Viv

Fell, New York

November 1982

VIV

Jamie’s car was gone, and the motel had gone ominously quiet. The wind kicked up outside, howling over the parking lot and shushing the empty trees. In the office, Viv sat behind the desk as the lights flickered yet again.

She was waiting. If Jamie did what he had promised, it would happen any minute.

The phone rang. Viv started in her chair and stared at it, sweat prickling her neck. This was the plan, but still she felt the jolt of terror. She was jumpy.

“Hello?” It wasn’t the greeting she’d been trained to give.

It wasn’t who she expected. There was silence on the other end of the line. Soft breathing. Someone listening and waiting.

These calls were routine at the Sun Down. Kids, the other clerks grumbled. Teenagers. Don’t they have anything better to do?

But now, listening to the breathing in the waiting silence, Viv wondered how they could all have been so stupid, herself included. The sound on the other end of the line wasn’t the comical kind of heavy breathing particular to pranking teenage boys. It was simply breath, the sound of another person living, existing.

Someone who wanted to talk. Who maybe couldn’t.

“Betty?” Viv said.

Still, the breath. No pause, no hitch.

“He’s here,” Viv said, letting her voice fill the silence. “I know it upsets you. I know it makes you angry and sad. But I’m going to take care of it tonight. I promise.”

Still nothing. Just breath.

“I’ve been living with this for so long,” Viv said. “I don’t think I have a life anymore. I don’t know that I want one. I don’t really see the point anymore. Do you?”

Did the breathing change its rhythm? Even for a second? She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know if what she was saying could even be heard by whatever was on the line. But she said it anyway.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t think anyone has been as sorry for you as I am. I looked at your picture, and you could be me. You could be any of us. You didn’t deserve it—none of us do. It’s wrong. I don’t know what else to do except try to make it right. I think it might cost me everything, and I don’t care. I don’t matter, really.”

Still quiet. Why did she feel like the other person was listening? There was no indication. Still, the feeling was there.

“That’s the best way to fix this,” Viv said. “The only way. I’ll take someone who doesn’t matter and trade her for the rest of you. I’ll trade myself for the rest of you. To stop him. I think it’s the only thing strong enough to end this. I know who he is now. He won’t be stopped by anything halfway.”

The next breath on the other end of the line was a sigh, and then a single word, spoken on the breath: “Run.” Then the line went dead with a click.

Viv put the phone down. While her hand was still on the receiver, the phone rang. She picked it up again. “Hello?”

“Room two-twelve,” a familiar voice said.

Viv pressed the button and put him through. She watched as the button on the phone lit up with its soft click. Then she listened with the receiver.

“Hello?” came Simon Hess’s voice.

“I know you,” the other voice said. “I know what you’ve done.”

There was a pause. Then Hess again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.” Viv closed her eyes. He was doing such a good job. It was Jamie Blaknik saying the lines she’d given him. “Meet me at the corner of Derry Road and Smith Street. I’m calling from the pay phone there. I saw you with Tracy. If you aren’t there in twenty minutes, I’ll tell everyone what I saw, what I know. Not just about Tracy. About the others, too.”

Silence on the line. Viv held her breath. This was the moment of truth.

Then Simon Hess spoke. “You’re the one who’s been following me, aren’t you?”

“I saw you in Plainsview, watching her,” Jamie said, following the lines Viv had written for him. “I saw you at the high school choir night. I know everything. And I’m going to tell.”

“Is this blackmail?” Hess said. “Do you think you’ll get money out of me?”

Viv bit her lip hard, trying not to sob. I was right, she thought. I thought I was crazy, but I was right. I was right.

“You won’t know what I want until you meet me,” Jamie said. “Twenty minutes or I go to the police.” He hung up.

Hess breathed into the phone for a second, then hung up as well. Viv put the receiver down. Her throat was tight, her eyes burning.

A minute later, a car motor started in the parking lot. She walked to the door and watched Hess drive away. Now, except for the passed-out Mrs. Bailey, Viv was alone at the Sun Down.

She waited fifteen seconds in case Hess changed his mind. Then she opened the bottom desk drawer and rifled through it until she found what she was looking for: a key labeled MASTER. Janice had shown her the key briefly on her first night. If someone’s passed out or dead in one of the rooms, you might need this.

Viv took the key and stood, hesitating. Then she dug in her purse and put her knife in its leather holster under her sweatshirt. She had left the office unarmed once, and it had nearly cost her. She wasn’t doing it again.

She left the office, walking quickly to the stairs. She had needed Jamie to make that phone call; Hess would never have believed a woman. He’d expect his blackmailer, the mastermind who had put all the pieces together, to be a man. He would have hung up on a woman—and then he would have remembered Viv, that he’d seen her somewhere.

