The Scapegoat

by Sara Davis

  From its center rose the modest steeple, and above it, the simple cross. I felt a throb in my wrists, and my pulse skipped forward. A strange new quality established itself in my mind. Two fingers, I thought, and I saw the image of the drawing on the notepaper superimposed on the steeple in front of me, as if that one, the drawing, was the one that counted.

  We pulled up to the front entrance. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a remarkably tall bellhop standing behind a podium, eyeing us with no visible reaction as we slowed to a stop.

  Here I was, I thought; now, how do I get inside?

  There was no reason I could not simply come back another day, I reasoned, it was not as though my father’s body were upstairs growing cold—no—whatever there was to be gleaned from this hotel, if there was anything, could be learned just as successfully tomorrow or the next day. Now that I knew where it was, I could—

  I was startled from my thoughts by a sudden soft pressure on my knee. Looking down, I saw that it was the hand of the guest lecturer.

  Through the windshield I could see the bellhop, who was coming slowly toward the guest lecturer’s door. Evidently, he had decided we were in need of assistance. He put his hand on the door handle and pulled it open, and I was surprised by the look he gave us through the glass—there was nothing friendly about it, and perhaps even something faintly menacing. Then he stepped back, holding the guest lecturer’s door open, and his face was plunged into shadow again.

  The guest lecturer, however, was oblivious to all this. She gave the bellhop a look of unmistakable displeasure and, without saying a word, reached out and shut her door again.

  “Now,” she said, replacing her palm on my knee. “Would you like to come up and have a drink?”

  She was breathing, as she said the words, rather heavily, and on each exhalation rode the sweet-sour smell of wine.

  I found I could not reply immediately. Instead, I looked down at her hand. I could feel the warm, sticky heat of her palm through the fabric of my pants, and I felt a nearly incapacitating desire to push it off. But, I thought, now is not the time to be so particular.

  The guest lecturer, I could feel, was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. Look, I asked myself sternly, is this an investigation of a death? Or not?

  I watched with a feeling of detachment as my own hand released itself from the steering wheel and came to rest on top of the guest lecturer’s, covering it like a shell on a snail. To have done so felt nothing short of heroic, as though with this one gesture I had swept all the stars and the moon from the sky. Then I brought my gaze to meet hers, and lifted the corners of my mouth in a smile.

  “I would like that very much,” I said.

  * * *

  “Isn’t this lobby bizarre?” whispered the guest lecturer, as we stepped across the threshold.

  It was, and in a way I had not expected. To begin with, its entire visible staff (besides the bellhop outside) seemed to consist of one dark-haired young man, a small and fastidious-looking person, who nodded politely to the guest lecturer as she tottered by, aiming a little wave of her fingertips in his direction.

  But stranger by far was the look of the lobby, which was incongruously ultra-modern, as if someone who had never seen the outside of the building had ordered up an interior design scheme from some other hotel, one located in some sleek metropolis. Everything was hushed and dimly lit. On our right, white leather donut-shaped couches curved around low black tables, and on our left was a long, narrow bar that had been lined with a row of tiny red votive candles.

  There were about half a dozen seats at the bar, all of them empty, nor was there any sign of a bartender, though liquor bottles were lined up against the mirrored wall, and clean glasses gleamed brightly from their shelves. Nothing about the place—I looked around me once more, noting the scentlessness of the air, the soft, piped-in music—had any specificity. The guest lecturer and I could have been making our way across a lobby in London or Dubai; there was no way of knowing in what larger geographical region we would find ourselves if we stepped outside.

  “A lot of controversy,” the guest lecturer was saying, “about it opening. Did you hear about that?”

  I shook my head. I had not heard about any controversy; I had not heard anything about this hotel at all. I was not even aware that it had opened, but that did not trouble me in the slightest. Even if I had been, I would not have been interested in discussing it with the guest lecturer. No! All I wanted, in that particular moment, was a little quiet in which a new thought could take form. My own father had walked here—exactly here, where I was walking!—from the front door of the Old Mission Hotel through the lobby to the elevator.

  How often could one say that one had walked—actually walked—in someone else’s footsteps? If this did not bring me closer to some understanding of my father’s death, what would?

  We had reached the elevator, the doors slid open, and we entered. I was surprised to see that the numbers on the buttons went all the way up to 5.

  “Five floors?” I said aloud. “It’s much taller than it looks from the outside.”

  Whether the guest lecturer heard me or not, I couldn’t have said—she was engaged in a careful inspection of her own face in the mirrored back wall of the elevator. At one point she pulled back her lips in what I at first thought was an especially menacing smile, until I realized that she was trying to see if there was anything stuck in her teeth. I cleared my throat loudly to remind her of my presence, but she paid me no attention whatsoever until we had entered her hotel room, Room 409, where, after rummaging in her handbag for the key, and then opening the door, she made a beeline for the bed, seated herself heavily on the edge, and kicked off her shoes with an air of satisfaction. Beneath her considerable bosom the lavender suit jacket strained at the buttons.

