The Sun Down Motel

The next photo showed the door to room 104 opening and a man standing in the gap. He was smiling at Mrs. Bannister. He was fortyish, with salt-and-pepper hair. Not bad-looking, I thought, but it was a mystery why a woman so young would cheat with him at a down-and-out motel. Then again, I was the last person to understand anything about sex.

I looked more closely at the photo of Mrs. Bannister and her lover. Marnie had been at the back of the parking lot, and she’d gotten a lot of the motel into the frame. On the upper edge I could see the second level of the motel, the bottoms of the line of doors through the slats of the second-story railing. There was a dark shadow on the second floor, as if maybe someone was standing there. But then again, it could be anything.

Inside the motel office, I heard the desk phone ring. I jogged back toward the motel, putting the photos in my coat pocket. The ringing stopped as someone picked up the phone, and then the office door opened. Nick stepped out and motioned to me. He’d been in the office going through the rest of the stack of Marnie’s photos. “It’s Heather,” he said.

“Thanks.” My glasses fogged as I walked back inside, and when I pulled my hat off my hair probably looked comical. I continued to make an excellent impression on Nick Harkness in my campaign for seduction.

“Hey,” I said, picking up the receiver he’d left on the desk. It was sort of a thrill, using an old-style telephone. It felt like it weighed five pounds.

“Okay,” Heather said on the other end of the line. “I’ve been researching the Bannisters for the last hour and I’ll tell you what I’ve found: nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” I pawed at my hair with my free hand, trying to pat the flyaways back down. I heard Nick sit, though I couldn’t see him through the fog.

“I mean nothing,” Heather said. “There’s a mention of a Steven Bannister winning a high school high jump contest in 1964, and that’s it. I have no idea if it’s even the right person. No other mentions of either husband or wife at all. And they’re not in the Fell phone book.”

The frustrations of tracking people who didn’t live their lives online. “Okay. It was a long shot anyway that either of them would have met Viv. What about the man Mrs. Bannister was cheating with?”

“Aha,” Heather said. “Now you’ll see how clever I am. Because I truly am fiendishly clever.”

“Fiendishly?” My glasses cleared, and I glanced over to see Nick sitting in one of the office chairs, leaning it back with his feet pressed against the desk. He was wearing jeans and his black zip-up hoodie, his hair pushed back from his forehead as if he’d pushed it with his fingers. He had Marnie Clark’s photo negatives in his hand and was looking at a strip in the overhead light, squinting a little, his body balanced easily. Even in that pose he looked awesome, scruff on his jaw and all.

“Yes, fiendishly,” Heather said as I watched Nick put down one strip and pick up another. “I talked to a guy online who can do DMV lookups. Those photos of Marnie’s have license plates in them. It cost me seventy bucks, but now I know who owned the cars in those pictures.”

“You’re right—that is fiendish.”

“I know. So here goes: The Thunderbird in the photos belonged to none other than Steven Bannister, high school high jump star. He moved to Florida in 1984 and dropped off the map. The second car belonged to a Robert White, who died in 2002. He would have been forty-one in ’82, so that probably makes him Mrs. Bannister’s lover.”

“Okay,” I said. Nick started to lower his chair, so I stopped staring at him and moved my gaze to a spot on the wall.

“There’s a third car, too. That one belonged to a fellow named Simon Hess. Here’s where it gets interesting.”

“Go on.”

Heather paused, purely because she loved the anticipation. “Two things about Simon Hess. First, he worked as a traveling salesman.”

That made a bell ring deep, somewhere in my brain. “Where did I read about a traveling salesman?”

“When you read about Betty Graham,” Heather said. “She was last seen letting one into her house.”

Now the back of my neck went cold. “Oh, Jesus.”

“It gets better,” Heather said. “I looked up old Simon Hess to see if he was dead yet. And I found something interesting. It seems he left on a sales trip sometime in late 1982 and he never came home.”

“What? That makes no sense. What do you mean he never came home?”

Nick was sitting up and watching me now, trying to follow the conversation. I wished like hell this ancient phone had a speakerphone option, but I’d just have to tell him everything after I hung up. How did anyone before 1999 do anything at all?

“He just left and never returned,” Heather said. “And get this. His wife didn’t even call the police. She eventually declared him dead five years later, when she tried to claim his life insurance money. She said she thought he’d abandoned her for another woman, but eventually she figured he might have died, so she wanted to sell their house and get the money.”

“Could she just do that?”

“It seems like it. There’s a time period someone has to be missing before they can be declared dead. In New York it’s three years. I couldn’t access the file, but they must have investigated it and decided that Simon Hess was dead and Mrs. Hess got her money.”

I rifled through the pile of photos with my free hand, pulling out the one that had Hess’s car in it. “So his wife said he went missing sometime in 1982, but she didn’t know when?”

“She last saw him in November.”

“These photos are from October. So he was still around.” I brushed my finger along the edge of the photo, then picked up the next one in the sequence, which showed my aunt Viv walking along the walkway from the AMENITIES room to the office. It was the shot Marnie had cropped and sold to the newspapers, showing Viv’s face. Hess’s car was in the corner of the frame.

“What are the odds that we have two people who went missing around the same time in one photograph?” I said.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Heather said. “And if Simon Hess was Betty’s killer, then I’d say it isn’t a coincidence at all.”

“So he killed Viv and fled town.”

Nick was listening, but he leaned his chair back again, balanced it, and picked up another negative, looking at it through the light. For the first time, I wondered what he was looking for.

“You have to admit, it’s a pretty great theory,” Heather said. “But Simon Hess seems like a dead end. No one’s seen him since 1982 and he’s legally dead.”