The Sun Down Motel

“Maybe Alma Trent can help.”

“She isn’t a cop anymore. Do you think we should go to the cops with this?”

I was starting to think so. This was looking less and less like an amateur attempt to satisfy my curiosity and more like something the police could actually use.

I thought of Betty as I’d seen her, tormented and terrifying and somehow still beautiful. Her body dumped here at the Sun Down. Simon Hess’s car here. Simon Hess vanishing. Did he leave town before he could be arrested for murder?

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Hess had come to the motel sometime in October 1982. But what was he doing here?

I smelled cigarette smoke and glanced at Nick again. He wasn’t smoking, of course. He was still looking at Marnie’s negatives, but now he was frowning at them, pulling the strip in his hand closer to see it better.

“I’m going to call Alma tomorrow,” I decided. “I’ll tell her what we have. She’ll know what to do.”

I hung up and dropped into the office chair. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said to Nick.

He righted his chair again and raised his eyebrows at me. “I’ve been here for weeks. I’ll believe a lot of things. Including the idea that the smoking guy is around somewhere right now.”

I met his gaze. It was strange, so strange to have someone share your crazy delusion. Someone who saw the same ghosts you did.

“This is even weirder than that,” I said.

“Hit me.”

I told him everything. Nick did what he always did, no matter how crazy the story: listened without judging, laughing, or scoffing. All he said at the end was: “Interesting.”

“Interesting? That’s it?”

“Yes. If he killed Betty and dumped her here, then he was familiar with this place. Maybe, once it was built, he stayed here on his sales trips. Maybe he’d seen Viv and was watching her. Planning.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, his gaze moving past me to look at nothing. “They said my father snapped the day he killed my brother, that he went crazy all of a sudden. But it wasn’t true. He planned it.”

I held my breath and waited, listening.

“He’d had the gun for over a week,” Nick said. “He’d never owned a gun before. He went through the process of getting it legally. He spent some time figuring out what he was going to do and putting the plan into motion. He’d even called our high school and said we were taking a family vacation, so both of his sons would be out of school for a while.” His blue gaze was remote. “The only reason Eli was home at all was because his basketball practice had been canceled. He called Dad at work and asked him where he kept the stash of gas money, because he needed to put gas in his car. So Dad knew we were both home. He gave Eli an answer, then left work and came home to kill us.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“He said at the trial that he heard voices telling him to do it. But my father was a lawyer. He may have been trying for an insanity defense. I don’t know whether he was lying about the voices or not. In any case, the defense didn’t work.” He looked at me calmly, holding my gaze. “I got asked a lot if I was really in the bedroom when it happened. I was.”

I dropped my gaze to the desk in front of me.

“I spent a lot of time wondering if I should have stayed. If I could have gotten past Dad without being killed, gone downstairs and helped Eli. But he died so fast, and no ambulance could have saved him. I think, deep down, that I knew that. Dad had been quiet in the last few weeks, so quiet. He wasn’t a violent person, but somehow, when I heard the shots and the screaming, I knew. I knew that Dad had shot Eli, and that it would be over in minutes if I didn’t run. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I think I expected it.”

“You had a gut feeling,” I said. “An instinct.”

Nick pressed his fingertips to his forehead and rubbed it tiredly, his eyes closing for a minute. “Maybe. But if I had an instinct, then why didn’t I act on it? Why didn’t I say something? Do something? I know I was a fourteen-year-old kid, but this is the kind of thing that goes through your head when your dad tried to kill you. It’s why I don’t sleep.”

“I bet you could sleep in the right place,” I said. “Not just at the motel. You can’t spend the rest of your life here. I bet you could sleep if you were in a place that made you happy. Where you knew you’d wake up to something good.”

He gave me half a smile. “You think that place exists?”

“Sure it does. There are good places, Nick. They’re different for everyone. I think you’ll find yours.”

“You’re way too nice to me,” he said.

I shrugged. “I have ulterior motives. I have to sit at this desk all night and I have no one to talk to.”

“Maybe, but your theory doesn’t explain the fact that I can sleep in this shitty motel out of all the places on Earth. Because this is definitely not a good place.”

“No. The Sun Down is not a good place. But you can sleep in it because it suits you—at least right now. I know because it suits me, too.”

Nick frowned. “That’s truly messed up.”

I held up the book I’d brought to read tonight—Ann Rule’s classic The Stranger Beside Me. I’d read it so many times it was falling apart. “Have you met me?”

He laughed, which gave me a rush of pleasure. Which I tried to ignore. “So what do we do next?” he said.

I put the book down. “We talk to Alma tomorrow about whether any of this should be turned over to the Fell PD. And we try to find out everything we can about Simon Hess. He could be my aunt’s killer. And we know he crossed paths with her at least once.” I slid the photo across the desk that showed Viv at the motel with Hess’s car in the corner of the frame. “He disappeared around the same time she did. I think if we know why, we can solve what happened to her.”

“I have another question to add to the pile.” Nick put the strips of negatives he’d been looking at on the desk. “Why do we have more negatives than we have prints?”

I sat up straighter. “We do?”

“Yes. I’ve been looking at the negatives, matching them up. There are four photos in the negatives that we don’t have prints of.” He pointed to them, though lying on the desk they just looked like splotches of nitrate. “It looks like some kind of outdoor shot—trees or something. What is it, and where are those photos, and why didn’t Marnie Clark give them to you?”

I looked at the strip of negative and bit my lip. “I guess I’ll get out the phone book. There must be somewhere in town that develops old negatives. After all, this is Fell.”