The Sun Down Motel (14 page)

Fell, New York

October 1982

It seemed fitting that the rain was still coming down as Marnie drove them through town. She wound through the streets of downtown Fell and to the other side, where the small split-level homes tapered off into farmland and scrub, pocked by warehouses and run-down auto body shops that never seemed to be open. She pulled up next to an overpass and parked on the gravel, the windshield facing the dark tunnel in the rain.

“This is where Cathy Caldwell was found,” Marnie said.

Viv pulled her hood up over her head and got out of the car, her sneakers squelching on the wet ground. Cars passed on the highway overhead, a small two-lane that fed onto the interstate miles away. Other than that, the world was quiet except for the rushing of the rain. There was no one around, no other cars on this road, no buildings in sight.

Viv looked at the overpass, the shadowed concrete place beneath it. It was just an overpass, one of thousands, an ugly stretch of concrete spattered by a few lazy squiggles of spray-painted graffiti, as if the teenagers of Fell couldn’t be bothered to come out here very often, no matter how bored they were. Beneath the gray sky the mouth of the overpass looked dark, like it was waiting to swallow prey. The road beyond was slick with water in the hazy light.

Viv passed beneath the lip of the overpass and the rain stopped beating on her hood. She pushed it back and looked around. There was a concrete shoulder on either side of the road, and the ground at her feet was littered with trash, a broken beer bottle, and cigarette butts. There was a deflated piece of rubber that she realized with shock must be a condom—a used one. She looked away, blinking and smelling old urine.

Cathy’s killer had dumped her body here. This place, of all places.
This
place. Viv pushed down her disgust, her outrage at the thought of being left here to lie naked and dead, and tried to think. Why this place?

First of all: There was no one to see. That much was obvious. Since Marnie had parked the car, no one had driven through here. The only potential witnesses were the cars passing overhead, and those drivers would have to be leaning out their windows to see. How long did it take to dump a body? One minute, two? She had already stood here longer than that.

Second of all: The overpass was full of shadows. A body might be mistaken for a sleeping drunk or an addict. Compared to a ditch or an open field, there was the chance for a longer time before the body was discovered. Yet the body
would
be discovered—that was also clear.

Third of all: This was a place for the people who knew where it was. The drunks, the teenagers, the condom users. This wasn’t a place that someone would randomly find on a stroll. He dumped the body here because he’d driven through here before. Probably many times. In one direction or the other—this was a road he’d taken.

Cathy, being taken as she got into her car to go home from work. At a time when her husband was away. Her body dumped here.

Viv walked back to the car and got in. Marnie was sitting in the driver’s seat, and Viv realized she’d been watching her the entire time.

“Well?” the other woman said.

Viv ran a hand through her hair, her careful curls that were wet now, her pretty makeup that had been rubbed off long ago. “He picked her,” she said. “He followed her. He knew where she worked, knew that her
husband was away. And after he killed her he picked this place. He planned it—and he’s local.”

“Well, hell. All that from five minutes standing there?” Marnie seemed to think this over. “He’s local because he knows this place,” she said, putting the pieces together. “A stranger wouldn’t know.”

Viv pointed through the overpass. “What’s that way?”

“It goes out of town, heading south to New York.”

New York. Viv remembered wanting to go there, wanting to be on this very road. Planning to pass through Fell and take this very route. She could still do it. She could still go.

Someone who came and went from Fell would take this road. Someone like, say, a traveling salesman.

She turned to Marnie. “Let’s go to the next place.”

Marnie took her to a tree-lined street on the edge of what passed for Fell’s suburbs, a neighborhood of twenty-year-old bungalows. Viv had been born in a house like this before her father got a better job and they moved into a brand-new house in Grisham, surrounded by freshly dug lawns and newly planted trees. This street was well kept and unpretentious, and was probably pretty on a summer day, though now it was soaked and dark in the early-morning rain.

Marnie pulled the car up to a curb and turned the engine off.

“What’s this place?” Viv asked her.

