I nodded and took the key as Veronica hit the elevator button to go back down, phone stuck to her ear.
I reached my former room, inserted the key, waited for the little light to turn green, and went inside.
The room was all made up, waiting for the next guest. Stepping into the center of the room, I didn’t see Milt anywhere. It was possible, of course, that one of the housekeeping staff found Milt and, rather than turn him in to the office, decided to keep him. Milt was pretty threadbare from years of hugging, but then again, the staff here probably didn’t make a fortune, and coming home with any stuffed toy for your daughter, even one whose antlers were nearly falling off, was better than coming home without one at all.
I walked around the room, glanced under chairs, opened the drawers of the dresser-all empty.
Then I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. Clearly, vacuuming under here was not something hotel management insisted be done on a daily basis. There were dust balls the size of, well, golf balls.
I found a skin magazine, a package of cigarette papers, a paperback novel by John Grisham. Where the bed met the wall, there was a dark blob. I reached my arm under, grabbed hold of it tentatively.
It was furry.
I pulled it out. It was Milt. I picked the larger bits of dust off him and tried to blow off the rest.
“Got ya,” I said, holding Milt, looking into his goofy face, touching the right antler, which was hanging by a thread. “I thought I’d lost you.”
And then, suddenly, sitting there on the hotel bedroom floor with Milt in my hands, I felt overwhelmed.
Cried like a baby.
I allowed myself three minutes to feel bad, then got to my feet, went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, dried off with a fresh towel, and left the room.
I WAS HEADING BACK TO THE ELEVATOR, Milt in hand, when I heard muffled screaming coming from a room at the end of the hall.
A woman’s screams. Short ones. Every few seconds.
Not frightened screams. Not screams of terror. They were cries of pain.
I started heading to the end of the hall, pausing at the doors, trying to figure out which room the cries were coming from.
“Aww!” a woman shouted. Nothing for a few seconds. Then, “Aww!”
That meant waiting a moment at each door, listening for the next cry to determine whether this was the room.
I was hearing another voice now, another woman. She was shouting, “You don’t go home! You here to work! You try to run away again, they make me do this even harder!”
I had the right door.
Then a noise that sounded like thwack.
And then the woman screamed, “Aww!”
Something horrible was happening in that room.
I reached into my pocket, felt the key card. Veronica had called it a passkey. I took that to mean that it would let me into any room, not just the one where I’d stayed.
I like to think I would have gone through that door to help any woman who was in trouble, but at that moment, I was going through that door because I thought it might be Syd.
I put the card into the slot, waited, hoped for the light to turn green.
It did. I withdrew the card, turned the handle, and burst into the room.
“What’s going on in-”
And I stopped, tried to take in what I was looking at.
Standing in front of me was the woman I’d run into in the hotel breakfast nook. Cantana. She was in her hotel uniform. She was holding in her right hand a thin chrome wand, or stick. I looked a little closer and realized it was an old car antenna.
The other woman in the room was kneeling at the foot of the bed, bent at the waist so that her upper body and arms were splayed out on the bedspread. She was dressed similarly to Cantana, but the big difference was, there was blood seeping through her uniform on her buttocks. She turned her head toward me, and there were tears on her cheeks. She was Asian, mid-twenties.
“What you want?” Cantana asked me. “How you get in here? What you doing with that?”
She was pointing at Milt.
I was speechless. I started backing out of the room, Cantana still yammering at me. “What you doing in here? Can’t you see we having a meeting?”
Once I was all the way into the hall, Cantana slammed the door in my face. I stood there, dumbstruck, then turned around slowly.
What the hell was that?
That was when I found myself staring directly at the fire extinguisher station recessed into the opposite wall. The extinguisher sat behind a labeled glass door.
The letter “I” in the word FIRE was nearly worn away.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE PICTURE.
The picture that was emailed to me, to make me think that Syd had been spotted in Seattle.
It had shown Sydney, in her coral scarf, walking past a fire extinguisher station. And the “I” in FIRE had been worn away, just like this one.
I didn’t have that picture in front of me right now, but I was certain this was the spot. This was where Syd’s picture had been snapped.
She’d been in this hotel.
She’d worked here.
She’d been working here all along. She hadn’t been lying.
It was everyone else who had been lying. Everybody here had been primed to tell the same story. To say they didn’t know Syd, they’d never seen her.
Everybody here was covering their collective ass.
But if that was the case, then I wasn’t safe here. Not if I gave any indication that I’d figured out the truth. Especially after walking in on Cantana disciplining that other hotel employee. Whatever had been going on in there, it wasn’t some kinky sex scene. The woman bent over that bed was in genuine distress. Her screams had been real. She’d broken the rules and was paying the price for it.
I had to get out of here. Once I was out of here, then I could call-
“Mr. Blake?”
I hadn’t even heard the elevator open. I looked down the hall and saw Veronica Harp stepping off.
“Have you gotten yourself lost?” she asked. “The room you were in was at the other end of the hall. But-oh!-I see you found it!”
She was pointing to Milt.
“Yes, yes, I did,” I said, walking toward her.
“What were you doing down here?” she asked.
“I was just… a little distracted. I had Milt in my hands here and walked right past the elevator without noticing.”
“Do you have my key?” she asked.
I reached into my pocket and handed it to her. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t want this falling into the wrong hands!” she joked, putting it into her own pocket. I hit the elevator button. The doors, which had just closed, popped open again. Veronica boarded the elevator with me.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look a little… rattled.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, you know, as fine as I can be, considering.”
“Sure, sure,” she said. “I understand. Listen, about the other evening, I want to apologize.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I think I came on a bit strong.”
“It’s okay, really.”
We reached the first floor and the doors parted.
“Take care,” I said to Veronica, rudely getting off ahead of her and hotfooting it to the lobby doors.
“Well, so long to you, too,” she said.
I GOT IN THE BEETLE, putting Milt in the passenger seat, and drove out of the Just Inn Time lot as quickly as I could. I had to put some distance between myself and this hotel. I had to think about what this all meant.
If I’d felt I was nibbling around the edges before, now I felt as though I was taking huge bites.
Close to finding answers, close to finding Syd, or both?
Of that, I was less sure.
Something was going on at the hotel, and now I was guessing that Syd had stumbled onto it. And given that Eric-or Gary, or whatever his name was-was looking for her, I felt the odds were she was still out there somewhere.