The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4

by Robertson Jr, Michael

  Lance considered this for a moment, adding up the suspicious looks Meriam had given him when he’d arrived, as if she knew secrets about him, and now this question that seemed very unlikely for her to have guessed.

  Calm down, Lance. Slow it down and talk to her.

  But, instead of denying it, or dancing around the subject, he decided to be direct. Honest.

  “How did you know?” he asked, taking a casual sip of coffee.

  Meriam gave him a look that Lance felt carried silent meaning, as if she knew they were both playing the game, but then her face shifted and she smiled and waved a dismissive hand in the air. “You’re not the first who’s come through here because of the rumors. But I must say, it’s been a while. Several years, in fact. Longer, actually. It happened so long ago.”

  She eyed him again, another appraising up-and-down glance. “Before you were born, most likely.”

  “What happened?”

  Meriam shot him a sly look. “You don’t already know?”

  Lance said nothing.

  Meriam shrugged. “That poor woman ended her life.” She shook her head. “So sad. Very, very sad. My husband was the one who found her. When she didn’t check out that morning, he went to make sure everything was okay, and well … it wasn’t. It shook us both, badly.”

  “Did you know her?” Lance asked.

  Meriam took a very small sip of coffee. “No. She’d only checked in two days before. Said she was visiting relatives in town. Had come up for a long weekend. Which sounded plausible, of course.”

  “Plausible? You mean, that’s not why she was here?”

  Meriam shook her head. “We found out later she had no family in the entire state. She was a single mother from North Carolina, and that’s where all her relatives still were.”

  “So she drove several states away just to take her life? Why?”

  Meriam was quiet for maybe a full minute before she answered. “According to the police, her three-year-old son had been missing for nearly a month. The search hadn’t turned up anything—nothing she was satisfied with, anyway—and apparently she decided to take matters into her own hands.”

  “So she was looking for him here?”

  Meriam shook her head. Shrugged again. “We never had any idea why she ended up here. Or why she picked our motel to kill herself.”

  She’s lying, Lance thought. He didn’t know how he knew, but something tugged at the back of his mind.

  “Police never said anything else?”

  “Why would they tell us? We weren’t family. We were just a crime scene, essentially. We learned what everybody else learned, from the newspaper. We just wanted to move on. It killed business for nearly two months. Nobody would come near the place.”

  Lance processed this, then asked, “You mentioned rumors.”

  Meriam sat back in her chair, as if happy to move away from details of the suicide and discuss other things she felt more comfortable with. “Ah yes, the rumors. The very kind I’m sure that brought you here tonight. Because, let’s face it”—she held out her hands and motioned to the space around her—“we aren’t exactly the Hilton. What other reason would you have to be here?”

  That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

  “Humor me,” Lance said. “What are the rumors?”

  In a very robotic voice, like somebody repeating something they’ve memorized and are forced to recite on a regular basis, Meriam said, “That the spirit of the woman who killed herself never checked out. That she haunts room one and chooses very inappropriate times to frighten my guests and make for great stories for ghost hunters and boggers to write about and make videos.”

  “Boggers?”

  “Yes, those people who write articles on the Internet.”

  “I think it’s bloggers, but I’m not exactly technically advanced. I still have a flip phone.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  “Well,” Lance said with a smile, “wouldn’t being a niche tourist attraction actually help business?”

  Meriam spoke sternly. “We are not a tourist attraction, we’re a motel.”

  Lance said nothing.

  Meriam shifted in her seat again and continued. “Anyway, one middle-aged door-to-door salesman started the rumor about six months after the initial accident, so roughly four months after things had started going back to normal. He sold encyclopedias, you see. Do you know what those are?”

  Lance nodded.

  “Well, he had his current inventory in his room. Said he didn’t trust thieves not to break into his car to steal them.” Meriam chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Like he was peddling record players or marijuana. Alas, he said he woke up in the middle of the night and all his books were floating around the room, spinning and spiraling, and then they all flew directly at him, like an attack. Said they busted up his face pretty well and good. And yeah, he had a black eye and busted lip and a bit of blood dried on his nostrils, but you know what else he had? You know what my husband found when he went in the room? An empty bottle of whiskey and only one dirty glass.”

  Lance nodded. “He got drunk and somehow hurt himself.”

  “Clearly. But apparently he was ignorant or prideful enough to fail to admit this and ended up making up a ghost story instead. When a few local folks over at the diner showed a bit of interest in his story over breakfast, he took it and ran with it. News spread fast. Like wildfire, as the saying goes.” Meriam shrugged, as if Lance could work out the rest on his own. “And here we are.”

  Lance nodded again. “You and your husband have never seen anything to make you believe the room might actually be haunted?”

  She gave him a stern look. “Goodness, you really are one of them, aren’t you?”

  Lance said nothing. Shrugged.

  Meriam sighed. “No. We never did. My husband went to his grave still angry at that guy for starting such a bunch of baloney. After all we struggled with over the years, after all the… well, he never forgave the guy. This was all we had, you see? This motel, this was ours. It’s what we worked and lived for. It was everything to us. And one down-on-his-luck fool tried to destroy it because he was a drunk and enjoyed the attention.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lance said. “About your husband. And about all the rest.”

