Thirty-Four
We arrive at the motel an eerily similar time to when we first got to Kingston, back when we thought the texter—thought Evan—was going to help us.
Soft morning sun blankets the motel, making the purple doors pop.
The parking lot is still empty, the vacancies sign still on, but we’ve encountered much scarier places here since.
This is just six rooms we could possibly search through, with only one local to contend with in the office.
We tried contacting Natalie on the walkie-talkie, but no reply yet.
But she should’ve been able to hear we were heading here. We have backup.
Maybe it’s just naivety, but I think we’re ready to face this place.
Paisley’s last moments might’ve been at this motel.
Paisley’s body could be somewhere at this motel, for all I know.
The odds finally feel in Beck’s and my favor.
Beck and I step over to the office side by side. My fingers itch to hold hers, but given the red territory we’re in, I understand it’s far from the best move to get whatever motel worker in there to talk to us.
The person working the front desk is a young guy, maybe in his twenties, with curly golden hair that falls around his shoulders.
It reminds me of guys at our high school who still run flat brushes through their curls because their straight-haired moms didn’t teach them any other way.
After Evan, though, my senses are on alert.
Sure, Evan could’ve just asked if the motel was occupied that night to safely hide Paisley’s body before burying her somewhere else entirely, but there’s a high chance one of the motel workers is in on it.
“Hi,” I say.
He glances up from his ancient desktop, eyes glazed over in what seems like a mix of exhaustion and boredom. “Hey. Need a room?”
I nod, despite what comes out of my mouth. “Were you working in October?”
His light eyes go wide. “I don’t know anything about those girls,” he insists. “I wasn’t working that night. We closed the office at six, so we weren’t even checking in guests if I had been here. I don’t know any suspicious characters or anything like that.”
Beck and I exchange a glance. I don’t think I’ve heard a more suspicious response in my life.
Beck leans on the counter. “Okay,” she says. “Does this place have a most-popular room, then?”
The desk worker swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Room 5. People like only sharing a wall with one other guest.” He sniffles. “And no one likes 1 because of that old movie and the peephole thing.” He pauses. “We don’t have a peephole. I can show you the wall right now.”
“Were all the rooms available that night?” Beck asks.
He glares, looking back to the computer. “We have someone who’s always in 2, but that’s all I know.”
So that’s five potential rooms for us to search for a lead on Paisley’s body. We can at least rent out one and then sneak into the others.
Beck gives him a smile. “Three, then, please.”
I suppose it doesn’t really matter what room we start with, I think. Three works.
He hands us the key without any other questions. Doesn’t even ask for our IDs.
As soon as we’re out of the office, Beck snorts. “You think they’re peddling something here? There’s no way that fucker didn’t card us, and he was acting so skittish.”
I shrug. “Any number of not-as-bad-as-murder crimes.”
She puts a hand on my back. “Next investigation.”
I shake my head. “Let’s not make a habit of this.”
We turn the key and swing the door open.
It’s every bit as unremarkable as I would’ve guessed judging by the office.
The walls are some flavor of honey-mustard yellow, the yellow hue fading behind what seems to be decades of old hand- and footmarks all over the walls.
There are two queen beds with brown quilts and flat pillows and a dark chipped wooden desk in the corner.
When I glance at the floor, there’s clearly been stains here, but there’s no real way to know what substance they once were.
The whole place smells like homemade cleaning solution and dust.
“We need a black light,” I say.
Bang!
The noise reverberates from the right wall, room 4. Like someone knocked over a piece of furniture.
Beck puts a hand to her heart. “I know we’re looking for signs of murder, so worth asking—we’re not actually staying here tonight, right?”
“No.” Hopefully, we can find what we need, slip out unnoticed, and will have federal agents on the phone before the day ends. “If we don’t find anything now, we’ll just go to Natalie with what we have and wait with her for the forest cops to arrive.”
Beck exhales. “Good.”
Either way, we’d do well to not interact with any neighbors. If the front desk guy is as shady as he seems to be, I don’t need to know who usually stays here.
“Here’s the black light by the way,” Beck says.
We’d bought it prior to the trip, when I was trying to think of every tool that might help us. Not that I really had any vision of it working in the woods. It’s nice to have something to do with it now.
Beck clicks the lights off and the black light on.
I don’t know what I’m expecting, exactly.
A motel this sketchy will surely be covered in stains.
Some will likely be blood but not be from someone being murdered.
But my stomach clenches the second Beck’s pen finds a single stain on the floor.
It’s a bit of spray, but nothing that would indicate any struggle or deaths took place here.
I really don’t know much about blood spatter other than a few things picked up watching crime shows, but I assume there would have to be a lot of blood.
We have so much of it inside of us, and it can’t be contained easily.
If anyone were hit hard enough to die, there’d have to be an uncontrollable amount of blood in here.
But there aren’t any puddles, any huge lines of spray. There are…small lines of spray, dots, smears as big as fingertips. I have to think even if Paisley were already dead, she’d leave some sign of her life around here somewhere. Blood draining out of a mortal wound isn’t that easy to hold in.
“You know, it raises the question whether I’d ever do this to another hotel room again,” Beck says as she glances over a stain on the right bed’s pillow. “Is it better to live in ignorant bliss or to physically leave a premises covered in human fluids?”
I snort and say, “I wish I could vote for ignorant bliss, but my anxiety is only kept tame by knowing things.”
