Vera ran the shower until the small bathroom packed wall to wall with thick billows of steam. She closed the door, locked it. Stripped, then stepped over the edge of the tub, and eased under the showerhead. With wet hands, she tore the wrapper off a bar of soap and lathered up. The hot water pulsed, cascading down her back. For the first time since yesterday evening some part of her wasn’t in danger of frostbite. Warmth enveloped her instead. Muscles lost their tension, unkinked. Circulation returned. Layers of road-trip grime washed down the drain. She split the corner of a complimentary shampoo packet, squirting pearly pink gel into her palm. A scent of fresh strawberries filled the misty room. It was too sweet, clearly artificial, yet so much of an improvement over the combo of stale coffee and dried nervous sweat that accompanied her from Chicago. She sighed and closed her eyes. Leisurely, thoroughly, she washed her hair.
Where was she going from here?
The more she thought about Aunt Helene, the less she wanted to involve the peaceful geriatric nun in this violent mess. And what would she tell her? That her thief of a boyfriend stole a relic box from a group of lesbian witches? He planned to hand it over to murderous Satanists? Vera had a hard time wrapping her mind around that herself. Yet she saw the mutilated bodies. Damn it, Chan! How could he be so stupid!
Tomorrow she’d figure it out.
Maybe she’d end up burying the thing out in the woods.
Couldn’t do that—the ground was hard as concrete.
Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes. Well, she’d find a really deep one, drill a hole in the ice, and drop the stone into the abyss. Send it sinking to a cold watery grave. Good riddance. The Pitch could search all they wanted and never have a chance of finding it down there. Of course, they’d find her first. They’d force her to tell them what she did with their little treasure.
What if it was worth money?
A lot of money.
She hadn’t given that thought really serious consideration before. Though now it seemed almost obvious. This stone/relic/box was old . . . old as rock, in fact. Maybe it was an archaeological treasure, like those prehistoric spheres scattered all over Costa Rica; she had seen a program about them on the History Channel. She might sell it to a dealer in antiquities, or even a museum.
It sounded far-fetched, but who knew?
This spooky Pitch business had to be an elaborate charade: a cover story designed to ensure Chan would steal the stone for cash; thinking it was only important to a select group of believers, he’d make no attempt to run off looking for higher bidders. Whoever hired Chan knew the stone box’s value.
Maybe it wasn’t a box at all.
Chan never said it was a box. He kept calling it “the artifact” or “the item.” In any case, Vera had come up with her own theory— a puzzle box with treasure locked inside. How else did you account for bloodshed over an ugly pointy rock?
Madness. It made no sense.
Unless . . . the rock was something rare.
The thing itself had to be the treasure, not anything it contained. Could it be a giant gemstone? Or maybe it was precious metal? Silver, gold . . . platinum? To an amateur’s gaze, a chunk of unearthed raw metal would be hidden in plain sight. Add a can of spray paint. You might even fool an expert.
Scratch a stone and uncover a fortune.
Vera would take a closer look after she dried off.
She rinsed the shampoo from her hair. Eager now, she hurried to make her inspection. She had a Swiss Army knife in her purse. That would do the trick. If not, she could drive to the local hardware store and buy a hammer and chisel, a can of paint remover, too. By the end of the night, she’d know what she had on her hands; even if it meant reducing the stone to a small pile of rubble. Blinking water droplets out of her eyes, she turned off the shower and reached for her towel.
She dried her face.
Water gurgled in the pipes.
She lowered the towel.
The bathroom was dark.
Had the lights burned out? It happened every day in households spanning the globe. So it must happen in motels, too—probably more because people often kept the lights on in their motel rooms. There were two shining when she went in to take her shower: one connected to the exhaust fan and a fluorescent tube above the vanity mirror. Two bulbs don’t flicker out simultaneously. She leaned over to the wall switches and toggled them. Nothing happened.
A fuse.
That was it.
The motel had Christmas decorations—those strands of primary colors attached to green wires, running front to back on their property. There must have been an overload. They blew a fuse. She’d call the office immediately. Ask if they could correct the problem or move her to another room.
Quickly, she dried off in the dark.
She detected a strip of felt gray half-light at the bottom of the door.
Vera had the oddest sensation of time passage, hours missed: an intuition that when she ventured beyond the door, it would no longer be daylight but a persistent, irrevocable night.
She went out.
The motel room was dim. Yet she was glad to see it brighter than the closed bathroom. Clearly, it was late morning outside, though a bleak December rendition of it. The curtains hadn’t been drawn fully. An armchair blocked the way, snagging the drapery. Shadows played on the walls. She had left the table lamp on and now that was off, too. The face of the digital clock read blank.
Fuse.