“You asked about Betty Graham,” Marnie said. “She let a traveling salesman into her house on a Saturday afternoon.” She pointed. “That’s Betty’s house.”

Viv stared through the windshield as the rain pelted the car. The house was small and tidy, with a neat front walk and well-tended shrubs in the garden beneath the windows. It was past eight o’clock in the morning now, and as they watched a man came out the front door. He wore a plaid overcoat and a matching brown hat, and he looked to be in his late
fifties. He checked his watch, then got in his car and drove away. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

“They sold the place, obviously,” Marnie said. “You’d think they’d have trouble selling it, but they didn’t. Maybe because Betty wasn’t killed in the house.”

“She wasn’t?”

Marnie shook her head. “There was a broken lamp in the living room. That was the only sign anything had happened there at all. No blood, no nothing. He got her out of there somehow.” She pointed to a house across the street. “That’s the neighbor who saw the salesman. She saw him go in the house. No one saw anyone leave.”

“How is that possible?”

Marnie shrugged, though the motion was tight, her shoulders tense. “You’d have to ask him that. All anyone knows is that Betty disappeared, and then her body showed up on the construction heap that was the Sun Down Motel.”

The woman in the flowered dress. She’d lived here, but she didn’t haunt this place. She haunted the motel instead.

“How do you know so much about all of this?” Viv asked her.

“The Fell PD hires me sometimes to take photos of crime scenes. Usually burglary scenes—smashed windows, broken locks, ransacked rooms, footprints in the garden. The PD is so small that they don’t have someone full time to do pictures, and they don’t have enough equipment for two scenes at a time. That’s where I come in. Freelance, of course.” She started the car again. “I’ve never shot a body, but I’ve worked with cops. I listen to what they talk about, the things they say among themselves. Cops gossip just like everyone else. And if they aren’t paying attention to you, you can listen.”

“They don’t think the same man did these,” Viv said. It wasn’t a question.

“Not even close. It’s a small police department. It isn’t like the movies, with a staff of detectives to look at this stuff. Betty and Cathy didn’t travel
in the same circles or know any of the same men. And Victoria’s boyfriend was convicted of her murder, so they don’t include her at all.”

She pulled away from the curb and drove slowly forward, her wipers going in the rain. “What if they’re right?” Viv asked her. “What if these girls all got killed by different men for different reasons?”

“Then we don’t have a killer in Fell,” Marnie said. “We have more than one. Which one gives you the best odds, honey?”

The jogging path where Victoria Lee was murdered was nearly dark in the rain, the last dead leaves drooping wetly from the trees, the ground thick with soaked mulch. The entrance was off a side street, blocked by a small guardrail that everyone obviously stepped over. There was no sign.

“Victoria’s house is that way,” Marnie said, pointing to a row of the backs of houses visible on a rise behind a line of fence. “She would have come around the end of the road and up the street here toward the trail.”

“This is wide open,” Viv commented, looking around. “Anyone could have walked by.”

“Not that day,” Marnie said. “It was raining, just like it is today. A thunderstorm, actually. No one uses the path in the rain.”

Viv swung her leg over the guardrail and walked onto the jogging path, her hood up, the rain soaking the fabric. “She went running in the rain.”

“After an argument.” Marnie followed Viv over the guardrail. She didn’t bother with the fiction of a hood; she just got wet, let the water run down the jacket she wore. “She didn’t get far. Her body was found about thirty feet down the path.”

The sound of the rain was quieter under the trees, hushed in the thick carpet of brush along the path. Water dripped and trickled onto Viv’s forehead, and her shoes squelched in the mud. She pushed her hood back and looked around. It was like a cathedral in here, dark and silent and scary. You couldn’t see the place where the trees cleared and the yards and houses beyond, even though it wasn’t far away. Standing here felt like
being in a forest that went for miles. “Where does the path lead?” she asked Marnie.

“It runs just over a mile. It’s old city land that was supposed to be used for a railroad that was never built. That was probably a century ago. The land sat for a long time while the city argued over it, and in the end they just left it, because it’s long and narrow and they can’t use it for much else. In the meantime the people who live around here made a path. It ends just behind the Bank and Trust building on Eastern Road.”

