The Sun Down Motel

He pointed to the headline. “Who was Vivian Delaney?” he said. “I have to admit, I kind of want to know.”

I looked up at him again. I wasn’t used to seeing guys in daylight anymore, I realized. I scrambled to recall how people who weren’t me or Heather spoke to each other in the middle of the day. “She disappeared in 1982,” I told the man. “No one ever found her.”

“No shit,” the guy said. “She disappeared from Fell?”

“From the Sun Down Motel. She was working a night shift there.”

“I know that place.” He pulled up a chair and sat on it next to me, then seemed to remember himself. “I’m Callum MacRae, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Carly,” I said, shaking it. Now that I was level with him I could see that he had even features, dark brown eyes set beneath symmetrical brows, a perfect nose and cheekbones, a good chin. Something about him radiated class—the sweater, maybe, which I could now see was far from cheap and fit him to every seam. Or the easy way he took over and leaned in, like it was his right. Or the crisp way he smelled, like he’d put expensive cologne on a day or two ago, its tang just barely discernible. It was a nice package, and he gave me a smile, but I still kept my guard up. I’d spent time in college, and he was an inch too far into my space. If this guy was a creeper, I’d have no problem making a scene.

“Sorry,” Callum said, though his tone said he wasn’t really. “I’m interrupting you. But I’m a geek when it comes to the history of Fell. Are you at FCCE? Doing a project?”

I was tired and stupid for a second. “What’s FCCE?”

He smiled again, more widely. “I guess you aren’t a student, then. It’s the Fell College of Classical Education.”

Oh. Right. “No, I don’t go there. Do you?”

“Not really,” Callum said. “Sort of. My mother is one of the profs there, so technically I get to go for free. It’s a perk they have for their profs. I try to go, but to be honest I don’t make it there very often.” He shrugged. “It’s boring, at least to me. I find this more interesting.” He tapped my pages. “I guess it’s a stupid question to ask if you’re doing a project, since you’re looking up Fell newspapers from 1982 and not Chaucer or something. I was just surprised to see someone in here. The only person who ever hangs out in this room is me.”

I looked around. “You hang out in the archive room of the Fell Library?”

“It sounds weird, I know. But they haven’t digitized the Fell Daily before 2014. I guess you know that, since you’re here. You can’t get older issues online.”

“I know.” It was a big part of the reason for this whole adventure, actually. I had wanted to come to Fell to read the archives, a century ago when I was a seminormal Illinois girl with a weird reading hobby and a skeleton in the family closet.

“There were two other Fell papers,” Callum continued. His face had lit up, and I knew that whatever this was, it was his thing. “The Fell Gazette and the Upstate New York Journal. The Gazette was daily, the Journal weekly. The Gazette folded in 1980, the Journal in 1994. Neither of them are digitized, either, and they’re full of amazing stuff. A lot of those two aren’t even in the microfiches here. They’re all paper issues in the stacks, if you can believe it. And I know I’m totally boring you, but I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.” He smiled again, and I felt myself smiling back. “The library doesn’t have the budget for the digitization project. When I heard that, I decided to do it myself. As a volunteer.”

My eyebrows rose. “Wow. You come in here every day and digitize papers? For free?”

“Yeah, I have permission. It’s not costing the library anything except for the scanner they bought and the computer they let me use. The librarians all know my mother because she’s an FCCE prof. They know I want to do this. So here I am.”

“But why?” I asked him. “Shouldn’t you be in school or something?” I cringed inwardly, because I sounded exactly like my mother. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I meant that if you really like this kind of thing, you could go to journalism school. Or intern at a paper.”

“I could do that,” Callum admitted, “but then I’d have to write about what they assign me and not what I want.”

I sighed and adjusted my glasses on the bridge of my nose. “I get that, actually.”

“I thought you would, because you’re here, too. Sitting in the archives room alone, just like I do.” He leaned forward. “This is Fell. Did you know that when they dug to make the parking lot of the Sav-Mart on Meller Street, they found six bodies? All children, all two hundred years old. That was in 1991. It wasn’t a graveyard—there was just a pit with six kids in it, all dead of typhoid. There weren’t even any coffins. Someone just dug a hole and put them in.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Were they siblings?”

Callum held up a finger. “No,” he said, relishing the moment. “Not siblings. They were Europeans, too. So what happened? If there was an outbreak, there’s no record of it. Fell has a graveyard that dates back to 1756 and has European settlers in it. So why weren’t these kids there? Who just dumped them in a hole and ran? No one knows. I found the story in the Journal when I was digitizing last week. They wrote one story, that’s it. It’s the craziest thing. Just ‘someone found the bodies of six kids, no one knows why they’re there. Also, it’s going to rain this weekend.’ That’s what I mean about Fell.”

“Yeah, I’m getting the idea,” I said.

“You’re not a local, I can tell.” Callum leaned back in his chair. “Fell attracts weird types. People who are a bit morbid. No offense.”

“None taken.” I gestured to the article on the table between us. “Viv Delaney was my aunt. My mother was her only sibling, and she’s dead now. I want to find out what happened, because she deserves some kind of justice. But nothing’s going the way I thought it would.”

He didn’t ask what that meant. He just nodded. “Okay, then. You’re not getting the full story on this microfiche. Let’s find some of the papers from 1982.”

* * *

• • •

Three hours later, Heather and I were sitting in our apartment, me on the sofa and her cross-legged on the floor. The coffee table was covered in printouts and photocopies, my spiral notebook sat open and scrawled in, and both of our laptops were open.

“This is a bonanza,” she said. “I’ve always done my true-crime stalking on the Internet. I guess the Fell archives room is the place to be.”