The Sun Down Motel(101)

November 2017





CARLY


The night roads flew by out the window. My body throbbed with pain, and my phone was hot and silent in my hand. Vivian Delaney sat next to me, driving in silence.

She looked older, of course. Her cheekbones had thinned and her face was harder, tougher. Her hair was grown long, the 1980s perm long gone. She wore jeans, boots, and a practical zip-up jacket, a knit cap on her head. She wore barely any makeup. She smelled faintly fruity, like cherry body wash.

“I’m not taking you far,” she said at last. “But it’s best to get out of the Sun Down, at least for a little while.”

“The ambulance is coming,” I said, my voice raspy. “The cops. Nick . . .”

“What happened, exactly?”

I made myself look at her. Really look. “You’re alive,” I said.

Viv said nothing.

“You’ve been alive for thirty-five years.”

She pulled into a parking lot. I recognized the sign for Watson’s Diner. “I couldn’t go home,” she said. “I had to run.”

I watched as she parked the car, turned off the ignition. My emotions were like blinking lights behind my eyes. Shock. Fear for Nick. Excitement. And anger. So much anger, quick and hot. “My mother died grieving for you,” I said.

Viv froze, her jaw working, and I realized she hadn’t known her sister was dead.

That told me everything I needed to know. I opened the door and got out.



* * *



? ? ?

“Okay, listen,” she said, following me into the diner. “I deserved that. You can be mad at me. I had to move on and cut ties completely or I’d lose my nerve. But we have to talk about what happened tonight. What’s still happening.”

I kept my phone tight in my hand. When I walked into the diner I saw that I had bars of service, so I called Nick. It rang, but no one answered.

I hung up before the voicemail kicked in and sat in a booth, my legs and back groaning in complaint. Viv sat across from me as if she’d been invited, even though she hadn’t. Part of me wanted to kick her out. But another part knew she was right: We had a lot to discuss. I had been in Fell for weeks now, living her old life. The least I needed to do was get answers.

I set my phone down on the table in front of me, faceup, in easy reach. I heard Viv order two bowls of soup from the waitress, but I barely paid attention. Nick, where are you?

But Viv’s next words jolted me out of my stupor. “We’ll start with Betty. What set her off tonight?”

“You’ve seen Betty,” I said.

“I saw her in 1982, yes. Saw her, heard her.” She picked up the cup of coffee the waitress had put in front of her. “In those days, she went crazy every time Simon Hess checked into the motel. But I haven’t worked the night shift in a long time, so I don’t know what did it tonight.”

“He checked in,” I said. I was talking about this like it was real. Because it was real. “He came into the office and asked for a room. I saw him. His voice was in my head. I put a key on the desk and he thanked me and left again.”

Viv’s knuckles were white on her mug, and she downed half the coffee in one swig. “You checked him in?”

I shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“Well, Betty is going to be furious. Does the motel have any other guests?”

I shook my head, thinking back to the guest book when I was in the office. It was blank. “Unless they didn’t sign the book. I haven’t exactly been there very much tonight.”

“Then no one else will get hurt, maybe,” Viv said. “Whatever happens there, it’s going to be bad.”

“There will be cops and EMTs there, if there aren’t already,” I said. “And my friend is there somewhere.”

The waitress put our bowls of soup in front of us as I called Nick again. No answer. “Eat,” Viv said when I put the phone down again. “You need sustenance, trust me.”

I put my spoon in my soup—chicken noodle, I realized. “I just saw Simon Hess,” I said. “Except he’s dead.”

Viv took a swallow of her own soup. “Are you waiting for me to say it? Okay, I will. Simon Hess is very, very dead. I killed him in November 1982. I put a knife in his chest, and then I pulled it out and put it in his neck. Then I wrapped him in a rug, put him in the trunk of his own car, and left it in an abandoned barn.” She put her spoon in her soup again. “I did it because he was a serial killer who killed four women that I knew of. I did it because he admitted everything to me that night before I put the knife in the second time. I did it because if I hadn’t, he would have gone free and killed again. Most likely starting with me.”

I watched as she took another swallow of soup. “You’re so casual about it.”

“Because I’ve had thirty-five years to come to terms with it. You’re just figuring it out for the first time.” Viv pressed her napkin to her lips. “If you want to call the cops on me, I won’t stop you. I’ve had thirty-five years of freedom that I haven’t really enjoyed and that a lot of people will say I don’t deserve. I’m no danger to you, Carly.”

This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had. I didn’t know what to do, so I ate some soup. “You didn’t do it alone,” I said. “You had Marnie and Alma.”