Lew cupped his hands to one of the narrow windows beside the door. “Can’t see a thing through these curtains,” he said. “But I think the night clerk’s been laid off.”
I touched the driftwood and ran my finger along the bulb and down one limb. It wasn’t wet, exactly, but the wood seemed oily and slightly gritty. I delicately touched the tip of the tentacle, dimpling the skin of my finger, and the porch light came on. I jumped, Lew jerked upright—and then we looked at each other and cracked up.
The lock clacked significantly and we stifled ourselves. The door opened six inches on a chain. A small white-haired woman glared up at me, mouth agape. She was seventy, seventy-five years old, a small bony face on a striated, skinny neck: bright eyes, sharp nose, and skin intricately webbed from too much sun or wind or cigarettes. She looked like one of those orphaned baby condors that has to be fed by puppets.
“What are you, drunk?” she said. Her voice was surprisingly low and sharp.
“No! No ma’am.” I glanced at Lew, daring him to laugh. “You just startled us.”
Lew sidled up behind me, raised a hand. “Hi.”
“Do you know what time it is? ” she said. “You shouldn’t be out at this time of night.”
“We’d like rooms,” I said.
“Or cabins,” Lew said.
“I don’t check in people after eleven,” she said. “I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.”
“Please,” I said. “We’ll take anything you have. You don’t have to do anything to the cabins.”
She stared at me for a second, blinked. “You’re the boy who called.”
“That’s true,” I said, politely allowing the “boy” comment to slide. Last night we’d searched for every Harmonia Lake number we could find. The town had no chamber of commerce, no police station, not even a gas station. We came up with six phone numbers, five of them residential, none of them O’Connell’s. The remaining number was for the motel.
“I told you I’d give her your message,” the old woman said.
“I know, I just thought we’d—”
“She hasn’t stopped in yet.”
“That’s fine, I understand,” I said. “For tonight, though, we’d just like to—”
“She hasn’t got a phone.”
“You mentioned that, yeah.”
Her eyes looked past me, and then she seemed to come to a decision. She shook her head, disgusted. I said, “Listen—”
She shut the door. A chain slid back, then she opened it again a few inches. “All right, then. It’s almost morning. I suppose I can check you in. Besides, I’m already awake.”
She disappeared from the doorway. I looked at Lew, then pushed open the door. The old woman was already in the next room, walking
away from us. Her silver hair, I could see now, was waist-length, and braided. She wore a pink bathrobe over red sweatpants. The front of the old house was divided into three sections. The middle area was taken up by a picnic table covered by a red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth. To the right was a dark room illuminated only by a red Coca-Cola sign over the beverage cooler in the corner: the gift shop? Shadows suggested many shelves stocked with cheap crap. The old woman went left, into what I supposed was the hotel lobby, crossing the room to step behind a pressboard-and-veneer front desk. If not for the desk, the room would have passed for any homey cottage circa 1972: oval braided throw rug, a cockeyed green cloth swivel chair, and a plaid couch-and-loveseat combo. Covering the dark paneled walls were dozens of small framed photographs, interspersed with mounted, waxy fish of alarming size, nailed to the wall in midgasp.
“You should have told me you were coming,” she said. “You could have made reservations.”
“You’re full?” Lew asked incredulously.
“Cash or credit?” she said.
I reached for my back pocket, not looking at Lew. The bastard let me pull the wallet all the way out before he said, “Credit.”
“And we need two rooms,” I said. Lew shook his head but didn’t press me on it. Maybe he wanted his privacy as much as I did. She laid his credit card on a hand machine, racked it like a shotgun. I picked up one of the brochures on the desk, a photocopied trifold, black print on 30-pound yellow paper. The front had the same picture and logo as the billboard. Had I seen the Shug?! Yes, and too many times. These people could use a graphic designer.
“You don’t have Internet access, do you?” Lew said. “It doesn’t have to be high speed.”
She squinted at him. People either got Lew or they didn’t. She handed his card back to him. “You’re in three, he’s in four, next to the washhouse. Breakfast starts at five-thirty.”
Lew looked at me, one eyebrow raised. Washhouse?
The old woman escorted us outside, pointed down the gravel trail to the left, and waited on the porch while Lew and I got in the car and rolled slowly in the correct direction. The first cabin, barely visible in the dark, was only a dozen yards from the parking lot. Lew pulled in at the next gap in the trees. The Audi’s headlights revealed a miniature peak-roofed house, maybe twenty-five feet long and fifteen wide, set on cinder blocks, surrounded by trees except for the grassy parking space out front.
Lew sighed. “You so fucking owe me.”
He kept the headlights on as we got our bags out of the trunk. The lake was a faint gleam through the trees behind the cabin. He handed me my key, wired to a wooden block big enough to be used as either a flotation device or mace, depending on the emergency. Lew glanced at the duffel and said, “You going to be okay?” Talking about the chains. Last night in their house Lew had watched, aghast, as I looped the chains through the bed frame, adjusting the slack.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Listen, thanks for coming with me. I know you hate to take off work.”
He waved me toward my cabin and turned away from me. “Go to bed.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I was tired enough to fall over. My cabin was only fifty feet from Lew’s, connected by a stone path through the trees, but a few steps away from the headlights I could barely see a thing. I kept my eyes wide and one hand out to stop me from ramming into trees. I eventually recognized the outline of a small porch, went up the three short steps, and nearly impaled myself: hanging on the door was another one of those squid-shaped driftwood eye-stabbers. My hand moved lower, found the knob, turned. The door was unlocked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I found the switch inside the room, and an overhead light came on. Something small and long-tailed darted into a hole in the wall.
The room was floored with specked linoleum, and some of the specks were dubious. A double bed took up most of the room, its brown-and-yellow polyester bedspread nicely complementing, in both style and time period, a small yellow Formica table with aluminum legs and a couple of matching chairs padded in split vinyl. A small square window opposite the door mirrored the light. There was no bathroom: no bath, no room, not even room for a bath. From the smell, the walls were insulated with old fish wrap.
“You in?” Lew called.
“Does yours have a Jacuzzi too?” I shouted back.
“Sleep tight, now.”
Outside, the headlights switched off (Lew’s magical remote control). I shut the door and dropped my duffel bag on the floor. It clanked.
Oh. Sleep tight. Very funny.
I could hear the lake creeping toward the cabin. The longer I sat in the little room, the clearer I could hear it, until it seemed to be lapping at the floorboards beneath my bed. Bloop. Blurp. Blu-doop. I sat on the bed, propped up and staring at the dead flies in the bowl of the overhead light. My rodent roommate stayed demurely out of sight.