So she’d enlisted Jamie, and he had done his part. It wasn’t bad for the price of a kiss.

Viv climbed the stairs and walked to the door of room 212. Put the key in the lock. The doors up here were closed again, as if Betty had tidied up after herself. But as Viv opened the door to 212, the lights flickered.

The room was like all the rooms at the Sun Down: bed, nightstand, small dresser. A TV sat dark in the corner, the famously advertised cable TV on the sign. On the bed was the small suitcase Simon Hess had been carrying. It was closed. Nothing in the room was touched. It seemed as if Hess had checked in and simply sat, doing nothing until he got Jamie’s phone call.

What goes on in his mind?Viv wondered. Everything? Nothing? Hess had killed Tracy Waters either this morning or last night. Her death would be fresh to him. Was he reliving it in his mind, the memories vivid? Or had he forgotten about it already?

She walked to the suitcase and flipped the latches, opening it. She turned on the bedside lamp. Inside the case were neatly folded clothes: shirts, ties. A toothbrush, a shaving kit. Everything was tidy and clean. If Viv had hoped for bloody clothes and a murder weapon, she was out of luck. The problem was, she didn’t know what she was looking for.

At the bottom of the case was a folder, neatly tied shut, full of papers. She pulled it out and untied it, leafing through the pages. These were the neatly dittoed lists of Hess’s schedule, his maps, his sales receipts.

There was the map of the neighborhood in Plainsview where Viv had seen him. It diagrammed the street and each house with its number. In the square of each house Hess had handwritten a symbol, the language not hard to figure out. An X meant he had been turned down at that house. An O meant no one was home. And a Y meant he had made a sale.

Tracy’s house was blank. What did that mean? Viv flipped through the pages, hoping for something else. Something concrete. Pictures of Tracy, maybe, or notes to her. She wanted to call Alma Trent and get her to arrest Simon Hess right now, tonight. But Alma would have to call in other cops to do that, and she wouldn’t do it without a reason. Get me something, anything, Alma’s voice said in Viv’s head. Get me something, Viv.

“I know,” Viv muttered to Alma in the dark silence. “I know you would help if you could. You just don’t understand. And now Tracy is dead.”

At the bottom of the file was a second map. This one was hand-drawn in pencil on a piece of lined paper. Viv held it under the lamp and saw a row of houses, a laneway between two of them, a square at the end of the lane labeled Park. In front of the houses, on the other side of the park, was a street that curved in a C shape. Viv turned the page one way and then another, trying to see if the map was familiar. Her brain paged through its mental images of Cathy’s street, Tracy’s, Victoria’s. The map didn’t match any of them.

What was it a map of? A victim Viv didn’t know about? Was this a map of something in Fell, or in another town? There were no street names written anywhere. She flipped the page over and studied the back, but there was nothing there, either.

This meant something, she was sure of it. She just had no idea what.

“Close,” she said to herself, to Alma, to Betty. “I’m so damned close.”

She went through the papers again. Then the suitcase, the clothes. She circled the room, looked in the trash can, the dresser drawer, the nightstand drawer. All were empty. She walked into the bathroom. It was dark and silent, untouched. She looked at the shower curtain, the single thin towel hanging on a rail.

The lights flickered again, a few quick blinks this time, on and off, like someone flipping a switch. Except there was no switch that would turn the entire motel on and off in an instant.

Betty.

A warning.

Viv turned from the bathroom and stepped out into the main room again. She patted her pockets for her key. The suitcase was sitting open on the bed, the contents obviously rifled through. Viv straightened the clothes quickly and flipped the lid of the case closed. She was fastening the latches when a voice in the doorway said, “What are you doing?”

---

•   •   •Simon Hess was damp now, the shoulders of his overcoat wet with rain. Water had splashed the hems of his trousers. The bedside lamp lit his features, his even and regular face. He had brown eyes, Viv realized for the first time. He looked very calm.

Still, her gut turned and her blood pumped, every nerve ending screaming danger. “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered.

The words hung there, inadequate. Hess looked at the suitcase she was closing, then back up to her face. He blinked. “You,” he said, his voice soft with surprise. “It was you.”

Viv took her hands off the suitcase and turned to face him. He blocked the doorway and there was nowhere to run. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.” He took a step into the room and closed the motel door behind him. As he did, Viv could hear the click and bang of one of the doors slamming open. Then there was no sound as Simon Hess closed the door, trapping them in his room.

“I don’t,” Viv insisted. Cold sweat was beading under her clothes.

“Then why are you here?” The question was asked calmly, as if he were a doctor or a teacher, but Viv could see the splotches of red on his cheeks that meant anger. “In my room, going through my things? You were at that bus stop. Your footprints were in my garden.”

