CHAPTER TEN
Sleep wouldn’t come.
Selena lay on her back in the narrow motel bed with one arm over her eyes and listened to the room settle around her.
Pipes knocked once in the wall. The old air unit gave a tired rattle and went quiet again.
Somewhere outside, tires hissed over the highway and faded into the night.
Every time her body started to loosen, another sound pulled her back up.
The ceiling looked stained in the weak light from the parking lot.
She turned onto one side. Then the other. Kicked the sheet down. Pulled it back up.
No use.
Her father’s face kept returning to her.
Not the way he had looked when she was ten or fifteen or even twenty-five.
Too much like when he had cancer. Too close to that.
The version from the porch. Thinner. Smaller.
Fragile in a way that felt wrong on him.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his hand shaking just a little as he lifted the pipe.
Selena sat up hard and pushed both feet to the floor.
The motel room was close and stale. She reached for her jeans draped over the chair, pulled them on, then grabbed her shirt from the dresser. A glance at the clock told her it was past midnight. Late enough that even Elmsview should have gone still.
A sharp cry cut through the wall.
Selena froze.
It came again. High, jagged, sudden. It was definitely a scream.
She was on her feet before the sound had fully died. Pulled on her jeans and a blue top, and then she was ready.
When the scream came a third time, she had to act. Gun in hand, safety of motion taking over where thought lagged. She stepped to the door, listened, then eased it open.
Cold night air met her first. The motel lot lay under a thin wash of yellow light from the office sign. Cars sat motionless in their spaces. The soda machine near reception hummed to itself. Nothing moved.
Then the scream came a fourth time, louder now, unmistakably from the office.
Selena crossed the asphalt fast, keeping low by instinct, pistol angled down but ready. The walkway thudded under her shoes near the curb. The office blinds were half open. Flickering light spilled through them in jerky bursts, white and black and white again.
Another shriek split the night.
Selena reached the door, took one step inside, and stopped.
“FBI!”
Eric Wilson sat behind the front desk with his boots up on a chair, staring at a tiny television perched on the counter.
On the screen, a woman in a torn nightgown was running from something rubber and ridiculous in a castle corridor painted to look like stone.
Thunder cracked from the TV speaker. The creature roared. The actress screamed again.
Eric turned his head. “Jesus!”
His eyes dropped at once to the gun.
“You’re not going to shoot me for watching bad movies, are you?”
For a second Selena just stared at him.
Then she let out a breath and lowered the pistol. “I thought you were strangling someone in here!”
A grin spread across his face. “No. Just murdering cinema.”
The ridiculousness of it drained the tension out of her so fast it left her slightly unsteady. Selena slid the gun back into place beneath her jacket.
“You really shouldn’t have that on so loud when you have guests… I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait.” Eric swung his boots off the chair and stood. “Now you’re here.”
He crouched behind the counter, rummaged around, then came up with two squat glasses and a bottle. Even before he poured it, Selena could tell from the color and the label this wasn’t the cheap stuff people kept for show.
Eric came out from behind the desk and handed one glass to her.
“I’m not the only one around here who looks like they need a drink.”
Selena almost refused. Then she caught the scent rising off it and paused.
Peat. Smoke. Salt.
She looked at the label. “Lagavulin?”
Eric smiled, pleased with himself. “I love a good Southern bourbon, but those Scots know what they’re doing.”
She gave in. She lifted the glass. He touched his gently against hers.
“Hey, to Elmsview High and the good old days.” He smiled.
“To Elmsview,” she said. And for once, that sentiment didn’t stick in her throat. She wondered why.
The whiskey hit warm and deep. Smoky on the tongue, then a slow burn down the throat that settled into her chest in a way the room hadn’t. Good stuff, and more generous than she would have expected from a man running a roadside motel in a county this small.
A pair of old chairs sat against the far wall near a brochure rack filled with faded tourist leaflets. Selena took a chair. Eric settled in the other, television still muttering behind the desk while some doomed actor tried to warn people not to go into the tower.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Eric said, “What are you doing up so late?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
His gaze stayed on her a second longer than it needed to. “Is it about Brenda Colter?”
Selena nodded once. “Word travels fast.”
He gave a quiet laugh. “You’ve been away from Harlan County too long. It always travels fast. Everyone knows everyone’s business.”
On the screen, music swelled as someone opened the wrong door. Eric glanced toward it, then back to Selena.
“Is it true she was murdered in the old church tower?”
“I can’t talk about the particulars.”
“That’s cool. I just wanted to know what happened to her. It’s horrible.”
The answer might have ended it, but she was already there, already awake, and his mention of Brenda had sharpened something in her.
