The Spite House(3)
Behind her counter, the clerk slouched in her chair and stared at her phone, the light of its screen reflected in her glasses. He could turn back around and talk to her now and she might greet him like it was her first time seeing him today.
He entered his motel room expecting to see his daughters but found it empty. There was a note on his pillow.
STACY WANTED PANCAKES. TOOK HER DOWN THE STREET. IF YOU DON’T SHOW, I’LL BRING BACK SOME CHICKEN STRIPS.—DESS.
He took out his phone to call her, to ask her how she had enough money to dine out, and it vibrated in his hand before he could dial. He knew the number on the screen; he had read it several times today and had just called it a few minutes ago.
“Hello,” he said, conscious of not wanting to sound surprised to have been called back so soon.
“May I speak to Eric Ross,” a woman said.
“Speaking.” He sat on the bed. He’d known many people who could stand or even pace a room and still sound composed when talking business, but he’d never even liked calling customer service to dispute a charge without sitting down first, much less discuss something this important.
“Mr. Ross, my name is Dana Cantu. I just listened to the message you left expressing interest in the house. I’d like to talk to you about scheduling a face-to-face and some other prescreening items if you have a moment.”
“I do,” he said, and pressed the speaker button on his phone. There was a pen on the nightstand, beside his bed. He flipped Dess’s note over to take notes of his own, starting with the name “Dana Cantu” written at the top of the page. Most of what he wrote during the call, however, did not pertain to what she told him, but to what he told her. He had a strong memory when it came to the things people said to him but struggled to keep up with his lies if he didn’t put them to paper.
CHAPTER 2
Dess
Two hundred miles to the west was the birthplace of her great-grandparents.
Her father held a fondness for Odessa, Texas, that she found strange. He’d been there fairly often as a boy, to visit his grandparents, but from what Dess knew of her father, she didn’t think the city as a whole appealed to him. It certainly wasn’t attractive to her, not the parts of it she remembered from the few trips she’d taken with him and Mom to see her great-grandparents. She was much happier when Pa-Pa Fred and Ma-Ma Nelle came up to see them in Maryland, and was sure that Dad felt the same. Nonetheless, since his grandparents had passed, Dad had often spoken of his dream to buy their former home in Odessa from the people his father sold it to.
“Your pa-pa Fred basically built that house,” he had told her. “It should have stayed with the family.”
Now they were closer to Odessa, Texas, than they’d ever been in her life, and her father’s dream had never been more futile. Dess thought she ought to feel something about that but couldn’t muster a meaningful emotion.
For the third time that day, she turned the television on and skipped through channels too quickly to see if anything might hold her attention. She didn’t dare hope to be entertained, merely occupied. She used to have a taste for television, but spending so much time staring at the same shows over and over for the past eight months had soured her on it. She had four paperbacks in her backpack, and had read through three of them more than once, but hadn’t been able to muscle past chapter three of the remaining novel. It was written well enough but opened with and lingered on the disappearance of a young girl, something the blurb on the back had not hinted at, and that Dess found too difficult to read about.
She glanced to her left, where Stacy sat at the motel room’s small desk, her legs swinging above the floor. Her doll, Miss Happy, a cotton-stuffed rag with no mouth, black ink dots for eyes, and glued-on straw for hair, sat on the table. Stacy had assisted her mother in making the doll a few years ago, and she took great care of it. Its fabric was marginally frayed, but none of the seams had come loose enough for it to be in danger of spilling its insides. Stacy’s box of colored pencils rested against Miss Happy, and once in a while she would thank her doll for helping her.
Having filled up the latest coloring books Dad bought for her at a dollar store, Stacy had decided to create her own coloring book using stapled sheets of printing paper donated by the motel’s clerk. She was on her third page of outlines, waiting to fill in her drawings later. Dess had looked over the first page of drawings when Stacy had finished them. It wasn’t the work of an artistic prodigy, but smiling bears looked like smiling cartoon bears, dogs like friendly dogs. Houses didn’t lean, and trees weren’t misshapen. For an untrained seven-year-old, it was solid work.
“How did you get so good at drawing?” Dess had asked her, more a statement of encouragement than a genuine question.
Stacy had shrugged. “Pa-Pa Fred always said we could do whatever we wanted, we just have to make it happen, remember? I just kept trying because I wanted to get better.”
As a big sister, Dess knew she’d had it easy when it came to helping Stacy learn her arts and crafts, the alphabet, her numbers, and anything else. She used to joke with her parents that her brilliant teaching was responsible for Stacy being ahead of most kids her age, but the truth was that Stacy was a fast and determined learner. Gifted, even. She had uncanny patience for someone her age and didn’t get discouraged by failure. Any mistake was just something to learn from, and she didn’t repeat most of them.