I move into the bathroom, which is our best shot for finding evidence, anyway. They always do sketchy shit in the bathroom.
Hell, one of the most famous kills in cinema happened in a motel shower. There must be something to that. Or at least enough homicidally-inclined people would have it etched into their memories that they’d think it was the smart move.
There’s obviously no decayed body in the tub, but we keep going. Any clue would help. God, if we could even find another piece of her jacket or some jewelry. Something that says she and Evan were here together whether she was alive or not at that point.
We turn off the lights. Black light on.
Bathtub, shower curtain, sink, toilet.
Beck moves the black light slowly, as if painting the room stroke by stroke.
Nothing on the tile.
What happens if this is all for nothing, and Paisley isn’t on this property at all? If she were indeed killed and buried in the woods and the call to this motel was a coincidence? The idea has my throat growing heavy.
“Try the grout,” I say.
It’s easy to wipe away blood from tile, but getting anything out of the space between has to be difficult, right? We lean in close together, as if one of us could ever miss it.
There’s a glow between the tiles of the shower.
“There’s something there, but there’s no way to prove it’s blood.” My stomach sours. “This isn’t gonna get us anywhere.”
Beck throws the black light onto the ground.
I cringe as it shatters, the sound reverberating in this lonely little space.
“We found her fucking fingernails,” she says.
“So where’s her body? If she died in here, where is it?
God, Emma, what are we doing? What if the federal cops don’t even take us seriously?
Why would they, without Paisley’s body? Will they even believe we killed Evan in self-defense?
We have Evan’s gun with us, for god’s sake. ”
“For self-defense,” I say. “We’ll give it to Natalie as soon as we find her.”
“We—”
Bang!
And there’s that sound again. The hairs on my arms rise, my body moving closer to Beck. “Do you think we should be concerned about that?”
Another bang hits, this time directly on the wall between our room and room 4.
The thought is so insane, but I can’t stop the idea from tumbling out. “What if it’s the local cops? What if they found Evan?”
“It has to be someone else,” Beck says. “This place seems to have a lot of shady characters.”
But the banging moves.
To our motel room door.
“So what do you do with that?” I ask.
We move out of the bathroom. I grab my pepper spray, knowing Evan’s gun is in my bag if we need it, but I really don’t want to watch someone else die. There are pens and lamps and all sorts of things that hurt people in movies, but I have no idea if they work in real life. I unplug a lamp—
—and Beck moves toward the door.
“What’re you doing?” I demand in as low a voice as I can manage while expressing my indignation.
“I’m checking the peephole thing,” she whispers back. “We should at least know what kind of person we’re dealing with before we call the cops. I’d prefer not to do that.”
I know it’s fine for her to look through the peephole.
I know. But everything inside me curdles at the thought of someone stabbing a weapon right through that peephole into her eye socket like in the movies.
“Beck, please, don’t go near the door!” I say, my voice rising.
But I don’t care anymore. “It could be anyone! This is how people die!”
Beck shakes her head. “Emma, I appreciate you deeply, but we’re not in a horror movie. It’s all gonna be fine. Go call the front desk guy while I check.”
With a hand still clutching the lamp, I dial the front desk from the room’s landline. Despite everything going on, my introvert heartbeat slams in my chest.
“Yeah?” the front desk guy says.
“There’s someone banging on our room door.”
There’s crackling on the other end. “It’s just some stupid girl. I’ll tell her to go. Hold on.”
A stupid girl.
Evan was the one who did all of this. Yet I can’t shake the feeling from being entrenched so long in this town. My whole body heaves wishing it weren’t a fucking girl.
“Beck, don’t—” I say.
Beck looks through the peephole.
All the color drains from her face. She stumbles back, falling against the side of the bed, dropping onto her ass on the stained carpet we both agreed we’d never touch.
“Fuck,” she says. Her hands rise to her mouth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…”
I fall to my knees beside Beck, place a hand on her shoulder. “What?” I say. But she doesn’t answer. I clutch her shirt. “Beck, what’s going on?”
She buries her face into her knees. “No. No, no, no.”
“Beck!”
But Beck is gone, and someone is still terrorizing our door. Where’s the front desk guy?
I stand on wobbly knees, the vision tunneling into one image: the front door.
Like Beck before me, I suddenly feel the need to be closer to the door. Like some entity beyond me is pulling me toward it. My fingers twitch, preparing to settle around the doorknob.
“Beck! Emma! Please, open up!”
And I suddenly understand Beck’s intense reaction. My own world turns on its side, panic and fear and—
—and relief flooding my overtired system.
That’s Paisley’s voice.
I don’t believe in witches; I don’t believe in ghosts. I should believe in fearing what’s behind that door, but I practically rip the door off its hinges to see who’s on the other side.
After being with Beck so much the past few weeks, I stopped remembering Paisley as herself and started remembering her through Beck’s features.
Paisley’s eyes became the dark blue of Beck’s.
Paisley’s hands were the slender, strong hands of Beck.
Paisley’s voice even got deeper in my mind; she got taller, her skinny frame muscular and strong.
But no, Paisley is all her own. Her own cupid’s bow on chapped lips, her own golden hair knotted into a bird’s nest, her own perfect smooth skin covered in cuts where it’s not hidden by a stranger’s worn-out clothing. Something that you’d steal out of a motel lost and found.
But most damning of all, Paisley’s fingertips are bandaged up.