AND THAT’S JUST WHAT IT WAS.
A room. A generic, nondescript, plain room. A patternless blue spread covered the double bed in the center. Dull white shades covered the lamps flanking the bed. The bedroom walls were beige, much like the bathroom and the towels and the halls and everything else in this budget-minded hotel.
But that said, it was also clean and well kept. The bathroom came equipped with soap and shampoo and a hair dryer. The closet had one of those mini-safes you can program with a four-digit code, suitable for holding a passport, a video camera, and a few thousand in unmarked bills.
The hotel hadn’t yet moved to fancy flat-screen, wall-mounted TVs. And while the bulky set sitting atop the dresser seemed to be from a couple of decades ago, you could still order up movies-including ones with titles like She’ll Be Cummin’ Round the Mountain When She Cums-if you were so inclined.
I flipped through the channels, left Dr. Phil on in the background to exploit some miserable family stupid enough to air their dirty laundry for the entertainment pleasure of millions, and looked out the second-floor window. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. Maybe I thought staring at the Howard Johnson restaurant and hotel off in the distance, the cars and trucks whizzing past on I-95, would somehow provide a clue as to where Syd had gone after I’d dropped her off out front of the Just Inn Time.
It didn’t.
Watching those hundreds of cars and trucks and SUVs racing by, I couldn’t help thinking that if you were in one of those vehicles, in a few short hours you could be anywhere in New England. Boston or Providence, up to Maine. Maybe Vermont or New Hampshire. You could head west and north, be up in Albany in under three hours. Or closer to home, but harder to find, in Manhattan.
And that would just be the same day you got in one of those cars. By now, weeks later, a person could be almost anywhere.
If that person was alive.
I’d been trying very hard, since the moment she’d gone missing, not to let my mind go there. As long as there was no definitive evidence that harm had come to her, I had to believe she was fine. Lost-at least to Susanne and me-but okay.
The image of that blood on Syd’s Civic, though, was a hard thing to get out of my head.
And there was an audio loop running through my head. It had been playing for weeks, always below the surface, like a hum, like background noise.
The loop was made up of questions that I kept asking over and over again.
Where are you?
Are you okay?
What happened?
Why did you run?
What scared you?
Why won’t you get in touch?
Did you leave because I asked about the sunglasses, and then something happened that kept you from coming back?
Why can’t you just let me know you’re okay?
So around nine o’clock, a time of day when, as I’ve gotten older, I’m often ready to nod off, I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.
I went through the motions anyway. I unzipped the bag I’d taken to Seattle, and there was Milt the stuffed moose looking up at me.
“Oh shit,” I said, feeling slightly overwhelmed. I took him out and set him on one of the pillows.
I took my cell phone from my jacket and set it by the bed. I brushed my teeth, stripped down to my boxers, threw back the covers, and got into the bed. I channel-surfed for another ten minutes, then hit the light.
Stared at the ceiling for half an hour or so.
Light from Route 1-passing cars and trucks, the neon glow of the commercial strip-was flooding into the room. I thought maybe pulling together the drapes more tightly would block out the light and help me get to sleep.
I got out of the bed, padded across the industrial carpet, and grabbed one of the drapery wands. But before giving them a pull, I gazed out over this part of Milford. Traffic was thinning, except on the interstate, where it always seemed to be busy. Cars always appeared to be moving so slowly when viewed from some height.
The view of the nearby businesses from up here was actually pretty good. I could see many of the places I’d visited in the last few weeks. The Howard Johnson’s to the right, the other, small operations to the left.
I could clearly see the blood-red neon letters of XXX Delights, and half a dozen cars parked out front. I watched men, always alone, go into the store empty-handed, emerge a few minutes later with their evening’s entertainment packaged in plain brown paper.
A man coming around the corner of the building, where the flower shop was, caught my eye.
He walked across the lot, pointed a remote, and then the red lights of a van pulsed once. He opened the driver’s door and got in. I wasn’t certain, but it looked like the Toyota van belonging to Shaw Flowers.
Seemed kind of late for a delivery. Maybe Ian had use of the van any time he wanted. Maybe he had a hot date.
The van backed out of its spot, then nosed up to the edge of Route 1, waiting for a break in traffic.
The knock at the door nearly made me jump.
I turned away from the window, walked across the darkened room, and squinted through the peephole. Veronica Harp, the day manager.
“Hey!” I shouted through the closed door. “Give me a sec!”
I flicked one bedside table lamp, found the pants I’d draped over a chair, pulled them on hurriedly, threw on my shirt, and was still buttoning it when I opened the door.
“How are you?” I said.
She had traded in her corporate uniform for something more casual. Crisp, tailored jeans, heels, and a royal blue blouse. With her black hair and soulful eyes, you didn’t look at her and immediately think “grandmother.”
“Oh no,” she said, looking at my bare feet and the buttons I had left to do up. “I caught you at a bad time.”
“No,” I said, “it’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
“I just popped in and Carter told me you were actually staying in the hotel,” she said. “I was so surprised.”
“I needed a room,” I said.
“Did something happen to your house? A fire?”
“Something like that,” I said. “I’m hoping I’ll be able to go back tomorrow. Get the place cleaned up.”
“That’s a terrible shame,” Veronica said, still framed in the doorway.
It seemed rude to make her stand there, so I opened the door wider for her to come inside. She took half a dozen steps in, and I let the door close behind her on its own. She glanced over at the unmade bed.
“Well, I’m delighted you chose this hotel. There are certainly nicer ones around,” she conceded.
“I guess, these days, I know this one best,” I said, and offered her a wry smile.
“I suppose you do,” she said, and smiled back.
I sidestepped back toward the window, took a quick look outside. It was more difficult to see, what with the room lights reflecting in the glass.
