The bathroom separating the two bedrooms had a medicine cabinet. Darby opened it. Empty shelves. The drawers for the vanity were empty, but the cabinet held toilet paper and a bottle of liquid soap. Blue towels were piled on the shelves of the linen closet. No personal items – not even a box of tampons or maxi-pads.
The spare bedroom was fully furnished and didn’t have any clothes in the drawers, and the closet was empty. Empty was becoming the key word here. The only room that had a trace of personality was the master bedroom, with its thick quilt, sturdy oak furniture and twin bookshelves, which were packed with religious hardcover and paperback books and an assortment of religious knick-knacks and bric-a-brac: well-worn copies of the entire ‘Left Behind’ series wedged behind a pair of stone praying hands; a wooden cross and a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary; and prayer cards sticking out of copies of God Loves You, The Road of Light and A Room at the End of the World: My Journey from Disbeliever to Believer. There was also an entire series of Christian romances featuring plain-looking women on the cover who had, after suffering tragic accidents and personal misfortune, found solace in hunky but appropriately clothed men. Yikes.
Again, she searched through the photos, enlarging different areas. Again, she found it difficult to concentrate, and she gave in quickly to her frustration regarding Noel, who, she was sure, had sent her here on a fool’s errand.
One more time, she thought. Go through the house one more time.
Darby put the phone away, went back downstairs and roamed through the rooms.
An hour later, she once more found herself in the upstairs bedroom, sitting on the bed between the two bookcases, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms.
New locks and deadbolts had been installed on the front and back doors: Maximus locks, considered the best in the business. Not the sort of thing you’d expect to find inside a residential home, as the company catered to commercial businesses. If Melissa French was one of those paranoid types looking for the best locks money could buy, she may have jumped on the Internet and found the Maximus company and decided on their locks, given their high user ratings. Not ordinary but not unordinary either.
What was out of the ordinary was finding a bedroom doorknob with a key-operated lock. What was extraordinary was finding a deadbolt behind the bedroom door. Not only did the woman want to lock the door to prevent anyone from entering while she wasn’t home, she wanted to prevent anyone from entering her bedroom each night when she went to sleep.
What kind of person installed a key-operated lock and a deadbolt in a bedroom door?
Head stuffed and frustration growling in her stomach, Darby didn’t have much need to pay attention to the road. Twenty, maybe even thirty minutes had passed before she realized Michael the Driver wasn’t taking her to a hotel in Fort Jefferson.
‘I work at the Moonlight Mile Lodge in Big Sky,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘It’s a pretty sweet place – and I’m not just saying that because I work there.’
It was pretty sweet – and surprisingly large. Not as big as the Overlook Hotel in the movie version of The Shining but something fairly close to it, a big, imposing and sprawling structure, the front area, protected by a flat room, long and wide enough to accommodate the passengers in one if not two buses. There was plenty of activity even at this late hour: cars parked everywhere, people leaving and people coming to stay. The staff handling the luggage and opening the doors were all young men that, like Michael the Driver, wore matching black shirts and jeans, a Stetson and a black duster. The lobby, with its warm tiled floor, fireplaces and lodge-type furniture, had a life-sized bronze bear in the centre.
Two young blonde women were working the front desk: they wore matching blue sweaters adorned with snowflakes. They were dealing with an older man with a long white beard who was complaining about the water in his room. As Darby approached, she heard one of the girls say, ‘We’re having problems with the filtration system.’
One of the women, chubby and wearing braces, turned to Darby and smiled brightly, as though she were greeting a fellow sorority sister at a key party. Darby gave her name and the young woman said, ‘I have everything right here, waiting for you. Mr Covington called ahead, told us you were on your way and to make sure we had everything ready. Your bags are already in your room.’
Then, when Darby took out her wallet, she said, ‘We don’t need your credit card and licence. Mr Covington took care of everything. You’re on the second floor. Room Two-seventeen.’ She handed Darby an envelope holding two keycards.
‘Is Noel Covington or Phil Bradley staying here?’ Darby asked.
‘Let me check.’ The woman turned to the computer. The other one smiled politely, her tiny silver nose ring glinting underneath the overhead lights.
If Noel or Bradley was staying here, she would try to find a way to get into the agent’s room, see if any information had been left behind – files, messages, whatever – that could help to shed some much-needed light on who Melissa French was and why she was so important to the Bureau.
The chubby woman shook her head. ‘They don’t have a reservation with us.’
‘Did a Jackson Cooper stay here? This would have been last week.’
‘Let’s see … No, he didn’t stay with us.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Elevator is directly behind you. The kitchen is open for another hour. Mr Covington told me to tell you to order whatever you want and charge it to the room. Enjoy your stay.’
Darby wanted a hot shower and longed to sleep under warm sheets and to close her eyes; but she didn’t feel like being locked inside a strange room, alone, coming to grips with Coop’s death. She started to walk around the hotel because she didn’t know what else to do, or where to go, the grief moving inside her like a bat trapped in an attic.
The hotel had its own bar, located at the far end of the building, but it was too crowded and noisy, with a band playing bad country music. She spotted a lounge not far from the hotel’s front desk, a quiet place that served coffee, sodas, sandwiches and, after ten, allowed guests to purchase wine, bottled beer or to choose from a limited but decent selection of hard alcohol. It was nearly deserted, save for an elderly man sitting at one of the oval tables, working diligently on what appeared to be a Sudoku puzzle.
The person manning the counter was a woman getting on in years: hearing aid, her face deeply furrowed, makeup applied somewhat haphazardly. She wore the same black shirt and jeans as Michael the Driver and the boys out front. Darby ordered a Knob Creek, double neat, and carried the glass with her to a pair of leather club chairs and matching couch arranged around a long coffee table made of logs, all of it facing a massive flagstone fireplace and hearth that took up almost the entire wall.
Darby sat on the couch. The logs behind the firescreen still had some life left in them and gave out a decent amount of heat.
‘Good,’ Noel Covington said. ‘You’re still up.’