to be a nice place.”
In measured steps and her head down, the girl made her way back. “What?” she said. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” The lights on the side of the motel created deep sinkholes where her eyes should have been.
“This particular patch of country is private property, shut down by the police,” Courtney said. “Can you tell me why you’re here?”
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