“You can sleep with Dad and me, and Mae and Wyatt can have the other bed.”
Wyatt takes issue with that. “I’m not sleeping with her. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Let’s see about a cot then,” I say because I can only imagine how filthy the carpeting is.
Cobwebs hang from the corners of the room. When I pull back the quilt, the linens are stained, a pale red the color of terra-cotta or salmon flesh, which makes me think of blood.
Incidentally, the police don’t clean up from a crime scene when they’re through with it. That’s up to the homeowners to do, which Ms. Dahl neglected to tell me when she gave me the key. Maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe she just didn’t say.
I look around the room. I’m not even sure why the motel is still in business, why the health department or some other entity hasn’t shut them down. My stomach sinks.
Even here, Emily and Nolan are still dead. Reese is still missing.
I don’t know why I thought this would be any better.
“I’m going to shower,” I say, needing a minute to myself more than anything.
I set my bag on the dresser, gathering clean clothes from inside of it before going to the bathroom, where I try closing the door, but the latch is misaligned. It doesn’t stay shut. Instead, it floats immediately open, and I have to push it closed for a second time, pressing more firmly this time, wishing for a lock, which the door doesn’t have.
Hesitantly, I strip my clothes off, keeping my eyes on the door. I drop them into a pile by the toilet, running the water so hot that at first it scalds me and I have to turn the knob and scale back on the heat. The water smells like sulfur. Some of the shower tiles are missing while mold grows in the grout. I let the water run over me, using a small, generic travel-size bar of soap to scour myself clean, though no matter how hard I scrub, I can’t erase the image of the blood in Emily and Nolan’s cottage from my mind. It’s still there.
It will always be there.
The bathroom is full of steam when I turn the water off. I peel the curtain back to see that the mirror is completely fogged up.
I don’t see at first that the door has popped open all on its own.
I don’t see anything through the thick water vapor, not until I reach for a towel on the toilet seat with nothing on to find Wyatt standing on the other side of the door, looking in at me through the crack.
I get dressed. I don’t tell Elliott about Wyatt, because Elliott and I are barely on speaking terms, but I keep my distance from him.
A little while later, Detective Evans texts to say the fingerprint results have come back. He stops by the motel to speak tome, and when he arrives, I meet him outside, leaving Elliott in the motel room with the kids.
We stand in the parking lot, the sound of passing traffic on the street ambient noise. There, Detective Evans tells me that all of our prints were found in the cottage. The ones left with blood, however, belong to none of us. They belong to someone else, someone whose prints are not in their database.
It’s cold outside, the warm day disappearing with the sun. Night has fallen.
I shiver, though it’s not only from the cold.
The motel sits on a rural highway, where the occasional car or truck passes by. The motel’s parking lot is small. There are only a couple cars besides ours. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they’re vacationers like us. I think they’re unhoused people living temporarily in the motel, which is only one floor with rooms entered from the outside.
“Forensics analyzed the blood on Reese’s sweatshirt. It wasn’t hers,” he says. “It didn’t belong to either Reese or her parents.”
“Then who?”
“Daniel Clarke. He says it’s his.”
My jaw goes slack in disbelief. “What... what do you mean he says it’s his? When did you speak to him?”
“He’s back home, Mrs. Gray.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Where has he been?”
“That’s why I’m here. I came to tell you. According to him, he drove west, sleeping in his truck at rest stops. He made it as far as the South Dakota border before turning around and coming home. Thought he’d go see Mount Rushmore but then changed his mind.”
“He’s lying,” I say with unwavering belief.
“I don’t think he is. We checked his bank statement. There are receipts for gas and food all along Interstate 90. And trafficcams show that your niece wasn’t with him.” He pauses, angles his head the other way and says, “He isn’t like you and me. He’s a loner. A drifter, a stoner. He’s gotten in trouble for things before—like trespassing and robbery—but never anything violent. He was a couple years younger than me in school. As far as I know, he’s always been like this.” He shrugs, though this is the first time Detective Evans has mentioned having firsthand knowledge of Daniel Clarke. It takes me aback, and I have to regroup and remember that both men are about the same age. I’ve never asked Detective Evans about his personal life, if he grew up here and why he became a detective. It never crossed my mind, but now it does, though there are some things I can answer for myself now, like that he did grow up here, and he knew Daniel when they were boys. “He said he just needed to be alone.”