  The room, like the lobby, was utterly devoid of any distinguishing characteristics. Everything you’d expect in the way of hotel furnishing was there, and nothing more: a bed, a desk, a cabinet with a television, and a wall of windows obscured by a heavy ocher curtain.

  The guest lecturer cocked her head to one side and regarded me with feigned criticism. “What are you doing all the way over there?” she said. “You’re so far away.”

  I could, I wanted to say, hardly be described as far away. I was standing in front of the television and could have grazed her knee with one fingertip if I’d reached out, but instead I made an attempt at laughter and said that I had been promised a drink, and made a show of looking around me as if one might appear.

  The guest lecturer raised her hands up in a gesture of defeat, and then brought them down rapidly so that they slapped against her thighs. She liked this so much, apparently, that she did it again: flinging her arms up and then slapping them down again with gusto.

  “There’s gin in the cabinet,” she said thickly, gesturing toward the wall, a wall where, as far as I could see, there was nothing in the way of furniture.

  “I think you have a message,” I said, because I had come across the room to the desk, where a many-buttoned telephone sat, the red light blinking next to an image of an envelope.

  “Humph,” said the guest lecturer indistinctly. “Probably my kids.”

  She was beginning to lean backward, little by little, like an ocean liner sinking below the wave line, until she was lying prone on the bed.

  “Do you have kids?” she asked suddenly.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Ever been married?”

  “No.”

  The guest lecturer muttered something into the bedspread, something that sounded like, “Lucky.”

  “I have five,” she said, her voice suddenly distinct. “Kids.”

  She was lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling, her feet in their pantyhose splayed in front of her at the end of the bed.

  “My husband and I are both only children, and we thought growing up was a little lonely, you know? Let’s have a big family. Everyone will be friends.
”

  I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see me. The idea sounded reasonable enough.

  She laughed darkly. “They all hate each other.”

  I began to imagine the guest lecturer’s five children, sandy-haired like their mother, standing on the lawn outside their home in Colorado—and then I found I had no interest in imagining them at all.

  “How about you?” she said, turning on the bedspread to face me, a maneuver which caused one of her breasts to pour out over the other, as if suffocating it.

  “How about me what?”

  “Do you have siblings?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “So you had a lonely childhood, too.”

  I shrugged. I had never quite succumbed to the habit, so dear to the American heart, of casually trading confidences.

  “What are your parents like?” she said doggedly. The question put a stop, temporarily, to my whirring thoughts, and I was unhappily transported to the last visit I had paid my mother, her room suffocatingly hot, and the nurse, cool and efficient, bringing me a piece of gauze and a wet washcloth for my nosebleed. It’s the desert air, the nurse had said. Pinch it here at the bone.

  “That’s a funny question,” I said.

  The guest lecturer raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I think it’s pretty standard.”

  When I spoke again I felt my voice was coming through a little strangely, like a familiar song played just half an octave off.

  “They were never married,” I said. “I grew up with my mother.”

  “Oh,” said the guest lecturer. “In England?”

  “In England,” I repeated.

  This woman, I thought, feeling irritated, is nothing but a big distraction. I looked down at her supine form with distaste.

  “Any more questions?”

  I had spoken perhaps more harshly than I had intended. I came to the side of the bed and knelt down, so that she and I were at eye level. Her eyes widened and grew more alert.

  “You look tired,” I said. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”

  Her eyebrows raised questioningly. She was breathing audibly through her nose but did not speak.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  Her eyes closed. The furrows in her brow smoothed themselves over, and her features seemed to settle slightly and grow less tense. Several minutes later, I heard the beginnings of a gentle snore.

  Well, I thought, this is lucky, as I watched the lapels of the lavender suit jacket rise and fall. The whole evening had been unbelievably lucky, in fact. One thing had led so easily to the next, and now the most unpleasant part of it had just fallen asleep, fully clothed, on her bed. I could not have asked for a kinder set of circumstances. I was now free, I reflected, to move about the room, to examine it for clues.

  Clues! I smiled a small, private smile to myself. What a childish word to use. But all the same.

  On the other hand, I thought, as I rose to my feet and began to move slowly about the small, generic room, perhaps it’s unwise to overstate it; this was not a crime scene, I reminded myself. My father, that he had been to this hotel, that was likely to be true. And kept a souvenir, also true. And here was a good question: Why? There was something inherently suspicious about a man in need of a hotel room in the same city in which he lives. That was undeniable.

  But I had no way of knowing which room he had stayed in. If it had been this one, the coincidence would be remarkable—and even so, it would have since been cleaned and inhabited; a thousand different people could have stayed in it.

  I moved to the heavy ocher curtain and drew it back slightly, revealing only a view of the parking lot under the black night sky, flanked by the long oleander hedge. I began to feel somewhat discouraged, and my investigation of the room did not improve my mood. Peering into the darkness at the dim forms, I came to no judgment more noteworthy than my initial one: that it was a small and suitably furnished hotel room, outfitted in the same new and impersonal style as the lobby, though less aggressively modern.

  The desk! I thought. At least there is the desk! There could be something there. I walked over to it and, taking care to do so quietly, pulled open the drawer. Inside was a bundle of writing paper and envelopes. Each sheet was the twin of the one I had at home—a square of notepaper with the simply drawn cross and steeple. I traced one slowly with my finger.

