Beyond that, all he’d noticed was Elizabeth. In his longtime-without-sex, soul-weary-and-lonely midnight fantasies, he couldn’t have conjured up a more perfect partner. She’d lost her shyness once he’d started kissing and touching her, and she had become as eager, as willing and as desperate as he’d been. If he had been her revenge against a straying husband, for him, at least, revenge had been sweet.
He let himself into his room, recently cleaned and smelling of disinfectant and lemon polish. He’d been living here for the better part of eighteen months, but he still hadn’t gotten used to the smells.
He could have rented a house for the duration of the project, as his partner had, but in the beginning he had foolishly believed there was something left of his marriage to save. He’d worked on-site five or six days a week and made the two-hour drive back to Oklahoma City about half those nights. He’d been perpetually exhausted, and Sandra had been utterly disinterested. She hadn’t let him touch her, hadn’t let him make love to her, hadn’t even managed to be home a good number of those nights to see him. Finally, as problems at the site grew, he’d given up and moved into the motel for the duration. He’d accepted that the marriage was over. He’d just been hoping to unload the resort before he had to deal with the divorce.
Naturally Sandra hadn’t let that happen.
Sitting at the desk, he opened the Tulsa phone book to the listings for attorneys. There were pages of unfamiliar names and firms. He had just as much chance of finding a good lawyer by closing his eyes and pointing blindly as he did by making a conscious selection. Maybe he should ask Brad for advice.
Brad Daniels was his partner in Blue Water Construction and Eagle’s Haven. They were a mismatched team—Brad, born with the proverbial silver spoon, his own stock portfolio and more money than a reasonable person could ever need, and Mick, son of a West Texas dirt farmer and a carpenter by trade. Mick had worked his way up through the construction business until he’d finally formed a small company of his own. In his lucky fifth year, he’d built a house for Brad, who had liked his work and proposed a partnership focusing on high-dollar homes. Mick would build them and Brad would sell them.
It had been a good partnership until Brad had come up with the idea of building a luxury resort on the shores of Lake Eufala. That was when the trouble had begun. But they were still partners, still friends. Brad would help him find the best criminal attorney money could buy.
He dialed Brad’s local number, then his cellular, then his home phone in Oklahoma City and finally his pager, then paced the floor for a half hour without a call back. Unable to bear the wait any longer, he grabbed his keys and left the room. Brad had his cellular number. He could reach Mick in the truck while he looked for Elizabeth’s shabby motel.
It was an easy search. Ten or fifteen miles straight out of town, as he’d told the sheriff—thirteen and a quarter, to be exact—in a little drib of a town called Sunshine, there it was: Last Resort Motel.
It lived up to its name. No one in his right mind would stay there unless it was a last resort. Its heyday, if it had ever had one, had ended at least twenty years ago. Now it was just waiting to fall in on itself, at which time the owners would probably give a great sigh of relief and walk away free.
Why had Elizabeth chosen such a place? Ignorance of the area? She hadn’t known there was a better motel thirteen miles down the road? He hoped that wasn’t the case, because that would surely indicate she wasn’t from around here, and then how the hell would he ever find her?
Maybe she’d chosen it precisely because it was so run-down. Because there would be few, if any, other guests. Because the chances that she would run into anyone she knew there—the chances that she would run into anyone at all there—were virtually nonexistent.
He waited for an eighteen-wheeler to pass, then turned into the lot. His truck bumped over ruts that more accurately could be called ditches as he pulled to a stop in front of the office. Through dirty plate-glass windows, he saw no sign of activity inside. He would scare up a clerk, a manager or an owner from somewhere, though.
The double doors led into a combination lobby-restaurant. The vinyl chairs and stools were patched with silver duct tape. More than a few of the tables were off-kilter. Half the fluorescent lights overhead were burned out, and half of those that did work flickered and buzzed annoyingly. But the floor was scrupulously clean, the counter above the stools gleamed, and appetizing aromas filtered from the kitchen out back.
Finding no bell at the registration desk, Mick took a few steps toward the kitchen door. “Hello?”
A moment later the swinging door opened, and a middle-aged woman with arms full of ketchup bottles came through. Talking softly to herself, she walked past him, circled the desk, looked around blankly, then deposited the bottles in a cabinet. Smiling happily, she closed the cabinet door, then disappeared through a nearby door.
“Merrilee?” The kitchen door opened again. This time an elderly woman came through—four foot nothing, maybe eighty pounds, with steel-gray hair curled atop her head and sharp blue eyes that swept over him, then dismissed him. “Where did she go?”
“Through that door.”
“Did she take the ketchup with her?”
“It’s in that cabinet.”
Shaking her head, the old woman retrieved the bottles and placed one on each table. When she was done, she faced him. “What can I do for you?”
“I need some information.”
“About what?”
“A guest at the motel Saturday.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Are you a reporter?”
“Do I look like a reporter?”
“Lord, these days a reporter can look like anything. Don’t you watch TV, boy?”
“Too much.” That was all he’d had to fill his nights for the past year—television Sunday through Friday, and a couple of hours of solitary drinking at the bar next door on Saturdays. Except for this most recent Saturday. “No, I’m not a reporter.”
