Chapter Kyla
KYLA
Heading out the front door of Ryan’s room, Kyla looked to the right. Down the arm of the motel, the door to the office was closed, the windows dark. She could almost feel the twins inside, watching her. Let them.
“Have you seen anyone come or go from this room tonight?” Kyla asked Ethan. “Seen the lights on?”
A hard wind was blowing down off the mountain. Ethan’s teeth started chattering. “Pr-pr-probably where the t-twins sleep.”
“We’ll get the key from them in a minute. It’s only fair they let us search every room.”
Ethan looked at his watch. “It’s al-al-almost ten forty-five.”
“Fuck me. There just isn’t time, is there?”
Ethan shook his head. There was clearly something he wanted to say, but his lips were turning blue.
The guy didn’t have a jacket, and this frozen wind wasn’t letting up.
The ring of lights around the motel flickered.
Out in the desert, a warning SHRIEK, like some primal alarm, cut through the night.
“Let’s get inside,” Kyla said.
Past room 2, sheltered by the roof of the walkway that ran between the motel’s northern arm and its main body, Kyla found an unlocked door she’d noticed when they’d checked in.
Inside was a wide, windowless supply room stocked with cleaners, linens, tools, spare dinner plates.
The room wasn’t exactly warm, but it was shelter from the wind.
Kyla was still thinking about what Ethan had told her a moment ago, the way Sarah Powers had been lying through her teeth when they’d first met the woman in the office. “Was it true what you told her? That your mom died?”
Ethan rubbed his arms. He nodded.
“Same thing with my dad,” Kyla said.
“When?”
“Six months back. Feels like yesterday.”
“Is that why you moved out this way?” Ethan said.
Kyla was surprised. He wasn’t far off the mark. “It’s a little more complicated than that. But I guess not by much.”
“What got him? Your dad, I mean.”
“Car accident,” Kyla said.
“Cancer,” Ethan said.
“Same thing. Just slower.”
Ethan’s body seemed to warm up enough for him to start walking again. He took a few steps around the supply closet, his hands tucked into his armpits, deep in thought. “Does your friend Fernanda have stomach issues?”
The question was so strange Kyla took it seriously.
Did she? Kyla wasn’t entirely sure. The girls weren’t especially close.
After a few months of her working at the steakhouse, Frank had hired Kyla to help cater one of the massive barbecues he threw for his men at his big compound outside of town.
It had been hard for Kyla not to notice the imperious, beautiful Mexican woman standing alone in the corner of Frank’s house like a piece of furniture.
Kyla had said hello to her. Frank had been delighted.
Swing by tomorrow, keep her company, he’d said, as if Fernanda were some kind of restless animal.
Frank had added, Ask her to tell you a story.
Here, in the motel’s supply room, Kyla said honestly, “I’m not sure. We don’t know each other all that well.”
“She said she was late coming to dinner because she needed to use the restroom,” Ethan said.
“But it seemed a little long for a bathroom break, if you don’t mind me saying.
You and Penelope got to dinner around, what, 7:35?
It was ten, maybe fifteen minutes before Fernanda turned up.
Do you think she was in y’all’s room that whole time? ”
Kyla narrowed her eyes, if only because she’d tried to avoid asking herself this same question all night. “I don’t think Fernanda could have killed Sarah. She isn’t that type of girl.”
“But you just said you don’t know her very well.”
“She wouldn’t have done that. You saw the way Sarah’s pants were pulled down. I feel pretty confident my friend isn’t a rapist.”
“We don’t know that Sarah Powers was raped.
” Ethan looked almost pained to be asking these questions—pained on Kyla’s behalf—but he didn’t stop.
“The way her pants were pulled down could just be a smoke screen, something the killer did after the fact to confuse us, just like you said a few minutes ago. Fernanda knew the cartel trick with the pillows. She knew that Sarah was going to talk to Frank after dinner. She knew that Sarah had a satellite phone. She knew that Stanley was here, too, and if he didn’t have one of those phones, he might want to use Sarah’s if he ever found out she had it. ”
“Why would Fernanda care about the satellite phone?”
A little smile came over Ethan’s face. “Please. It’s obvious y’all are on the run from Frank’s outfit.
It would be very, very bad if either Stanley or Sarah told Mister O’Shea that y’all were here.
I don’t know the details of y’all’s trouble—respectfully, I don’t want to know—but you ain’t exactly being subtle about it.
That satellite phone could really complicate your lives.
Making sure Sarah didn’t have it would be good.
Making sure she never got the chance to tell anyone she saw y’all here could be even better. ”
“I don’t…,” but Kyla trailed off. She wasn’t stupid. She’d considered this angle for herself already, many times, and never come to a satisfying answer. It wasn’t like she could ask Fernanda to admit to murder and leave the woman out in the cold when the lights died.
Could she?
“What about your man?” Kyla said to Ethan, desperate for a change of subject. “Was he with you all night?”
“He was with me well before seven thirty.”
“That’s a rather lawyerly answer.” Kyla turned from a shelf full of laundry detergent to arch an eyebrow. “I asked if he was with you all night.”
Ethan examined shelves of his own. He held up a white plastic bottle and said, “Look at this label. Doesn’t the logo look old, like the sort of thing you see in old commercials?”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“Because there ain’t much to say. Hunter just took a smoke break, is all. Got back to the room around six forty-five and took a nap with me. I couldn’t sleep, though. I just stayed awake with him until he got up and we went to dinner.”
Kyla said, “Six forty-five. You’re sure on that time?”
“I am.”
“Why, though? Were you watching the clock? Were you waiting for him to come back?”
