The Sun Down Motel(52)

I scrolled through the article and found a photo of Betty Graham. She had a conservative haircut and wore a high-necked blouse, but there was no hiding that she was a beautiful woman. She was sitting for a formal portrait photo, likely for the school where she worked, her head tilted at that specific angle they always used in old school photos, her hands folded demurely in front of her, a polite smile on her face. She was beautiful but she was closed off, her eyes and demeanor saying don’t approach. She looked like the kind of woman who could be polite and pleasant to you for years, and decades later you realize you don’t know a single personal thing about her because she’s never told you.

If you looked at her face, you wouldn’t see a woman who would fight and bleed to her dying breath. You saw a woman who would lead a boring spinster existence to the end of her days, not someone who scratched her nails off and crawled on her knees in an effort not to die. You wouldn’t see someone who wanted to live so badly, so desperately that she would do anything.

Then again, maybe you might.

Maybe you saw a woman who hated dying so much that she refused to do it all the way. Maybe you saw the woman in the flowered dress at the Sun Down Motel. Because I had. It was definitely her.

And if I had seen Betty, then it was possible Viv had seen her, too.

Five minutes later I was in the bathroom, sweating and gripping the counter with icy hands, hoping I wouldn’t faint.

We had a conversation about Cathy Caldwell a few weeks before Viv died.

The woman in the flowered dress, looking down at me from the upstairs level.

Betty Graham, fighting and dying and getting dumped in the place where I now worked. Where Viv had worked.

We were single girls who worked at night. Do you think we didn’t know the dangers, even back then?

Cathy fucking Caldwell. How could I be so stupid?

I bent over the sink and turned the cold water on. I put my hand under it, meaning to splash it on my face, but I couldn’t quite do it. I just stood there, staring down at the water going down the drain.

This was the connection. It had to be. Viv had known about Cathy Caldwell in 1982—she had had a conversation about her with her roommate. If Viv knew about Cathy, it was entirely possible she knew about Betty Graham. Especially since Betty’s body was dumped at the Sun Down construction site. It was one of those things you’d hear about when you’d worked in a place for a while.

If the woman in the flowered dress was Betty—and she was—then Viv had seen her. Known who she was. She could have figured it out, just like I did.

And it had something to do with her disappearance. It had to.

I spent too much time reading about dead girls a few years ago. It put me in a bad place.

Viv was sad. And she was also sort of angry, especially toward the end.

Viv had been out a lot at the end. Out pursuing something that wasn’t a man. Something that made her angry.

The water still running, I raised my gaze to the shelf next to the medicine cabinet. I took in Heather’s line of medications, arranged just so.

Betty, Cathy, Victoria. They were dark things, and following them led to a dark place. I could see it so easily, how you could walk through that door and never come out. How reading about the dead girls would lead to thinking about them all the time, to obsessing about them. Because after all this time, after decades and overturned convictions and reams of Internet speculation, no one knew who freaking killed them. No one at all.

If I was going to solve this, I was going to have to go through the door.

So I went.





Fell, New York

November 2017





CARLY


Two days later I was back in the archives room at the Fell library, going through old newspapers again. This time I bypassed the microfiche and went straight to the paper archives.

I read every article about Betty Graham’s body being found in 1978. The murder had been the top story in Fell that year, a terrifying mystery in a town that had thought itself innocent up to then. There were anxious updates about how the police had nothing new, and the Letters to the Editor columns were filled with letters like Should we lock our doors at night? and Are our streets safe anymore? “I don’t even want to let my daughter go to the roller rink,” one woman—I pictured her in a sharp pantsuit with feathered hair, carefully hanging her macramé plant holder—complained. A man wrote, “I will not let my wife stay home alone.” I pictured his wife popping Valium, thinking, Please leave me home alone. Just for ten minutes. Another man wrote, of course, that it must have something to do with black people, because who else could it be?

There was nothing anywhere about Betty’s injuries. The police hadn’t released that information. Was it too graphic for the public in 1978? Or did they withhold it because it was something only the killer would know about? Probably both.

I flipped forward to 1980. That was the year of Cathy Caldwell, and for the first time I wondered if the same killer could have done both. It didn’t look like it on the surface: Cathy and Betty had been taken differently, killed differently. Cathy didn’t have injuries like Betty did. But both were pretty; both had been raped, stabbed, and dumped; and it was too much of a coincidence that a place as small as Fell would have two vicious killers. I’d seen speculation about this from the armchair sleuths on Reddit, but the Fell police had nothing to say. Besides, if the same man had done both murders, he’d either stopped or moved away after Cathy. Or died.