“Really?” Bobby was excited.
“Maybe she’ll take you out.”
“Out? Out of here? You mean tomorrow we can leave the room?”
“Don’t disappoint her,” Ash said.
“I won’t. I won’t. You mean we’ll leave the room, Ash?”
“She’s going to want to show you off,” Ash said. “She’s very proud of you.”
“Really? Do you mean it?”
Ash wanted to tell him not to get so excited. He wanted to explain that Bobby was safest at this stage, before Dee’s expectations got too high. Before she loved him too much.
“You mustn’t disappoint her,” Ash said.
“I won’t. Stop saying that. I’ll be good.”
“You have to be so good.” Ash said. “So good.”
The old fool was dispensing towels again. Like clockwork, as soon as the woman’s car appeared, George jumped up from his chair and grabbed the towels. Reggie thought he looked like his damned chair was rigged. Like the gas station where you ran over a rubber hose and the bell rang, only here there was no bell, just a shot of adrenaline straight into the old fool’s ass. Reggie watched him hovering around the office until “Dee” came home, pretending to work, pretending he knew how to read the books and count the figures. And all for a younger woman’s smile.
Reggie watched with growing anger as he scurried out the door, holding the towels with one hand, patting his hairs into place atop his pate with the other. It was enough to make her spit. If he didn’t look so damned ludicrous it would be sad, but as it was it was pathetic. Just pathetic.
The woman, of course, greeted him like a long lost friend. Good old George, her personal laundry man, grinning and patting himself like a gigolo. If they had gigolos that age. Reggie looked at “Dee” waiting by the car, containers of take-out food stacked on top. She was very careful not to give George a peek inside the room, Reggie noticed. She would take the towels, smile and chatter away for a bit while George stood there and drooled, then, as he finally turned and walked away-and he usually wouldn’t have sense enough to do that until Reggie stepped out of the office onto the porch-then, and only then, when George’s back was turned, would she knock on her door and when it was opened a crack, slip inside with the towels and take-out food.
There was something suspicious going on in cabin six, and no doubt about it. George was too besotted to see it, of course, and there was no point in trying to convince him, but Reggie didn’t need his help to find out what was afoot. She had been a motel owner for seven years and nobody’s fool for long before that.
She left George safely watching a rerun of a sitcom that featured a famously stupid blonde with a chest that Reggie considered indecent and an equally famous vacuous young man who worked obviously at his acting, but very hard. As long as the blonde was on the screen, which was most of the time, George would never know that Reggie was gone. Not that it mattered if he did know, she thought. She had a perfect right, after all.
She slipped out of the office door and paused for a moment on the front porch. The cabins stood in pools of light from their own outdoor lamps. Some of the lights were out and the guests already retired for the evening. Some of the cabins stood empty, unrented and dark. Cabin six was lighted.
Reggie stepped off the porch and walked to the edge of the illumination that came from her own porch light. A few steps beyond it and she moved in darkness, which was the way she wanted it. She knew the way well enough. There were no surprises between here and cabin six, even though her eyes had not yet adjusted to the night. Reggie caught herself tiptoeing even though she was forty yards away from the cabin. She had no reason to sneak, she told herself. It was her motel, her property, her livelihood, and she had every right in the world to know what was going on in any one of her cabins. Especially when it was something undeniably fishy. Unconsciously she slipped back into her stealthy mode after a few steps.
When Reggie was halfway there, the light on cabin six went out with a suddenness that startled her. The transition from light to dark was so abrupt she thought she could almost hear a snap. A body came out of the cabin and opened the door of the car parked in front of the building. The interior light of the car showed Reggie that it was the woman. Dee, and then the car light, too, went off.
Reggie froze where she was, covered by a blanket of darkness that lay between the office and the cabin. She was certain that Dee did not see her watching. Reggie could only make out Dee’s shape without the cabin light because she knew where to look. Dee hurried to the cabin. There was a brief glimpse of pale blue-green light from the television set in the cabin, and Reggie had the impression of someone very large scurrying from the cabin and into the car. He seemed to be carrying something, but Reggie had no idea what it was. He was into the backseat of the car in an instant and the cabin door was closed even before that. Another shape hurried through the dark toward the car and Reggie knew it was Dee again.
Car doors slammed, the engine roared to life, but still there were no lights. Dee drove with her headlights off across the curved gravel drive. As it approached the road the car came under the light from the Restawhile sign that stood beside the highway and Reggie could see Dee behind the wheel, but there was no sign of anyone else in the car. The car’s headlights came on as the car pulled onto the highway and Dee was lighted again by the sweep of oncoming beams, but still there was no indication of another soul in the car.
Reggie waited until Dee’s automobile was off, heading toward town, then she waited a minute longer, forcing herself to count to sixty to make sure the woman didn’t remember something and come sweeping back. Finally, her heart beating faster, Reggie turned toward cabin six again. The woman had claimed her husband had trouble with his eyes, which might account for the strange, unlighted dash into the car, but it certainly wouldn’t have made him invisible. Why would a man run into the backseat of a car and flop down out of sight immediately? Reggie could not think of any legitimate reason for such behavior.
With a glance back at the highway, Reggie fumbled through her keys, selected the right one, and opened the door to cabin six.
It smelled funny, she realized immediately. Heavy, musky, stale. Not like unwashed bodies, she thought, not that exactly, but more like something that you couldn’t wash away. It wasn’t sex either, which was what Reggie had expected. There was a milky cast to the odor, and something sharp and acrid that she could not identify.
She eased the door closed behind her before turning on the interior light, because even though she had a perfect right to be where she was, there was no need to advertise her presence.
The bedspread was missing, she saw that immediately. Some guests removed it on purpose and stored it on the shelf in the closet where it was intended to go, but most never bothered and slept with it over them, piling a blanket on top of the spread if it got cold. But, of course, no one was cold now. Reggie felt her skin prickling as if she were about to break a sweat just from the exertion of walking here from the office. The spread was nowhere to be found, which was all the reason Reggie would require to get rid of George’s little favorite. Even he could not argue against theft of motel property. Sneaking off with a towel was one thing, and certainly a major nuisance, but an entire bedspread was another matter entirely.
It did not take long for Reggie to inventory the room. There was evidence enough of the “husband.” A shirt of his hung in the closet, an old-fashioned razor with two-sided blades was beside the sink. Even George used a disposable cartridge razor these days. The woman’s cosmetics were strewn throughout the bathroom, atop the sink, on the top of the toilet tank, some spilling onto the floor. Reggie had known she would be a sloven. Three toothbrushes stood upright in the motel’s bathroom glass. Two adult-size models with slanted heads and one children’s size, baby blue. Wasn’t she just too cute to bear, Reggie thought. Her little teeth were just too delicate for an adult brush. It was enough to make you sick. The woman’s nightgown hung on the back of the bathroom door. Reggie flicked it with a finger, disgusted by the frilliness of it. She could just picture the harlot flitting around the room in her lacey nightie, her face painted like a whore’s, her child’s toothbrush in her mouth. She probably talked baby talk, too, Reggie thought. George would like that, of course. He wasn’t many years removed from a second childhood himself.
Reggie returned to the closet, a doorless recess with a shelf above and a single metal bar below. The woman had four pairs of shoes in there, the man had none, which meant he was wearing his only pair now. There were no trousers hanging in the closet, either. They had been in the cabin more than three weeks now, Reggie calculated, and the only change of clothes she could see for the man was that one forlorn-looking shirt. She knew other men who would live like that if their women allowed it. Not George. The old fool had more clothes than
