The Resort

by Bentley Little

  “I know we’re right,” Rachel snapped. “What did you think? We were lying?”

  “No, ma’am. Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “We just want our rooms back,” Lowell said.

  “And we want to know how something like this could happen in the first place,” Rachel said pointedly.

  “I’m very sorry. I don’t know how it could have happened. What I can do is upgrade you to a deluxe suite. Two bedrooms, sitting room, luxury bath with sauna shower. It’s much nicer than the adjoining rooms you have now. And you’ll be closer to the pool.”

  “Am I going to have to pay extra for this?” Lowell asked.

  “Oh no, sir.”

  “All of our things are still in there,” Rachel said. “Our luggage, our personal items . . . everything.”

  “Like I said, we’re very sorry for the inconvenience. Let me call Mr. Blodgett, and we’ll get this straightened out.” She picked up the phone, punched in the room number and the pound sign. “Hello . . .” she started to say.

  They could hear Mr. Blodgett’s tirade even from where they stood.

  The desk clerk attempted to placate the man, but it was clear that he was in no mood to be pacified. “I understand,” the young woman assured him. “Yes, that is why I’m calling . . . yes, I understand . . . yes, it is our fault . . . I know exactly how you feel . . . yes . . . yes.”

  Listening to Eileen’s side of the conversation, Lowell felt sorry for the young woman. True, it was The Reata’s fault and such a thing should never have occurred, but at the same time everyone made mistakes. This wasn’t the person who had checked them in; she might not have checked in Mr. Blodgett. Yet she was taking the heat for it.

  Rachel, he saw, shared no such sympathy for the girl.

  After a too-long conversation filled with almost constant apologies and a promise to halve Blodgett’s room rate, Eileen finally got the man to agree to open his doors and let them take out their belongings. She gave them card keys to their new suite and said that a porter would meet them in front of their old rooms to help them move. “Again,” she said, “we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “You should be,” Rachel told her.

  The porter was waiting for them outside of the room when they returned, a clean-cut young man who looked like he should be a cast member at Disneyland (Lance. Las Vegas, Nevada. Four Years). He’d brought along a luggage cart and parked it next to the door, and when they walked up, he nodded politely, then knocked on the door. “Mr. Blodgett?”

  “Give me a minute!” Blodgett yelled roughly. “Jesus Christ!”

  The porter smiled at Lowell apologetically.

  A moment later, they heard a muffled “All right! Hurry up and do it, then!”

  There’d been no click, no sound of a disengaging latch, but Lowell tried to open the door anyway. As he suspected, it was still locked, and the porter had to let them in with a passkey. They stepped inside. The bed was unmade, as though Blodgett had been sleeping in it, and a single suitcase was lying open on the dresser. Otherwise, everything was as they’d left it. The man himself was nowhere to be seen in the bedroom/sitting room area or the large open bathroom, but the door to the small alcove housing the toilet was closed. “Make it quick!” Blodgett said from inside.

  Lowell opened the door separating 522 from 523 and told the kids to get their things together. He and Rachel started gathering their belongings. He glanced at the closed door to the toilet. It seemed increasingly suspicious to him that the man had taken the room as his own without asking any questions of the resort staff. Hadn’t he noticed the wet bathing suits hanging from the shower rod? The clothes in the closet? The bags of food on the table? The luggage? Blodgett was either singularly unobservant, a complete moron or some type of psycho. Lowell was beginning to suspect the latter. There seemed something very odd about the way the man was hiding in the toilet closet. Even if he slept in the nude, it would have taken him only a moment to pull on a shirt and a pair of pants. On the other hand, maybe he was embarrassed and didn’t want to face them.

  Although he didn’t seem like the type to be easily embarrassed.

  “Are you through yet?” Blodgett demanded.

  No, there was definitely something weird going on here.

  In the adjoining room, the boys had gathered all of their bags and suitcases together and were carrying them out into the corridor, piling them on the luggage cart. This had become something of an adventure for them, and he could tell that though they were moaning and complaining under their breath, they were relishing the experience and would be reliving this moment endlessly in their conversations for the next week and retelling it to their friends for the rest of the summer.

  Rachel had finished shoving the last stray paperback into a tote bag, and the porter helped them carry their suitcases and ice chest and plastic sacks out of the rooms and onto the cart. The second they brought out the final load, the door slammed shut behind them. There was a loud angry click as the security lock was engaged. He had not seen Blodgett, although the man must have been right behind them as they headed out the door, and when he met Rachel’s eyes, he saw that she had not caught a glimpse of him either.

  Something about that made him uneasy.

  They had no idea where they were going, but the porter—Lance—obviously knew the way to their new suite, and they followed him up a winding cement pathway, past occasional couples and families out for leisurely evening strolls, past other hotel workers hurrying through the darkness to provide for guests’ needs.

