The Sun Down Motel

CARLY

After all of my research, I wasn’t sure what I expected at the Sun Down. I’d seen an image of it on Google Earth, and it looked like an everyday roadside place: a strip of rooms, a sign. I knew full well that my family history, and my odd fixation, gave it a halo of importance in my mind. But to anyone else, I figured the Sun Down would be mundane.

The Sun Down was not mundane.

I stepped out onto the gravel lot and looked around. The building was shaped like an L, with doors facing an open-air walkway. It was full dark now, and the blue and yellow sign blinked down on us with its shrill message about cable TV and vacancy. There was a single car in the lot, an old Tercel parked in the shadows of the far corner. There were no other cars parked in front of the motel’s doorways, no sign of anyone at all.

Heather got out of the passenger side and we stood in a breath of silence. No traffic passed on the road behind us. Beyond the motel were only trees and darkness with a half-moon high in the sky. I zipped the collar of my coat up and stared at the building, transfixed, taking in the dim lights on the walkway, the uneven patterns they made, the blank reflections on the motel windows. For a place that was built for people to come to, it had an air so deserted and quiet I felt for a minute like I was somewhere unearthly, like a graveyard or an Icelandic landscape.

Heather seemed to feel the same, because she stood next to me in silence. She had left the poncho behind and was now swathed in a black puffy coat, practically a parka. I had the idea that Heather was perpetually cold.

“Not creepy,” my roommate finally said, her voice low in the night air. “Not creepy at all.”

My gaze traveled to the OFFICE sign, which was lit up. In theory, someone must be inside, but I found I didn’t really want to know. “Let’s look around,” I said instead.

We circled the building, looking at the walkways and the closed doors. The walkways were dated, and the doors still had knobs with keyholes; it was practically the same place my aunt had seen thirty-five years ago. Around the other side of the building we found an empty pool, surrounded by a dilapidated chain-link fence. It was darker here, but even without the extra light I could see that the pool hadn’t just been closed for the season. The edges of the concrete were chipped and cracked, and the entire pool was filled with dirt and old leaves. The pool had closed years, maybe decades, ago and was never going to open again.

I made myself think past the creep factor, think past the clammy cold in my spine, and remember my aunt Viv. If you were going to disappear from this place, where would you go?

The most obvious answer was the road. Viv had left her car behind, but someone could have shoved her into their car and driven away. But that opened up a new list of questions. How had the person done it? Had they knocked her unconscious? The newspaper reports didn’t mention any blood or sign of a struggle. Had the person lured Viv out of the front office somehow? Begged for emergency help, perhaps, or pretended to need her for something? Had the person planned to take Viv specifically, or was it done on the spur of the moment?

I walked away from the pool and started to circle back around the front of the motel. I wished now I’d come in daylight, so I could see the landscape better. Maybe in daylight the motel wouldn’t loom quite so weird and sinister.

I was lucky, actually, that the Sun Down was still almost exactly as it was in 1982. If it had been bulldozed and replaced with a strip of big-box stores, I wouldn’t be able to map out where Viv could have gone. What if she hadn’t left by car? Could she have run somewhere on foot?

“Heather,” I said, “do you remember what’s around here? Say, if someone were walking?”

“Oh, God, let me think,” Heather said, following my footsteps. “I think it’s just woods and maybe farmland over that way, behind the motel. You’d have to go miles before you hit anything.”

“What about either way up the road?”

“You’d hit a gas station that way,” Heather said, pointing along Number Six Road in the direction out of Fell, “but again it’s a mile. And I don’t know if it was there in 1982. That way”—she pointed in the direction of Fell, the road we’d just driven up to get here—“there’s a turnoff toward Coopersville two miles up, and past that are a few old houses and a Value Mart before you hit the edge of town.”

“I wonder if I can find a 1982 map,” I said.

“Probably in the city library,” Heather agreed. “Someone died in that pool, by the way.”

I turned and looked at her. “What?”

“Seriously, Carly.” Her pale cheeks were reddened by the cold breeze, her blond hair tousling around its bobby pin. “I mean, come on. I’d bet a thousand dollars. Someone died, and they emptied it and closed it off and no one ever went there again.”

I pressed my lips together. “Maybe they closed it because they don’t have enough customers to keep opening it,” I said. “Like, none.”

“Duh,” Heather said, “they have no customers because someone died in the pool.”

I opened my mouth to answer her, but a voice called out, “Hey there! Can I help you?”

We turned and saw a man standing in front of the office. He was watching us, though he had not come off the walkway to get any closer. With the light from the sign over his shoulder, we could only see that he was tall, beefy, and somewhat young.

“Sorry!” I called out to him. “We’re just looking around.”

The man shifted his weight uneasily. “That isn’t a good idea,” he said. “No one is supposed to go near the old pool area.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound agreeable. I started toward him, Heather following behind me.

When we got closer, I could see he was about thirty, with dark hair cut close to his scalp. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue polyester uniform vest with dark dress pants. The vest had the words Sun Down Motel in yellow over the left breast. “Do you need a room?” he asked us.

“No,” I said. “Sorry, we’re just curious.”

That seemed to confuse him. “About what?”

“I like old motels,” I said, inspired. “You know, these midcentury ones. I think they’re neat. It’s sort of a hobby of mine.”

We stepped onto the walkway. The man’s gaze moved between me and Heather. “I’ve never heard of anyone with a hobby like that,” he said.

I looked at his uniform vest and felt my fascination ramping up. This was the place where Viv had worked for months before she disappeared. She’d likely stood in this exact spot. Had the vests been the same in 1982? I had the feeling of Viv nearby, looking over my shoulder, like I’d had in apartment C. I was so close, with just the thin shimmer of time between me and her. In Fell, that shimmer seemed to barely exist. “Can I see the office?” I asked him.