She made her way around the tables to the registration desk. “I already told the sheriff yesterday that I didn’t rent a room to anyone fitting that girl’s description.”
So that was why the sheriff had been so skeptical about Elizabeth’s very existence. That was why he’d stressed that if Mick wanted to change his story, he’d better do it before he signed his statement. “So maybe someone rented the room for her,” he suggested stubbornly. “Room 17.”
The narrowed blue gaze settled on him again. “You’re not with the sheriffs department ’cause I know everybody over there. You say you’re not a reporter. Are you a lawyer?”
He shook his head.
For a time she studied him, then quietly said, “So you must be the man Sheriff Mills believes killed his wife and set that fire to destroy the evidence.”
His body would have given him away if he’d tried to deny it. Heat flushed his face, and his throat tightened, making his voice hoarse. “I didn’t kill my wife. I was here that night. In room 17. With a red-haired woman named Elizabeth.”
She shook her head slowly. “We didn’t rent any room to a redhead Saturday, and we didn’t rent number 17 to anyone. We only rent that room out when the rest of the place is full because there’s family living in 18 that doesn’t like to be disturbed. Number 17’s been empty longer than I can recall.”
A chill crept through Mick, cooling the heat that reddened his face. “That’s not possible. I was there. I spent the night there. We got here about ten o’clock and I didn’t leave until almost twelve hours later. I slept in that bed. I took a shower in that bathroom.”
The old woman shook her head again, then turned the register around for him to see. No computers here. Just a big green ledger with the date written at the top of the page and registration information on each guest written in a neat spidery hand underneath. There had been a man from Texas in room 1 and a man from Tulsa in room 3. That accounted for the two cars he’d seen.
His hand trembled when he push
ed the ledger back toward her. So did his voice. “I’m not crazy. I’m not lying. I was in room 17 Saturday night. The...the carpet is brown and... and there are water stains on the ceiling and the sink drips and the toilet runs and—”
She shook her head once again. “Son, anyone can look at this place from the outside and guess those things. I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll show you the room, just like I showed the sheriff.” She gestured, and he followed her out the door and down the cracked sidewalk to the third-from-the-last door. With a key from the ring fastened around her wrist, she unlocked the door, pushed it open, then stood back for him to enter.
The carpet was brown, and even from the doorway he could hear the sink dripping. The water stain was in the corner, just as he’d remembered.
Little else was. The bed was unmade, a bare mattress on top of a box spring. The chair where Elizabeth had laid her clothes was gone, as was the lamp she had insisted on turning off before they made love. Worse, there was no sign that a lamp had ever stood on the bedside table. The dust that spread across the top was thick and even; nothing had been brought to the table or taken away since it had settled. The other table, where the phone sat, was the same. The wastebasket under the sink where he’d disposed of condoms and wrappers was upside down and left an impression in the carpet when he moved it, as if it had stood there a long time.
Mick stood stiffly in the middle of the room. If he didn’t know better, he would believe the room hadn’t been occupied for at least six months. Hell, there was even a thin coat of dust across the carpet and cobwebs in every corner. But, damn it, he did know better. He had been here.
Hadn’t he? Was it possible that he’d made a mistake? That this wasn’t the motel Elizabeth had taken him to?
He stared at the bed and remembered white sheets, coarse against his skin, smelling of laundry soap and fabric softener, as if they’d been recently washed. He remembered flat pillows and a popped spring that had scraped his back when she’d rolled on top and he’d gripped her thighs, thrusting into her hard. Resting one knee on the bed, he felt around and found the spring and the small hole it’d torn in the ticking.
This was the room.
But someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it appear otherwise. The old woman? She stood in the doorway, gazing absently at the dirty carpet. If she’d given the room its long-unoccupied look, she was the best actress he’d ever seen, because she looked as guileless as a newborn babe.
The crazy woman who’d walked right past him without seeing him while on her way to store ten ketchup bottles in a cabinet full of office supplies?
Maybe Elizabeth herself?
“What about your housekeeping staff?”
The old woman laughed. “Son, what cleaning gets done around here, we do ourselves. We don’t have any housekeeping staff.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Myself, my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter.”
The daughter-in-law would be the crazy lady. And the granddaughter... “Does your—”
“No. My granddaughter isn’t a redhead. Her name’s not Elizabeth and she doesn’t pick up men in bars. Besides, you’re not exactly her type. You’re a fine-looking man and all, but Hannah likes men a little less rough around the edges and a whole lot more single.”
So Hannah had something in common with Sandra: he hadn’t been her type, either. But Sandra hadn’t cared about rough-around-the-edges or single. She had cared about pleasure, about self-satisfaction, about having everything she ever wanted while depriving him of anything he’d ever wanted.
“Maybe Hannah has a friend...”
The woman shook her head again. “Not a redhead. Not the sort of woman the sheriff described.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s out of town—has been since Saturday morning. You’re barking up the wrong tree, mister. You weren’t here Saturday.”
But he was. He knew it. Now if he could just prove it.