Viv walked farther down the path. “The newspapers didn’t say that Victoria was an athlete,” she said. They’d only said that Victoria got in a lot of trouble in school, as if that might be a reason her boyfriend had grabbed her and strangled her. As if somehow she deserved it. They didn’t say it outright, but Viv could read it between the lines—any girl could.
If you’re bad, if you’re slutty, this could happen to you.
Even the articles about saintly, married Cathy Caldwell speculated whether her killer could be a secret boyfriend.
Sneak around behind your husband’s back, and this could happen to you.
Viv wondered what the newspapers would say if Helen the cheating wife died.

“She wasn’t a runner,” Marnie said. “She was just trying to keep slim. You know, for all those guys she supposedly dated.”

So a girl no one had really liked had come down this path, running in the rain because she was angry and needed to move. Viv left the path and fought her way through the brush, which was wet and darkened the knees of her jeans. Her shoes were hopelessly wet now, her socks soaked through.

He did it quick
, she thought. Victoria was running, angry. She wasn’t sweet or pliant. He’d have to physically jump her, grab her, stop her. Get her on the ground. Get her quiet. His hand over her mouth, on her throat. Maybe he had a knife or a gun.

Would Victoria have fought? She could have at least tried to scream—there were houses not far away, including her own. There was a good chance there were people in hearing range. All it would have taken was one scream.

But if the man who grabbed her was her boyfriend, someone familiar, would she have screamed?

Viv turned in a circle, the thoughts going inescapably through her mind:
What would I have done?
Because this could have been her, storming out of the house at eighteen after a fight with her mother. Or leaving work. Doing what women did every day.

It could still be her now. It could be her tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. It could be Marnie, it could be Helen. It could be Viv’s sister back home in Illinois. This was the reality: It wasn’t just these girls. It could always, always be her or someone she knew.

She looked back at the path.
Would I scream?
She didn’t think so. She would have been so terrified, so horribly afraid, that she would have done whatever the man said.
Don’t speak. Don’t make a sound. Come over here. Lie down.
And when he heard someone coming and put his hands on her neck, it would all be over.

“You think the boyfriend didn’t do it?” Marnie called to her from the path.

“I don’t know,” Viv answered honestly. “It’s like you said. If he did it, then there’s more than one killer in Fell.”

“You’re ignoring the possibility that he did Betty Graham and Cathy Caldwell. Maybe it’s Victoria’s boyfriend who is the serial killer.”

Viv closed her eyes as water dripped through the trees. It was possible, she had to admit. The timeline worked. “So he started with strange women, then killed his girlfriend.”

“And he hasn’t killed anyone since. Because the cops caught the right man.”

The rain was cold on Viv’s skin, but she welcomed it. She felt hot, her blood pumping hard. “Victoria was eighteen when she was killed. Was her boyfriend older?”

“He was twenty.”

“Still, it puts him in high school when Betty was killed. He would have had to pull off posing as a salesman.”

“If the salesman actually did it. Which no one knows.”

It was possible. Victoria’s boyfriend could have spent years as a monster in secret, killing a teacher and a young mother before he was twenty. Viv kept her eyes closed. “You don’t think that’s true,” she said to Marnie. “If you did, you wouldn’t have brought me to all of these places. You think there’s a killer still on the loose.”

Marnie was quiet for a minute. “All I know is I’d like to leave this damn jogging path. It’s giving me the creeps.”

Viv opened her eyes again and walked farther into the brush. It was true—this was likely a fool’s errand. Victoria’s killer was in prison. There was no mystery here. Except there was. How did Victoria’s boyfriend know where she was? She wasn’t an athlete or even a habitual runner. Why had he come here to this place? If he jumped her at the beginning of the path, was he waiting for her? If so, how did he know where she would go?

She kept walking until she hit the edge of the trees. She looked out onto a rain-soaked stretch of scrub with fences and houses beyond it. These were the same houses that Marnie had pointed out as being Victoria’s street.