“Just Brenda Bailey,” Alma said. “She was an alcoholic. Her husband would go through a phase of trying to make her quit, so she’d check into the motel to do her secret drinking. She was in her room that night, passed out. The detectives questioned her, and then I questioned her myself off the record. She didn’t see or hear a thing.” She nodded toward my paper. “And Brenda’s dead, too. She passed in ’87. Jesus, it seems like I know a lot of dead people, doesn’t it? I promise there are still a few people alive in Fell.”
I wrote down Brenda Bailey, because it seemed like I should. “What about the man who worked the shift before Viv’s? He might be the last person to see her alive.”
“Johnny? Sure, you can talk to him if you want. He’s in his seventies now. Lives in an old folks’ home in New Jersey, where his niece put him so he can be close. He never had anything to say about that night except that Viv showed up and he went home. His mother confirmed he was home by eleven fifteen.”
This was hopeless. I was getting nowhere, so I changed the subject. “Did you work the Cathy Caldwell case?”
I looked up and saw that Alma’s face looked shocked, like someone had given her bad news. “There is no connection between Vivian’s disappearance and the Cathy Caldwell case.” The words came out of her automatically, like the Snickers bars in the Sun Down’s semifunctional candy machine.
“But we don’t know that,” I said. “They were around the same time. Cathy’s murder is unsolved. So was Betty Graham’s. And there was Victoria Lee, which everyone thought was solved, but it turns out it wasn’t. So all three are open cases.”
Alma’s voice was firm. “Like I say, there’s no connection.”
“Isn’t it too much for coincidence?” I insisted. “All these girls dead right before Viv? And then it stopped?”
Alma shook her head as I spoke. “Damn the Internet, honestly. Carly, honey. I know it’s tempting. But we had detectives working those cases—good ones. They wanted to solve those murders, and if there was any connection with Vivian’s disappearance, they would have jumped on it. But they couldn’t find that connection. Without a body, there’s nothing to go on.”
She sounded so firm, so confident. And she had that cop’s voice, the one that said I know what I’m doing, so just do as I say. But still. All of those women, murdered and unsolved around the same time. What were the odds that they were all different killers? And that Viv had crossed paths with yet another killer? This place would be worse than the town in Murder, She Wrote. Didn’t the cops see that? Shouldn’t they be the first ones to see it?
But from Alma’s expression I knew I was trying to dig on stony ground. “Okay,” I said. “It was just a thought.” I closed my notebook. “Thanks for your time.”
“I’m sorry,” Alma said. “It’s just that those cases are near to me. I’m not a detective, but we were all hands on deck after Betty and Cathy. People were scared. It was a difficult time.” She pressed her lips together. “We had a strange run of deaths in the late seventies, early eighties, I’ll give you that. But it stopped, and Fell was quiet for a long time. We didn’t have any more headline-grabbing cases until the Harkness murder.”
Nick. His father shooting his brother, then coming up the stairs as Nick jumped from the window.
“I’ll tell Nick you said hello,” I said.
Alma’s eyebrows went up. “Nick is back in town?”
Oh, shit. Was that supposed to be a secret? Don’t mention my name, Nick had said. I was such an idiot. “I guess so,” I hedged. “I met him at the Sun Down.” I put my notebook in my lap.
“Nick Harkness is staying at the Sun Down?”
“Just for a little while, I think.” Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut? Nick wanted his privacy. Maybe he didn’t want it all over Fell that he was back. “He’s the one who gave me your name and suggested I talk to you.”
“Yeah, he’d remember me,” Alma said. “I dumped him in the drunk tank to sleep it off enough times.” She pushed her chair back. “He isn’t a person you want to get too close to, Carly. Take it from me.”
“He’s grown up now,” I said, even though I didn’t know Nick all that well. “He doesn’t get in trouble anymore.”
“Or so he says.” Alma looked at me thoughtfully. “You know, we could never prove anything, but I always wondered if Nick was really upstairs in his room like he said he was. Tell him I say hello.”
Fell, New York
November 1982 VIV
Without sleep, the nights were long. It felt like Viv lived in an endless stretch of darkness, punctuated only by fleeting daylight in which she dozed, her eyes restless behind her closed lids. Tonight she was at the Sun Down, sitting in the office alone. Her limbs ached and her eyes were half closed. She’d come in to find a single white envelope on the desk marked Paycheck—Janice’s only interaction with her employee.
What if I didn’t show up at all? Viv wondered to herself. Would anyone notice? Would Johnny tell anyone? How many nights could I simply not come to work before someone wondered where I was?
It was a lonely thought, and for a second she felt soft and bruised by it. She should call her mother sometime, maybe. Her sister. Try talking to her roommate, Jenny, again, even. How long had it been since she talked to someone? She rubbed her eyes and stretched her cramped legs beneath the desk.
There was no one at the motel tonight. Literally no one. For the first
