While he began to pluck and chord the instrument in another slow, edgy blues song, Ed chose not to say goodbye, decided not to interrupt the baker-musician anymore. She stepped off the dock and onto the pebble path and followed it around through the suicide garden.
A few minutes later, she stepped out into stinging bright daylight. Looking along the wall of grasping vegetation, she made out the larger tunnel fifty yards away. Heading that way was seriously tempting.
“Got me one las’ chore before,” she said to the imposing stone walls of the Hotel Or across the way, surrounded by its sickly green-gray water. No longer needing the security of the Alabama twang, she dropped it to the lawn as she started back around to the gypsy bridge and basement entrance of the hotel. One of the surly bridge sentries unlocked the steel door for her. Stepping inside, the heavy lock set with a metal clack.
13
Entering the lobby at the poolside, Ed was greeted by the lovely sound of water from an eight-inch pipe filling the swimming pool. The tools and saw horses had been removed and a gypsy in pajama pants tucked into rubber boots was tossing inflated floating toys from an open locker into the still shallow water.
A tiki hut had been rolled into place at the pool edge. Gentle Hawaiian music played from a record player on a drinks and buffet table. Beach lounges and umbrella tables had been set up circling the pool.
“Having a pool party?” she asked the man whose face resembled a cricket.
He ignored her.
She saw an unfamiliar hotel resident rounding the Christmas tree in a gaudy swimsuit carrying a beach towel and full shoulder bag. Another rounded the tree from the other side.
“Hello,” Ed said to each as they passed by.
Neither one acknowledged her as though not registering her presence. She continued on.
Lendall was behind the reception counter standing at a tilted angle.
“Swim party?” she asked.
His eyes were clearly transfixed on the bark of the tree at her back.
“Can room service deliver a stolen car?”
She got her expected blank response.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, do you know who was flying those air things outside my balcony?”
Lendall blinked harshly and re-entered the lobby and saw Ed for the first time.
“My young boy. He’s constructing a new one.”
“Your son?”
“He’s a good boy. Troubled.”
“Is the boy your son?”
“Sometimes a handful. I think his heart is made of black glass and metal. Very creative, mechanically.”
“Yes. Building those what? Airplanes that can hover?”
“They’re not actually airplanes. More like hovering cameras. Want some?” He raised his brown paper bag from the desktop under the counter.
Before Ed could decline, he took a big pull on the bag and disappeared.
She climbed the stairs to her floor and was stepping from the alcove when she saw activity at the door of a suite to her far right. A cart of medical equipment was outside the door of a dreamy decorated suite. A gypsy maid came out holding a bucket that she retched into just outside the door, vomiting a yellow stream of goo.
Ed walked in that direction, her hand gracing the atrium rail. The suite’s back wall was painted a soft sky blue to the height of the top of the door when it melded into the nighttime dark with painted stars. Pillow-size clouds dangled from sky-colored chains across the suite’s façade.
An elderly man stepped through the door to the medical cart. He wore a black surgical gown and mask and shuffled on heavy feet.
Approaching the suite, Ed heard the man dismiss the maid, “I’ve got this. Go notify Marlaina.”
Ed noted his American accent. He had a square head, cowl-licked short, white hair, and a nearly flat face.
“One of those dogs with mashed faces,” she said to no one.
The maid looked relieved and quickly set her bucket on the lawn beside the cart. Brushing past Ed without a glance, she headed for the stairs.
The smell of death and rot stung Ed’s eyes and roiled her gut, but she stepped to the open door.
The dog-faced man noticed her and spoke through his black fabric mask, “Help me if you’re tough enough?”
He took another mask from a box on the top of the cart and handed it to her. She put it on and knotted the strings at the back of her wig while looking forward to see into the suite.
“I’m Doc Malcom. Your name?” he asked, handing her a pair of latex gloves.
Ed decided to go with ‘dingbat.’ “It’s Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie’ Rang.” She then asked the obvious, “Someone die?”
Doc Malcom arched a bushy white eyebrow and scowled.
“Ya think? You’re the new employee. Hostess, right? Enough of that. You’ll help me transfer George Bell from his recliner to the bag.”
The elderly doctor handed Ed a green jar of Vicks VapoRub. “Dab some under your nostrils.”
“This George Bell is dead?”
The redundancy pained him. Doc Malcolm shook his head at Ed’s second simpleton question.
“For about two weeks, I estimate. We’ll need to peel the fabric off of him.”
The front room was all light blue—the walls, furniture, and decorations—which were minimal. Seeing her looking at the repainted dreamy blue television, he said, “The bedroom is all nighttime and stars. Come.”
George Bell’s recliner rested where the bed would normally be in the second room. The doctor turned a second light on. The stomach-turning smell was at least twice as bad. A row of untouched room service trays lined the wall inside the door. Although the air was stingingly putrid, the midnight painted room had the feel of infant-pleasing calm.
Ed followed Doc Malcom to the front of the recliner where flies swirled in a buzzing cloud.
“He’s really dead,” Ed said.
“You got that all on your own?” The doctor shook his head.
