The Sun Down Motel (15 page)

She peered through the rain. The stretch of backyard fences was broken in only one place: a narrow laneway, a shortcut from the street, so that people didn’t have to walk all the way to the end of the street and around if they didn’t want to. Viv pressed forward, leaving the trees and heading for the laneway.

She heard footsteps behind her, Marnie’s voice. “Hey! Where are you going? It’s wet out here.”

The laneway was a dirt path leading between two yards. Weedy but well used. A shortcut the locals took when they wanted to come to the jogging path.

And from it, while she stood out of sight, she could see the street. A short suburban lane, maybe fifteen houses packed in a row.

Viv was still staring at the street when Marnie caught up to her and stood at her shoulder. “What the hell?” she said.

“Look,” Viv said.

Marnie was quiet.

“Which house is Victoria’s?” Viv asked her.

“I don’t know.”

“I bet it was one of these,” Viv said, pointing to the row of houses in view. “I bet that’s how he knew when she left the house, where she was going. He stood right where we are now. And if she went around the end of the street and back . . .”

“Then he could take this shortcut and beat her there,” Marnie said.

Maybe. Maybe. So many maybes. But if Victoria’s boyfriend had killed her, then he must have had a way to head her off at the jogging path.

And if her boyfriend could have stood here and watched the house, then so could a stranger.

Viv pulled her notebook from her pocket and made notes, bowing over the page so the letters wouldn’t get wet. She wrote addresses, names. She made a map. She made a list of what she had to do next, because she knew. Marnie waited, no longer complaining about the rain.

When she finished, Viv put the notebook away and turned to Marnie again. “Okay, I’m finished. Can we look at your pictures now?”

Fell, New York

November 2017

Jenny Summers, who had been my aunt Viv’s roommate in 1982, worked at an old-age home in downtown Fell. It was a flat square building of burnt red brick, surrounded by low evergreen shrubs, a metal sign embedded in the front lawn:
KEENAN RETIREMENT RESIDENCE
. Jenny refused to talk on the phone, but she’d asked me to come to her work so we could talk on her break. I stayed awake when I was supposed to be sleeping and said yes.

Heather came with me, her poncho and parka traded for a quilted coat because the day was slightly warmer than usual. She’d pinned her hair back from her forehead in her usual style and wore dove-gray mittens that complemented the coat. She wore a black skirt that fell to her ankles and black boots.

“Are we Good Cop and Bad Cop?” she asked as we got out of the car. “Can I be Bad Cop?”

“I don’t think anyone falls for that anymore,” I said, zipping up my coat and leading the way to the front door. There was hardly any traffic in the middle of the day, and the breeze smelled almost good, if chilled. Black birds wheeled in the sky overhead, calling to each other.

“You’re probably right,” Heather admitted. “Besides, it would work better if you brought one of your men with you instead of me.”

I made a face at her as we opened the door. “No boys. Callum is annoying, and Nick doesn’t know I’m alive.”

She waggled her eyebrows at me, Heather’s way of trying to “get my goat,” as she put it. She was good at it when I was in a certain mood. “Callum likes you,” she said. “He keeps calling and texting you. Tell Nick about Callum and see if he gets jealous.”

“How old are we? And boys are not your bailiwick, remember?”

She just smiled, and I turned away. I’d given Callum my number after I’d met him at the library—he said he wanted to send me any other articles he came across—and he’d used it frequently. He texted things like
I found the 1982 Greyhound bus schedule. What if Vivian took the bus out of town?
or
I found the ownership records for the motel at the courthouse. Here you go.
It was a little weird, frankly, that a guy as attractive as Callum took such an interest in me. That wasn’t a self-confidence thing—it really
was
weird. I preferred to think of it as purely an intellectual interest, one geek to another.

We asked at the front desk for Jenny Summers, and a few minutes later a woman came out to get us. She was in her late fifties, whip-thin, with blond hair in a stylish short cut. She wore burgundy scrubs, Crocs, and very little makeup. She was a woman who had obviously always been pretty, and age had served only to sharpen her features and give her a harder, I-don’t-give-a-crap expression. “Come with me,” she said.

She led us down a hallway to a room that said
PRIVATE BREAK ROOM
on the door. Inside were a small fridge, a coffeemaker, a few chairs, and two sofas. The sofas had blankets folded on them, pillows on top. It was obviously used as a nap room for some of the shift workers.