“Did you know her?” Selena asked.
“Actually… I did. Well, a little.”
“How?”
Eric swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Only through work.”
Selena watched him over the rim of hers. “What do you mean by ‘work’?”
His eyes flicked up, measuring the question. “I probably shouldn’t say much about that. Her business was her business, and I don’t want people thinking bad of the dead.”
The Latin phrase on the church wall came back to her. To take a whore. It had seemed ugly enough in daylight. Here, in the motel office with the horror movie shrieking faintly in the background, it took on a different edge.
“You said ‘work.’ Brenda stayed here often?” Selena asked.
Eric hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. She did.”
“With different men?”
“I mean. Whenever she arrived, she arrived alone.”
“That’s not what I asked, Eric.”
He sighed.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling for a second as if trying to count the visits.
“I saw more than one guy leave her room over time. On different nights.”
Selena kept her voice even. “Can you describe them?”
“Not really.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “One of them was tall. Dark hair. That’s about all I’ve got.”
“You never saw their faces clearly?”
“Mostly late. Mostly men who didn’t look like they wanted remembering. People sometimes stay in these sorts of places because they’re just passing through and want to have a good time. I try and keep my nose out of it.”
“What about security cams?”
“Nah, we wipe them every couple of weeks.”
“When was the last time Brenda was here?” Selena asked.
“Uh, I’d say it was more than two weeks ago.”
A roar came from the television. The creature in the film caught fire for some reason. Eric turned toward it.
“Did Brenda have a reputation for being with different men, then?” she asked.
Eric took a drink before answering. “There were rumors.”
“Like she was a prostitute?”
“Jeez, Selena,” he said, turning to her. “I don’t know. But there were rumors that when money was tight, she might’ve done a little escorting.”
“Might’ve?”
He gave a small shrug. “That’s all I heard.”
“Where did you hear those rumors?”
“Roy’s Bar. Drunk talk, mostly.”
“Who said it?”
“I don’t remember. Just stool talk. Jeez, I give you a good whiskey and you give me the third degree.” He laughed.
Selena knew the place he was talking about. Roy’s Bar was exactly the sort of place where a woman’s name could be ruined in three counties before midnight. Still, she needed more.
“You don’t remember who started it,” she said.
“No.”
“You ever see her out and about in town with someone you know?”
“I’ve seen her. But I don’t remember. I’ve got my own problems.”
Her glass was somehow empty now. She set it carefully on the floor beside her chair.
Eric leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. “Look, for what it’s worth, Brenda never caused trouble here. Paid cash. Kept to herself. Whatever people said about her, most of it came from men who’d done worse and wanted somebody else to look down on.”
Beyond the office walls, a night insect battered itself against the glass of the soda machine. The TV heroine screamed again, then stopped screaming abruptly. Killed off, apparently. Eric reached for the remote and lowered the volume. The night sounds settled more fully around them.
Selena said, “If you remember anything else, let me know.”
“I will.”
She pushed herself up from the chair. “Thanks for the drink.”
Eric looked at her empty glass, then at the bottle. “You want another? We can watch this film. It’s hilariously bad. It’s about this creature from space… Nah, it’s best if you watch it from the beginning. I start it again?”
“Another time, maybe.”
His expression suggested he knew exactly what that probably meant. Still, he took the refusal well enough.
“Well, you know where I am, Selena.”
Selena picked up the glass and handed it back to him. Their fingers brushed briefly by accident. He looked like he might say something else, then thought better of it.
Outside, the night felt colder than before. The motel office door clicked shut behind her. She crossed the lot under the buzzing light, hands in her jacket pockets now, mind working faster than the whiskey could soften it.
Brenda checked in alone.
Different men leaving the room.
Rumors of escorting.
A phrase in Latin written beside a butchered woman in an abandoned church. If she was a prostitute or escort, then the phrase could have been written by one of her customers.
By the time Selena reached her room, the warmth of the drink had already begun to thin beneath the sharpened edge of the case. She locked the door, stripped off her clothes, and slid back under the sheets.
The mattress sagged in the middle like it always did.
This time the room stayed quiet.
Selena stared into the dark and pictured Brenda in the choir loft. Head bowed. Hands arranged. Candles below. Words on the wall. Someone out of view that wanted the killing to mean more than death. A crime of passion would have been left in disarray. This had meaning to it.
Her eyes stayed open long after the motel had gone still and the sounds of Eric’s movie had finished. Selena’s mind swirled around the murder, and what the killer wanted to say about someone like Brenda.
Was Brenda being punished?
Or purified?