Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

  Shauna did not even look up from her magazine. “Let it drop.”

  “I’m not going to let it drop. I called, and they were supposed to bring it to us. I’m going up to that front desk and give them hell.”

  “Chapman…”

  “Stay here. I’ll be back.” He grabbed one of the key cards from the table in front of her and went out, closing the door behind him. Down the walkway that led to the lower parking lot, he spotted a maid pushing a cleaning cart away from their building.

  “You!” he called out.

  The woman turned to face him. Young, slim and Hispanic, she was prettier than he was expecting. Her nametag said Rosa.

  The fact that she was attractive didn’t give her a free pass. “Where’s my hair conditioner?” Chapman demanded. “I called the office a half hour ago, and they were supposed to send someone over to deliver it to our room.”

  He had reached her by this point and saw, next to a clipboard on the cart, a tray of toiletries in plastic bottles. “Give me four of those,” he said, pointing. “Hair conditioner.”

  “Yes, sir,” the maid replied, looking at him boldly. He didn’t like the expression on her face. What should have been a subservient smile was closer to a smirk. And was that “sir” sarcastic? He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded that way to him. Bitch was probably illegal. He thought of threatening to call the INS if she didn’t shape up, putting the fear of God in her, but this had already taken too much time and he wanted to hit the pool, so he took the bottles she chose for him and left. He’d complain to the management later. For a place with such a great reputation, the service here was so far disappointing.

  They’d hear about it when he filled out the customer satisfaction card he’d seen on the desk in their room.

  “Got ’em!” he announced when he returned.

  Shauna was already getting into her bathing suit. She’d shaved since yesterday, he noticed. “Good for you,” she replied. “I’m going to take a dip.”

  “Me, too,” he told her. “Hold on a sec. Let me change.”

  Moments later, they were on their way down to the lower pool, she carrying several magazines, he with a hefty political biography he’d been meaning to read for the past year but had never gotten around to. They chose two lounge chairs near the deep end, slipping off their sandals as they put their reading material on the small glass-topped table between them. “Can you get us some towels?” Shauna asked, nodding toward a cabana near the shallow end of the pool.

  “Be back in a minute.” Passing other couples laying out, trying to avoid the splashing of a family playing Marco Polo in the water, Chapman made his way across the hot cement to the cabana. Inside, he saw the same maid he’d encountered earlier, talking to a young man holding a tray of drinks. She glanced in Chapman’s direction, whispered something in the young man’s ear and smiled. There was a sly look on her face that he didn’t like.

  This had to be nipped in the bud.

  Chapman strode up to the cabana’s counter. “Give me two towels,” he ordered the maid.

  She grabbed two from the shelf behind her as the kid with the drinks exited through a rear door. “Here, sir.” But when he brought the white towels back to where Shauna was waiting and unfolded them, he saw that both had large yellow urine stains in the center of the terrycloth material.

  “Jesus!” Grimacing, he dropped the towels on the ground at the foot of his chair and strode purposefully back to the cabana. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  The maid was gone, and behind the counter was a teenaged girl in a red one-piece bathing suit. His outburst startled her. “Sir?”

  Chapman pointed across the pool to the small pile of white cloth at the foot of his lounge chair. “I just picked up two towels, and they had piss stains on them!”

  The girl seemed flustered. “I’m…I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how that could have happened. Our towels are fresh laundered each day, and—”

  He was distracted by movement off to his right. Someone waving. Glancing over, he saw the maid standing behind the Jacuzzi, her left arm wrapped around a pile of towels, her right arm moving back and forth in the air. Snickering, she turned away and disappeared behind a suite of rooms.

  What the hell…?

  He was almost tempted to follow her, but the girl in the cabana was shaking out some new towels to show him they were clean. “I’m sorry for what happened,” she said again. “But these are nice and clean. And if you need any others—”

  He took the towels and returned to their chairs. Someone had already come and taken the piss-stained towels away.

  “It’s that maid,” he told Shauna. “The same one I got the conditioner from. Insolent bitch.”

  “Calm down,” Shauna said. “We’re here to enjoy ourselves. Get in the water and relax.”

  He got in the water, but he couldn’t relax. Swimming laps to work off his frustration, he traversed the length of the pool, back and forth, back and forth, until his arms grew tired and he started to develop a cramp in his side. Shauna was already out and sunning herself, and he pulled himself out of the pool, toweled off and picked up the receiver from a nearby resort phone. “I’m going to order drinks,” he told Shauna. “You want something?”

  “A margarita would be nice.”

  He requested two when the phone was answered, charging the order to their room. Moments later, a runner brought the margaritas, setting the glasses down on the small table between them. Chapman tipped the kid a dollar, then picked up his glass. Something black caught his eye as he was about to lift the drink to his lips.

  There was a dead beetle floating in his glass.

  Caught off guard, he spilled half of the margarita on his stomach and bathing suit before putting the glass back on the tabletop. He could still see the black bug floating in what was left of the drink. His eyes searched the pool area for the employee who’d delivered their order.

  Was the runner the same kid who’d been talking to the maid?

