Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
If Samantha Beacher could do it, so could Greg.
For the next several days, Greg and Faye scoured the downtown environs of Woodstock. They handed out flyers with his photo on them. They went to every coffee shop, gas station, hotel, and gym, and talked to strangers they passed on the street. But despite the myriad of mysteries resolved in the novel he was reading, Lie to Me , the only thing Greg had managed to accomplish after all their hours of pounding the pavement together was getting a cramp in his foot.
“Are you sure you don’t recognize him?” Faye asked, standing at yet another hotel counter, speaking with the concierge.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” The concierge frowned.
Greg analyzed their latest suspect. He was tall and skinny—totally inconspicuous on the surface, which made Greg immediately think he was guilty of some nefarious crime. It was always the innocent-looking ones in his Sam Beacher novels, the ones you never would suspect, who had basements full of missing children.
“Can you just check one more time for me?” Faye asked.
Greg could hear the despondency in her voice. “Listen, you,” Greg said, moving to intervene with a line from his book. “You think I don’t realize what you’re doing here?”
The desk attendant blinked. “What?”
“I’ve got your number—” Greg said, his eyes drifting down to young man’s name tag. “ Clark. And you might have everyone around here fooled, but I know what you’ve been doing, late at night, when you think no one is watching.”
Clark swallowed. “I... I... I always wash my hands after.”
“Okay!” Faye suddenly interrupted. “I think we’ve had enough investigating for one day.”
Faye grabbed Greg by the arm and, thanking the young concierge for his help, quickly pulled him outside.
“What—” she asked, raising both eyebrows in his direction “—was that?”
Greg shrugged. “It worked in your Samantha Beacher novels.”
“Not everything is how it is in books.”
“I know that,” he admitted, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet. “But I’m feeling a little desperate right now.”
The frustration he used to have with speech now reappeared with every dead end. While he could finally express himself fully—only experiencing the occasional glitch—he still had no idea who he was. No one had come for him. No one seemed to recognize him. His memory had not returned, and Greg was losing hope.
Faye chewed on her lower lip. “There is another option.”
The charge in his chest returned. “Really? Well, that’s great news!”
“Hold on,” she said, raising one hand to stop him. He could see she was choosing her words carefully. “There are a few motels on the outskirts of town. I didn’t originally mention them because, well... I didn’t think you would be staying at them. They’re kind of sketchy.”
Greg squinted. “Sketchy...how?”
“Like they once found three decapitated bodies in the swamp behind them sketchy.”
“That’s horrible.”
Still, they were running out of ideas. His eyes fell downwards, to the sheet of paper Faye was carrying. They had checked every location on her list, run his fingerprints. They had even taken one of those DNA tests, spitting into a tube before mailing it off to California, to see if Greg had lost relatives somewhere...but they wouldn’t get the results back for several weeks.
It felt like an unnaturally long time to a man without a memory.
“I suppose we should get going then,” he said finally.
Faye nodded. “I think that’s the right call.”
The sky twisted into golds and purples around them, dusk settling, as they made their way back to her car. And on the drive beyond town, Greg thought back to the novels he’d been reading. It was always darkest before the dawn. There was always a series of tests and challenges, of growth amid rising stakes, before eventually, the final resolution.
Faye wasn’t kidding when she called the stretch of motels beyond town sketchy. Had it not been for a few lone cars, and the sporadic hum of a half-broken neon sign glowing VAC NCY, Greg would have assumed they had all been abandoned.
“We should split up,” she said.
“Absolutely not.” Greg did not hesitate.
Even if he hadn’t been in the middle of devouring yet another Samantha Beacher mystery, serial killers would have still been on his mind. The last thing Greg was going to allow was Faye wandering about this murder trap alone. He had promised her back in the hospital to keep her safe—and after everything she had done for him, he was not about to go back on his word.
“We can cover more ground if we split up.”
“No,” he replied firmly. “We go together.”
“Greg.” She said his name with a huff, clearly frustrated. “I appreciate your concern here, but I am a grown woman who can spend fifteen minutes—”
He cut her off. “Samantha Beacher is always getting kidnapped.”
