grown man, wide-eyed and baby-faced, in an orange vest festooned with yellow rickrack and pom-poms, guzzling diet soda and reading a vampire book so close to Halloween, but probably no stranger than seeing a nervous- looking woman and her sullen, hockey fanatic son checking into a dumpy highway hotel this late on a weeknight.
“Reservation?”
He must have been joking. Did anyone ever stop here intentionally? I’d assumed only the prospect of driving oneself into a ditch would induce anyone to check into this dive.
“No,” I said.
We checked in under my name, as mother and son; we’d be staying for one night and we’d need two beds and two keys. My “son,” wacky kid, insisted on wearing his face protector and waving his stick around when we entered the building.
“Teenage boys-what can you do?” I said, plucking the card keys from the counter and hoping I sounded like a typical suburban mom. I tried not to let it bother me that the desk clerk didn’t bat an eye at the idea that I was the mother of a teenager. (That was the last straw. Microdermabrasion, here I come.)
Caroline was in the breakfast area of the lobby where she’d probably be having bad coffee and chemically preserved muffins in the morning while I was home sleeping in.
“Jason, Jason.” It took a while for Caroline to realize I was calling her. She was transfixed by the local news report on the lobby television. It was her own smiling image. Blond, blunt-cut hair, velvet headband, no dark roots.
“C’mon,” I said, tugging on her sleeve. “No more television tonight. Didn’t you watch enough in the car?”
Caroline said nothing as we walked down the narrow hall all the way to the end. Our room, number 104, was on the left, next to the pool and spa, and smelled faintly of bleach or whatever it was they used to clean the Jacuzzi. At least they cleaned it. Inside the room, Caroline pulled off the mask and sucked air.
“No wonder Jason has zits.” She tiptoed to the bathroom and dampened a scratchy washcloth to wipe her face while I hurriedly pulled the curtains shut.
The bathroom was a toilet and a tub that Toulouse-Lautrec would have felt cramped in. Outside the closet- sized bathroom was a sink with a square of mirror bolted to the wall, and underneath the sink a rectangle of curling plastic tile on the floor to catch the drips. The rest of the room was just as basic with a microwave; a boxy tweed Herculon loveseat; and the one incongruous item, a giant flat-screen television, which probably cost more than all the other furnishings combined. Priorities, I supposed. I turned it on for background noise.
By this time Caroline and I were starving. I was ready to give the curiously named Famely Restaurant a try, so I told Caroline to make herself as comfortable as possible while I went out to get us some dinner.
“Can’t we order?” she asked.
“I’ll ask at the desk, but I don’t think they have room service here, and I doubt that the Famely Restaurant delivers. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be back in thirty minutes with something reasonably healthy to eat. Bolt the door after I leave; don’t open it for anyone but me. Don’t call anyone and don’t answer the telephone. And don’t walk around barefoot on this rug. My shoes are sticking to it. Not a good sign.” Clearly, I was taking my role as “mother” seriously.
True to my word I returned in under thirty minutes. While I was waiting for our order to be ready I learned that Famely was not a typo, the restaurant was actually owned by a couple named Famely, which I’m sure caused their children no end of embarrassment and may have even resulted in early, disastrous marriages as offspring tried to escape the Famely family moniker.
Although good, healthy food was foreign to the Famely family, they made up for it with quantity. Back in our room I laid out our feast on the fake wood coffee table-fried chicken, coleslaw, biscuits, and applesauce. The only things that were green were the straws for our sodas.
“All the basic food groups: grease, mayo, bread, and sugar,” I said.
“Don’t knock it. You’ll be amazed at how easily it all goes down,” Caroline said, opening the Styrofoam boxes. “It’s better than it sounds. We eat this way all the time when Jason has an away game.” Her face darkened and I wondered if she was thinking of her previous life or all those away games long ago that had gotten her into this mess.
My dining standards having plummeted in the last few years, I inhaled the food but swapped out my biscuits for her applesauce. We said little while we ate, just listened to the buzz of some inane low-budget reality show now turned up loud to drown out the shower noises and toilet flushes we could hear through the hotel’s cardboard walls.
“Want to tell me about Kate?” I said after we finished eating. I thought that’s where she was heading when we fled her house.
“Not really,” she said, with a laugh. She told me anyway.
“As soon as Kate got out of prison, she got in touch with my brother. She didn’t ask if he knew where I was, just sent him money. A lot of money. He used some of it…mostly for my father, but he put the rest of it away for me.”
So that’s why she still considered Kate a friend.
“You stayed in touch with him while you were on the run? Wasn’t that risky?”
“Not really,” she said again. “Another lesson learned from Sherry, the girl I met in New York. I wonder what happened to her.”
In Florida, Caroline had gotten college kids to mail postcards for her when they returned home from spring break. They’d be sent from all over the country, even from the UK, and wouldn’t have a Miami postmark. Eventually, three and a half years after she last saw him, she thought it might be safe and sent her brother an unsigned postcard asking him to meet her at the Delano in South Beach.
“He came to Florida and brought me the money. That’s what I was living on when I met Grant.”
“What did you live on the first three years?”
“Don’t ask.”
Holy cow, and I thought this woman just stayed home and did needlepoint and baked cookies.
“That’s why I don’t think Kate would do anything to harm me. If she didn’t expose me then, why would she do it now?”
“Does that mean you think she’s still alive?” I asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I just know she wouldn’t hurt me.”
Thirty-five
If Kate was off our list, as Caroline had insisted, she was the only one we’d been able to eliminate so far. Who had hired Countertop Man to track down Caroline? Who had come after me in the parking lot? Who had sent the threatening note with the charm? It was close to midnight and my brain was getting fuzzy, probably from all the poisons coursing through my system from the crap food, which did, as Caroline predicted, go down far too easily.
We still hadn’t heard from Lucy and Grant, and I was getting worried-then I realized it wasn’t likely Lucy would call my cell. She knew how bad I was about remembering to turn it on. She probably would have called on the landline. I checked the cell anyway. There was only one voice mail message. From Roxy Rhodes. Did I know how to reach Grant Sturgis? Kevin Brookfield was close to making an offer on the nursery and she wanted me to see if Grant was still interested. Especially since Kevin and I were friends, too.
“What’s the matter?” Caroline said, looking adorable in her son’s oversized, albeit smelly, hockey shirt. “You look puzzled.”
I was. Why would Roxy think I knew more about Kevin Brookfield than she’d told me? I’d only met him once, that time at the diner when I was planting false lamiums for Babe. We’d barely exchanged words.
Despite the hour, I called Lucy and she picked up on the first ring. After pretending to be Caroline, she and Grant had driven in circles for hours trying to elude the press and had decided to stop for the night. She hadn’t seen anyone at the dumpy motel where they’d pulled in and felt they were in the clear. Lucy sounded exhilarated over her adventure; I doubted Grant Sturgis was having as much fun.