Jenny motioned us briskly to sit, then went to the coffeemaker. “Which one of you is Carly?” she asked.

I raised my hand. “Me. This is my friend Heather.”

Jenny nodded. “I could have guessed it. You look a little like Vivian. So you’re her niece, huh?”

I felt a fizzle of excitement, like Alka-Seltzer in my blood. This woman,
right here, had known Vivian. Talked to her. Lived in the apartment Heather and I shared right now. It was like a door back to 1982 had opened a crack, letting me peek through. “My mother was Vivian’s sister,” I said.

“Sister!” Jenny leaned a hip against the counter as she poured her coffee. She shook her head, staring down at her cup. “She never mentioned a sister. Then again, it was so long ago.” She turned to us. “You know I might not be able to help you, right? It’s been thirty-five years.”

“Anything you can remember,” I said. “I want to know.”

Jenny took her coffee and sat across from me, crossing one scrub-clad leg over the other. “You weren’t even born when she disappeared, right? So you never knew her. Jesus, I’m old.”

“What was she like?” I asked.

She looked thoughtful. “Viv was moody. Quiet. Lonely, I thought.”

“The papers called her vivacious.”

Jenny shook her head. “Not the Viv I knew. Maybe she was vivacious back home in Illinois—I wouldn’t know. But here in Fell, she kept to herself. She told me her parents were divorced and she wanted to get out of her mother’s house. She only talked to her mother once or twice that I knew of, and she didn’t seem happy about it. She worked nights at the motel. No boys, no parties. We worked the same schedule because I was on nights, so I knew her social life. She didn’t go on dates. Though in the weeks at the end she was gone a lot during the day. She said she had a hard time sleeping so she’d go to the library.”

I glanced at Heather. “What did she want at the library? Was she a big reader?”

“Well, she never checked anything out. I remember telling the cops all of this at the time and they couldn’t even find a library card. Though a few of the librarians remembered seeing her, so she wasn’t lying. They said she liked to read in the archive room.”

So I’d been sitting exactly where Viv had been, maybe. Somehow that didn’t surprise me anymore. “Did she go anywhere besides the library?”

“That, I don’t know. I mean, she was gone quite a bit near the end as
far as I remember. Though I can’t be sure, because I slept days. I had my first nursing home job then and I didn’t rotate off nights until the following year.” She looked around the break room. “I thought it was a temporary job to make a little money. Goes to show how much I knew. I’m retiring next year.”

Maybe Viv would be retiring soon, if she’d lived. It was so strange to lose someone, to feel their life cut short, even if you didn’t know them. Viv had only been as old as I was now. “It’s strange, though, isn’t it? That Viv wasn’t home much in her last few weeks? She could have met someone.”

“I suppose she could have.” Jenny shrugged. “That’s what the cops thought at the time, but they never could find anyone Viv knew. They kept asking me if she could have met some guy, like that would solve the whole thing. I kept telling them no, and they hated it. But they didn’t know how deep inside her own head Viv was. I know what a girl looks like when she’s met some new guy. I’ve
been
that girl. That wasn’t Viv. She didn’t look happy those last few weeks—she looked determined, maybe. Grim. I told the cops that, but they didn’t really care. Viv was twenty and good-looking. They figured she must have run off with Mr. Right—or Mr. Wrong. Case closed.”

Heather pulled her chair up next to mine. “How did they look for her?”

“As far as I know, they asked around,” Jenny replied, sipping her coffee. “They did a search around the motel, but that only lasted a few hours. They talked to her parents. They searched her car and pulled our telephone records.”

“Pulled telephone records?” I asked.

Jenny looked at me. “You remind me of my daughter. You kids don’t know a damn thing. We only had a landline back then, of course. The records were kept by Ma Bell, and the cops got a big printout. Old school, as you would put it.”

I wondered where that phone record was, and if I could get my hands on it. “She didn’t mention anyone else to you?” I asked her. “Not necessarily a man, but anyone? A hobby? An interest? Anything at all?”

Jenny leaned forward, and I could see in her expression the weary look of a woman who had spent thirty-five years caring for people. “Honey, we weren’t really friends. We were roommates. We didn’t swap secrets or go on double dates. We just chatted while we got ready for work from time to time, that’s all.”

I looked her in the eye. She could tell herself whatever she wanted, but the truth was the truth. “Viv was gone for four days before someone called the police,” I said, my anger humming beneath my words. “Four days.”