Viv couldn’t look away from him. This close, she could see the beginnings of stubble on his jaw and his neck. Five o’clock shadow, his mother had always called it when her father hadn’t shaved. Her parents were very far away now.

She was afraid, and yet she wasn’t. She’d been following him for weeks now. Part of her was ready.

“I’m going to call the police,” Viv said. “You killed Tracy.”

He didn’t flinch. “Who did you tell?”

She shook her head. “No one.”

“You told someone,” Simon Hess said. “The boy who called me on the phone just now, for example. You told him, did you not, when you asked him to lie to get me out of my room?”

He put emphasis on the word lie, as if that mattered. As if he were offended by dishonesty after what he’d done. He looked at her with a tinge of disgust, and Viv felt the anger flush hot in her own cheeks.

“You’re just angry because you got caught,” she said. “You thought no one would ever do it, but I did.”

“Wrong,” Hess spit back. “You haven’t caught me yet. I’m still standing here. Call the police if you want. What can you prove?”

“I saw you with her.” She was angry, so angry. “I saw you with Tracy. Watching her. Following her. Why did you do it?” The words were wild, unwise, but they came out of her anyway. They had been dammed up for too long. “She never did anything to you. None of them did. Why did you have to kill her? And why do you keep coming back here?”

Outside in the corridor, a door blew open with a loud bang. It was the door to the next room. Then something soft hit their closed door, one thud and then another. A palm.

“Help me,” came a woman’s voice from outside, raspy and hoarse. “Help me!”

Viv’s hands went cold. The voice was the most terrifying and the saddest thing she’d ever heard. It was the voice of someone who knew she was dying, that after a long fight it was going to be over. That she would never win.

“Help me!” the voice screamed hoarsely, the palm hitting the door again, weaker this time.

Viv looked at Simon Hess and saw that he had a dreamy smile on his face. “Betty,” he said. “That’s why I come here. Because she’s here. I can’t . . . I go as long as I can without seeing her, but I always have to come back.”

Outside, the voice sobbed. “Help me. Please. Please.”

She sounded like that, Viv thought, when he did whatever he did to her.

What doesviolated mean?

“She was in my trunk,” Hess said, his voice a calm counterpoint to Betty’s screaming. “I thought she’d be quiet, but that was a mistake. She wasn’t quiet at all.” He shook his head. “I never made that mistake again. I learned my lesson. They aren’t quiet when you want them to be.”

Viv thought of the Betty she’d seen in the photo, calm and confident. A teacher. Spinster was the word the papers had used, even though she was only twenty-four when she died. “Why Betty?” she asked Hess.

“I loved her,” Hess replied. “I’ve never loved anything in my life, but I loved Betty. I just had to make her see.”

Betty screamed again, her palms pounding on the door, and Hess smiled. Betty had sounded like that in his trunk. She’d screamed like that, pounded on the trunk lid like that. To Hess, it was a lullaby. Her stomach twisted and she thought she was going to be sick.

She walked toward the door. She had to brush past him to do it, but he didn’t move. She tried not to recoil as she got near him.

“What are you doing?” Hess asked.

“Letting her in,” Viv said. She put her hand on the doorknob—it was ice-cold, so cold it almost burned her fingers—and wrenched it. The door opened and the cold, wet wind blew in. There was no one in the corridor.

She looked at the outside of the door. There were bloody palm prints on the cracking paint. Viv opened her hand and placed her palm over one of the prints, feeling the cold blood against her skin. It’s almost like it’s real, she thought crazily. Her palm fit perfectly over the print on the door.

Run, Betty had told her, standing in front of her windshield while Viv crouched in the car. Run.

She could run now. She had the door open. She had no doubt Hess would chase her; he might even win. He was older than her, less agile, but he was a hunter who had chased down his prey many times. Maybe she’d never know how many times. He’d chase her down, and then she’d be the next one on his list.

He had the same thought. “Do you think you’re going somewhere?” he asked calmly, even though she stood in an open doorway, ready to run.

She could do it. Get down the stairs, get in her car. Drive away from this place, from this killer. Tell the authorities.

What good would it do?

Nothing would happen. No one would believe her. Simon Hess would seem like a reasonable, law-abiding person who was falsely accused by a crazy girl. And it would start all over again.

Or he would kill her, and he’d get away with it. Again.

She stepped back from the doorway and turned around to face him. “No,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Three things happened.

All of the lights, including the sign, went out and everything went dark.

Betty screamed.

And Viv pulled the knife from her sweatshirt, slid it from its holster, and sank it into Simon Hess’s chest.