The Sun Down Motel

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.