“Of course I was waiting for him to come back. We’re in a strange motel in the middle of nowhere and—” Ethan broke off, clearly debating whether to tell her something.
“Y’all aren’t the only people who’d like to steer clear of Frank O’Shea.
Back when we passed through Turner, Hunter did something pretty awful to a man who works for Frank.
I was worried the guy’s goons were sure to come looking for us. ”
“Was it Cleveland, the fry cook with the little rat face?”
“You know him?”
“Little shit came to dinner on Frank’s dime once a month. Always found some excuse to look down my shirt.” Kyla almost smiled at the idea of that particular fucker having a run-in with Hunter. “Whatever your man did to him, the boy had it coming.”
“I don’t think anyone deserves what Hunter did to that guy.”
Yes. Well. Kyla sure wasn’t one to talk about unintended acts of violence.
She and Ethan lapsed into an uneasy silence.
They were poking through the contents of the maintenance room, but what were they even looking for?
That mythical satellite phone? Penelope Holiday?
The girl certainly wasn’t here—there was nowhere for a sixteen-year-old girl to hide in a room this size—and the other junk seemed just as gone.
Why were they even bothering? Kyla could practically feel time slipping away from them, vanishing underfoot like a highway under the wheels of a speeding car.
She was genuinely afraid to ask Ethan to check his watch.
Judging by the way the light of the room was flickering, the motel’s generator hadn’t discovered a surprise second wind.
The lights were going to die, sooner or later. Kyla couldn’t accept that the same would happen to her, but it was getting harder and harder to believe otherwise.
Ethan looked just as unnerved. “What do you think Tabitha meant after Stanley died? She said she and Thomas had done this before, done this with other guests, but how is that possible? It would draw attention. That’s probably the last thing someone like Frank O’Shea would tolerate in his backyard.”
“Unless the twins work for Frank,” Kyla said. “I say we give this five more minutes and then we go find the others. We take matters into our own hands. We’ve all got guns. It’s four on two. Whatever game they’re playing, I’m not going to end like anyone else they stuck here.”
“Do you really think that will work?”
“It beats the shit out of this.” But then something occurred to Kyla. “Your man went for a smoke break earlier this evening, right?”
Ethan didn’t seem thrilled at this new line of questioning. “Yes.”
“He’s sick in the lungs. Why would he do that?”
“Old habits die hard. I thought I’d convinced him to quit, but I realized today I can’t convince that man of anything.”
“What kind of cigarettes?”
“I don’t know the brand. I didn’t even know he still had a pack.”
“No, no.” Kyla shook her head. “When he came back inside, did he smell like menthols?”
Ethan glanced over from a corner in the back of the supply room. “How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” Kyla said. “But don’t you remember who else smelled like menthols tonight?”
Whether he did or not, Ethan didn’t get the chance to say.
A new noise rolled over the motel, a sound unlike anything Kyla had ever heard before.
She thought at first it was the cry of a whale in pain, the moan of a massive animal in agony, but there was something inorganic about it, like a massive piece of metal being bent out of shape, stone shearing from stone.
And yet stone or not, the moaning noise still sounded alive. Alive and afraid and in pain.
The sound sent a tremor through the earth, subtle but unmistakable. It made the lights flicker, warped the air of the supply room, sent a wave of SHRIEKS spreading across the desert. The creatures outside: call Kyla crazy, but they almost sounded afraid.
Ethan said, “That noise came from the mountain.”
But Kyla was distracted by something else.
When the lights had flickered, they’d briefly grown brighter, bright enough for her to see something that had been too murky to notice a moment before.
The concrete floor of the supply room was coated with a thin layer of dust. No doubt the twins never bothered to clean in here.
Why would they? The guest rooms must have kept them plenty busy.
Which was a good thing for Kyla and Ethan. There was a mess of footprints near the door and around the shelves that must have seen the most activity: the sheets, the glass cleaner, the plates.
But there was only one set of prints that weren’t like the others. They were boot prints. Not a large boot, no more than a size nine, with a rounded toe and grooved soles. The boots had walked from the door of the supply room to the furthest corner, ending at a shelf full of paint supplies.
Kyla looked at Ethan’s feet. They were big, easily an eleven or twelve, and shod in cowboy boots with pointed toes. Not a match.
She could only think of one other person who’d worn boots tonight.
Kyla followed the steps in parallel, careful not to disturb them. She stopped at the can of paint supplies and surveyed its contents. Cans, brushes, acetone, a folded tarp.
And tucked away on the edge of the shelf she found an empty paint can with its lid removed. It held a few wooden stirrers, a screwdriver, a weathered pencil. Shaking the can under the light, Kyla found something else squirreled away in the clutter. Something small and round and yellow.
Fishing her fingers into the can, Kyla plucked out a plastic cylinder with a yellow case. Even without reading the letters on the side, Kyla knew what the little cylinder contained. She’d seen plenty of ones just like it today.
On the side of the cylinder were the words KODAK GOLD 400.
35 MM NEGATIVE FILM.
36 EXPOSURES.
A small tab of orange celluloid jutted from the side of the roll. Kyla wasn’t a professional photographer, but she was pretty sure that meant there was raw film inside. Maybe even a full roll.
“Do you think this is from Sarah’s camera?” Ethan said.
“I can’t think of anywhere else it would have come from,” Kyla said, though her mind was suddenly moving too quickly for her to really consider such a statement. “Sarah had a bathtub full of development chemicals in her room. Fernanda knows how to expose film.”
Ethan looked at his watch. “I hope she can work fast. It’s already eleven thirty.”