The Sun Down Motel(38)

“This is what you do all the time? Every day?” Viv asked. “It seems dangerous. I mean, for a woman. I thought you’d be a man.”

“You did? Well, we’re all disappointed sometimes. You thought I’d be white, too, right? You can say it.”

Viv shrugged. She had.

“I don’t do this all the time,” Marnie said, indicating the parking lot, the motel. “I do other work, too. I take glamour shots and sometimes I work school photo days. Real estate agents need pictures of the houses they’re advertising. On slow days I can pick up five or six houses at four bucks a shot. It isn’t creative, but it’s work.”

Viv had never heard of anyone doing any of that for a living. It seemed her time at the Sun Down Motel was one learning experience after another. “The pictures you take of the motel. Do you still have them?”

“Once I develop them, I keep a copy of every one. Even the ones I’m not supposed to. You never know what’s going to be useful. Why do you ask? Shit, here he comes. Get down. I don’t want him to see you.”

Viv looked out to see Mr. White leaving his room and locking the door behind him. He was slim, fit, and vigorous, and he plainly wore a wedding band on his left hand. He was dressed in a dark suit and light shirt, his tie knotted, salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his forehead. He opened an umbrella and in a flash of panic Viv realized he would have to check out. “There’s no one in the office,” she said. “I’m off shift and Janice hasn’t come in yet. It’s locked.”

Marnie was pulling her camera out of her bag again. “Did he pay up front?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t worry about it.” She aimed the camera, snapped a few shots of Mr. White walking to the office. He seemed like any average man going to work on an average day, except he was leaving a motel at seven o’clock in the morning after a night with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

“I don’t really need the pictures of him,” Marnie said as the camera clicked. “Just her. But here he is, so I may as well. To each her own, you know? White men aren’t my thing.”

She tossed the words off so easily, and Viv felt the pain of embarrassment in her chest. Even though her mother saw her as a delinquent, the fact was that she was twenty years old and a virgin. She had no idea what kind of man was “her thing.” You had to have tried a few men, at least, to know that. She wondered if she’d ever be as worldly as Marnie, or Helen, or even Alma Trent, who seemed to know everything. Still, she tried it on by saying, “He isn’t my type, either.”

Marnie clicked her camera as Mr. White tried the locked office door, then gave up. She laughed softly, not unkindly. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said as she followed the man through her lens. He walked back down the walkway, tossed the key back into the motel room, closed the door, and jogged to his car. “Tell me what you’re doing in my car in the rain,” Marnie said.

Still slid down in the back seat, her coat rucked up around her ears, Viv let the words This is stupid trickle through her mind.

But deep in her gut, she knew they were a lie. The burning inside her chest that had started when she first learned about Cathy’s and Victoria’s murders, of Betty Graham’s body being dumped at the future Sun Down, hadn’t subsided. In fact, it had gotten worse. She wasn’t sleeping during the day, and instead she spent her time at the Fell Central Library, going through more and more old papers, looking for something, anything at all. But she had hit a dead end. The appearance of Helen and Mr. White tonight, with the green sedan in faithful attendance, had been a godsend that sent her spirits up. It was the thing she’d been waiting for.

Next time this guy comes in, get me something.

This wasn’t stupid. Not at all.

“Have you heard of Betty Graham?” she asked Marnie.

The woman in the front seat went still for a second. “What do you know about Betty Graham?” she asked, and her voice had an edge of suspicion. “And why are you asking?”

“Her body was dumped here,” Viv said. “At the Sun Down, before it was built. Did you know that?”

“Yeah, I knew that.” Marnie lowered her camera as Mr. White drove away. “A lot of people know that. It was a big deal when it happened. My question is, why do you know that?”

Because I’ve seen her, Viv thought. She’d seen the woman in the flowered dress again three nights ago. She’d heard the soft click of heels outside the office door, and when she’d gone to the door and opened it, she’d smelled a faint scent of perfume. The woman in the flowered dress was standing twenty feet away, her back to Viv, the hem of her dress rippling in the wind, her pretty hair lifted from her neck. She hadn’t turned around.

Viv had gathered her courage and said, Betty?

The woman hadn’t answered. And then she was gone.

“I’m interested,” Viv said, to try to placate the suspicious tone in Marnie’s voice. “I work here, and I heard about this famous murder in Fell. With the body dumped where I work. So I’m interested.”

“Uh-huh.” Marnie’s tone said that cynicism was her usual default. “And what does this have to do with me?”

“The last person to see Betty Graham alive saw her with a traveling salesman,” Viv said. “He knocked on her door and she let him in. No one saw either of them leave. No one knows if he killed her or even who he was.”