George Bell appeared to have melted—body and face—deep into the angled back of the midnight black recliner. His mouth, nose, and sunken eyes were wild with maggots. The black and star-painted carpet around the recliner was stained with a mess of mustard and gray body fluids.
Medical kits and cleaning supplies circled the dead body. An unzipped black body bag was at George Bell’s elevated ugly and discolored bare feet. George Bell had died in his birthday suit, and two weeks of rotting and decay had added nothing favorable to his nude appearance.
Doc Malcom pointed to the spray bottles and a gallon jug of liquid.
“I’ve applied the solvents to his back and rear. I’ll do most of the lifting. You able to keep the bag unzipped and open?”
“This body bag?”
He ignored that. His right hand and arm slid under the dead man’s thighs and the other in behind his mid-back. Even with the solvents used, the corpse made sticky tearing sounds as it peeled from the chair fabric. Doc Malcom grunted and half carried, half dragged the remains of George Bell up and forward off the recliner. He struggled to turn the body before roughly dropping it into the bag that Ed was keeping open by raising the zippered sides.
Doc Malcom hacked up and spit on the carpet and told Ed, “Zip it up.”
She tugged the sides as close as possible and drew the heavy zippers up along the view and smells of the dead man, the last tug and pull sealing the heavy plastic over the feet.
“Thanks,” Doc Malcom breathed, panting from exertion.
“Was he your friend?” Ed was blinking her stinging eyes and using the back of a finger to massage the Vicks VapoRub up inside her nose.
“Nope. He was another recluse, like me, except when my medical duties call. Mr. Bell was a scientist of sorts. The few times we talked at those idiotic, mandatory midday meals, I listened to him go on and on about the details of his so-far-failed attempts to bridge his dreaming with what he called ‘our world.’ From what I gathered, he was convinced that both worlds, both lives, were e
qually real. Sounded like his experiments were aimed at finding a way to live on the bridge between.”
“Think he made it?”
“I think he died alone and insane and forgotten.”
“Is that sad?”
“Ms. Rang? Your momma have any children not stillborn? Now help me lift him onto the gurney. You’ll help me roll him to Thorngarten’s funeral home and we’ll be done with this.”
“Who’ll clean the room?”
“What?” Doc Malcom looked both perplexed and befuddled by the question. “Not you. Not me, for sure. Those criminal and worthless Croatians can do it. Or not. Don’t care.”
The doctor retrieved the gurney from the bathroom and rolled it to the side of the body bag.
“One, two, three…” The two of them grasped the plastic and raised the heavy, sagging body.
“Roll him, I’m tired,” the doctor instructed.
Ed unlocked the wheel brakes and pushed the gurney from the bedroom and through the cloudy blue living room and out onto the lawn. She and the doctor passed along the run of curious suite facades to the turn for the Thorngarten’s. She pulled the black, mint-licorice scented mask from her face.
“You said you’re a recluse. What’s that mean?” she asked, tilting her beautiful face for an added ditzy effect.
“Different to each. Some recluse because they have no use for others. Some like George do so because they’re lost in the clouds in their brains.”
“And you?”
“Contrition.”
“What’s that?”
“Shame and remorse. And hoping for forgiveness. Once amiable and professional Doc Malcom was changing the radio station when he should have been watching the road. T-boned a sputtering station wagon full of children in the intersection. The capable, ever-healing doctor killed three seven-year-old girls and a nine-year-old boy on their way to the mall. The woman driver survived, in her way.”
Ed stopped pushing. She dropped the dingbat pretext and said, “That is terrible. For you. For everyone. But it was an accident.”
“Wrong. It would be an accident if my car was on ice when it hit theirs. But I was
futzing with the radio.”
“Right. Not an accident, but also unintended. A mistake.”
“A deadly one. Four funerals I didn’t dare to attend. Sold what remained of my practice. Left my wife. Left the States. Wandered this country for a few years working my penance in any church I came across.”
“How did you end up here?”
“Constance Snapp and Marlaina tag-teamed me. I was working the infirmary at a hotel in Puerto Mita—the Riviera Nayarit. Those two were waiting for one of their new wealthy British recluses they had convinced to move to the Hotel Or. Permanently, I assume. Constance sent a fancy yellow card to my room asking to meet. Constance, with her lovely eyes and tempting, spilling breasts. The lowest cut blouse I’ve ever seen outside of porno-movie intros.
“She was very funny and witty and smart, even though she had a vodka Cosmo constantly in her hand. A Betty White-like dagger tongue. And Marlaina, pitching the solitude and a good-size apartment and light medical duties. Told me I could modify the inside and out of the suite anyway I liked. Offered to also manage my remaining savings.”
“And you bit.”
“It was good timing. I’d given up on contrition in the churches and was, and am, searching inside myself for it instead. We chatted and laughed at all of Constance’s jokes, and I fell in love with her chest and accepted.” George Bell’s ending smile had a touch of mystified wonder.
“Malcom?”
“Doc Malcom.”
“Doc Malcom, how can I get out of this hotel?”
“Let’s deliver Mr. Bell first.”
Ed continued pushing the gurney up the lawn.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said outside the entrance to the Thorngarten’s funeral home. Nudging Ed aside, he rolled the body up the slight ramp to the ornate door and entrance saying over his shoulder, “The hotel wants to place him in a second story room. His decay won’t allow that.”