  Now he was just being paranoid. Two coincidences did not make a conspiracy. The maid was not plotting against him. She hadn’t purposely peed on their towels, and she hadn’t told anyone to put a beetle in his drink.

  But…

  But she had been talking to a kid carrying a tray of drinks. And she had been the one to give him the towels. And she did seem to have an attitude.

  He thought of the mocking way she’d waved at him before leaving the pool area.

  Chapman stood. “I’m not putting up with this,” he said.

  “That bug probably just flew in there. I’m sure they’ll give you another one—”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “Where are you going?” Shauna asked as he started away.

  “To solve this.”

  Barefoot and wearing only his wet bathing suit, Chapman walked around the pool and up the path that led to the resort’s lobby. A group of well-dressed Asian tourists were at the front desk, either checking in or checking out, and he waited, dripping on the carpet, until another clerk emerged from the back office. “May I help you, sir?”

  “I’d like to see the manager,” he told her.

  “May I ask what this is about?”

  “Inappropriate conduct by one of your employees. I’d like to see the manager.”

  “Just a minute,” she said solicitously. “Let me get him.”

  Moments later, she returned, followed by a trim man in a blue suit who introduced himself as “Ralph Covey, general manager,” and who formally shook his hand, a sight that must have looked ridiculous to anyone watching. “What seems to be the problem?” Covey asked.

  “It’s one of your maids. She was supposed to deliver hair conditioner to our room, didn’t do it, then when I tracked her down, she was rude to me.”

  “I’m sorry. We try to—”

  “Then,” Chapman continued icily, “she gave me and my wife two towels for the pool that were supposed to be clean but instead had urine stains on the
m. Again, she behaved in a very disrespectful manner. Finally, I saw her conspiring with one of your waiters by the pool who gave me a drink with a very large beetle in it.”

  “I promise, I will get to the bottom of this,” the manager said. “You wouldn’t happen to know this maid’s name?”

  “I think her name’s Rosa?”

  “I’ll look into this, and I assure you that it will not happen again. Our resort has the finest reputation—”

  “It’s why we’re staying here,” Chapman told him.

  “—and we do everything we can to maintain that reputation.” He motioned to the clerk at his side. “We’ll be providing you with comped drinks for your entire stay and will do everything we can to make sure that the rest of your time here is as perfect as we can make it.”

  The clerk had gone around the side of the front desk and returned with an embossed envelope that she handed Chapman. He opened it to see a stack of tickets inside. “These are for your free drinks,” she explained.

  “If you need more, please let me know,” Covey told him. He shook Chapman’s hand again. “And I promise you, I will get this problem taken care of.”

  “Thank you,” Chapman said. “I appreciate it.” He walked out of the lobby the way he’d come and returned to the pool, where he and Shauna ordered new margaritas and spent the rest of the afternoon alternately swimming and lounging in the sun.

  They had a nice dinner that evening at the resort’s restaurant and ate on the patio so they could have a view of the city lights. There were several paths that wound around the grounds, and, afterward, they went for a long stroll, before ending up at their room, where they made love, watched TV and fell asleep.

  Shauna was still asleep and the room was dark when he awoke around five. He had always been an early riser, even on vacations, though she preferred to sleep in. Getting up quietly, he walked slowly through the darkness toward the bathroom, using the bathroom light they’d left on all night to navigate. Once inside, he carefully closed the door, then peeled off his underwear and turned on the shower, letting the water heat up before he stepped in.

  It felt good, the state-of-the-art shower head delivering a warm pulsing spray, and he let it hit his skin for a few moments, luxuriating in the sensation, before picking up the soap and starting to wash. He had opened up the little bottle and was about to shampoo his hair when the bathroom door opened. The shower curtain was pulled aside—

  And the maid stood there, facing him.

  It was the same maid as before, the impudent, attractive one—Rosa—and she met his eyes, pointed at his penis and laughed.

  He grabbed the shower curtain from her and used the bottom portion to cover the lower half of his body. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  She was still smiling. “I knock and there no answer. So, I come in to clean.”

  “It’s six o’clock in the morning!”

  “I thought you check out. I thought this room empty.”

  She was lying. She couldn’t have knocked or she would have awoken Shauna. Which meant that she’d used her pass key and quietly sneaked in.

  Not to mention the fact that, even before opening the bathroom door, she had to have heard the shower.

  This was purposeful.

  “Get out of here now,” Chapman said through gritted teeth.

  She nodded, smirking, and bowed an apology.

  “You’re fired,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  She left, not bothering to close the bathroom door.

  Foregoing the shampoo, Chapman shut off the shower, reached out to pull the door shut and quickly toweled off. Shauna was awake, and she came into the bathroom, frowning. “Was the maid just in here? I woke up and thought I saw—”

  “Yes!” Chapman said, furious. “She snuck into the bathroom while I was taking my shower.”

  “Didn’t you hang the privacy sign on the doorknob?”

  “Of course! But she purposely ignored it.”

  “They’re not supposed to do that.”

  “No shit!” He got out of the shower and started drying himself. “I’m going straight up to the lobby. This is outrageous.”

