The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  There was no light switch, just blank wall. She found the outline of the door beneath her fingertips and followed it to the doorknob, which she turned and pushed. A glimpse of parking lot, a rush of sweet cold air—and the door swung closed again.

  “Hey,” Viv said aloud, her voice cracking. Then: “Hey,” a little bit louder. She found the doorknob again, grasped it. It wouldn’t turn.

  The ice machine shut off abruptly, and now all she could hear was her own breath sawing in and out of her lungs. “Hey,” she said again, louder, though she didn’t know who she was talking to. She banged the side of her fist on the door once, wondering if anyone in any of the rooms would hear her. If they did, would they bother to come out?

  She banged again and was shoved backward by a force against her chest. She stumbled, the hard bone of her shoulder blade hitting the edge of the candy machine, pain flaring upward. She flung her hands back and tried to scrabble for purchase.

  Run, a voice said, a breath of wind, a hiss of air.

  The door flung open, so hard it hit the wall behind it with a bang. Then it hung limply, creaking in the September wind.

  Viv bolted out of the door and into the parking lot. She was gasping for breath, but one thing rang around and around in her mind, like an alarm going off without stopping: Those were hands. Those were HANDS. Two hands, two palms, their distinct shape against her rib cage as they shoved her. Viv stumbled, put her hands on her knees, trying not to throw up with fear.

  That was when, through the panicked ringing in her ears, she finally heard the shouting.

  * * *

  • • •

  The office was quiet and tidy, just as she’d left it. She came through the door on numb feet and dropped into the chair behind the desk, her hands shaking, looking for something Janice had pointed out on her first night. She found it tacked to the wall next to the desk: a piece of paper labeled FELL POLICE DEPT. In case anyone gets rowdy, Janice had told her. They know who we are. Viv picked up the office phone.

  There was no dial tone on the other end of the line. Instead, there was a man’s voice. “Helen, just tell me what’s going on.”

  Viv went still.

  “I have no idea.” The woman’s reply was calm, her voice low and sexy as whiskey. “Someone is arguing in the parking lot. Two men. They look like truckers. The night shift girl said she’d call the police.”

  That was me, Viv thought. I said that.

  “How late will you be?” the man said.

  “I have no idea,” Helen replied. “I could be all night.”

  Viv went very still, trying not to breathe and listening. I have no idea how, but I’m hearing the phone line from room 121.

  Then she thought, I should hang up.

  “I just want you home safe,” the man said. “I’m waiting for you. I’ll stay up.”

  “You know that isn’t a good idea,” Helen said, her voice tired. “I’ll call you when I’m free, okay?”

  Viv listened as they said a few more words, then hung up. She felt a little bit sick. I should have hung up, she thought. Why didn’t I hang up? She pictured herself calling the man back—though she didn’t have a phone number—and saying, Your wife is lying to you!

  But of course she wouldn’t do that.

  Instead she toggled the phone a few times to make sure the line was clear, then dialed the number for the Fell Police Department.

  A bored, gravelly male voice answered. “Fell PD.”

  “Hi,” Viv said. “I, um, I work at the Sun Down Motel. At reception.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a fight going on in our parking lot. Two truckers. They’re, um, fighting.”

  This didn’t impress him. “They armed?”

  “I don’t think so?” she said, hating how she sounded like a stupid girl, which of course he assumed she was. She thought of the woman with the whiskey voice, how effortlessly dignified she was, and she made an effort to change her tone, sound more worldly. “I didn’t see any weapons. But they’re having a fistfight and punching each other right now.”

  “’Kay,” the man said. “Hold tight. Chances are they’ll sort it out themselves, but we’ll send someone anyway.”

  Ten minutes later, the fight was still happening. The guests had stayed in their rooms and Viv was standing by the office door, poking her head out and biting the hangnail on her thumb. Her shoulder throbbed. She caught a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. Not now, she pleaded silently to the smoking man, Not now.