  This building was smaller than the one housing their previous rooms and was in the shape of a V. It contained only four suites—two up, two down—and the porter led them to the upper right, where Lowell slid his card into the reader and then opened the door. If their previous room was the largest and most luxurious he had ever seen, their new lodgings made that look like ship’s quarters. And the view was breathtaking. They were slightly higher than they had been previously, and in addition to the panorama of the desert, they could see much of The Reata laid out before them, its buildings and tennis courts and lighted pathways looking like an oasis of civilization against the vast darkness of the wild.

  With the porter’s help, they unloaded their belongings from the luggage cart. Lowell was unsure whether he was expected to tip the man or not—he had helped them move, but then again there would have been no reason to move had The Reata not screwed up and double booked their room—but when he made a move to reach for his wallet, Rachel stopped his hand and gave a quick angry shake of her head. So Lowell merely thanked the man and closed and locked the door behind him.

  “There’s a TV in the bathroom!” Ryan called.

  “You can take a dump and watch cartoons!” Curtis said, giggling.

  “Curtis . . .” Rachel warned.

  It was a great suite, the type ordinarily seen only in the glossy magazines in their mundane little hotel rooms. Each of the bedrooms had walk-in closets and large Santa Fe- style dressers with overstuffed earth-toned couches big enough to sleep on, a fact that the boys picked up on instantly. “Can Ryan sleep on the couch?” Owen asked. “I don’t want him in my bed.” There were two queen-size beds in the room.

  “Me either,” Curtis echoed.

  “It’s up to Ryan,” Rachel told them.

  “I want to sleep on the couch!” Ryan announced.

  The phone rang, and Rachel answered. “Hello? Yes, we did . . . yes . . . okay . . . all of it? That’s great. . . . Yes . . . yes . . . okay. Thank you.” She hung up and grinned. “Everything in the minibar,” she said. “Comped.”

  They turned the key to open the small refrigerator. In addition to cans of beer and bottles of liquor, there were soft drinks, orange juice and a selection of candy bars.

  “The Milky Way’s mine,” Curtis called.

  “After we unpack,” Lowell said. “Put everything away and then you can have candy bars.”

  The boys dragged their bag
s and suitcases into their room and started putting their clothes in the dresser while he and Rachel did the same in their room. Suddenly Rachel paused, stopped. A funny look came over her face, and she started digging through each piece of luggage and then searching the tote bags and the plastic sack with the wet bathing suits.

  “What is it?” Lowell asked. “Is something missing?” He thought of Blodgett’s angry complaints and gruff shouting.

  She looked at him, her face flushed, anxious. “Yes.”

  “What?”

  She glanced out the open door to make sure the kids weren’t outside and couldn’t hear. “Panties,” she said quietly. “A pair of my panties is gone.”

  Four

  Rachel heard the thunder and got up from bed to look out the window, cracking open the louvered shutters just enough to be able to see outside. Lowell was dead asleep, sprawled over half the bed, and the kids were in the next room, zonked out from the heat and the swimming and the generally chaotic events of the day. She knew this was the monsoon season in southern Arizona from reading the Tucson Living and Southwest Lifestyle magazines provided by the resort, and indeed the weather forecast on the local news that they’d watched had predicted a thunderstorm sometime after ten. Tomorrow, however, was supposed to be clear and over a hundred degrees.

  Humidity really did make a difference, she thought. People were always joking about the cliché “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” as though the phrase were false or inane, but this afternoon, lying out by the pool in hundred-degree heat, it honestly had felt cooler and more pleasant than a typical eighty-degree day in Southern California.

  Not that she would ever want to live here.

  It was a nice place to visit, but . . .

  The truth was that it wasn’t even that nice of a place to visit. She couldn’t say why exactly, couldn’t put her finger on anything, but ever since they’d arrived at the resort, even before the mix-up with the room, a part of her had been thinking that she’d rather be back home, back at work.

  That was silly, though. This place had everything. Gym, spa, pool, hiking trails, tennis courts, luxurious air-conditioned rooms with satellite television, a wonderful restaurant. So why would she rather be at work? She didn’t even like her job all that much. It was just a stopgap position, something to do until . . . until . . .

  Until what?

  She realized suddenly that she had a job rather than a career, and she wondered when that had happened. Lowell had always had that attitude, had always considered a job to be merely something one did in order to make enough money to support a family and a lifestyle, but she had started out more ambitiously, more optimistically. She’d always loved art and drawing, which was why she’d earned her degree in graphic design in college. And the first few years after graduation, she’d worked at a local design firm, rising upward through the ranks. When the company went under, she’d been forced to take a day job at a bank, although she continued to apply at various graphics houses, even doing a couple of freelance jobs that led to additional contract work. Somewhere along the line, though, she’d gotten derailed, had stopped freelancing, stopped applying, made friends with her coworkers and settled in at the bank. When, though? When the twins came along, perhaps. With kids and a full-time job, she simply hadn’t had the time or energy to pursue her own career goals.

  Did she resent Lowell for this? No. Well . . . maybe just a little. Deep down. But she never thought about it, and she didn’t know why she was thinking of it now. They were on vacation, for God’s sake. She should be enjoying the luxuries surrounding her instead of creating dissatisfaction where it didn’t exist.