Her eyebrows lifted into her forehead. “Samantha Beacher isn’t real, Greg! It’s just a made-up story, with fun plot twists and wild turns, meant to entertain. You’re being ridiculous.”
He threw the argument right back at her. “Just because a book is fun and fictional...doesn’t mean there’s nothing real to learn inside of it. You said it yourself...you have to read everything with a grain of salt. You have to look at the world through a lens of nuance and discernment. Well, here’s my grain of salt, Faye. Bad things exist. Bad people, too. You’re not getting murdered on my watch.”
“I thought we were worried about me getting kidnapped?”
“Faye!”
He did not find her joke funny. He looked over to see her rubbing one eyebrow, a clear sign that she was getting stressed. “Greg,” she said, finally. “I appreciate what you’re saying...but there is no Origami Killer.”
With that, she tore off her seat belt and started down the block. “Meet you back at the car in fifteen minutes,” she shouted back at him.
He crossed his arms against his chest, slightly annoyed. It seemed unfair to win an argument by just leaving.
It was pointless.
The first motel yielded no results. Instead, all he managed was to get trapped in a conversation with some old dude—eyebrows like caterpillars—who told him that he had once been possessed by a demon. The second motel was also uneventful. It was padlocked shut and the interior covered in spooky cobwebs.
Finally, he found his way into the last motel on his side of the strip. Upon entering, he was surprised to find it in an almost suitable condition. The lobby was clean, devoid of any strange smell or cockroaches scampering across the counters. The carpeting, a paisley pink-and-mauve print on the floor, had been freshly vacuumed. All the electricity, like the lights in the sign out front and on the ceiling above him, was working.
The only thing that detracted from the entrance was ongoing construction. In the center of the hallway, a young man, wearing oversized jeans splattered with paint, stood on a ladder. A toolbox by his feet, his head was hidden within the open tile of a drop ceiling...and he was talking to himself. Greg approached him.
“It couldn’t be a hotel in Miami, right?” splatter-pants said, then banged on a pipe repeatedly. “Not the Fontainebleau in South Beach. Or the Mandarin in Cocoa Bay, right? No, you had to die and leave me this cesspool of bedbugs and bad plumbing to deal with. I’m leaving you the dream, Shelby. The dream. Ha!”
“Excuse me?” Greg called out.
“One minute.”
Shelby—at least, Greg assumed the man’s name was Shelby, based on the conversation he was having with himself—continued ignoring him. Greg glanced over to a clock on the counter. He only had a few more minutes left before he needed to get back to Faye.
“I just need to ask you a quick question,” Greg said.
“And I said—” Shelby appeared from beneath the tile “—I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Shelby disappeared back into the drop ceiling. Greg sighed. Stepped closer. Laying both hands on the ladder, he looked up at the young fellow. “I just need to know if you’ve ever seen me before?”
“I’ve seen you,” Shelby shouted back.
“You barely even looked at me.”
Shelby huffed, and bent down to meet Greg. “Well, let’s see,” Shelby snarked, waving his wrench around like a wand, “you’ve got flaming red hair, you’ve clearly never missed leg day...and you look like some dude who just escaped from a romance novel. So, yeah. I’m positive I’ve seen you before. Happy?”
Shelby went to dive back into his hidey-hole. This time, Greg had the wherewithal—and apparently, speed—needed to stop him. On instinct, he reached out and grabbed the man’s arm, holding him there for the last question.
“Do you happen to have an extra key to my room?”
Shelby rolled his eyes, annoyed. “You lost the key?”
“I’ve lost a lot of things.”
Shelby huffed and considered the request. “Room 13,” he said finally. “You can find an extra key on the back wall of my office. Only...take...one.”
“Thank you,” Greg said, and raced to grab the key.
“And bring it back when you find the other,” Shelby shouted, before dipping back into his hole, mumbling between curse words and profanities. “If you haven’t noticed, we are not exactly drowning in cash around here!”