  A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot, silent, cherry lights off. It pulled up in front of the two trucks that were parked in the lot, next to the fighting men, and a cop got out. Viv breathed a sigh of relief, and then she realized the cop was too small, too slight, the hair tied up at the back of her neck. It was a woman.

  She took another step out onto the walkway to see more closely. A woman cop? She’d never seen one except on Cagney & Lacey.

  But this cop was real. Unlike Cagney and Lacey she was wearing a uniform, dark blue polyester with a cap on her head. Her belt was heavy with a gun holster, a nightstick, and a radio, but it fit her hips snugly and she walked with a swagger that looked powerful and confident. As Viv watched, she walked straight to the fighting truckers and pulled one man off the other, breaking them up.

  The truckers obeyed. They looked angry and one spit on the ground next to the cop’s feet, but they stopped fighting and stood still as the cop spoke to them. Viv watched her take out a notebook and pen and start writing down information, like she wasn’t at least fifty pounds lighter than each man.

  When the cop finished writing, she took the radio from her belt and talked into it. Both truckers retreated to their trucks. The one who had spit turned and added a second gob, aiming it so it hit close to the cop’s heel without hitting her. The cop didn’t seem to notice, or care.

  She turned and saw Viv standing at the corner of the office. Caught gawking, Viv raised a hand in a shy hello. The cop nodded and started in her direction as Viv ducked back into the office.

  “Crazy night,” the cop said as she followed Viv through the office door. Up close, Viv could see that the cop wasn’t more than thirty, with dark brown hair tied neatly back under her cap. She wasn’t precisely pretty, but she had high cheekbones, dark brown eyes, and a tired air of complete confidence. Viv retreated behind the desk and touched her teased hair, suddenly self-conscious about her white blouse on its third wear and her ugly uniform vest.

  “Crazy,” Viv said, thinking, You have no idea. No idea at all. She pressed her shaking hands together and hid them under the desk. She could still feel the imprint of the two palms on her chest, shoving her backward. She worked hard to take a deep breath.

  The cop yanked a chair from its spot against the wall next to the rack of ancient and wilted tourist brochures and plopped down in it, pulling out her notebook and crossing her legs. “It says here it was called in by one Vivian Delaney. Is that you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Viv said.

  The cop gave her an amused look. “I’m no more a ma’am than you are, honey. My name is Alma Trent. Officer Trent. Okay?”

  “Yes, okay, Officer Trent,” Viv said. Why was it so comforting to have a cop around? It was an instinctive thing. She can’t protect you from ghosts, Viv reminded herself. No one can.

  Officer Trent tilted her head a degree, studying Viv. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Uh-huh,” Alma Trent said. She had a no-bones way of speaking, but her eyes weren’t unkind. Without knowing she was doing it, Viv glanced and saw she wore no wedding ring. “You from around here?” the cop asked.

  “Huh?” Stupid, she sounded so stupid.

  “Here.” The cop made a circle with her index finger. “Around here. Are you from it?”

  “No, ma’am. Officer Trent. I’m f
rom Illinois.” Viv closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I sound like this. It’s been a long night. I’ve never talked to a policeman—woman—before.”

  “That’s a nice sort of person to be,” Officer Trent said, again not unkindly. “The kind who has never talked to the police, I mean. You’re the night girl, I take it?”

  This time, she sounded slightly less idiotic. “Yes.”

  “On shift every night?”

  “Yes, though I get one night a week off.”

  “Worked here long?” The questions were rapid-fire, probably to help Viv keep her thoughts straight. It was working.

  “Four weeks,” Viv said, and then she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked at a calendar, taken note of what day it was. “Five, maybe.”

  “You called us in before?”

  “No.”

  “First time, then.” It was conversational, but Officer Trent’s gaze didn’t leave Viv. “No disturbances until now?”