  Five minutes later, he was dressed and storming up to the front desk, where a timid young woman backed away at his approach. “I want to see the manager!” he barked at her. “Now!”

  She pressed a button on the phone console in front of her. “The night manager’s here right now—”

  “Get him!”

  She pressed the button again. “Yes?” said a male voice through a tinny speaker.

  “There’s a guest out here who needs to talk to you,” the clerk explained.

  “Now!” Chapman bellowed.

  “I’ll be right out.”

  Seconds later, a portly man in a blue suit emerged from the back office. “How may I help you?” he asked.

  “You can fire one of your maids.”

  “What seems to be the problem, sir?”

  “She walked in on me just now while I was taking a shower! Not only that, but she pulled open the shower curtain in order to see me naked, then claimed it was an accident, that she thought we’d already checked out, even though my wife was asleep in the bed when she walked in, and when she came into the bathroom, the light was on, the shower was on, and she damn well knew I was there!”

  The manager was contrite. “I’m very sorry, sir. That definitely should not have happened. I apologize—”

  “I want her fired,” Chapman demanded.

  “I completely understand—”

  “I. Want. Her. Fired.” He fixed the night manager with his hardest stare, and the other man looked away.

  “We do everything we can to make sure our guests are completely satisfied.”

  It was a vague answer and promised nothing, but Chapman knew enough not to press any harder on that particular point, so he subtly shifted his strategy, picking up a pen from the front desk and asking for a piece of paper, which the young woman behind the desk provided him. “Now what’s your name and official title?” Chapman asked the night manager.

  The man stiffened slightly. “John Marks. Sonoran Resort Off-Hours Manager.”

  Chapman put down the pen, folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “I expect you to take care of this.”

  He left the lobby without looking back.

  They went out for breakfast—not to the resort’s restaurant; he wasn’t about to give them more money after what had happened—and returned to find that their beds were already made and the room had been tidied up. He saw two new bottles of Perrier on the dresser top as well as a complimentary tin of Danish cookies.

  This was more like it.

  Chapman turned on the television to the Today show. He’d had both coffee and orange juice with his breakfast, and needed to take a leak, so he walked past Shauna into the bathroom, pulled up the closed toilet lid—

  —and promptly dropped it shut, gagging.

  Someone had taken a shit in the bowl and not flushed it.

  The maid.

  He knew it was her, and he imagined that devious little bitch laughing to herself as she hiked up her uniform, sat down, took a dump and left. Trying not to throw up, he flushed the toilet. He no longer had to go to the bathroom, and he washed his hands in the sink, scrubbing them hard, before furiously marching up to the lobby.

  The night manager was gone, and Ralph Covey, the original manager he’d spoken to, was back on duty.

  There was no preamble this time. “She took a shit in my toilet!” Chapman shouted as he strode through the lobby. “She didn’t even flush it!”

  The young desk clerk looked panicked at his approach, but Covey was already out of his office helping a customer and immediately switched places with the desk clerk, greeting Chapman in a low calm voice clearly meant to placate him.

  Chapman was having none of it. “I was in here less than an hour ago because she walked
in on me taking a shower! Now she’s taken a shit in my room!” He had reached the front desk.

  “If you’ll just keep your voice down…”

  “I’ll do no such thing! Bring her here! Now!”

  “That’s something we need to talk about, Mr. Davis.”

  “I’m done talking! If she isn’t fired—”

  “You mean Rosa.”

  “Of course I mean Rosa!”

  “We’ve looked into that, sir, and there is no Rosa working at the resort.”

  Chapman stopped short. He frowned. Maybe he’d gotten the name wrong. Maybe…

  No.

  He specifically remembered seeing the name Rosa on her nametag.

  “Then check which maid is assigned to our room,” he demanded, “and call her in here. I want to speak to her in person.”

  The other customer was gone, the lobby now empty, and Covey told him to wait while he retrieved that information. The manager disappeared into his office, and Chapman and the desk clerk stood there uncomfortably, not looking at each other. Moments later, Covey returned and announced that the maid was on her way.

  The uniformed woman who entered through a side door was older, white and considerably overweight.

  It wasn’t her.

  “This is Doris,” the manager said. “She’s assigned to your block of rooms.”

  The feeling he experienced was unfamiliar: a mixture of confusion and low-level fear. Who was the woman who’d been pretending to be a maid, then? Who was the person who’d been harassing him?

  “It’s not her,” he said, stating the obvious.

  “This is the woman—”

  “It’s not her! I know what she looks like. She’s slim, Spanish, and her name’s Rosa.”

  “I’m sorry. we have no Rosa—”

  “She was talking to that kid by the pool,” Chapman remembered. “The one delivering drinks. Ask him who she is!” He sounded desperate even to himself, and he was aware by the way the other three were looking at him that he was acting unhinged.

  Was this part of her plan?

  What plan? Did he actually think some wannabe maid was setting him up, playing out some elaborate scam in order to…what? Humiliate him? Make him think he was going crazy? Make other people think he was going crazy?