She picked up her room phone.
Dead silence.
This phone had a cord. It was an old-fashioned landline and not subject to the electrical circuitry of the motel. Part, or the whole, of the town must have suffered an outage. The storm winds felled power lines. Telephone lines, too.
At least she had heat.
Funny, but the room was stifling. Even naked she felt uncomfortably warm. Her spine dampened with a dew of sweat and her cheeks flushed tight.
The only heater she saw, it was also the AC unit, was mounted into the wall at the back end of the room. She lifted the trapdoor on the facade and started punching buttons ... but this thing worked on electricity, too. She put her hand over the vents. Air didn’t blow.
She smelled cigarettes.
Not cigarettes.
Matches.
She put her nose over the vent. The smell wasn’t coming from there. She turned and walked over to the armchair, then the bed. To the closet and bathroom, her orbit brought her back again.
The smell was strongest by the armchair.
As if, while she was showering, a person had sat there in the dark, striking matches one after another, then blowing them out.
Obviously, no one was sitting in the chair. Her bundled leather jacket rested in a lump on the seat. Inside was the stone.
She remembered the scorch marks she’d discovered on the kitchen table before leaving home.
But Chan had done that with his lighter. How else ... ?
Despite the heat, she slipped into a pair of jeans and a black knit sweater. She didn’t bother with underwear or socks. She tugged her boots on and grabbed the room key off the top of the television. There was something she wanted to see. She propped the door open with the armchair so the room would cool.
Out on the narrow sidewalk, the cold shocked her, nearly driving her backward into her boiling murky accommodations. Snow was falling in earnest, slanted left to right, obliterating any views far from the motel. Flakes swarmed the air. Already the lot needed plowing; her Camaro was entombed in white powder. The spotlight above her car surged star-bright. She had to turn away ... so icily bright. .. then she heard it explode with a glassy pop.
Brittle fragments rained on her car’s hood.
Vera stood at the center of an encircling darkness.
An overhang shielded the sidewalk. The downspouts were frozen solid. Floes thrust out of them like pale paws. Icicles elongated before her eyes and frosty snow tongues licked over the roof’s edges.
That’s where the Christmas lights are , she thought.
I want to see them.
She braved a blast of Arctic wind and, clutching her arms to her chest, staggered forward and planted her two boots firmly in a drift alongside the curb. She faced the motel, looking for evidence of the lights. She had no difficulty picking them out. The childlike meanders of stapled wire and colors were obvious. Their gaudy flavors leaked like snow cones into the surrounding ice.
Only the lights strung above her door were unlit.
Unnerved, she stumbled closer. Her boots skated on slick icy crust. She caught her balance, reached up on her tiptoes, and jiggled the strand of bulbs. A couple of staples pulled loose and fell.
No flickers.
No lights.
Cell phone in her grip, she waited for a satellite link. She’d tell the office.
“C’mon,” she said, shivering.
A journey around the perimeter of the motel to the office was unthinkable. She’d end up snowblind. The cold proved too much for her. She wedged into the doorway. One side of her face going numb while the other half baked. The storm whooped. Ice pebbles chattered along the walkway. No linkup. The satellite tumbled in the heavens beyond her reach. She didn’t even know the number to the office. It would be labeled on her room’s telephone, of course. She stared into her room, afraid for no reason she could name, when a voice beside her spoke.
“Deep into that darkness peering , long I stood there wondering , fearing/Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before ...”
“Excuse me?”
It was the old man. No dog this time, no yellow coat. But she knew it was him. He wore a long wool cardigan frayed at the elbows and covered in rusty dog hairs. A thin cigar fumed between his fingers. He smiled.
“Here I am acting silly, reciting Poe. My name’s Max Caul. I’m staying right down the row from you.”
“In a nonsmoking room?” she asked, and pointed to the cigar.
“No, no. I enjoy the brisk air. Having a problem?”
“My electricity’s out.”
“How odd,” he said. “Mine’s working fine.”
“And there’s a strange smell in the room ...”
His eyes widened, the wrinkled lids unpeeling. “Sulfur, would you say? Matchsticks?”
She pulled back slightly. “How’d you guess?”
He shook his head, shrugged, and dragged on the cigar. The orange crumb of ash reddened. “Would you like to come into my room? You could ring the office. I’m sure they’ll fix whatever’s wrong.”
What were her options?
Fear, freeze, or acquiesce. Up close the old man seemed terribly
thin despite wearing a sweater. His hands shook with a mild palsy. When he toked his cigar his eyes pinched with the effort. He was feeble. She’d only be in his room for a minute, long enough to warm up and call the office, and if he was a dirty old man and tried anything, she was confident she could handle him.
She acquiesced.