She’d even cooked Thanksgiving dinner for us when she was sick. She was still on her feet then, trying to convince herself that she could do everything she used to do. She’d waved us off, gone shopping for a load of groceries when Graham and I weren’t looking. She’d fallen asleep while the turkey was in the oven. Just thinking about it now made me sad. I had no idea what old idea buried in my mother’s psyche made her crazy at Thanksgiving, and now I would never know.
I loved Graham. He was my big brother, my only sibling, my protector and my torturer for as long as I could remember. The one who didn’t let bullies tease me for being a dorky bookworm, but who also believed that making me watch horror movies at age nine would “toughen me up” and had snuck me my first copy of Pet Sematary. But now he was twenty-three, working in an office, and practically married. While I stood here in the parking lot of the Sun Down at three in the morning, watching the snow, it felt like Graham was on Mars.
I held the photo in my hand out at arm’s length, matching the image to the motel. It was one of Marnie Clark’s stack of photos, taken from the parking lot of the Sun Down in 1982. This shot was taken from near where I was standing, at the edge of the parking lot, facing the motel. I moved the photo until I had it exactly matched—the real motel outside the frame, the 1982 version inside. There was almost no difference at all.
In a weird, scary way, this place was almost magical, stuck in time.
I lowered the photo and picked up the next one from the stack. It was taken from the same angle. There were two cars in the parking lot in the picture, parked in front of rooms 103 and 104. They were boxy, early-1980s cars, ugly and oddly retro-attractive at the same time. A woman was getting out of one of them. She was young and dark-haired and beautiful, sexy and maybe a little mean. Or she just had resting bitch face, perhaps. This was the woman Marnie had been paid to follow and catch cheating. Bannister, Marnie had said the name was. This was Mrs. Bannister, on her way to an assignation at the Sun Down.
I switched to the next photo. My hands were getting cold in my mittens, but I didn’t care. There was no chance that I would be needed inside the Sun Down office anytime soon, because we had no customers, and I liked looking at the photos out here, seeing where Marnie had been when she took them, the real spot where Mrs. Bannister had parked. It was like a door through time.
The next photo showed the door to room 104 opening and a man standing in the gap. He was smiling at Mrs. Bannister. He was fortyish, with salt-and-pepper hair. Not bad-looking, I thought, but it was a mystery why a woman so young would cheat with him at a down-and-out motel. Then again, I was the last person to understand anything about sex.
I looked more closely at the photo of Mrs. Bannister and her lover. Marnie had been at the back of the parking lot, and she’d gotten a lot of the motel into the frame. On the upper edge I could see the second level of the motel, the bottoms of the line of doors through the slats of the second-story railing. There was a dark shadow on the second floor, as if maybe someone was standing there. But then again, it could be anything.
Inside the motel office, I heard the desk phone ring. I jogged back toward the motel, putting the photos in my coat pocket. The ringing stopped as someone picked up the phone, and then the office door opened. Nick stepped out and motioned to me. He’d been in the office going through the rest of the stack of Marnie’s photos. “It’s Heather,” he said.
“Thanks.” My glasses fogged as I walked back inside, and when I pulled my hat off my hair probably looked comical. I continued to make an excellent impression on Nick Harkness in my campaign for seduction.
“Hey,” I said, picking up the receiver he’d left on the desk. It was sort of a thrill, using an old-style telephone. It felt like it weighed five pounds.
“Okay,” Heather said on the other end of the line. “I’ve been researching the Bannisters for the last hour and I’ll tell you what I’ve found: nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” I pawed at my hair with my free hand, trying to pat the flyaways back down. I heard Nick sit, though I couldn’t see him through the fog.
“I mean nothing,” Heather said. “There’s a mention of a Steven Bannister winning a high school high jump contest in 1964, and that’s it. I have no idea if it’s even the right person. No other mentions of either husband or wife at all. And they’re not in the Fell phone book.”
The frustrations of tracking people who didn’t live their lives online. “Okay. It was a long shot anyway that either of them would have met Viv. What about the man Mrs. Bannister was cheating with?”
“Aha,” Heather said. “Now you’ll see how clever I am. Because I truly am fiendishly clever.”
“Fiendishly?” My glasses cleared, and I glanced
