“Hi, I'm so sorry, I must have left my key in my room, and my sister isn't answering her phone,” I say.
He looks at me for a few scrutinizing seconds, and I rub my hands together. As if he's first noticing the cold, he nods and steps back, holding the door for me.
“Come into the heat,” he instructs.
“Thank you so much.”
I scoot past him and take the few steps to dip into the stairwell. Peering out of the pane of glass set into the center of the door, I wait for him to go back into the room standing open, then slip out. I don't hesitate but rush past the room toward the lobby. Just before going around the corner, I drop down to my knees so I can crawl behind the counter out of sight of the camera.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” I mutter to myself.
Mirna still isn't behind the counter, but I doubt I have much time. She won't leave the lobby unattended all day. Pulling up onto the balls of my feet in front of the drawers, I tug on the one where I saw Mirna get the registration book. Unlike the door, the drawer isn't secured. The metal screeches slightly as it grinds together. I cringe and open the drawer the rest of the way so I can reach inside. My fingers touch the edge of the book just as I hear Mirna's voice in the office.
I grab out the book, close the drawer, and scramble my way back into the hallway. Holding the book under my arm, I run to the end of the hall and into the stairwell. Once behind the door, I start flipping the pages, scanning the registration cards to find the right range of dates. Before I get a chance to find exactly what I need, a door opens above me, and footsteps head down the stairs.
Of course, now is the time for one of Mirna's handful of guests to decide to be health-conscious and use the stairs rather than hopping in the elevator.
I meant to come here and snap a few pictures the way I did yesterday, leaving the book behind so no one would be the wiser. Instead, I find myself tucking the entire thing under my arm and running for the door at the end of the hall. Maybe Creagan was right. Maybe I have lost my touch. Maybe everything going on with my father and with Greg took something out of me.
I make it out unseen. Tossing the book onto the passenger seat, I drive out of the parking lot and head back down the road.
My curiosity lures me into the parking lot of a tiny hamburger stand at the side of the road, and I yank the book over into my lap. Flipping through the pages again as my eyes scan over the registration cards, my hand suddenly stops, and a smile comes to my lips.
Creagan was wrong. I haven't lost anything.
Chapter Twenty
A shadow falls through my window over the registration card I pulled from the plastic sleeve in the book. My breath catches in my throat, and I snap my eyes toward the figure looming close to the car. My hand instinctively moves to the lock, though I know it's engaged. Even when I drove around in the first lumbering hunk of metal that amounted to my first car, engaging the manual locks was the first thing I did after closing the door. The locks in my car drop into place automatically, but I’m not so lucky with the car Creagan chose for this job. I’ve had to get back into the habit of locking the doors myself.
I look up, and the face staring in at me looks more startled than I am. Wide brown eyes in a face that seems far too young for the pink and white striped waitress uniform blink.
“Can I get you something?”
Her voice is muffled by the glass of the window, but I can make out the uncertainty in the offer. I roll the window down and lean slightly out of it.
“What?” I ask.
“Can I get you something?” she repeats, her head tilting slightly toward the hamburger stand.
“Oh,” I say, looking through the windshield at the old-fashioned walk-up restaurant. The menu made up of a whiteboard with individually placed black letters looks like it might have been totally untouched for the last several decades. Which means the food is bound to be incredible. “Sure. What's good?”
“Burgers and fries are the most popular,” she answers.
I notice the narrow white name tag pinned to her chest says 'Evergreen', and my heart gives a nostalgic flutter for the hippie mentality still flowing strongly through the veins of rural Southern towns. The ideals may have shifted, but the energy is the same.
“It's not even ten-thirty in the morning,” I point out.
“We have an egg biscuit special,” she offers.
I contemplate the options and shrug.
“Burger and fries sound great.” The young waitress nods and starts back toward the restaurant. I lean from the window. “And a milkshake.”
She waves over her head at me to acknowledge the request, and I go back to the registration card.
Cristela Jordan. Most of the rest of the information filled out on the card are details I already know, thanks to the investigation records made available to me. But it's the information that wasn't in those records that stands out to me. No one mentioned she checked into Mirna's hotel four days before she was found dead. And apparently never checked out. The line on the card with the guest’s signature and a date and timestamp is blank. I look at the other cards in the pages and the ones in front of and behind it. All have the signature line filled in. The only other card I've seen without this line complete is the one belonging to the supposed Ron Murdock.
An idea strikes me just as Evergreen appears at the window again. She smiles and holds up the tray holding my food and milkshake. My thoughts immediately go to my mother as I roll down the window and take the massive Styrofoam cup. During her younger years in the ballet, she never would have been allowed to enjoy treats like this. Her ballerina body depended on a strict diet that left her longing for some semblance of a realistic relationship with food. That came when she left Russia and came to the United States. Here she learned to indulge.
Milkshakes were always a favorite. Though my father made sure she had one whenever the thought even crossed her mind, she would still pretend to sneak them and act like it was a secret for the two of us to share.
The waitress knits her eyebrows together as she scans the papers spread out around me.
“Are you some sort of reporter or something?” she asks.
I take the cardboard container of fries and paper-wrapped burger from her.
“Something like that,” I tell her.
She smiles. “That's amazing. I want to be a newscaster one day.”
“You do?” I ask.
I breathe in the hot, oily smell of the fries and can't resist plucking one from the box and biting down on it.
“Always have,” she says, then looks around wistfully. “But it's not like there are a lot of news stations around here.”
“So, go somewhere where there is one,” I tell her.
“Easier said than done,” she muses.
“I did it,” I tell her.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. When you really want something, don't let something like where you came from stop you. This is all just a steppingstone. Make it happen.”
She smiles and makes her way back across the parking lot toward the cook barking at her through the open window. It might not have been the complete transparent truth, but my story doesn't veer too far from that path. At least it seemed to inspire her, so the shaky details are worth it.
Following the thought that came to me, I go back through each page of the registration cards, reading over them as I go. It doesn't take long to find another card with Cristela's name, then a few pages before that another, and then another. With the four cards spread in front of me, I note the differences in the information provided on them. Everything is the same except for the check-out line. On the other three cards, the line is properly filled out and signed. It's only the most recent that's left blank.