“Looking for something?” Veronica asked.
The van was gone.
“No, just, no, nothing,” I said.
“You know what?” Veronica said. “I’m intruding. A person should be able to check into a hotel without being pestered by the management.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, stepping away from the window and doing up the last of my buttons. I felt a bit self-conscious about my bare feet, but thought it would be silly to pull my socks on at this point.
“So how’s that grandson of yours?” I asked.
Veronica brightened. “Oh, he’s wonderful. He’s always watching everything going on around him. I think he’s going to grow up to be an engineer or architect. He has these oversized building blocks in his crib and he’s playing with them all the time.”
“That’s great,” I said. Then, “Why did Carter tell you I was here?”
Veronica smiled. “He knows you and I’ve spoken a few times, and he knows how hard you’ve been working to find your daughter.”
“Maybe he’s tired of seeing me hanging around the parking lot,” I said.
“Well,” she said, and her voice trailed off. “No one could blame you. Anyone else in your position would be doing everything he could. So this fire? How bad was it?”
“It wasn’t a fire,” I said. “There was a break-in.”
Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my. Did they take a lot?”
I shook my head slowly. “No. A bit of cash.”
“That’s an awful thing. You feel so violated.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can I ask you a weird question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Would the hotel have a pair of binoculars?”
“Binoculars? What are you doing? Spying on someone?”
“No, never mind, forget it.”
“Why would you want binoculars?”
“Just passing the time, watching the cars go by. Looking at the trucks on the interstate.”
Veronica Harp’s eyebrows popped up briefly in puzzlement, but she didn’t pursue it. “Is there anything else I could get you? We don’t have room service here, but if you wanted a pizza or something I could arrange to have it delivered and we could add it to your room bill.”
“No, I’m good.”
She walked farther into the room, ran her hand across the top of the rumpled bedclothes, then asked, “Is your room okay?”
“Of course. It’s fine.”
She turned and faced me head-on, very little space between us.
“I feel that you’re such a sad man,” she said.
“I’m kind of going through a rough patch,” I said.
“I can see it in your eyes. Even before your daughter disappeared, were you sad?”
I wanted to change the subject. “Are you… What does your husband do?”
“He passed away two years ago,” she said, and pointed to her chest. “Heart.”
“He must have been young for a heart attack.”
“He was twenty years older,” she said. “I miss him very much.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said.
“If you didn’t know I had a grandchild, would you have guessed it?”
“No,” I said, honestly. “Not in a million years.”
She leaned in, tilted her head up. Before she could kiss me, I turned my head slightly and rested it on her shoulder, held her lightly for several seconds before gently moving her away and creating some distance between us.
“Veronica…”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You think it would be wrong, with your daughter…”
“I…”
“I know about sadness. I do. My life has been one sadness after another. But if you wait for all of them to be over before you allow yourself any pleasure, you’ll never have any.”
Part of me would have been happy to forget my problems. To put them aside, however briefly, for some human contact, sex without strings. But nothing about this felt right.
When I didn’t say anything, she understood we were done. She went to the bedside table and wrote a number on a pad bearing the hotel logo. She tore off the sheet and handed it to me.
“If you want to talk, or need anything, you call me. Anytime.”
“Thank you,” I said, and held the door for her as she slipped into the hall.
I leaned my back against the door for a second, let out a breath, then killed the lights and returned to the window.
There was something about Ian I couldn’t get out of my head. Something was off about the guy.
I wanted to know more about him. And for now, that meant watching the flower shop from my perch up in this hotel room.
But Ian had just left in the van. He could be gone for hours. What was I going to do? Just sit here all night and stare out the window?
I grabbed the remote, turned the TV to CNN for background noise. I heard Anderson Cooper’s voice, but didn’t listen to anything he had to say.
There was one cushy chair in the room-the one I’d used to hang my clothes on-and I dragged it over by the window so I could sit comfortably while I conducted my amateur surveillance. I leaned my head up against the glass, frosted it with my breath. I turned the TV so the screen didn’t reflect in the window.
This was dumb. What the hell was I doing, staring out the window, waiting for some flower delivery guy to return to his apartment? Maybe I was doing it because I couldn’t think of anything.
I got up, grabbed a pillow, sending Milt on a tumble, and put it between my head and the glass. As awkward as I must have looked, I was actually pretty comfortable.
So comfortable that I drifted off to sleep.
I woke myself up with my own snoring, the TV still blaring. I lifted my head away from the window and the pillow fell to the floor.
I was groggy and disoriented. For several seconds I didn’t know where I was. But quickly things started to make sense. The clock radio by the bed read 12:04.
I’m at the Just Inn Time. I’m staying here because my house has been trashed.
It was all coming back to me.
And I was watching the florist shop.
I blinked a couple of times and looked out the window. There were fewer cars on the road now. Only a couple of pickups were at the porn shop, which was still open.
The Toyota van was back. How long it had been there, I had no idea. But clearly Ian was back home and tucked in his-
Hang on.
Someone was coming around the back of the van and up the passenger side. The van must have just returned, and Ian had just gotten out the driver’s door.
He opened the passenger door, but no one stepped out. He leaned in, like he was undoing the seat belt for someone. But he stayed in that position for several seconds, like he was trying to get hold of something.
Then Ian eased slowly back out of the van, very carefully. He was carrying something large and cumbersome. It looked as though he had something slung over his shoulder, like a sack.
He backed up far enough to clear the door, slammed it shut. A streetlight was casting a soft glow in his direction. There was just enough light to see that Ian was carrying someone over his shoulder. Someone smaller than himself.
Someone with long, possibly blonde hair.
A girl.
And she wasn’t moving a muscle.