The Sun Down Motel
“Vivian,” Alma said at last. “Come down here and we’ll talk.”
Fell, New York
November 2017
CARLY
I had been on shift at the Sun Down for an hour. It was midnight, and I was reading the old copy of Firestarter I’d found in the office. Drew Barrymore’s baby face was on the cover, her hair lifting in the draft from the wall of flames behind her. Andy and Charlie had just been captured by the CIA, and things were about to get really bad. Then the office door opened and Nick walked in.
He was wearing jeans and a black zip-up hoodie. His hair was a little mussed and his beard was thicker. He looked like he just woke up. He carried a six-pack of beer, which he put on the desk in front of me.
“Hey,” he said.
“What’s this?” I asked from over the top of my book.
“Beer.”
“I’m only twenty.”
His eyebrows went up. “Are you for real?”
I put my book down, finding a Post-it note to use as a bookmark, because folding the corner of a page—even in a thirty-year-old book—is sacrilege. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not a big drinker, though. What is this for, anyway?”
Nick walked to the corner of the room, pushed some old tourist brochures off a wooden chair, and pulled it up to the desk. “Because I didn’t answer your texts earlier.” He sat down and pulled a can from the pack.
“You were sleeping,” I said.
“No, I was being an asshole.” He popped the beer open and handed it to me. At the look on my face he said, “It’s what I do.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, taking the beer from him.
He took his own beer and slouched back in the wooden chair, his big shoulders dwarfing the back. “It’s a habit,” he said. “I’ve been an asshole for a long time.”
I sipped my beer politely and glanced at my book, like I was longing to get back to it.
“I’m not used to people being nice to me,” he said.
“Um.”
He waited a beat. “So I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize.”
I lifted my glasses and scratched the bridge of my nose, then lowered them again. “Okay, I accept.”
He let a breath out, almost like he was relieved. Which couldn’t be right, but a girl can dream. “So what happened with Alma?” he said. “You wrote in your text that you would tell me.”
I sipped my beer again, a tight knot forming at the back of my neck. I had said that, but now I didn’t want to tell him everything that had happened with Alma. Because I’d told her that Nick was here, which I was now sure I wasn’t supposed to. And she’d told me that Nick might not have been upstairs like he said he was.
This was awkward.
So I changed the subject. “I figured something out,” I told him instead. “The woman who haunts this place was named Betty Graham.”
Nick blinked. “The woman who sat on my bed?”
“Yes, that one. She was murdered in 1978 and her body was dumped here at the motel. It was a construction site at the time. She was a schoolteacher who lived alone. They never solved it.”
Here was why I couldn’t stay mad at Nick Harkness: He put all of the pieces together right away. “Your aunt disappeared only a few years later, from the same place. What are the odds it was two different guys?”
“Exactly.” I nearly shouted it but kept my voice calm at the last second. “There are others, too. Cathy Caldwell.”
Nick frowned, then closed his eyes briefly, remembering. “Girl left under an overpass?”
“That was two years later, Nick. Right in between Betty and Viv. And it was also unsolved.”
“God, this town sucks,” he said, running a hand through his hair and making it stick up more, which still didn’t look stupid for some reason. “Believe me, if some scumbag decides he wants to murder people, the place he’s going to come to is Fell.”
“It seems like a nice place to kill someone,” I said politely.
“There were no leads? Nothing at all?”
“Nothing that made it to the papers. It’s frustrating. I thought Alma Trent might be able to give me some insight, but as soon as I mentioned Cathy and Betty she went quiet and closed me down.” And then she told me not to talk to you. I bit my lip.
“What?” Nick said, watching my face.
I sipped my beer again.
“What?” he repeated. Then he frowned, figuring it out. “She said something about me,” he said slowly, as if he were reading the words in writing across my forehead. “Something bad.”
“Not really.”
“Carly.”
“I let it slip to her that you’re here,” I confessed. “She seemed so friendly. I’m sorry.”
Nick frowned slowly, as if computing this. “Alma knows I’m here? At the Sun Down?”
“Sort of. Yes.”
“Shit,” he said softly. “I’m going to get a visit. Probably soon.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t going to be a secret forever. I mean, what was my plan? Stay at the Sun Down until I’m sixty? I’ll go crazy before Christmas.”
“She’s not a fan of yours. Like you said.” I put my beer down. “She says there’s a theory that you weren’t in your room when your brother was killed.”
Nick went very, very still. He looked at me for a long moment, his expression going as quietly blank as a blackboard being erased.
I didn’t want to feel nervous, but I did. The nerves made my throat dry and my back tight, made cold sweat start under my T-shirt. “Nick,” I said finally, unable to take the silence.
“Yeah,” he said as if he hadn’t paused. “That was a theory. I remember.”
I swallowed. “I didn’t say I believed it.”
“No, you didn’t.” He swigged his beer, then put the can down. For a second I thought he was going to say he was leaving, that it was over. He even leaned forward in his chair. Then he said, “Who’s the kid? The one I see running around in shorts?”
It took a second for me to realize he meant the ghost. “He hit his head on the side of the pool and died,” I said. “The year the motel opened.”