  I imagined my father, standing where I stood, sliding open the drawer of the desk, taking out a sheet of writing paper, writing on it—here was a complimentary pen: Saturday, 10 am, MC. Perhaps he had been on the phone? With MC himself? Herself?—then folding it in half and putting it in the pocket of his coat.

  Is that what happened? I asked myself. And why? Why, I thought, was he wearing a coat in the first place?

  I slid the drawer shut, then opened it again, removed a sheet of notepaper from the bundle, folded it in half, and put it in the pocket of my pants. There, I thought. Now what has that achieved? I felt like a member of a cargo cult, who, after donning his wooden headset, gazes up from a straw control tower at an empty sky, without the faintest idea of what to expect.

  There must be something I was missing. It occurred to me then that the sound of snoring had stopped, and I looked over at the guest lecturer, half certain she’d be propped up on one elbow, watching me at my probably pointless ritual. But she was not; she was as laid out on her back as ever, only now the rise and fall of the lavender suit jacket was imperceptible. But she might wake at any point. Perhaps, I thought, it was time for me to go. And it was then, as I slid the desk drawer shut and turned toward the door, that I stubbed my toe, and noticed the dark, solid object I had stubbed it on, which on closer examination was revealed to be a slim briefcase made of smooth brown leather that had been concealed in the shadowy recess below the desk.

  Strange, I thought. Why would the guest lecturer feel the need to hide a briefcase beneath her desk?

  I knelt and ran my fingers along its top, feeling the metal buckles. I looked over at the guest lecturer lying on the bed, at her earrings, at her brassy hair and wide mouth. I thought, The woman before me would not carry such a briefcase. The two simply did not go together. I ran my fingertips along the buckles again. There was no lock. All I had to do was desire it and the briefcase would open. I lifted it, ever so slightly, off the floor, and gave it a gentle shake—something inside made a heavy clunk. Whatever it was, it was certainly not made of paper.

  But, I told myself, this was not, strictly speaking, a part of looking into my father’s death. No reasonable argument could be made about its relevance. So what if a woman from Colorado, an unassuming woman, a somewhat coarse and unappealing woman, had found herself in possession of a lovely and apparently expensive briefcase? What did that have to do with me?

  Nothing! I answered my own question sharply. The answer was nothing. And as I thought this, I saw that I had opened the briefcase.

  At first I could not make out what was inside. The light was too dim under the desk, and I made an inelegant scooting movement backward toward the center of the room, so that the thick stripe of moonlight made by the gap between the wall and the heavy curtain lay across my lap. Now I could see the rough outlines of the object that lay at the bottom of the briefcase, but it was still not quite bright enough to distinguish it by sight. Cautiously, I touched the lining of the briefcase; I brushed lightly against it with my fingertips. It was made of a soft and delicate material—suede, I thought—that had been marred in places by a sticky substance. Even in the half-light I could see that these wet patches were darker than the rest.

  I brushed lower down, and my fingers closed around a hard, curved object, extremely heavy for its size and a little longer than my hand, and held it up to the stripe of moonlight to see if I could get a better look. That was when the darkness in the room took on a new quality—it thickened, somehow, and grew more opaque; it pressed inward against me. I froze, the hard, sticky object illumined by the light.
I could not escape the feeling that it was the point upon which all the attention of the darkness was focused.

  You’re imagining things, I told myself. Darkness doesn’t have an attention. What is this you’re holding? I asked myself. Concentrate! The thing I was holding appeared to be made of stone, a stone carving of an animal. Here was a tail, some crudely carved teeth, here the suggestion of low-set eyes. But what kind of animal it was meant to be was impossible to tell, because it was covered in a dark and viscous sludge, the same substance that had stained the lining of the briefcase. Wrapped around the carving was a thin piece of matter. I ran my fingers along it several times. I could not even say how long I remained with that object in my hand, anxiously tracing and retracing that long and peculiar filament with my fingertips, until the conclusion I’d been resisting struggled free and laid itself unequivocally across my thoughts. It was true, I thought—it felt very much like a human hair.

  5

  Concentrate! I told myself again, as I rode the elevator down to the lobby. Act natural! I stared at the buttons on the elevator control panel, I seared into them with the power of my gaze, as first the 3, then the 2, and then the L were illuminated, each like the pale orange glow of a cigarette tip glimpsed through the night.

  That was no ordinary object! I thought. I put a hand out to the elevator wall, to steady myself.

  And no ordinary hotel room! Now the button marked L was glowing, now it winked out.

  My hands! I thought, for one panicked moment, before the doors opened, but when I brought them up to the light I was astonished to find that they were completely clean. There was nothing on them—not a spot. How could that be? But before I had a chance to take that thought any further, the elevator doors opened to reveal the lobby and a tired-looking young couple with a pair of wheeled suitcases. I stepped out to let them pass.

  I was surprised to find that the lobby was deserted—just as it had been before—except for the dark-haired young man at the reception desk by the front door.