The Sun Down Motel (24 page)

Heather climbed the fence first. I boosted her over and Nick helped
her down. Then I climbed, waiting every second for a shout, the bark of a dog, the scream of an alarm. There was only silence. I swung my leg over and Nick took my waist in his hard grip, lowering me down.

“This way,” he said.

The foliage had grown in over the years, and we fought our way through the naked branches of bushes until we found the path of the driveway. It was overgrown, too, washed over with years of snow and rain. There were no tire tracks. I could see no evidence of human habitation at all. The wind blew harsh and cold, making sounds in the bare branches of the trees.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Heather said. She was walking as close to me as she could, her cheeks deep red with cold. “It looks like someone’s abandoned property.”

How old were Marnie’s photos, I wondered? If they had been taken at the same time as the Sun Down pictures, they were thirty-five years old. Had no one really been here for thirty-five years? Why not?

We picked our way over the uneven drive, and the barn appeared through the trees. It wasn’t even a barn anymore; it was a wreck of broken boards, caved in and rotted. There were dark gaps big enough to let a full-grown man through them. The front doors looked to be latched closed, but with the state of the rest of the walls, it wasn’t much security.

“Wait here,” Nick said. He circled the barn, disappearing around the corner. We heard the groan of rotten wood snapping. “I found a way in,” he called.

On the side of the barn, we found he’d snapped some rotten boards and opened the hole wider for us. He looked out at us. “It’s dark in here, but I can see something.”

I looked at Heather. She had gone pale, her expression flat. Gone was the girl who had wanted to spend the night at the Sun Down, taking pictures and videos of ghosts. I didn’t have to touch her to know that her skin would be ice-cold. “You don’t have to come in,” I said.

She looked at me, her gaze skittish as if she’d almost forgotten I was there. “I should go in.”

I stepped closer to her. “This isn’t a contest. You don’t win a prize for going in there. She’s my aunt, not yours. This is my thing. Just wait and I’ll tell you if it’s safe.”

I thought she’d argue with me, but instead she hesitated, then gave a brief nod. I wanted to touch the arm of her coat, but I didn’t. Instead I turned back to the barn.

The hole gaped at me, deep black. I could see nothing inside, not Nick, not even a shadow. A dusty, dry, moldy smell came from the hole, and dust motes from the disturbance swirled in the air.

“Carly?” Nick called from the dark.

Down the rabbit hole
, I thought, and stepped through.

The light inside came through the gaps in the walls, soft slices of illumination from the gray sky overhead. I could see the four walls, junk tossed against them, dark shapes in the corners. An old bicycle, tools, scattered garbage. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I caught sight of Nick, who had walked to the other end of the barn. He was standing right behind the closed doors. He turned and looked at me. “Hey.”

I came closer to him. Behind him was an old green tarp thrown over what was obviously a car underneath. I paused at Nick’s shoulder, looking at it.

My mind spun. The newspaper reports had said that Viv’s car was left in the Sun Down parking lot the night she disappeared. Wherever she’d gone, she hadn’t taken it.

But what had happened to her car after the investigation? Where had it gone? Where did a missing person’s car go, long after they went missing?

“Uncover it,” I whispered to Nick.

He didn’t hesitate. He grabbed one end of the tarp and tugged it, stepping back and letting it fall to the dirty floor. Underneath it was a car, boxy and decades old. The color was indistinguishable in the dim light. The tires were flat. The windows were opaque with dust.

Nick stepped over the tarp and brushed the side of his hand along the passenger window, smearing the dust. “No one’s been near this thing in ages, maybe years,” he said. He leaned forward and peered through the clear hole he’d made.

Don’t
, I wanted to shout.
Don’t.
I jumped at the sound of flapping in one of the barn’s upper corners, cold sweat rising between my shoulder blades as I realized it was a bird somewhere up there in the shadows. I made my feet move, made myself circle the car to the driver’s side and wipe my own spot, peer through it.