“I’d help you if I could, son, but I can’t. Now I’ve got to get back to the office before Merrilee does something foolish.”
Reluctantly he walked out the door and watched as she locked up again. This was definitely the right place, and Hannah, he suspected, was the key. Maybe Elizabeth was a friend of hers whom Granny knew nothing about. Maybe Hannah had slipped this friend a key to room 17 and kept quiet about it because Granny didn’t like giving out rooms for free. Or maybe Granny’s morals didn’t allow married women to use her motel for one-night stands with married men. Maybe there were any number of reasons for Hannah and Elizabeth to lead the old woman wrong.
“When will Hannah be back?”
The old woman fixed her sharp gaze on him. “I reckon that’s between Hannah and me. I’ll tell her about the room and Elizabeth, and if she has anything to say—which she won’t—she’ll say it to the sheriff.”
“The sheriff isn’t particularly interested in anything that might prove I’m telling the truth.”
She didn’t say anything to that, just shrugged and walked away.
As he returned to his truck, Mick sighed wearily. He’d like to crawl into bed, sleep twenty-four hours and wake up to find that it was all a bad dream. Instead, what he was going to do was find a place where he could watch the Last Resort Motel without the old lady watching him, and he was going to wait for Hannah to come home. Maybe her grandmother was right and she couldn’t add anything to what they already knew.
Or maybe she could.
Across the street there was an abandoned gas station, built probably fifty years ago. The windows were boarded up, the old rounded pumps rusted, and weaving lines of weeds grew two feet high through cracks in the pavement. Vines covered a pile of junk on one side and stretched halfway up the nearest telephone pole. It wouldn’t hide his truck completely, but it should give enough cover that no one would notice him.
Seeing the old woman’s gaze on him, he backed out and pulled onto the road as if heading back to Yates. Two blocks down, he turned left, came back and eased his truck over bumpy ground right up to the canopy of vines. He rolled down the windows, shut off the engine and settled in to wait.
As lunchtime rolled around, people came and went. Sunshine was a small town, and the Last Resort seemed to be the only restaurant. No one stayed long, though, and no one was young enough to be the old woman’s granddaughter.
There were better ways he could be spending his time than waiting for someone who most likely couldn’t help him to return home. He needed to track down Brad and to find a lawyer. And there were funeral arrangements to make. Sandra had family, but she’d worked hard at distancing herself from them. She’d been ashamed of her upbringing—not dirt-poor, but close—and ashamed of her parents. At eighteen she’d left their home out in the Oklahoma panhandle, and she’d never been back. She hadn’t invited her family to their wedding for fear they would embarrass her, had never spent a holiday with them or acknowledged them in any way. After eleven years of marriage, Mick’s introduction to his in-laws would come at their daughter’s funeral. How was that for bizarre?
The abrupt ring of his cell phone startled him. He snatched up the handset with a curt greeting.
It was Brad. “Hey, Mick, sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I’ve been in meetings all day with our lawyers and the insurance people. How are you?”
“My wife was murdered, our hotel was burned down, and I’m the sheriff’s prime suspect in both crimes—oh, and my alibi has disappeared off the face of the earth. How the hell do you think I am?”
A moment of silence was followed by Brad’s cautious voice. “I’m sorry about Sandra, man. Jeez, I’m so sorry. I just can’t believe—”
“Did you see her after she left the site Saturday? Did you talk to her? Do you have any idea why she went back out there that night?”
“No. The sheriff thinks...he thinks you lured her out there.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To take care of two problems at the same time. I
told him he’s way off base. I mean, yeah, you threatened to get rid of her, but we all knew you were talking about the divorce, not about getting rid of her. And, yeah, you did say we should burn the damn resort down, but you didn’t mean it. It was just talk. I mean, you’re not stupid. If you’d really planned to kill her and set fire to the hotel, you never would have said so, and I told the sheriff that.”
With his free hand, Mick rubbed his eyes. He had made both statements, but under the circumstances, their meanings changed drastically. When he’d said he would get rid of Sandra once and for all, he had intended to put a stop to all the haggling and foot-dragging, had intended to call his lawyer first thing Monday morning and order him to get the damn divorce settled immediately so she would be out of his life.
And, yes, he had suggested—sarcastically, ironically, never, ever seriously—burning down the resort. The place had been eating them alive. Construction had gone way over schedule. Cost overruns had been out of control. Labor had been a problem, and the buyers Brad had promised from the beginning hadn’t materialized. Instead, they’d been stuck with a big beautiful luxurious white elephant that was costing them tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments. When yet another prospective sale had fallen through and bankruptcy had begun to look more and more likely, Mick had suggested they burn the damn place down, collect the insurance money and get out from under the debt.
But he hadn’t been serious.
“Mick, are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Where are you? I tried the motel and the trailer out at the site, and there was no answer.”
“I’m just driving around.” He wasn’t sure why he lied. Brad was his best friend. He had a lot at stake here, too—not his freedom or his life, like Mick, but a lot. He would be reassured to know that Mick was trying to locate his alibi and clear his and the company’s names.
The Overnight Alibi Page 2