The Sun Down Motel Read online

  “Really?” His eyebrows went up. “Like what?”

  I couldn’t say why I felt uneasy, but I did. He was a nice guy in nice clothes taking an interest in my project, and yet I had the urge to sidle away. “Just the history of this place, I guess,” I said. “There seem to be a lot of murders here.”

  “Ah.” Callum smiled again. “I warned you about that. So I guess you see what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. How is the digitizing going?”

  Callum spread his hands out, as if to show me they were empty. “I’m done for the day. And the place is about to close. What are you doing right now?”

  I gaped at him because I was a dork. “What? Why?”

  “We could go get dinner.”

  “I can’t.” It was a lie, but I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw that I’d had a phone call while I had it on silent. I recognized the number: Alma Trent, the retired cop that Nick Harkness had suggested I contact. I’d left her a message a few hours ago. “I have an appointment,” I said to Callum, hoping that it was true.

  “Oh, really? Where?”

  I blinked at him but he waited for an answer, as if unaware he was on the edge of rude. A lifetime of training—be nice!—rose up and I said, “Um, I think I’m going to talk to Alma Trent, who was a police officer back when my aunt disappeared.”

  The librarian made the announcement about the library closing, and I started toward the doors. Callum followed.

  “That sounds interesting,” he said, unbelievably. “Can I come?”

  “It isn’t a good idea,” I said, fumbling, as I pushed through the doors. “I promised I’d go alone.”

  His voice went a notch darker. “The cop made you promise that?”

  We were outside the library now, and I could see my car parked in the pay spot at the curb. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for offering, though. Talk to you soon, okay?” I gave him a fake-cheery wave and got into my car. Before I turned the key I pulled out my phone and listened to the message Alma had left.

  She told me she was retired—I knew that from Googling her, like I knew her number from the good old Fell phone book—but she would be happy to talk to me. She had a pleasant, no-nonsense voice, a plain way of speaking. She told me I should just let her know when I could visit and she’d put some coffee on.

  I called her back and told her I was coming, and she gave me her address. When I hung up, I gave in to impulse and texted Nick Harkness. You up? I wrote, because I was never sure when Nick was sleeping.

  There was no answer. I stared at my phone for a minute, and then I added, I’m going to see Alma Trent, the cop you told me about.

  I paused just in case. Still nothing.

  I felt lame now, but I finished: I’ll tell you about it tonight.

  Not that he cared, of course. Why would he? I didn’t even know what he did with his time besides sleep. The only reason I had his number was that he’d told me to text him when his pizza arrived last night.

  I didn’t know why I was texting him, except that I didn’t want to see Alma Trent alone. And I didn’t want to ask Heather because she was fragile about the whole thing right now. The last thing I needed was to worry that I was damaging Heather’s mental health.

  Still no answer. I sighed and put my phone down. I’d go alone.

  I looked out the window. Callum was still standing in front of the library, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Watching me. When I looked at him, a slow smile touched his mouth, and he gave me a wave.

  I started the car and drove.

  * * *

  • • •

  Alma lived outside Fell, on the opposite side of town from the Sun Down, on a two-lane road that led to a well-kept old farmhouse. It was fully dark now but I could see that the house was of white clapboard, the shutters painted dark green. Pots, now filled with dead plants, lined the front porch, and as I approached the door a dog started barking. I knocked at the screen door, since the dog had obviously given me away.

  “Hold on,” came Alma Trent’s voice from inside. Then, in a lower voice: “Stop it, you crazy thing. Honest to God, you’re an idiot.”

  The dog kept barking, and a minute later the front door opened. Alma was in her late fifties, with gray-streaked brown hair tied back in a ponytail and no makeup on her pleasant face. She wore old jeans that bagged a little and a plaid flannel shirt under a brown cardigan. She was still fit and looked strong, and she gave me a kind smile. “Carly?” she said.

  “Hi.” I held out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Thanks for taking the time.”

  We shook, her hand going easy on mine, though I could tell she could crush me if she wanted. “Come in,” she said. “I put the coffee on, like I said. I know it’s late for coffee, but I’m a night owl. Comes from doing all those years of night shift.”

  “Right,” I said, following her down the front corridor and into her kitchen, which was dated but cared for. A small dog, some kind of terrier, barked his authority at me and then joyously smelled the cuffs of my jeans, dancing around my shoes. “I’d love some coffee. I’m a night person myself.”

  “Watch your step. My dog’s an idiot.” She led me through the cozy house into the small kitchen, where she gestured for me to take a chair. She paused, looking closer at me in the light. “You look a lot like her,” she said.

  I didn’t have to ask who her was. I felt a zap of excitement again. I was in the presence of someone who had seen Viv, known her.

  I opened my mouth to ask a question, but Alma started first. “Can you tell me something? What is it that brings you here looking for an aunt who died before you were born?”

  “Technically she might not be dead,” I said.

  Alma’s eyebrows shot up politely. “Okay.”

  “I mean, she is,” I said. “She probably is. But they never found a body. Though she left her wallet and her car behind and everything.” I trailed off. I sounded like a ditz.