Jenny closed her eyes briefly and her shoulders sagged. “I know. I went to see my parents for a few days. When I got back, I thought maybe she’d gone home for a visit. I figured wherever she was was her business. I was wrapped up in my own bullshit and drama, and I didn’t think. It’s bothered me for three and a half decades, but that’s what I did.” She sat back in her chair. “I think to myself, what if I had called the police that first night I got home? Would she be alive? I’ll never know. But it was me who called them, though I did it too late. So on other nights I lie awake thinking, what if I never called the police at all? How long would it have taken for someone to notice that Viv was gone?” She ran a hand through her short hair. “A week? Two weeks? Her stuff was in the desk drawer in the motel office, and no one who worked there gave a shit. Literally no one cared that Viv’s purse was sitting there and she was nowhere to be seen. That’s worse, you know? That’s fucking worse. Poor Vivian.”

I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to be in this place, in this depressing break room, smelling these depressing smells. How Jenny had done this job for thirty-five years, I had no idea. “You think something happened to her,” I said. “You don’t think she ran away.”

“I
know
something happened to her,” Jenny said. “The police can say whatever they want to make themselves feel better, but I
know
.” She pointed to Heather. “If Heather dropped off the planet for four days, what would you think? What would you
know
?”

I clamped my teeth together as a chill went down my spine. I didn’t answer.

“We were single girls who worked at night,” Jenny said. “Do you think we didn’t know the dangers, even back then? Christ, sometimes I think back to the fact that we had a conversation about Cathy Caldwell, of all things, a few weeks before Viv died. Cathy fucking Caldwell. How could I be so stupid?”

“Who is Cathy Caldwell?” I asked.

Beside me I felt Heather sit up straight, her narrow body tight as a bowstring. “She was murdered,” she said, answering my question. “Dumped under an overpass in the late seventies.” She looked at Jenny. “You knew her?”

“No,” Jenny said. “She lived on my parents’ street, and after I moved out and started working nights, she was my mother’s favorite bogeyman. ‘Be careful or you’ll end up like Cathy Caldwell!’ ‘Don’t talk to strange men on the bus or you’ll end up like Cathy Caldwell!’ That sort of thing. Cathy loomed large in my mother’s mind—those were simpler times, you know? She was big about Victoria Lee, too.”

“Killed by the jogging trail off Burnese Road,” Heather said.

“‘Don’t take up jogging, Jenny! You’ll end up like that girl!’” Jenny shook her head. “My poor mother. She grew up when these kinds of things didn’t happen, or so she thought. She never did understand what the world was coming to. But she wasn’t wrong. I was always careful, and so was Viv. We talked about it one night not too long before she disappeared. I think that’s part of the reason I assumed Viv had gone somewhere sensible. Viv knew the dangers of working at night. She was careful. And she definitely wasn’t stupid.”

I thought of my brother, Graham, telling me stories about the man with a hook for a hand when we were kids. Bogeyman stories. Jenny’s stories were different, though. I’d been dealing with creeps since I’d opened my first forbidden MySpace account at ten—strangers, people pretending to be other people, people trying to get you to do things, whether it was to buy something or sign a petition or send them a photo. When my mother caught me, she didn’t know what to do or how to punish me—or
if she even should punish me. She had been utterly lost. Viv, in her way, had known more about danger than her sister had decades later.

I glanced at Heather. She was perked up, her face tight and serious.
There are so many of them
, she’d said when I first met her, and when I asked her what she meant, she said,
Dead girls
.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked Jenny, because I sensed her break was almost over and our time was almost up. “Anything at all?”

Jenny looked thoughtful, and for a second I pictured her thirty-five years ago, wearing high-waisted jeans and a puffy blouse, her hair teased out. “Viv was beautiful,” she said at last, surprising me. “I remember she said something about acting. She was originally going to New York, but she wasn’t serious about it. She just wanted to get away. She didn’t have the crazy beauty that models have. She was one of those girls who was beautiful the more you looked at her, if that makes sense.”

“Yes,” I said.

“It was something about her face, the stillness of it,” Jenny said. “She was sad—at least the Viv I knew was sad. Nowadays she’d probably be a perfect candidate for therapy, but we didn’t have that option then. And she was also angry, especially toward the end. I do think she was hiding something, though I suppose I’ll never know what it was now. Oh, and one more thing.” She pushed away her coffee cup and looked at me, her eyes hard. “Since they pulled our phone records and all, I always wondered why the police never asked me about the phone calls.”