The Sun Down Motel

We were single girls who worked at night. Do you think we didn’t know the dangers, even back then?

Cathy fucking Caldwell. How could I be so stupid?

I bent over the sink and turned the cold water on. I put my hand under it, meaning to splash it on my face, but I couldn’t quite do it. I just stood there, staring down at the water going down the drain.

This was the connection. It had to be. Viv had known about Cathy Caldwell in 1982—she had had a conversation about her with her roommate. If Viv knew about Cathy, it was entirely possible she knew about Betty Graham. Especially since Betty’s body was dumped at the Sun Down construction site. It was one of those things you’d hear about when you’d worked in a place for a while.

If the woman in the flowered dress was Betty—and she was—then Viv had seen her. Known who she was. She could have figured it out, just like I did.

And it had something to do with her disappearance. It had to.

I spent too much time reading about dead girls a few years ago. It put me in a bad place.

Viv was sad. And she was also sort of angry, especially toward the end.

Viv had been out a lot at the end. Out pursuing something that wasn’t a man. Something that made her angry.

The water still running, I raised my gaze to the shelf next to the medicine cabinet. I took in Heather’s line of medications, arranged just so.

Betty, Cathy, Victoria. They were dark things, and following them led to a dark place. I could see it so easily, how you could walk through that door and never come out. How reading about the dead girls would lead to thinking about them all the time, to obsessing about them. Because after all this time, after decades and overturned convictions and reams of Internet speculation, no one knew who freaking killed them. No one at all.

If I was going to solve this, I was going to have to go through the door.

So I went.

Fell, New York

November 2017

CARLY

Two days later I was back in the archives room at the Fell library, going through old newspapers again. This time I bypassed the microfiche and went straight to the paper archives.

I read every article about Betty Graham’s body being found in 1978. The murder had been the top story in Fell that year, a terrifying mystery in a town that had thought itself innocent up to then. There were anxious updates about how the police had nothing new, and the Letters to the Editor columns were filled with letters like Should we lock our doors at night? and Are our streets safe anymore? “I don’t even want to let my daughter go to the roller rink,” one woman—I pictured her in a sharp pantsuit with feathered hair, carefully hanging her macramé plant holder—complained. A man wrote, “I will not let my wife stay home alone.” I pictured his wife popping Valium, thinking, Please leave me home alone. Just for ten minutes. Another man wrote, of course, that it must have something to do with black people, because who else could it be?

There was nothing anywhere about Betty’s injuries. The police hadn’t released that information. Was it too graphic for the public in 1978? Or did they withhold it because it was something only the killer would know about? Probably both.

I flipped forward to 1980. That was the year of Cathy Caldwell, and for the first time I wondered if the same killer could have done both. It didn’t look like it on the surface: Cathy and Betty had been taken differently, killed differently. Cathy didn’t have injuries like Betty did. But both were pretty; both had been raped, stabbed, and dumped; and it was too much of a coincidence that a place as small as Fell would have two vicious killers. I’d seen speculation about this from the armchair sleuths on Reddit, but the Fell police had nothing to say. Besides, if the same man had done both murders, he’d either stopped or moved away after Cathy. Or died.

Or he’d stayed, and he’d killed Viv in 1982.

“Hey,” said a voice at my shoulder. “It’s you again.”

I jumped and looked up. It was Callum MacRae, the guy who spent all of his time in the archives room, digitizing everything. “Hi,” I said.

“It’s almost six,” he said, smiling at me. “The library’s about to close. They’ll do an announcement in a minute or so.”

“Oh, right.” I looked around. “I should probably go.”

“How’s it going?” he asked as I stood up. “The search for your aunt, I mean.”

He was wearing jeans and a zip-up hoodie today, both of them new-looking and not cheap. He knew how to dress, even if his social life seemed to be lacking. “I haven’t found her yet,” I said. “I haven’t even gotten close.”

“That’s too bad. Anything I can do to help?”

I gestured to the archives behind me. “You already helped by showing me how to go through the old papers instead of relying on the microfiche. So thanks for that. I found things I wouldn’t have found otherwise.”

“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.”