The Woman in Room Four Kyla
Kyla awoke to the sound of a toilet flushing. Her heart was in her throat, a chill on her skin: she’d dreamed of the dead city again, and the man in the gabardine suit, and his horrible smile: those teeth, grinding together like stones.
Oh no, Miss Hewitt. It is I who shall have audience once more.
Fernanda stepped out from the bathroom, wiping her hands clumsily on her jeans. “I do not mean to worry you, but I believe the motel might be running out of water.”
Kyla sat up on the edge of the bed, hardly hearing. She looked at the alarm clock. The time was pushing seven thirty. She’d slept with her shoes on. Ready to run.
She stood and risked a quick peek through the curtain of their front window. Night had fallen hard in the time she’d slept. A great ring of light surrounded the motel, past which the darkness of the desert was so dense it seemed almost like a living force, the maw of a void.
A neon sign burned in the parking lot.
Brake Inn Motel
Vacancy
Kyla didn’t feel rested, not in the slightest, but she’d awoken with clarity about one problem that had been nagging at her before she’d drifted off. She would need to go to dinner. There was no getting around it.
Not that Kyla wanted to eat; that was never going to happen on a day like today. It wasn’t to get the fresh air, either, because if Kyla could have her way, she and Fernanda would barricade the doors and windows and not leave this room until sunrise.
Kyla said in a low voice, “I need to talk to her.”
“Who?” Fernanda had settled herself at an easy chair near the corner table and tilted her head back against the wall. She closed her eyes, and Kyla realized this was the first time she’d ever seen the woman look tired.
“Sarah Powers.” Kyla murmured the name softly, nodding to the wall that divided their room from room 4 next door. “I’m going to make sure she doesn’t mention us to Frank. It would be very bad if he found out we were here.”
That was an understatement. Returning to her bed, shoving back her mattress, Kyla found the green backpack resting right where she’d left it before she dozed off.
She unzipped the bag, poked through its contents, as if anyone could have disturbed the bag while she slept.
She found everything exactly as she’d left it.
Frank would do anything to get this bag back. And there was no telling what he would do to the girls in the process.
Kyla jerked the mattress back into place and started pacing.
Thinking. Room 5 was much like any other room at any other motel.
It was clean, well-maintained, but more than a little dated, even by the faded standards of west Texas.
There were two twin beds with heavy carved-wood headboards.
There was a nightstand with a brass lamp wearing an accordion shade.
The window in the bathroom wasn’t a window, but a glass block set straight into the wall, the kind of thing that had probably seemed so modern fifty years ago.
It all felt fusty and old, and yet it had been kept in perfect condition.
These headboards must have been antiques, for instance, but they didn’t have a scratch on them.
Kyla gave herself a little shake. She was wasting time.
Plucking up their key from where it rested on the room’s nightstand, she held its wooden fob to the light. On one side, it read ROOM 5. On the other, someone had printed
7:30 DINNER
DRINKS TIL 9:00
12:00 LIGHTS OUT
Lights out. Like they were at some sort of summer camp.
“Dinner is coming up any minute,” Kyla said.
Fernanda’s eyes were still closed. “I agree that this Sarah woman is a concern. But would it not be suspicious to say, ‘Please, ma’am, when you talk to Mister Frank, do not mention our names’?”
“I have an idea for that. I think I can play it off.”
Kyla paced: back door, bathroom, front door.
She turned. She started again. As she neared the back door a second time, a creak of wood from the porch outside made her pause.
Slowing her step, treading softly, she held her eye to the door’s peephole and saw the two boys, Ethan and Hunter, making their way to dinner.
To the left, she could see the glowing windows of the motel’s cafe. A neon sign burned in its window.
Hot Food
Cold Drinks
“But why should we go all the way to dinner? The woman is right there.” Fernanda opened her eyes, nodded at the adjoining wall. “We could go next door and speak with her now. She said she would leave her doors unlocked.”
Kyla resumed her pacing. “Going to Sarah’s room would draw too much attention. If we talk to her in public, then she won’t think we have anything to hide.”
“But Stan Holiday is here. You saw him arrive in the van, same as me. What happens when he comes to dinner? He will be awfully surprised to see me here, so far from Frank’s house, without any sign of Frank. There is nothing you can say that would not make him suspicious.”
“Isn’t Stanley in some kind of trouble? He went off to Mexico against Frank’s direct orders. I heard it from… well.”
Kyla had heard this from a man named Lance, but the thought of Lance brought the smell of gunpowder to Kyla’s nose, brought back the sound of a bullet burying itself in a man’s stomach.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword, Fernanda had said this afternoon, when it was all over—when they’d been taking Lance’s keys, Lance’s guns—but Kyla had taken one look at her boyfriend’s dead face and tasted bile in her mouth.
Dying by the sword sounded more pleasant than what they’d done to Lance.
Now, in the motel, Fernanda only nodded. “I believe you are right. I heard Frank arguing with Stanley on the phone the day before yesterday. ‘You will be passing through enemy territory. You will just make the situation worse. Do not dare go after her.’ I remember that clearly.”
“So there you go. Whatever Stanley’s doing, he’s probably not in a hurry to get hold of Frank.”