  “No.” Unless you counted the lights going out, the ghosts coming out, and whatever had been lurking in the AMENITIES room. Run. Viv cleared her throat and tried not to shudder. “It’s usually quiet here.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” the cop said. “We sometimes get calls about hookers and dealers out here. You see anything like that?”

  Was she supposed to tell on her employer? What if she got fired? She saw hookers and dealers every day; if Alma Trent didn’t know that, she wasn’t a very good cop. “I don’t know,” Viv said. “It kind of seems like none of my business.”

  “A philosopher, I see,” Officer Trent said. “You’ll fit right in at the Sun Down.” She gave Viv a smile and leaned back in her chair. “I work nights, so it’s usually me who gets the call. Drug deals, drunk and disorderly, fights, domestics, runaway teenagers. That’s the kind of thing that happens out here. If you’ve been here five weeks, I think you have the idea.”

  Viv sat up in her chair. For a second, the ghosts were forgotten. “You work nights? Do you like it?”

  Alma shrugged. “I’m the only woman at the station, so they put me on nights and they won’t take me off,” she said matter-of-factly. “They probably want me to quit, but I haven’t yet. Turns out I sort of like the night shift. To tell the truth, I barely remember what daytime looks like, and I don’t miss it.”

  “I’m barely even tired anymore,” Viv said.

  Alma nodded. “They say it’s bad for you, but then again, everything’s bad for you. Soda, cigarettes, you name it. If you don’t have a body like Olivia Newton-John’s, then you’re doing something wrong. Personally, I don’t buy it. I think it’s instructive to be awake in the middle of the night every once in a while. To really see what you’re missing while you’re usually sleeping.”

  “Not everything you see is good,” Viv said.

  “No, definitely not.” Alma smiled. “You seem like a nice girl. The Sun Down is a little rough for you, isn’t it?”

  “The people aren’t so bad.” The living ones, anyway. She chose her words carefully. She didn’t even know Officer Trent, but it felt good to talk to someone, even for a few minutes. “I left home. I just wanted to be alone for a while, I guess.”

  “Fell is a good place for that.” Alma stood up.

  She had walked most of the way to the office door when Viv said, “Who died in the pool?”

  Alma stopped, turned. Her mouth was set in a line. “What?”

  Viv took a breath, smelled smoke again. For God’s sake, call an ambulance! The voice had been right here in this room, not two feet away. Alma Trent had to know. “Someone died in the pool, right? A kid.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Alma’s voice was sharp, cautious.

  Viv made herself shrug. “A rumor.”

  There was a long beat of silence as Alma looked at her. Then she said, “You shouldn’t believe every rumor you hear. But yes, a boy died in the pool two years ago. Hit his head on the side of the pool, he went unconscious, and he never woke up. But I don’t know how you could have heard that, since Janice never talks about it and Henry can’t have told you.”

  “Henry?” Viv asked.

  “The man who worked here at the time,” Alma said. “He was the one who called it in. He had a heart attack six months later.” She pointed to Viv. “He was sitting in that very chair.”

  Viv was silent. She thought she might be sick.

  “Someday you’re going to tell me how you knew that,” Officer Trent said. “Those aren’t the worst things that have happened here. But I think you guessed that, too.” She nodded. “Have a nice night, Vivian Delaney. Call me if you need me again.”

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  They hired me. There probably weren’t very many other applicants; maybe there weren’t any at all. But I found myself at eleven o’clock at night four days later, sitting in the Sun Down’s office with a miserable man named Chris, learning the job of night clerk. Chris was about fifty, and he said he was the son of the motel’s original owners. He wore a blue plaid flannel shirt and high-waisted jeans, and he was as unhappy as any guy I’d ever met, even in high school. Misery came off him like a smell.

  “Keys are in here,” he said, opening the desk drawer. “We never changed to an electronic card system, because that costs a lot of money. We have problems with electronics in this place, anyway. We tried a booking computer for a while, but it never worked, and eventually it just stopped turning on. So we still use the book.” He gestured to the big leather book on the desk where guests wrote their names.