  If Alma agreed, she didn’t say it. She opened a cupboard and took out two mugs. “It was a terrible night,” she said. “I remember it well. The night I found out she was missing, of course. She’d been gone for four days by then.” She paused by the coffeepot, lost in thought. “That shouldn’t have happened, that lag. But it did.”

  “How?” I asked. It was like she was reading my mind.

  “No one was paying attention, that’s how,” Alma said. “Vivian was quiet and kept to herself. She didn’t invite attention. Her roommate was away, I seem to remember. But she was far from anyone who cared about her. The owners of the motel didn’t even notice when she didn’t show up to work. If you want to meet people who make an art of not being curious, go to the Sun Down Motel.”

  I watched her as she poured coffee into two mugs. She had a calm about her, an unhurried quality that wasn’t tentative. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I could picture this woman scraping up a drunk, teenaged Nick Harkness at a party. Giving him a lecture and sending him on his way. In her decades as a cop, she must have seen a lot worse. “How did you know Viv?” I asked her.

  She looked at me, her eyebrows up again. “How do you take your coffee?” When I asked for cream, she turned back to the cups. “I was Fell’s night-shift duty officer for thirty years. I got called out to the Sun Down from time to time. Viv called me once or twice—truckers arguing in the parking lot, I think was the first one. You got petty disturbances like that at the Sun Down. It was just that kind of place. Still is.”

  “I know,” I said as she set my mug in front of me. “I work there.”

  For the first time, I surprised her. She paused, her hand still on my mug of coffee. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I work the front desk,” I said. “Nights, just like Viv did. I went out there to ask a few questions, and there was a Help Wanted ad, and I just . . .” I watched as she pulled a chair back and sat down. �
��What?”

  Alma shook her head. “The Sun Down isn’t a safe place to work, that’s all. It never has been. I worried about Vivian working there alone at night. Now it looks like I’m going to worry about you.”

  She knows about the ghosts, I thought, but when I looked at her face, I wasn’t sure. She would make a great poker player. And I wasn’t going to bring up ghosts with anyone except Nick, who had seen what I had seen. “I guess the Sun Down has always had bad luck,” I said. “I mean, Betty Graham’s body was found there while the motel was being built. And there was a boy who died in the pool.”

  Alma sipped her coffee and looked at me as if she might be reassessing. Maybe she’d expected an airheaded twenty-year-old dunce who liked to Twitter. Who knew? Most people expected that. “How do you know about that?” she asked.

  “The Fell library archives.”

  She put her mug down, her expression calm. “Okay. What do you want to know from me?”

  I pulled my own mug toward me. I didn’t sip it yet, though I’d barely slept today and I needed the caffeine. “Can you tell me anything about Viv’s case file? What was in it?”

  “I was just the night shift duty officer, not a detective. I didn’t work missing-person cases.”

  “But you saw the file,” I insisted.

  She sighed and lowered her hand below the seat of her chair in the absent way that dog owners do. Her dog pushed his nose into her palm. “I read the file,” she admitted. “I knew Vivian. It bothered me that she would go missing. She wasn’t wild, and she wasn’t on any drugs. And she wasn’t stupid.” She scratched the dog’s head. “It was like the newspapers said, I guess. It seems that she went to work, because her car and purse were at the motel and she talked to the man on shift before her. But she vanished sometime during her shift, leaving everything behind.”

  “Her roommate says that Viv was out a lot during the day in her last weeks. That she seemed down or angry about something. She also said that when she got their phone bill after Viv disappeared, there were phone calls on it that she didn’t make. She says she gave the phone bill to the cops but never heard from them again. It was like they didn’t even follow up.”

  Alma shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Jenny says she doesn’t think there was a boyfriend, but there was something going on.”

  “Jenny didn’t know her very well.” Alma’s voice was slightly clipped. “Considering she sat in an empty apartment for two days and didn’t wonder where her roommate had gone. Whether she was even all right.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The newspapers all described Viv as pretty and outgoing, but Jenny says she wasn’t outgoing at all.”

  “Pretty, yes,” Alma said. “She truly was. That was one of the reasons I worried about her working alone at the Sun Down every night. But no, she wasn’t outgoing. She was quiet, a little intense. She could light up when she was talking about something she was interested in. But I never heard about her having any friends.”

  “What was she interested in?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said she’d light up when she talked about something she was interested in. I just wondered what that was.”

  Alma paused, still stroking her dog. “You know, I don’t remember. A movie or a TV show, maybe. We passed the time chatting. Like I say, I was worried about her.”

  “No one at the motel knew her?”

  “Like who?” Alma said. “There’s no one around on the night shift. I knew Jamie Blaknik was one of the regulars out there, and he’d definitely met her, but that was all I could get out of him.”

  “Jamie Blaknik?” I asked.

  “He was a pot dealer in those days. Uppers and downers, too, when he could get his hands on them. That seemed like a big deal in 1982, before the harder drugs started coming in. He did some of his business out of the Sun Down, which meant he would have at least talked to Vivian. He was at the motel the night Viv disappeared.”

  “He was?”

