like, after the prom? Or she stood out front waiting for her bus home from her summer job, praying he would come by in his car. Unless he parked and tugged her inside the Flordana, and she got pregnant here. Don’t, asshole. Her lover could have been a night clerk or a waiter in the hotel coffee shop. Unless he . . .
Just don’t. Hope eats him up from the inside. He’ll walk in and find me. Be here. Would they know each other? He thinks so. It will play like a movie: Father. Son! Wait. The faithless shithead has a lot of explaining to do. Stupid, he knows, but losing people makes you stupid. Reporter, remember. You make your living finding out. Work this like any other story. Hit the right link and it will open up. Chapter. Verse. What happened to Lucy here. What’s so terrible about it, and who his people are, really. The begats.
It lodges in his throat: the begats.
Other people take family for granted, but then other people have photos of people who look like them posted somewhere, letters, birthday cards. Family trees. A chunk of Dan Carteret is missing. It isn’t just the no father that Lucy tried so hard to erase. It’s the gap ordinary mothers fill with particulars: where she’s from, who your grandparents are. What life was like before she got married and had you.
Stop that!
The woman at the desk is either a lot older or a lot younger than Lucy. She’s so carefully put together and made up that it’s hard to tell. Jointed silver fish dangle from her ears, very Florida. So’s the aggressively blonde hair. She looks fit in her frilled tank top, although the wrinkles in the tanned cleavage give her away. Full mouth. Nice smile. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I need a room.’
‘Lucky it’s the end of the season.’ She could do a commercial for those teeth whitening strips. ‘Take your pick.’
Rumpled after the long flight, wrecked by the week of last things and sweating through the back of his khaki coat, Dan realizes that gross as he looks right now, she’s coming on to him. ‘The cheapest, I suppose.’
‘Business trip?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Jessie.’ The grin says he must look pretty good to her, or that she thinks she’s younger than she really is and he’s older than he looks, unless it’s just her way of adding some color to the day. ‘Now, what shall I put down?’
He doesn’t know.
‘You don’t look like a tourist.’ She means, What are you doing here? ‘If you’re here on business, you get our special rate.’
Words pop out. ‘I’m down here on a story.’ Why does this lie make him feel so much better?
‘You write books?’
‘No Ma’am. For my paper.’ Like a person here on real business. Smile for the lady, she believes. So can you. ‘The Los Angeles Times? A story for the magazine.’
‘Cool. What about?’
He isn’t sure. ‘If I tell you, I lose my job.’
‘So I should put down business,’ Jessie says.
Dan doesn’t answer. He’s thinking hard. There’s some reason he burned out searching the web details on the human fires. Three old women. Here. Cool! Here’s his readymade rationale; two words and he’s justified. ‘Research trip,’ he says, grinning. ‘Preliminary research.’ Just saying it makes him feel better. As a matter of fact, it’s a terrific story, he was just too fried to see it. Like a visa to this strange country, Lucy’s fragment of newspaper justifies his presence here. ‘Now if I could have my key . . .’
She isn’t exactly holding him hostage, but she hasn’t started checking him in. ‘What are you researching?’
‘Just an old story.’
‘Ooooh,’ she says, fishing. ‘We have a lot of old stories here.’
‘It’s a kind of a mystery.’
‘We have a lot of those. Which one?’
‘I. Um. I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet.’ The story shapes up in his head like one of those great unwritten novels – the kind writers only talk about in bars because by daylight, they evaporate. He frames the pitch: FORT JUDE, TOWN OF HUMAN FURNACES. His big break.
‘I said, which one?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Not Ma’am.’ She has a very sweet grin. ‘Jessie. Which mystery?’
It’s been a long week. There’s no logic to it but he can’t be here at the desk much longer. He just can’t. ‘An old one,’ he says, finishing with a warm smile that he hopes will be enough.
It isn’t. ‘Oh,’ she says, all faux naïve, ‘which one.’
‘Spontaneous human combustion!’ Why does that embarrass him?
‘Oh, that