The Sun Down Motel(70)

The frustrations of tracking people who didn’t live their lives online. “Okay. It was a long shot anyway that either of them would have met Viv. What about the man Mrs. Bannister was cheating with?”

“Aha,” Heather said. “Now you’ll see how clever I am. Because I truly am fiendishly clever.”

“Fiendishly?” My glasses cleared, and I glanced over to see Nick sitting in one of the office chairs, leaning it back with his feet pressed against the desk. He was wearing jeans and his black zip-up hoodie, his hair pushed back from his forehead as if he’d pushed it with his fingers. He had Marnie Clark’s photo negatives in his hand and was looking at a strip in the overhead light, squinting a little, his body balanced easily. Even in that pose he looked awesome, scruff on his jaw and all.

“Yes, fiendishly,” Heather said as I watched Nick put down one strip and pick up another. “I talked to a guy online who can do DMV lookups. Those photos of Marnie’s have license plates in them. It cost me seventy bucks, but now I know who owned the cars in those pictures.”

“You’re right—that is fiendish.”

“I know. So here goes: The Thunderbird in the photos belonged to none other than Steven Bannister, high school high jump star. He moved to Florida in 1984 and dropped off the map. The second car belonged to a Robert White, who died in 2002. He would have been forty-one in ’82, so that probably makes him Mrs. Bannister’s lover.”

“Okay,” I said. Nick started to lower his chair, so I stopped staring at him and moved my gaze to a spot on the wall.

“There’s a third car, too. That one belonged to a fellow named Simon Hess. Here’s where it gets interesting.”

“Go on.”

Heather paused, purely because she loved the anticipation. “Two things about Simon Hess. First, he worked as a traveling salesman.”

That made a bell ring deep, somewhere in my brain. “Where did I read about a traveling salesman?”

“When you read about Betty Graham,” Heather said. “She was last seen letting one into her house.”

Now the back of my neck went cold. “Oh, Jesus.”

“It gets better,” Heather said. “I looked up old Simon Hess to see if he was dead yet. And I found something interesting. It seems he left on a sales trip sometime in late 1982 and he never came home.”

“What? That makes no sense. What do you mean he never came home?”

Nick was sitting up and watching me now, trying to follow the conversation. I wished like hell this ancient phone had a speakerphone option, but I’d just have to tell him everything after I hung up. How did anyone before 1999 do anything at all?

“He just left and never returned,” Heather said. “And get this. His wife didn’t even call the police. She eventually declared him dead five years later, when she tried to claim his life insurance money. She said she thought he’d abandoned her for another woman, but eventually she figured he might have died, so she wanted to sell their house and get the money.”

“Could she just do that?”

“It seems like it. There’s a time period someone has to be missing before they can be declared dead. In New York it’s three years. I couldn’t access the file, but they must have investigated it and decided that Simon Hess was dead and Mrs. Hess got her money.”

I rifled through the pile of photos with my free hand, pulling out the one that had Hess’s car in it. “So his wife said he went missing sometime in 1982, but she didn’t know when?”

“She last saw him in November.”

“These photos are from October. So he was still around.” I brushed my finger along the edge of the photo, then picked up the next one in the sequence, which showed my aunt Viv walking along the walkway from the AMENITIES room to the office. It was the shot Marnie had cropped and sold to the newspapers, showing Viv’s face. Hess’s car was in the corner of the frame.

“What are the odds that we have two people who went missing around the same time in one photograph?” I said.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Heather said. “And if Simon Hess was Betty’s killer, then I’d say it isn’t a coincidence at all.”

“So he killed Viv and fled town.”

Nick was listening, but he leaned his chair back again, balanced it, and picked up another negative, looking at it through the light. For the first time, I wondered what he was looking for.

“You have to admit, it’s a pretty great theory,” Heather said. “But Simon Hess seems like a dead end. No one’s seen him since 1982 and he’s legally dead.”

“Maybe Alma Trent can help.”

“She isn’t a cop anymore. Do you think we should go to the cops with this?”

I was starting to think so. This was looking less and less like an amateur attempt to satisfy my curiosity and more like something the police could actually use.

I thought of Betty as I’d seen her, tormented and terrifying and somehow still beautiful. Her body dumped here at the Sun Down. Simon Hess’s car here. Simon Hess vanishing. Did he leave town before he could be arrested for murder?

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Hess had come to the motel sometime in October 1982. But what was he doing here?

I smelled cigarette smoke and glanced at Nick again. He wasn’t smoking, of course. He was still looking at Marnie’s negatives, but now he was frowning at them, pulling the strip in his hand closer to see it better.