  “Okay,” I said. My job as a barista had been way higher tech than this. “Landline, too, huh?” I gestured at the old phone.

  Chris glanced at it. “You can use your cell out here if you get reception. We don’t have Wi-Fi unless you steal one of the local signals when the weather is right. Again, the electronics problem, and Wi-Fi costs money. Nancy comes at noon every day to make up any rooms that have been used—you’ll never see her. Dirty laundry goes in the bin in the back. Laundry is picked up and dropped off every week, again during the day. You won’t see them, either.”

  I was still stuck on the Internet thing. “There’s no Internet? None at all?”

  That got me a look of disdain. “I guess that’s a problem for someone your age, right? I bet you’d like to get paid to stay up all night and Twitter.”

  I gave him my best poker face. “Yes,” I said. “It’s a dream of mine to make minimum wage to sit in a motel office and Twitter. Like, totally. When I get extra ambitious, I Facebook.”

  “This country is going to the shitter in a handbasket,” Chris said.

  “It’s ‘hell in a handbasket,’ actually. The saying.”

  “Whatever. Wear this.” He handed me a dark blue vest with the logo on the breast. “Honestly, I won’t know if you actually wear it, but you’re supposed to. We were going to update them, but—”

  “That costs money,” I filled in for him.

  I gave him a smile, but he just looked sad. “My parents paid a song for this place,” he said. “Dad bought the land off of some old farmer and had the motel built for cheap. The land was supposed to be the real investment, with the motel just a way to make money to pay the taxes. I guess they were going to sell when the value went up.” He sighed. “It never did, because they never built that damn amusement park. Now my parents are dead and the place is mine. I tried to sell it around 2000, but no takers. So here we are. The few thousand bucks a year it makes is cheaper than paying an agent to sell it.”

  I took the polyester vest, feeling its thick plasticky texture between my fingers. “Then how do you make a living?” I asked.

  “I sell car insurance. Always have. Stateline Auto in town. If you need insurance, call me.” He looked around, his eyes tired. “Frankly, I hate this place. I come out here as little a
s possible. Every memory I have of this place is bad.”

  I wanted to ask what that meant, but the expression on his face had shut down. So I said, “If you want to save money, why have a night clerk at all?”

  “We tried going without one in the nineties, and frankly the hookers took over. They stayed here all night, did damage I had to fix, and took off without paying. Profits actually went down, if you can believe it. Turns out having someone here makes people behave, at least a little.” He pointed to a pinboard on the wall next to the desk with a note on it. “Call the cops if you need to. Most people are just jerks who back down when you tell them to knock it off. We’ve never had anyone get violent with a night clerk.”

  “Except for the one who went missing,” I said.

  Chris blinked at me. “What?”

  “The night clerk who went missing in 1982.”

  “How the hell did you hear about that?”

  “It was in the papers,” I said, which wasn’t a lie.

  “Oh, God,” he said, running a hand through his thinning hair. He seemed horrified. “Don’t bring that up, okay? I thought everyone had forgotten about that. That was in my parents’ time. You weren’t even born.”

  “Did you know her?” I asked him.

  “I was a kid, so no.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “Who knows? It’s ancient history. Please don’t bring it up. We don’t need even fewer customers than we already have.”

  That was the end of my interview with Chris about my aunt’s disappearance. Score zero for Nancy Drew.

  When Chris left, I dropped the blue polyester vest on a chair and went to work. I started with the desk, opening all the drawers and rifling through them. Except for the room keys, each of which was on a ring on a leather tab with a number stamped on it, there was nothing interesting.

  Next, I moved to the desktop. It was chipped wood with a Formica top. There was a blotter, pencils and pens, the old telephone with big square buttons across the bottom to open different lines. None of the buttons were lit at the moment. On the corner was the guest book, a large leather binder with pages inside. I hovered my hand over the guest book, then stopped.