The Sun Down Motel(56)

Alma gave me a look that was almost speculative, and for a second I wondered if she was going to bring up the topic of ghosts. “Janice was the same,” she said. “There was an accident at the motel soon after it opened.”

“The boy in the pool.”

“Right. The boy died in the pool, and Henry, the motel employee who called the accident in, died of a heart attack in the office six months later. Janice and Carl never really wanted to be in the motel business in the first place—they thought it would be easy money with the amusement park that was supposed to come here, and that the land would appreciate in value. When the park fell through and the deaths happened, they both lost their steam. Carl got sick and couldn’t work the place. Janice worked the front desk, but she didn’t care much. She sure as hell wasn’t there the night Viv disappeared. Chris took over after both of them died, but he doesn’t want it, either.” She shook her head. “It’s just a place that’s never been wanted from the first, you know? Right from the time Betty Graham’s body was found at the construction site. I don’t believe in curses, but the Sun Down is just one of those unloved places.”

My stomach had fallen and I felt light-headed. “Someone . . . someone died in the office?”

“Yes. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.” Alma shook her head. “I spent too many years as a cop, and we talk about this stuff. I forgot that you work in that office. Yes, Henry died of a heart attack. He was under stress after that boy died. I guess it caught up with him.”

Was he a smoker? I thought wildly. Because I think he still is.

“It wasn’t a big loss,” Alma said when I didn’t speak. “Henry, that is. He was a bit of an asshole, honestly. When I called his ex-wife after he died—she was still listed as next of kin—she said he could rot in hell and hung up on me. We’d had complaints from her over the years about him threatening her, but nothing ever came of it. She always dropped the charges. Henry wasn’t much of a charmer.” She picked up her cup and sipped her coffee. “I’m talking your ear off. You’re a good listener.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked down at the paper I was supposed to be taking notes on, which only had the name Jamie Blaknik on it. “Who else was staying at the Sun Down the night Viv disappeared?”

“Just Brenda Bailey,” Alma said. “She was an alcoholic. Her husband would go through a phase of trying to make her quit, so she’d check into the motel to do her secret drinking. She was in her room that night, passed out. The detectives questioned her, and then I questioned her myself off the record. She didn’t see or hear a thing.” She nodded toward my paper. “And Brenda’s dead, too. She passed in ’87. Jesus, it seems like I know a lot of dead people, doesn’t it? I promise there are still a few people alive in Fell.”

I wrote down Brenda Bailey, because it seemed like I should. “What about the man who worked the shift before Viv’s? He might be the last person to see her alive.”

“Johnny? Sure, you can talk to him if you want. He’s in his seventies now. Lives in an old folks’ home in New Jersey, where his niece put him so he can be close. He never had anything to say about that night except that Viv showed up and he went home. His mother confirmed he was home by eleven fifteen.”

This was hopeless. I was getting nowhere, so I changed the subject. “Did you work the Cathy Caldwell case?”

I looked up and saw that Alma’s face looked shocked, like someone had given her bad news. “There is no connection between Vivian’s disappearance and the Cathy Caldwell case.” The words came out of her automatically, like the Snickers bars in the Sun Down’s semifunctional candy machine.

“But we don’t know that,” I said. “They were around the same time. Cathy’s murder is unsolved. So was Betty Graham’s. And there was Victoria Lee, which everyone thought was solved, but it turns out it wasn’t. So all three are open cases.”

Alma’s voice was firm. “Like I say, there’s no connection.”

“Isn’t it too much for coincidence?” I insisted. “All these girls dead right before Viv? And then it stopped?”

Alma shook her head as I spoke. “Damn the Internet, honestly. Carly, honey. I know it’s tempting. But we had detectives working those cases—good ones. They wanted to solve those murders, and if there was any connection with Vivian’s disappearance, they would have jumped on it. But they couldn’t find that connection. Without a body, there’s nothing to go on.”

She sounded so firm, so confident. And she had that cop’s voice, the one that said I know what I’m doing, so just do as I say. But still. All of those women, murdered and unsolved around the same time. What were the odds that they were all different killers? And that Viv had crossed paths with yet another killer? This place would be worse than the town in Murder, She Wrote. Didn’t the cops see that? Shouldn’t they be the first ones to see it?

But from Alma’s expression I knew I was trying to dig on stony ground. “Okay,” I said. “It was just a thought.” I closed my notebook. “Thanks for your time.”

“I’m sorry,” Alma said. “It’s just that those cases are near to me. I’m not a detective, but we were all hands on deck after Betty and Cathy. People were scared. It was a difficult time.” She pressed her lips together. “We had a strange run of deaths in the late seventies, early eighties, I’ll give you that. But it stopped, and Fell was quiet for a long time. We didn’t have any more headline-grabbing cases until the Harkness murder.”