The Sun Down Motel

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.

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

CARLY



   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.”