  “Yes. I questioned him myself. He told me he was only at the motel for a few hours, doing business, and then he left. He had more than one alibi, too. It seems he had customers between eleven and twelve, and more customers after he left and went to a bar. If he killed Viv, he would have had to do it in a ten-minute span between one customer and the next. The PD could never pin it on him. He wouldn’t break.”

  “You questioned him,” I said. “I thought you weren’t a detective.”

  Her expression turned defensive. She pulled her hand from her dog’s head and put it back in her lap. “I asked around. That isn’t the same thing. There wasn’t a lot to do on the night shift unless someone was drunk and disorderly. And I knew a different set of people than the day shift guys. Not that any of them wanted to listen to me anyway.”

  “Because you were just the duty officer.”

  She gave me a smile that had a layer of complexity behind it I couldn’t read. “Because I was the Fell PD’s only female officer,” she said. “You think I did thirty years on nights by choice? That was the only shift they would give me. It was either take it or quit. And boy, were they mad when I worked it instead of quitting.”

  “That’s crazy. Isn’t it illegal or something?”

  She laughed, a real laugh that came from her belly. “You’re a smart girl, but you’re so young,” she said. “I started on the Fell PD in 1979. I was lucky to be able to get a credit card in those days without a husband. My coworkers called me ‘Dyke’ instead of my name, right to my face. I could have dated Robert Redford and they still would have called me that. If I got married and had babies, I was weak. If I stayed single, I was a dyke. I learned to appreciate the night shift because I didn’t have to listen to pussy-eating jokes. If I’d complained, I would have been ridiculed and probably fired.” She shrugged. “That was the way it was in those days. I wanted to be a cop, and I wanted to be in Fell. This is my town. So I took the night shift and I did things my way when no one was looking. And that included asking around after Viv disappeared.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “If I ever get a time machine, remind me not to go back to the seventies.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Alma said. “We had Burt Reynolds and no Internet and no AIDS. We didn’t know how much fun we were having until the eighties came and it started to dry up.” She sipped her coffee. “Jamie was around Viv’s age and not bad-looking. He would have noticed a girl as pretty as Vivian. But I knew him most of his life, and he wasn’t the violent type.”

  I pulled out a pen. Anyone who had met Viv was still on my list. “Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Dead,” she said bluntly. “Ran his car off the road and wrapped it around a tree. Gosh, when was that? The early nineties.”

  “Okay.” I clicked the pen. “Who else did you suspect? Who else did you talk to?”

  “There weren’t a lot of options. I did talk to Janice McNamara, who owned the place and hired Viv.”

  I thought of the picture I’d seen in the newspaper in 1979, of the woman with her husband and son standing in front of the brand-new Sun Down Motel. “I work for her son, Chris,” I said. “He says he doesn’t spend any time at the motel if he can help it.”

  Alma gave me a look that was almost speculative, and for a second I wondered if she was going to bring up the topic of ghosts. “Janice was the same,” she said. “There was an accident at the motel soon after it opened.”

  “The boy in the pool.”

  “Right. The boy died in the pool, and Henry, the motel employee who called the accident in, died of a heart attack in the office six months later. Janice and Carl never really wanted to be in the motel business in the first place—they thought it would be easy money with the amusement park that was supposed to come here, and that the land would appreciate in value. When the park fell through and the deaths happened, they both
lost their steam. Carl got sick and couldn’t work the place. Janice worked the front desk, but she didn’t care much. She sure as hell wasn’t there the night Viv disappeared. Chris took over after both of them died, but he doesn’t want it, either.” She shook her head. “It’s just a place that’s never been wanted from the first, you know? Right from the time Betty Graham’s body was found at the construction site. I don’t believe in curses, but the Sun Down is just one of those unloved places.”

  My stomach had fallen and I felt light-headed. “Someone . . . someone died in the office?”

  “Yes. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.” Alma shook her head. “I spent too many years as a cop, and we talk about this stuff. I forgot that you work in that office. Yes, Henry died of a heart attack. He was under stress after that boy died. I guess it caught up with him.”

  Was he a smoker? I thought wildly. Because I think he still is.

  “It wasn’t a big loss,” Alma said when I didn’t speak. “Henry, that is. He was a bit of an asshole, honestly. When I called his ex-wife after he died—she was still listed as next of kin—she said he could rot in hell and hung up on me. We’d had complaints from her over the years about him threatening her, but nothing ever came of it. She always dropped the charges. Henry wasn’t much of a charmer.” She picked up her cup and sipped her coffee. “I’m talking your ear off. You’re a good listener.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked down at the paper I was supposed to be taking notes on, which only had the name Jamie Blaknik on it. “Who else was staying at the Sun Down the night Viv disappeared?”

  “Just Brenda Bailey,” Alma said. “She was an alcoholic. Her husband would go through a phase of trying to make her quit, so she’d check into the motel to do her secret drinking. She was in her room that night, passed out. The detectives questioned her, and then I questioned her myself off the record. She didn’t see or hear a thing.” She nodded toward my paper. “And Brenda’s dead, too. She passed in ’87. Jesus, it seems like I know a lot of dead people, doesn’t it? I promise there are still a few people alive in Fell.”