Watching the back of the doctor’s square head and bristled-white hair, Ed called to him. “My question.”
“Yes, that. There are two ways out that I’m aware of. That chicken-shit suicide garden. Or old age, that’s my choice.”
“There must be another.”
If Doc Malcom had a thought on another route of escape from the hotel, he didn’t say.
The door closed.
Ed turned away and walked to the atrium railing and looked down.
Three residents were floating in the swimming pool which was about half full, the eight-inch spout still pouring water. The smell of the pool party barbeque carried to her. Three dripping wet residents were queuing in front of the grill. Tropical music played from the record player.
The Christmas tree blocked her view of the reception area which Ed decided was fine. The missing piece of her puzzle wasn’t going to be found by questioning employees or residents.
“I’m on my own for this one.” She walked up the lawn to the turn to her suite.
14
The first task Ed performed on entering her suite was to spy in on Puppy who still lay on the bed with his groggy head slumped to one side. She took the chair from the telephone desk and used it to bash open the balcony door.
Gathering up Puppy and placing him on a pillow, she carried him out into the fresh air and lay him down on the shady side of the balcony.
“Breath this, instead,” she suggested, looking out to the view of the tall, endless jungle.
Returning the chair, she glanced at the clock on the wall, seeing it was a half hour before the mandatory midday meal.
“Not today,” she decided and picked up the telephone receiver. She had a dial tone again. She was about to tap in the room service number, but stopped, looking at the blinking red message button. Her finger went to it instead.
The voice was British and that of a young woman.
“Hello there, my name is Rose Clair. Trust you’re enjoying my suite. They’ll be moving me downstairs this afternoon where there are no telephones. Be a love and bring me a dozen or more of my cozies. They are the ones on the bookshelf with the pastel colors. On the right-hand side, second and third shelves. They’re a good comfort and a heavenly distraction. I’m down in room two-eleven, second floor. Your willingness is appreciated in advance.”
Ed ended the message and dialed room service. She ordered fruit and vegetables and a half-dozen bottles of water, enough to last her and Puppy the rest of the day.
She showered and was pulling on fresh clothing when room service arrived, rolled in on a cart by a diminutive woman in a flowing red and navy blue dress. Ed recognized her from the gypsy camp.
Looking at Ed with distaste, the woman gave her a stern command, “You are required to be at the midday meal.”
“Yeah? Sod that, lovely,” Ed made her second attempt at a British accent. It sounded staged and needed practice. However, she was pleased by the scowl on the woman’s face as she left the suite.
She carried two plates with a variety of fruits and an empty bowl out to the balcony.
“I ordered your favorites, I think. Can we share?”
Puppy was looking revived and curious once again.
From her pocket, she poured water from a bottle into the bowl and set it out on the concrete for her new friend. She selected a cantaloupe slice for herself and sat beside him in the shade to watch him eagerly enjoy his meal.
After lunching with Puppy, Ed went inside. Setting her last cantaloupe slice on a bookshelf to the left, she found the two rows of the books with spring-colored bindings and randomly selected two dozen of the paperback novels.
Taking a pillowcase off the second pillow on Puppy’s bed, she carefully lowered the cozies inside it and went out on the balcony.
“Be a dearie and only poo on the newsprint,” she practiced her accent. “I’ll return in… a round of the
long clock arm. We’ll have us a balcony party. Tea, perhaps? Some crumpets, whatever those are.”
Puppy was staring at her, happily biting and chewing the red meat of a watermelon wedge. Ed knelt and pet his back and between his shoulders. He dropped the melon, and both his stump and good paw tenderly took hold of her forearm.
“Aww. My dear friend, I adore you, too.”
She spent five minutes watching and petting the monkey while he happily chittered and ate from the two plates.
“I must go, love. When I return, I’ll make us a bed with couch cushions out here. We’ll do ourselves some camping.”
In the living room, she took up the pillowcase of paperback mysteries and left the suite.
Standing on the landing of the second story, she hesitated. Beyond, the floor and walls were painted black, and the only light was from the lobby below and a faint spill from the glass atrium roof above. She walked out to the corridor seeing that all room windows were also blackened.
Choosing to go to her right, she counted down the room numbers to two-eleven by making two turns—the digits difficult to read in the weak light. From the spacing between the doors, it was clear that these weren’t suites but more the size of simple hotel rooms.
She knocked twice and waited a minute, listening for movement from inside. She tried the door handle. It clicked open and she stepped inside. A simple and dark room, desk to the left, the bed against the right wall, the bathroom just beyond. The only light was from the fluorescents that stretched above the headboard—a sickly bright white.
Rose Clair lay flat, her body trembling, attached to a maze of tubes and electrical wires patched to her head and chest. She was in her mid-twenties, and her appearance saddened Ed immediately.
Rose Clair spoke first while Ed studied her thin, wasted arms, neck, and face.
“You’ve come. I know it’s you. I recognize my clothing. Thank you so much. I’m Rose Clair. And your name?”
“Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie.’”
The Girl in the Hotel Page 8