  Meriam was quiet for a bit and then nodded her thanks. She took a sip of coffee.

  Lance’s mind spun wildly, trying to figure out how to delicately shift the conversation, get more answers. Meriam liked to talk, despite her outward disposition.

  His thoughts kept returning to the copy-and-paste boy. The one he’d seen hugging the woman who would eventually hang herself.

  He asked, “Did she have any visitors?”

  Meriam’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “The lady who hanged herself in room one.”

  “I never told you how she ended her life.”

  Ah, so we are still playing the game. Good to know. Lance shrugged, “Rumors and boggers, remember?”

  “Did you have somebody in mind? Someone you think might have visited a complete stranger from four states away, with no family or known friends in the area, at a rural mom-and-pop motel?”

  Now Lance sat back in his chair, crossed his arms. He wasn’t sure if in Meriam’s curiosity about him, she was leaning toward him being friend or foe, but he guessed their conversation was reaching its end, and there was no sense in being indirect.

  “A man, perhaps? You and your husband never saw anyone stop by the room while she was here? Not even a pizza delivery guy?”

  The look Meriam gave Lance was so cold he had to pull down the sleeves of his hoodie.

  “No,” she said. “She was always alone. She died alone. God rest her soul.”

  “Did you figure out who it was you thought I looked like?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Lance’s last words came out with a bit more emphasis than he had intended, but he was becoming slowly frustrated with Meriam’s withholding of inform
ation. Which he could not exactly prove, of course, but Lance had grown to trust his gut feelings pretty well. And in his experience, people who withheld information—lied, to put a finer point on it—usually were guilty of something. Didn’t always mean it was something big, but something, all the same.

  “When I checked in,” Lance said. “You seemed like you confused me with somebody else, maybe? Did you ever figure out who it was?”

  This was a test in its own right, from Lance’s perspective. When he’d first entered the motel’s office, he’d heard Meriam ask, almost to herself, Is it really you? As if she thought Lance might be somebody she knew. She’d quickly denied it when he’d questioned her, but later, after Lance had asked for room six, she’d given him one of those appraising looks and asked, Who are you? A question that didn’t imply she recognized him but that she was suddenly very aware that there was a lot more to him than what was on the surface. His inquiry about room six had triggered it, but why?

  So, Lance wanted to see which one of those two questions she’d answer. Would she still deny the first completely, or would she slip up and give him something?

  But all she said was, “No.”

  And that was that.

  And then, “But I will ask again,” she started, “who are you?”

  Lance picked up his mug and drank the rest of his coffee and smiled. “I’m just a guy who needed a room to get out of the storm, and who very much appreciates your coffee and your hospitality.” He stood from the table. The conversation was essentially over. “You don’t have to worry about me,” he said, hoping that it was enough to set her mind at ease about whatever it was she suspected of him. Because unless Meriam had tied the bedsheet around the woman from room one’s neck and hung her from the latticework, Lance saw no threat in her. She was lying to him, that was for sure, but Lance got the sense that it wasn’t out of self-preservation.

  He felt like she was protecting somebody else.

  “I’ll be on my way in the morning,” Lance said, heading for the door. “Thanks again for the coffee.”

  He waved and left her sitting there, alone with her secrets.

  He went around the office’s counter and pulled up his hood and cinched the strings tight and braced himself for the cold, which was just as fierce as he’d feared, and by the time he pushed through the door to room one and slammed it shut behind him, he was freezing again.

  His room was dark, and as he was reaching along the wall for the light switch, he paused halfway. The lights were on when I left. I’m sure of it.

  He found the switch and flipped it on and his head did something funny, like a temporary dizziness that danced around his skull. There was ringing in his ears, brief and quickly fading. His heart did a few rapid beats and caused his breath to hitch in his chest.

  And then it all stopped and the lights came on and Lance was staring directly at the woman who’d killed herself.

  8

  Believe it or not, it was not the sight of the woman in front of him—the woman who Lance knew was very much dead—that Lance’s mind chose to focus on first. It was funny how the senses worked sometimes, the way the nose and ears and eyes could work together to unravel a mystery and discover oddities before a person even knew what was happening. But that was what was happening right now, because even though Lance was aware of the woman in his room with him, he was also much more aware that this wasn’t his room.

  Okay, that wasn’t quite right. It was his room, but … not exactly. He saw the same pictures hanging on the wall, but their frames were not milky with smudges and coated with dust. He saw the same two beds, but their wooden headboards shined and lacked the chips and pockmarks; the comforters were not forest green but a deep red that wasn’t faded at all and looked like they might have just come from the packaging. The carpet was the same but looked fluffier, softer. Not worn down to the last few fibers from hundreds of sets of feet traipsing back and forth. The television was there, off now, and the beige plastic phone, looking more white than before. Lance inhaled, and any hint of mildew or unpleasant scents was not to be found. The room smelled fresh, like pine needles and leaves on the forest floor. His ears picked up voices, faint and laughing, from next door. The next room over. Was it a television or actual people? Either way, there were other people here, other people staying at the motel for the night. When had they arrived? How had he missed seeing their car in the parking lot as he’d walked from the office?

