The Sun Down Motel(43)
“They sold the place, obviously,” Marnie said. “You’d think they’d have trouble selling it, but they didn’t. Maybe because Betty wasn’t killed in the house.”
“She wasn’t?”
Marnie shook her head. “There was a broken lamp in the living room. That was the only sign anything had happened there at all. No blood, no nothing. He got her out of there somehow.” She pointed to a house across the street. “That’s the neighbor who saw the salesman. She saw him go in the house. No one saw anyone leave.”
“How is that possible?”
Marnie shrugged, though the motion was tight, her shoulders tense. “You’d have to ask him that. All anyone knows is that Betty disappeared, and then her body showed up on the construction heap that was the Sun Down Motel.”
The woman in the flowered dress. She’d lived here, but she didn’t haunt this place. She haunted the motel instead.
“How do you know so much about all of this?” Viv asked her.
“The Fell PD hires me sometimes to take photos of crime scenes. Usually burglary scenes—smashed windows, broken locks, ransacked rooms, footprints in the garden. The PD is so small that they don’t have someone full time to do pictures, and they don’t have enough equipment for two scenes at a time. That’s where I come in. Freelance, of course.” She started the car again. “I’ve never shot a body, but I’ve worked with cops. I listen to what they talk about, the things they say among themselves. Cops gossip just like everyone else. And if they aren’t paying attention to you, you can listen.”
“They don’t think the same man did these,” Viv said. It wasn’t a question.
“Not even close. It’s a small police department. It isn’t like the movies, with a staff of detectives to look at this stuff. Betty and Cathy didn’t travel in the same circles or know any of the same men. And Victoria’s boyfriend was convicted of her murder, so they don’t include her at all.”
She pulled away from the curb and drove slowly forward, her wipers going in the rain. “What if they’re right?” Viv asked her. “What if these girls all got killed by different men for different reasons?”
“Then we don’t have a killer in Fell,” Marnie said. “We have more than one. Which one gives you the best odds, honey?”
* * *
? ? ?
The jogging path where Victoria Lee was murdered was nearly dark in the rain, the last dead leaves drooping wetly from the trees, the ground thick with soaked mulch. The entrance was off a side street, blocked by a small guardrail that everyone obviously stepped over. There was no sign.
“Victoria’s house is that way,” Marnie said, pointing to a row of the backs of houses visible on a rise behind a line of fence. “She would have come around the end of the road and up the street here toward the trail.”
“This is wide open,” Viv commented, looking around. “Anyone could have walked by.”
“Not that day,” Marnie said. “It was raining, just like it is today. A thunderstorm, actually. No one uses the path in the rain.”
Viv swung her leg over the guardrail and walked onto the jogging path, her hood up, the rain soaking the fabric. “She went running in the rain.”
“After an argument.” Marnie followed Viv over the guardrail. She didn’t bother with the fiction of a hood; she just got wet, let the water run down the jacket she wore. “She didn’t get far. Her body was found about thirty feet down the path.”
The sound of the rain was quieter under the trees, hushed in the thick carpet of brush along the path. Water dripped and trickled onto Viv’s forehead, and her shoes squelched in the mud. She pushed her hood back and looked around. It was like a cathedral in here, dark and silent and scary. You couldn’t see the place where the trees cleared and the yards and houses beyond, even though it wasn’t far away. Standing here felt like being in a forest that went for miles. “Where does the path lead?” she asked Marnie.
“It runs just over a mile. It’s old city land that was supposed to be used for a railroad that was never built. That was probably a century ago. The land sat for a long time while the city argued over it, and in the end they just left it, because it’s long and narrow and they can’t use it for much else. In the meantime the people who live around here made a path. It ends just behind the Bank and Trust building on Eastern Road.”
Viv walked farther down the path. “The newspapers didn’t say that Victoria was an athlete,” she said. They’d only said that Victoria got in a lot of trouble in school, as if that might be a reason her boyfriend had grabbed her and strangled her. As if somehow she deserved it. They didn’t say it outright, but Viv could read it between the lines—any girl could. If you’re bad, if you’re slutty, this could happen to you. Even the articles about saintly, married Cathy Caldwell speculated whether her killer could be a secret boyfriend. Sneak around behind your husband’s back, and this could happen to you. Viv wondered what the newspapers would say if Helen the cheating wife died.
“She wasn’t a runner,” Marnie said. “She was just trying to keep slim. You know, for all those guys she supposedly dated.”
So a girl no one had really liked had come down this path, running in the rain because she was angry and needed to move. Viv left the path and fought her way through the brush, which was wet and darkened the knees of her jeans. Her shoes were hopelessly wet now, her socks soaked through.