The driver’s seat was empty, tidy. I straightened and tried the door handle. It opened, the click loud in the silence. Inhaling a breath, I pulled the door open.

A rush of stale air came out at me, laced with something sour. Dust motes swirled in the air. On the passenger side, Nick opened the door and leaned in. We both craned our necks, peering around the empty car.

Nothing. No dead body. No sign of Viv—no clothing, no nothing. There was no indication that anyone had ever used this car at all. Nick opened the glove box, revealing that it was completely empty.

“Cleaned out,” he said.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence. It’s some old car that someone didn’t want to use anymore, and they parked it here and left it. It happens all the time, right?”

“Why did Marnie have photos of this barn, then?”

It didn’t feel right. My stomach was turning, my head pounding. “Maybe Viv stole the car,” I said. “Maybe she stole it and stashed it.”

“Maybe whoever killed her stashed it,” he countered.

“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.” I sighed. “This is a crazy dead end. We’ve done all this work, and we aren’t any further along than we were. It’s a red herring, Nick.”

“What’s that smell?” he asked.

There was definitely a smell. Sour and rotten, but old. “Garbage?”

“Worse than garbage.” He straightened and stepped back, leaving the
front passenger door open. He opened the back passenger door and peered in. “Nothing back here. But the smell is worse.” He straightened again, leaving that door open, too.

We walked to the back of the car. The trunk had a keyhole in it, the way all old cars did. We’d seen no sign of a key.

“How do we get that open?” I asked as Nick bent his knees, lowering himself to a crouch.

“We don’t open it,” he answered me. “We call the cops.” He pointed to the floor beneath the trunk. “Either that’s oil or it’s very old blood.”

I crouched and followed where he was pointing. There was a large pool of something black beneath the trunk. It was dry and very, very old.

The blood rushed from my head, and for a second I thought I would faint. The pool was definitely too big to be oil. I gripped my knees and tears came to my eyes, too swift and hard for me to stop them. “Viv,” I said. I started shaking. My aunt was in the trunk, her body a foot from me, behind metal and cloth. She was dead in this car. She had been here for thirty-five years, her blood pooling, then drying and darkening on the floor. So lonely and silent. I inhaled a breath and a sob came out. “He killed her,” I said, my voice choked. “He did it. He killed those others. He killed Viv.”

I felt a hand on the back of my neck—large, warm, and strong. “You’ve got this, Carly,” he said gently. “You’ve got it.”

I inhaled again, because I couldn’t breathe. Another sob escaped my throat. My cheeks were soaked with tears now, my lashes wet, getting water on my glasses. “I’m sorry,” I managed as I cried. “I didn’t—I didn’t expect—”

“I know,” he said.

I’d been so in control. I’d been able to handle everything—ghosts, mysteries, this strange and crazy place. It wasn’t a game, exactly, but it was a project. A quest for justice. A thing I had to do in order to get on with my life. And if I did it, I would be fine again. I would know.

I hadn’t expected that being at Vivian’s grave would break my heart. I hadn’t expected the grief. It was for Viv, and it was for my mother, who
had lived the last thirty-five years of her life not knowing this car was here, that her sister’s body was alone and silent in the trunk. My mother had lived three and a half decades with grief so deep and so painful she had never spoken about it. She’d died with that grief, and now she would never feel any better.

I sobbed into my dirty hands, crouched on the floor of the barn. I cried for Viv, who had been so beautiful and alive. I cried for the others—Betty, Cathy, Victoria. It was over for them, too. I cried for my mother and for me.

Nick moved closer, put his arm around my shoulders. He knew exactly how I felt—of course he did. He knew how this kind of thing rips you in pieces from the inside out, changes the makeup of who you are. He was the only person who could be here and actually understand. He held his arm around my shoulders and let me weep. He didn’t speak.

After a minute I heard Heather’s voice from the other end of the barn. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a car,” Nick called to her, his voice calm. “There’s old blood pooled under it. We think there’s a body in the trunk. Can you call the cops?”

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.”