  All these things collided in Lance’s head, like the ingredients of a cake being dumped into a mixing bowl. Lance finally allowed his eyes to settle on the woman in front of him, the final ingredient, and when everything stirred together, he understood.

  He was standing in his motel room, but he was not standing in the present. He was somehow seeing the past. And then a thought occurred to him and he reached out with one hand and pinched the skin on the back of his other hand, felt the sting and saw the crescent shapes left behind by his fingernails, and then he knew. It was impossible—there was that word again—but it was happening.

  Lance wasn’t just seeing the past. He was somehow a part of it.

  Well, this is certainly a first. Guess I can add time traveler to my resume now.

  He joked with himself, but at the same time there was a distinctive tremor of fear that passed through him. To stay focused, Lance chose to believe that whatever he was currently experiencing was just a more deeply manifested version of the dream he’d had earlier when he’d been standing in the road, staring at the copy-and-paste boy outside the motel. He didn’t believe this, not really, but the bigger truth was too complex and too terrifying to contemplate at the moment.

  The woman was sitting at the small table next to the bed, the one where Lance had sat and charged his cell phone earlier—or was it several years later? He had no idea how to think about such things. It was one thing not to know where you were, but something completely foreign not to know when you were—and she was wearing a heavy green sweater and blue jeans. She’d kicked off her boots, which lay on their sides at the foot of the bed, and her feet were crossed at the ankles as she sat hunched over something on the table in front of her.

  It was a sheet of paper, blank and waiting. The woman’s right hand tap-tap-tapped an ink pen against the tabletop, her eyes staring down, just as blank as the page before her, lost deep in thought.

  Lance took a small, tentative step forward. Wanted to see if his movement would cause any sort of reaction from the woman. It didn’t, her eyes never leaving the blank sheet of paper. Which seemed so strange. To Lance, everything in and around the room, including the woman, was completely alive and real. This was more vivid and detailed and … exposed than any dream or hallucination or vision could possibly be. This was literally reality, and it was as though Lance were the bit that wasn’t real.

  It’s like I’m the dream, he thought, then shook his head. No, it’s like I’m the one on the other side, for once.

  Another tremble of fear. He didn’t know what this thought might mean—but he briefly considered the idea that somehow he’d died, and even in death, the Universe refused to let him rest. Forced him to carry on as their soldier. And think about how much more productive he would be without all the distractions of being alive, like eating and sleeping and having to go to the bathroom.

  He pushed these thoughts away. Took a breath to calm himself. And the fact that he felt himself inhale and exhale, felt the oxygen in his lungs and the beat of his heart in his chest, told him he was wrong. He wasn’t dead. As usual, he chose to put his faith in the Universe and go along with things. Business as usual, Lance. Go do your thing.

  As if he ever had any real idea what his thing was.

  He took another step closer, a fuller stride this time, and then leaned down, slowly, peering at the sheet of paper, so close to the woman’s face he could see the pores on her nose and forehead, as well as the dark circles under her eyes she’d made a sloppy attempt to hide with concealer.

 
Lance remembered Meriam’s story, how this woman had been searching for her lost child. She probably only slept when her body absolutely forced her, and even then the sleep was likely broken and full of who knew what kind of nightmares.

  The sheet of paper was stationery from another hotel, a bigger chain, something the woman must have grabbed at a stop along her journey here. Same with the pen that had suddenly stopped tapping. The woman closed her eyes then, taking a deep breath, then another. When she reopened them, Lance saw they were wet with tears, a single drop beginning to fall down her right cheek. Then she put the pen to the paper and—

  And when she started to write, the entire room began to wobble and the woman’s actions sped up several times faster than her actual speed. Lance’s vision jittered along with the ramp of speed, but he himself felt completely normal. He raised his hands in front of his face and wiggled his fingers and found his own movements to be regular speed. It was as if he were standing in front of an old VHS movie and somebody had pressed the fast-forward button on the remote.

  He watched in high speed as the woman scribbled on the paper, stopping from time to time and sitting back in her chair and wiping her eyes or digging in her pocket to pull out a tissue to blow her nose. All this in the span of three or four seconds. A rapid succession of actions. Then the room came to a crashing halt, slamming back into regular life speed, and Lance watched as the woman folded the sheet of paper in half, then folded it again, a tight square. She wrote something on the outside of it, then set the pen down and sighed, using the backs of both her hands to wipe at her cheeks again. Lance leaned forward to read what she had written on the outside of the folded paper, but then the woman stood from the chair and somebody hit the fast-forward button again and the room whooshed back into overdrive and Lance took a staggering step back as everything around him began to jitter and jive again.

  The woman fast-forwarded across the room to the alcove with the double sinks and flipped open her small suitcase she had on the counter. Reached inside and grabbed a handful of fabric. Zapped across the floor into the bathroom. Popped out a split second later wearing different clothes.