Greg made his way towards room 13. A Do Not Disturb sign still hung on the knob. He took a deep breath, bracing himself for what he would find inside. Thankfully, upon opening the door, everything seemed normal enough.
The place was tidy and inconspicuous. The bed was made. The trash by the door was empty. There weren’t any strange items lying about like a collection of origami animals made from human skin. He was slightly relieved at the innocent nature of what was apparently his room—that Faye was right, that his books were not always situated in reality—when his eyes drifted towards a black leather duffel bag on the floor.
Jackpot.
Heading to the bag, he opened it up, digging his fingers around. But pulling out each item for inspection, all he found was clothes. No photos. No notebooks. Just clothing, which, given the size on the tags, must have belonged to him.
Still, it was progress. He had a room. He had a bag. It must have meant something.
Trying to jog his memory, he brought the clothing up to his nose, inhaling the scent. He hoped it would remind him of some person or place—the place where he had come from—but despite nearly suffocating himself on the material, he came up empty. His mind was a blank. There was nothing.
Giving up on the duffel bag, he decided to focus on the rest of the hotel room. He checked the drawers in the bureau. Empty. The closets, too. Empty. In the bathroom, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and dental floss lay on the sink counter. But otherwise, the space was devoid of any personality. The only thing Greg could ascertain about his past was that he practiced good dental hygiene.
He supposed it was something.
He turned back towards the door to find Faye, and tell her what he had found...when an instinct came over him. Almost like a whisper, without words, the tingle of a memory. Slowly, he turned back to the bed. And then, bending down on one knee, he ran one hand between the mattress and the box spring, and felt it catch on something. Pulling it out, he found himself staring down at a large manila envelope.
Greg dragged one hand down his face.
Nope, that didn’t seem good.
A strange sense of foreboding overcame him. He was torn between the urge to open it up, and the sense that he should just forget about it completely. And yet, he wanted to know the truth about out who he was. He sank down to both knees, opening it, laying out each item, one by one, on the carpet in front of him.
The first was a new phone—a flip phone, in fact—still in its original plastic packaging. He blinked, confused, until a memory from the novel he had been reading returned. This was not a normal phone but a burner phone . The type of phone criminals used, because it came with prepaid minutes and could be discarded after use.
His heart sped up inside his chest. This was not good. Not good at all. Still, he didn’t want to panic. Maybe there was a perfectly logical explanation for a man to be staying in a sketchy hotel, with just a bag full of clothes and a burner phone hidden beneath his mattress...
He returned to that manila envelope, and pulled out a wad of cash.
Okay. That wasn’t great, either.
Again, he took a deep breath and tried to remain rational. He reminded himself that Eric had run his fingerprints. The police had checked his identity against countless criminals in their systems, and Greg’s had come back clean. He wasn’t a bad guy. Even with the cash, and the burner phone...it was all still speculation. He had no direct evidence that he had been involved in something nefarious. Samantha Beacher always needs evidence to solve a crime.
He tossed the cash to the side and, taking a deep breath, continued. He pulled out the last item, finding it at the very bottom of that manila envelope—and all at once, his heart sank. His world, his life with Faye, came crashing down around him. Because there, hidden inside his hotel room, alongside a burner phone and that wad of cash, was a single anti-Semitic flyer. On the front, written in bright blue ink and circled as if the note was important, were the words,
THE PAPER BOYS—WOODSTOCK, NY
He didn’t want to believe it. That he was one of them. A Nazi. A Paper Boy. A bad guy. Some hateful and despicable human being, who had come to Woodstock with the goal of spreading vile anti-Semitic propaganda. But the evidence, as he had found it, seemed to suggest that he was...and a physical pain rolled through the center of his chest.
He clutched at his heart, wanting it to stop, but it all began to make sense. Why he had appeared on the day after the flyers. Why Eric had rubbed him the wrong way at the police station, even though Faye was adamant that he meant well.
Why no one from his real life—parents and partners, employers, or friends—had shown up. The realization hit him hard, and all at once. Greg was a found person who, as it turned out, not a single person in the world was missing.