The Sun Down Motel

“This is where Cathy Caldwell was found,” Marnie said.

Viv pulled her hood up over her head and got out of the car, her sneakers squelching on the wet ground. Cars passed on the highway overhead, a small two-lane that fed onto the interstate miles away. Other than that, the world was quiet except for the rushing of the rain. There was no one around, no other cars on this road, no buildings in sight.

Viv looked at the overpass, the shadowed concrete place beneath it. It was just an overpass, one of thousands, an ugly stretch of concrete spattered by a few lazy squiggles of spray-painted graffiti, as if the teenagers of Fell couldn’t be bothered to come out here very often, no matter how bored they were. Beneath the gray sky the mouth of the overpass looked dark, like it was waiting to swallow prey. The road beyond was slick with water in the hazy light.

Viv passed beneath the lip of the overpass and the rain stopped beating on her hood. She pushed it back and looked around. There was a concrete shoulder on either side of the road, and the ground at her feet was littered with trash, a broken beer bottle, and cigarette butts. There was a deflated piece of rubber that she realized with shock must be a condom—a used one. She looked away, blinking and smelling old urine.

Cathy’s killer had dumped her body here. This place, of all places. This place. Viv pushed down her disgust, her outrage at the thought of being left here to lie naked and dead, and tried to think. Why this place?

First of all: There was no one to see. That much was obvious. Since Marnie had parked the car, no one had driven through here. The only potential witnesses were the cars passing overhead, and those drivers would have to be leaning out their windows to see. How long did it take to dump a body? One minute, two? She had already stood here longer than that.

Second of all: The overpass was full of shadows. A body might be mistaken for a sleeping drunk or an addict. Compared to a ditch or an open field, there was the chance for a longer time before the body was discovered. Yet the body would be discovered—that was also clear.

Third of all: This was a place for the people who knew where it was. The drunks, the teenagers, the condom users. This wasn’t a place that someone would randomly find on a stroll. He dumped the body here because he’d driven through here before. Probably many times. In one direction or the other—this was a road he’d taken.

Cathy, being taken as she got into her car to go home from work. At a time when her husband was away. Her body dumped here.

Viv walked back to the car and got in. Marnie was sitting in the driver’s seat, and Viv realized she’d been watching her the entire time.

“Well?” the other woman said.

Viv ran a hand through her hair, her careful curls that were wet now, her pretty makeup that had been rubbed off long ago. “He picked her,” she said. “He followed her. He knew where she worked, knew that her husband was away. And after he killed her he picked this place. He planned it—and he’s local.”

“Well, hell. All that from five minutes standing there?” Marnie seemed to think this over. “He’s local because he knows this place,” she said, putting the pieces together. “A stranger wouldn’t know.”

Viv pointed through the overpass. “What’s that way?”

“It goes out of town, heading south to New York.”

New York. Viv remembered wanting to go there, wanting to be on this very road. Planning to pass through Fell and take this very route. She could still do it. She could still go.

Someone who came and went from Fell would take this road. Someone like, say, a traveling salesman.

She turned to Marnie. “Let’s go to the next place.”

* * *

• • •

Marnie took her to a tree-lined street on the edge of what passed for Fell’s suburbs, a neighborhood of twenty-year-old bungalows. Viv had been born in a house like this before her father got a better job and they moved into a brand-new house in Grisham, surrounded by freshly dug lawns and newly planted trees. This street was well kept and unpretentious, and was probably pretty on a summer day, though now it was soaked and dark in the early-morning rain.

Marnie pulled the car up to a curb and turned the engine off.

“What’s this place?” Viv asked her.

“You asked about Betty Graham,” Marnie said. “She let a traveling salesman into her house on a Saturday afternoon.” She pointed. “That’s Betty’s house.”

Viv stared through the windshield as the rain pelted the car. The house was small and tidy, with a neat front walk and well-tended shrubs in the garden beneath the windows. It was past eight o’clock in the morning now, and as they watched a man came out the front door. He wore a plaid overcoat and a matching brown hat, and he looked to be in his late fifties. He checked his watch, then got in his car and drove away. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

“They sold the place, obviously,” Marnie said. “You’d think they’d have trouble selling it, but they didn’t. Maybe because Betty wasn’t killed in the house.”

“She wasn’t?”

Marnie shook her head. “There was a broken lamp in the living room. That was the only sign anything had happened there at all. No blood, no nothing. He got her out of there somehow.” She pointed to a house across the street. “That’s the neighbor who saw the salesman. She saw him go in the house. No one saw anyone leave.”

“How is that possible?”

Marnie shrugged, though the motion was tight, her shoulders tense. “You’d have to ask him that. All anyone knows is that Betty disappeared, and then her body showed up on the construction heap that was the Sun Down Motel.”

The woman in the flowered dress. She’d lived here, but she didn’t haunt this place. She haunted the motel instead.

“How do you know so much about all of this?” Viv asked her.

“The Fell PD hires me sometimes to take photos of crime scenes. Usually burglary scenes—smashed windows, broken locks, ransacked rooms, footprints in the garden. The PD is so small that they don’t have someone full time to do pictures, and they don’t have enough equipment for two scenes at a time. That’s where I come in. Freelance, of course.” She started the car again. “I’ve never shot a body, but I’ve worked with cops. I listen to what they talk about, the things they say among themselves. Cops gossip just like everyone else. And if they aren’t paying attention to you, you can listen.”

“They don’t think the same man did these,” Viv said. It wasn’t a question.

“Not even close. It’s a small police department. It isn’t like the movies, with a staff of detectives to look at this stuff. Betty and Cathy didn’t travel in the same circles or know any of the same men. And Victoria’s boyfriend was convicted of her murder, so they don’t include her at all.”