The Sun Down Motel

“Do you think he needs a lawyer?” I finally asked, miserable.

“No,” Viv said. “He won’t need a lawyer. There wasn’t a crime committed, unless they want to try pinning a stopped heart and a bunch of motel mold on him. They’re questioning him extra long because of who he is.”

Because he was Nick Harkness, whose father committed one of Fell’s most famous murders, and who had made a lot of mistakes afterward. Who had been in and out of trouble until he finally left Fell. We could never prove anything, but I always wondered if Nick was really upstairs in his room like he said he was.

I didn’t know why I felt I had to say it, but I did. “Nick was in his bedroom that day.”

“Yes, I know,” Viv said.

“Alma doesn’t think so.”

“Did she tell you that?” Viv looked at me, still holding my hand. “Alma likes to rattle people if she can. It’s a cop reflex. You should take it as a compliment. It means you shook her up.”

It was the first time Viv had admitted she even knew Alma, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything. “He’s not a criminal.”

“No,” Viv said. “I am.”

I looked into her eyes. She really did have beautiful eyes, my aunt Viv. They looked like my mother’s.

“They’ve identified Simon Hess,” she said. “Dental records, though it isn’t official yet. They’re going to process the car top to bottom for evidence.”

She squeezed my hand, then let me go and stood up.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, but turned away. The door behind the desk opened, and Nick came out. His blue eyes lit briefly with surprise when he saw me, and then he came my way.

“Hi there,” Viv said to the night shift desk clerk. “I need to talk to a detective.”

Nick came toward me. Tears stung my eyes.

“No,” I said softly, but I didn’t stop her.

“What is it regarding?” the desk clerk asked.

Nick put his hand on my shoulder.

“The body they found in the trunk of a car this morning,” Viv said. “I put it there. My name is Vivian Delaney, and I disappeared thirty-five years ago. I’d like to make a confession.”

It was surprisingly calm, surprisingly civilized. The desk clerk made a phone call. Then he stood up and said, “Come with me.”

Vivian didn’t look back as she followed him into the police station. The door clicked closed behind her.

Fell, New York

February 2018

Three Months Later



   CARLY



   It got cold that winter. The snow started early in December and didn’t let up. The winds were icy, the roads hard. I barely made it home to Illinois for Christmas.

I stayed with my brother, Graham, and his fiancée for three days. Then I got back in my car and drove back to Fell.

Graham and Hailey didn’t understand it. Why I wanted to be in Fell, of all places. Why I didn’t want to leave. Why Fell, the place where our aunt had committed murder and pretended to vanish, was home. But it was.

I stayed with Heather for another month, and then I moved into Viv’s apartment on the other side of town. Most people would think it strange that I would take over my aunt’s place after she was indicted for murder—specifically, voluntary manslaughter—but Heather didn’t. “Why not?” she said when I suggested it. “It fits in with the rest of this weird story.”

So I moved in. I quit college—another pissed-off lecture from Graham—and researched what I really wanted to do. For the first months of winter, I lived a quiet life. I read books. I walked. I hung out with Heather. And I spent dozens of hours, days, in the Fell Central Library, reading and researching. Thinking.

Callum’s autopsy showed that he had died of a brain aneurysm that night at the Sun Down. A quick and painless death, apparently. I was glad he hadn’t suffered. There was a funeral, but it was small and private. I wasn’t invited, and I didn’t attend.

The body of Callum’s grandfather, Simon Hess, was officially identified by police in early December. The cause of death was two stab wounds, one to the chest and one to the neck. The neck wound, said the coroner, had likely been the one to kill Hess, though if left untended the chest wound would have done it in time. The murder weapon was not found on the body, though it was determined to be a hunting knife, very sharp, the blade four to six inches in length.

Vivian Delaney’s defense claimed she had killed Hess in self-defense when Hess admitted to her that he was a serial killer. It made state and national headlines when Hess’s DNA was matched to the DNA found on Betty Graham, Cathy Caldwell, and Tracy Waters. There was no DNA found on Victoria Lee, since she was killed in haste and not raped.

Betty’s, Cathy’s, and Tracy’s families found closure. Victoria’s did not.

I didn’t go back to work at the Sun Down after that night, and neither did anyone else. The building was damaged from the roof to the foundation. Chris, the owner, tried to keep it open, but there were no customers and a county health inspector informed him that he had to close it down. The mold and the damp were a health hazard, the plaster ceilings and walls were starting to crumble to inhalable dust, and the heat didn’t work in the cold. The water pipes froze and the electricity went out, the sign going dark for good.

So Chris did what any sensible man, saddled with an unwanted and unviable business, would do: He got an insurance payout, put the land up for sale for next to nothing, and had the building condemned.

In late December, just after Christmas, a quick chain-link fence went up around the Sun Down, laced with signs that said PRIVATE PROPERTY. The motel sign came down and was carted away in a specialized truck. And in February, when the sky was muddy gray and the ground was churned with dirty snow and slush, the bulldozers and other vehicles moved in.

I watched it. I parked my car on the side of Number Six Road and walked to the chain-link fence, my gloved hands in my pockets and a hat pulled over my ears, the wind freezing my nose and my cheeks, chapping my lips. It wasn’t dramatic or even very interesting; there was no one else there to watch as the machines rumbled around the demolition site, pulling down walls and drilling into the concrete of the parking lot. There was no swelling music, no choir or curtain to fall. Just the streaked, darkening sky and the snow starting to fall as the crew worked day in and day out.

Betty Graham wasn’t there. Neither was Simon Hess, or the little boy, or Henry the smoking man. They were all dead and gone.

My phone rang in my pocket as I stood by the fence, and I pulled it out and yanked off my mitten to answer it. “Hello?”