The Sun Down Motel(79)

Heather didn’t say anything, and I assumed she’d stepped back out to pull her phone out of her pocket. I wiped my eyes and mopped the snot on my face, attempting to get a grip.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“We should go,” Nick said quietly. “This is a crime scene.”

He was right. Thirty-five years old or not, this was the site of my aunt’s dumped body. We needed to get our footprints and our fingers and our hair fibers out of here. Even the rankest amateur knew that, let alone a true-crime hobbyist like me.

I straightened, Nick keeping his hand on my elbow to help me keep balance. He’d know all about crime scenes, since his childhood house had been one. Nick had real-life experience of crime instead of just in books and on the Internet. Well, now I had experience, too.

Vivian was dead. But Simon Hess had been at the Sun Down. He’d seen Viv. And he’d disappeared at the same time. I knew now what had happened to Vivian, and I knew who had done it. My next job was to track down Simon Hess, wherever he was, and make him pay.



* * *



? ? ?

It was past noon when a cop came out of the barn and down the drive to where I was standing. The gates to the rusty fence were thrown open now and the dead foliage had been crushed with tire tracks. A single uniformed officer had been sent out first, and then a short stream of vans and unmarked cars had arrived. We had been shooed off the property from the first, and we hadn’t been able to see anything that was going on. We’d been questioned, together and separately, over and over. It was freezing and damp. When the cops finished with us, Nick had driven Heather home because she was nearly shaking with cold and shock. I hadn’t been able to leave. Not until someone told me something—anything.

In my pocket was a photo. One of the pictures from Marnie’s stack, showing Simon Hess’s car parked at the Sun Down. It was exactly the same make and model as the car we’d seen in the barn. The size and shape were burned into my mind, and I knew, in my heart, that we’d found Simon Hess’s car.

Nick came back in his truck, bringing me hot coffee and something to eat. I’d sipped the coffee and forgotten the food. My phone was long dead. I stood on the dirt road, as close to the gates as the cops would allow, simply waiting. I was going to wait for as long as it took.

The police knew my situation, that I was looking for my aunt who had vanished in 1982. After a while someone inside the barn must have taken pity on me, because a man came down the dirt drive to the gate. He was about fifty, a black man with close-cropped graying hair. He was wearing jeans and a thick black bomber jacket, which meant he wasn’t a uniformed officer. I had no idea who he was. His face was stern, but when he looked at me I knew he had seen people like me before, desperate family members waiting for any word at all.

“Are you Miss Kirk?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

He introduced himself—garbled a name and a title that I didn’t hear or retain. The blood was rushing too loudly in my ears.

“I understand you’re looking for your aunt, Vivian Delaney,” the man said.

I nodded.

He looked at me closely. “Listen to me, okay? I understand you’re in a weird place. But listen to what I’m saying.”

He did know. He understood what it felt like. I felt my shoulders relax, just a little.

“Two things,” the man said. “There is a body in that car. It’s been there a long time.”

My fingernails dug into my palms. I barely felt it.

“The second thing,” the man said, “is that it isn’t your aunt.”

My lips were numb, barely working. “How do—how do you know?”

“Because it’s a man,” he said. He shook his head as I opened my mouth again. “No. I’ve got nothing else to say. We’re conducting an investigation, and I have no information yet. But I can tell you definitively that we do not have Vivian Delaney in there. I’m sorry for the loss of your aunt. But we have your contact information if we need you, and you need to go home.”

He waited, his eyes on mine, until I’d nodded a brief assent before he turned his gaze to Nick. “Make sure she gets home,” he said, underscoring the message. Then he turned and walked away.

My head was spinning, my brain feverish. Nick took my elbow again and led me back to his truck. He helped me in, then circled to the driver’s side, getting in and slamming the door.

He turned the key and the truck’s heater came on, a blast of warm air on my face. My cheeks and lips tingled as the cold left them. I flexed my frozen fingers.

Nick didn’t put the truck in gear. He just sat there, his dark eyes on me, his expression unreadable. He was wearing a coat, but once again he didn’t seem cold. I thought he must be like a human furnace, not to be cold after all these hours. I wondered what that was like.

“Carly,” he said.

“It’s Simon Hess,” I said.

His eyes narrowed and he didn’t speak.

“I thought he was a monster,” I said, more easily now that my face was thawing. My brain thawing, too. Everything was thawing. “I thought he killed her and got away with it. But he didn’t, did he?”

“No,” he said. “He didn’t get away with it. At least, not in the end.”

I scrubbed a hand over my cheek, beneath the rim of my glasses. My cheek was starting to feel warm now. I was light-headed from the shock and the crying and the coffee and the lack of food. But at the same time I was thinking more clearly than maybe I ever had.