The Sun Down Motel(59)

It was the woman from that first night, the one who’d stood in front of Viv’s car as she cowered inside. Run, she’d said then, and Viv had simply stared in terror, unable to process any other emotion. Now the woman stood with her back to her, wearing that same dress, and all Viv could feel was pain and a horrible, horrible kind of pity.

I couldn’t just leave her, she thought.

“Betty,” she said, the word coming out a rasp from her dry throat.

Slowly, the woman turned. Viv’s eyes had adjusted to the dark—or perhaps it wasn’t as dark as she’d thought—because she could see the woman so clearly, the line of her neck and the white of her skin. The hair that fell just past her shoulders, dark honey brown and carefully brushed, pinned back from her face. The way, Viv knew now, that Betty had pinned it back that final day before she opened the door to the wrong man.

Her stomach dropped because in the strange light she could also see Betty’s scratches. The bruises and scrapes on her cheekbones. The deep marks on her neck. The blood smeared over her hands, over her fingers and palms, the nails ruined. Betty’s lip was split and her left eye was swollen mostly closed. Below the hem of her dress, blood ran from her knees down her shins.

Horror came over Viv, so complete it was a wash of sensation crawling up her back and burrowing into her stomach, like cold hands on her neck and cotton in her throat. She stared with cold tears on her face as Betty spread her hands and looked down at them.

And then she spoke, like the man had spoken, like the boy. Her voice a far-off reedy sound in the wind. Coming from somewhere and nowhere at once.

“How did this happen?” she said.

Viv raised a hand to her cheek, smeared one of her tears with her icy fingers. “Betty,” she said in a whisper.

Betty lifted her face and looked at Viv, and her expression was confusion and burning rage. “How did this happen?” she said again.

“I don’t know,” Viv said, and she had no idea if Betty could hear her or not, because she simply stood unmoving, her bloody hands held out. “Who was he? Tell me.”

Betty stared with those blazing eyes, and through her terror Viv had the urge to step forward, get closer. Her feet wouldn’t move. A plume of white rose in the air, and Viv realized it was her breath in the suddenly freezing air.

Betty’s mouth moved. Her voice was fainter. “How did this happen?”

“Tell me!” Viv shouted. “I can fix it! Please!”

A horn honked from the parking lot and Viv jumped, a scream coming from her throat. Red and blue light briefly flashed through the window and the half-open door, and there was a blip of a siren.

Viv turned her head, distracted, and when she turned back Betty was gone.

On shaky legs, she walked to the door. In the parking lot below her was a police cruiser, parked diagonally in the middle of the empty space. Next to the driver’s door stood Alma Trent, flashlight in her hand.

She looked up and saw Viv. “Jesus, you gave me a heart attack!” she said, her voice ringing clear through the night air. “The office door is wide open and there’s no one inside. I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought some creep had stuffed you in his trunk and drove off.”

Viv stood, staring down. Cold sweat trickled down her back, beneath her shirt and her sweatshirt.

“Aren’t you cold?” Alma asked. “Why are the lights out? I didn’t hear anyone call in a power outage.” She flipped on the flashlight and raised it to Viv’s face. “Are you okay? Why are all the doors open?”

Viv opened her mouth to say something—she had no idea what—and with an angry buzz the neon sign suddenly flipped on, the yellow and blue glowing in the darkness. Then the lights turned on, starting at the end of the L and moving up. One by one the doors clicked closed.

It took a silent stretch of minutes. When it finished, Viv still stood staring down at Alma, who had lowered the flashlight. The two women locked gazes for a long minute.

“Vivian,” Alma said at last. “Come down here and we’ll talk.”





Fell, New York

November 2017





CARLY


I had been on shift at the Sun Down for an hour. It was midnight, and I was reading the old copy of Firestarter I’d found in the office. Drew Barrymore’s baby face was on the cover, her hair lifting in the draft from the wall of flames behind her. Andy and Charlie had just been captured by the CIA, and things were about to get really bad. Then the office door opened and Nick walked in.

He was wearing jeans and a black zip-up hoodie. His hair was a little mussed and his beard was thicker. He looked like he just woke up. He carried a six-pack of beer, which he put on the desk in front of me.

“Hey,” he said.

“What’s this?” I asked from over the top of my book.

“Beer.”

“I’m only twenty.”

His eyebrows went up. “Are you for real?”

I put my book down, finding a Post-it note to use as a bookmark, because folding the corner of a page—even in a thirty-year-old book—is sacrilege. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not a big drinker, though. What is this for, anyway?”

Nick walked to the corner of the room, pushed some old tourist brochures off a wooden chair, and pulled it up to the desk. “Because I didn’t answer your texts earlier.” He sat down and pulled a can from the pack.