  Lightning suddenly flashed, illuminating the billowing storm clouds, and her heart jumped in her chest. She had never been one of those people afraid of thunder or lightning. On the contrary, she’d always enjoyed storms, found them to be curiously appealing, almost soothing, particularly at night when she was safely ensconced indoors as the weather raged outside. But it seemed as if the overarching cloud revealed by the lightning had the clear contours of a face.

  A heavy masculine face filled with uncontrollable rage.

  She tried to tell herself that she had just imagined it, but lightning flashed again, and the visage was still there, closer, the deep-set eyes trained directly on her as though looking across the distance through the window of her room, into her eyes. She stepped back from the shutters, frightened. Maybe she was still asleep, she thought. Maybe this was all part of a nightmare. It did have that sense of foggy surrealism usually associated with dreams, but somehow she knew that this was really happening.

  Feeling alone, feeling afraid, she picked up the remote control from her nightstand and turned on the television, but the storm must have affected the satellite reception because only two stations came in. The first was showing a horror movie. Children Who Won’t Sleep was the title, according to the ID bar that appeared temporarily on top of the screen, and Rachel saw a spooky wide-eyed girl in a windblown camisole standing atop a desert bluff at night. That was too close for comfort, and, chilled, she flipped through the channels until she found the only other station on air—something called AdultVue. The bar said this film was called Return to Beaver Valley, and in it one woman had her face buried in the hairy crotch of another woman who was moaning in ecstasy, eyes closed and lipsticked lips parted sensuously.

  She shut off the television before one of the boys heard anything.

  Outside, thunder rumbled.

  Rachel thought of that fierce cloud countenance and the terrible rage she had seen there. She considered waking up Lowell but decided that was stupid. What was there to be afraid of? A random convergence of clouds that happened to resemble a scary face? How old was she, ten?

  Still, she looked toward the shuttered window with dread. Between the slats and around the edges, the flash of lightning shone through, a blinding white that made the surrounding darkness even deeper. It reminded her of a scene in a horror movie, and she was unable to make herself move forward to once again look outside, scared that the cloud face would now be right next to the glass, glaring at her with its terrible expression of rage and hate.

  She stood there for a moment, trying to think through the situation logically. What else could it be other than a chance coalescence of storm clouds? God? A demon? It made no rational sense for any sort of supernatural entity to manipulate water vapor so that it resembled an evil face, and there certainly wasn’t any sort of monster that was made out of cloud. Not that she believed in that sort of stuff to begin with. No, she was upset, her brain was tired and her mind was simply putting a morbid spin on perfectly natural events.

  She forced herself to move forward across the darkened room, sidling next to the slightly open shutter slats, looking down this time instead of up. Below, the grounds of the resort were bathed in darkness, low lights along the pathways combining with the occasional flash of lightning to create a shifting world of shadows. The lights of the tennis court were off, as were those on the building housing the spa facility. The palms and saguaros and landscaped bushes seemed menacing and out of proportion, and made her think of the living trees that attacked Disney’s Snow White.

  A figure walked across the grass below, a dark shape that had been lurking near the edge of the building beyond her sight line but now moved suspiciously across the open expanse of lawn like a thief on his way to rob a house. Rachel could see only a silhouette, no details, but she could tell it was a man not a woman. A gardener. He was carrying a rake but something about the way he held it made it seem more like a weapon than a tool, and there was in his carriage and bearing the suggestion of violence, as though this was a man used to physically intimidating people.

  The figure reached the head of a lighted pathway where he stopped, turned, looked up. Though she could not see the features of the shadowed face, she could see the eyes, bright and wide and trained on her.

  Immediately, instinctively, she stepped away from the window, hid in
the darkness of the room. There was no way he could see her through the slats. He probably wasn’t even looking at her, was probably just checking out the trees next to the building to see when they needed to be trimmed. But she was creeped out nonetheless, and she remained in the darkness for a few moments, away from the window, waiting, giving him time to leave and get to wherever he was going at—she glanced over at the clock—one fifteen in the morning.

  Where could he be going? While he was carrying a rake, it was highly unlikely that he would be doing grounds work in the middle of the night. True, resorts and other high-end businesses sometimes made their hired help work in the wee small hours so as not to disturb guests. But while custodians could buff lobby floors thanks to inside lights, it was pretty close to impossible to prune flowers or trim bushes outside in the dark.

  She thought of going back to bed, wanting to just put this night behind her and wake up when the world was fresh and sunny, but she had to look, she had to know, and once more she moved next to the window.

  He was still in the same spot, looking up at her, and the second she peeked down through the slats at him, he raised his weaponlike rake as if in greeting.

  And then . . .

  he danced.

  It was a strange little jig, lasting only a few seconds, but it was clearly for her benefit, and she held her breath as lightning flashed and the man danced crazily, feet stomping furiously on the grass, hands twirling the rake. Then he was gone, disappearing into the night.

  Rachel exhaled, unaware until that moment that she’d been holding her breath. She scanned the ground below, looking for any sign of the gardener, but he was gone. Glancing into the sky at a fading flash of lightning, the clouds were once again just clouds. The show was over.