“No.” Fernanda chewed her lip. “If Stanley is in hot water with Frank and sees us here, delivering us back to Frank would be the perfect opportunity to return to his good graces.”
Kyla paced: front door, bathroom, back door.
Every time she passed their bathroom, she saw herself reflected in the mirror above the sink.
It was the only furnishing in this room that wasn’t in perfect condition.
A long crack bisected the mirror from top to bottom, so that for a few seconds on every trip, Kyla appeared to be two subtly different women.
There was probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Not that she had the patience to learn it.
“It doesn’t matter if Stanley sees us here.
There’s no landline here, and Frank only gives out the satellite phones to people on official business, which Stanley definitely is not.
I’ve never seen Stan with a cell, but the only tower is in El Paso, and that barely works in Stockton.
He would never have a signal this far away. ”
Fernanda looked at their nightstand, as if to confirm what Kyla had noticed the moment they arrived: there was no telephone in the room. “The twins must have some way to communicate with civilization. First they have no car, now they have no phone?”
“Who cares? We just need to survive the night here. The second that gas delivery comes in the morning, we’re gone.”
“Do you really believe the twins, though? That gas will come tomorrow?”
“Why would they lie about that?”
“I do not know.” Fernanda rubbed her arms. “But nothing about this place feels right. Frank used to say that this road was cursed. There used to be another motel—”
A noise from room 4 cut her off. Kyla heard it too: a woman was speaking next door, talking to a man. She didn’t sound happy. Kyla paused her pacing and inched her way over to the adjoining wall. She pressed her ear to the wood, held her breath.
Someone was with Sarah Powers in her room. They didn’t sound pleased about it.
Kyla heard a man say something. It sounded curt and brusque, but he spoke too low for her to make out the words.
Sarah Powers replied with something equally unhappy.
The man responded, now even quieter than before.
Kyla strained her ears, struggling to make out the conversation—struggling even to identify the speaker—but it was no good.
They were practically whispering by now.
In a whisper of her own, Fernanda said, “Is that Stanley?”
Kyla turned away from the wall. She shrugged. “I can’t tell. But who else would it be?”
Fernanda said nothing.
Kyla didn’t do well with too much advance planning.
She was a girl of action, decisive sometimes to a fault (just ask Lance).
She made her way to the nightstand between the room’s twin beds and opened the top drawer and found both their guns still inside.
Both of Lance’s guns, that is, not that he would be needing them anymore.
Checking the magazine and the barrel just like Lance had taught her to do, Kyla handed one to Fernanda, tucked the other down the back of her jeans.
The frozen metal bit into her skin. Good. A little pain was exactly what she needed to get moving.
“I’m going to go to dinner. I’ll go armed and wait for Sarah. You can stay here if you want. Maybe it would be best if you stayed out of sight.”
Fernanda considered the gun. She shook her head. “I would rather not be alone.”
Kyla nodded. She wasn’t sure if Fernanda was afraid of solitude or afraid that Kyla might somehow throw her to the wolves to save her own skin—the girls weren’t exactly the closest of friends, whatever Frank might think—but she didn’t see a point in arguing.
It was going to be a difficult night whatever they did.
And Fernanda was right about something else: everything about this motel felt off. Somewhere deep, deep down in the base of her brain, Kyla wondered if Stanley and Frank and all the horrors of Fort Stockton might not be the least of their worries.
The girls secured their jackets and their firearms. They headed for the back door. Stepping out into the cold, Kyla risked a glance at the strange house behind the motel and would have sworn—just for a moment—she saw a glimmer of light in the upstairs window.
A silver light.
As Kyla made to lock their back door, the sound of footsteps came from around the corner of the motel.
The sound came from the right, the direction of Stan Holiday’s room, and so Kyla hesitated, the room key in her hand, wondering if they should duck back inside.
If maybe it would be safer to try to avoid the big man after all.
But it wasn’t Stanley who appeared around the corner. Of all people, it was Penelope, Stanley’s teenage granddaughter, the strange kid with the awful scar on her forehead. Kyla hesitated. As far as she knew, she had no reason to be afraid of Penelope.
The girl looked ill at ease, so distracted by her own thoughts she hardly noticed Kyla and Fernanda until she almost collided with them on the porch. “Oh. Hi. What are y’all doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” Kyla said. “Did you come with Stanley?”
“No. He’s sleeping.” The girl blinked. “Oh, you mean to here. Yes. He took me from Mexico.”
“What were you doing in Mexico?”
Before Penelope could reply, Fernanda’s face went pale. Plucking the key from Kyla’s hand, she stepped back into their room. “I need the restroom again. I will catch up with you at dinner.”
And without another word, Fernanda vanished, leaving Kyla alone with the desert and Penelope Holiday and the strange house in the distance and the towering black mountain behind it.
A hard wind blew over the porch. Penelope whispered, almost to herself, “It’s not really an if question. It’s more a who question.”
Kyla shivered. “What?”
“It’s something my sister said.” The girl started down the porch. “When you consider all the people stuck here tonight and all the trouble we’re in, it’s not really a question of if someone is going to get hurt. It’s who.”