Jess Lourey - October Fest

I nodded, sinking into the mattress.

“OK. I have to leave for work at 5:00 a.m. I’ll head out early to check on them first, okay? Just sleep.” He felt my forehead and then covered me with a spare blanket before stretching out behind me, one arm draped loosely across my waist, reminding me I wasn’t alone.

And that’s all I remembered until I heard the scream.

My disorientation was total. The room was black. It didn’t smell familiar, and the digital clock was in the wrong place telling me some crap about 5:34. Where was I, and why had I been dreaming of moving to West Bengal? That’s when it came back to me in smelly waves of shame. Argh. I was pretty sure Johnny had seen me hurl last night. The humiliation was smothering.

And then it pierced my ears again, a scream as chilling as morgue water, the noise that had woken me. I sprung out of bed and was shoved back by a Mack truck of a headache. I powered through and felt my way to the door, focusing on a sliver of grayish light glowing through the curtains. I found the doorknob and turned it, welcoming the fresh and chilly lake air. West Battle’s waves were choppy and dark, the sun an hour and a half from rising. The only brightness issued from a lonely light in the parking lot. People were beginning to stir about in their rooms, but as of yet only two doors were open, mine and the one immediately to my right. A cleaning cart was resting between our rooms. I skirted it and entered the adjacent room gingerly, certain the scream had emanated from there.

I was paralyzed by what I saw.

In the middle of the room lay a crumpled male figure. A cleaning woman knelt next to the man, searching for a pulse. It was then that I noticed the jellied outline of a clear plastic bag over his head and the preternatural stillness that only death can bring.

I raced to the bedside phone to dial 911.

“Already called,” the cleaning lady said. “Besides, there’s no hurry.”

Her calmness unsettled me. “Were you the one who just screamed?”

“Yeah,” she said, leaning back on her heels. “This room was supposed to be empty. I was startled, is all. But you clean hotel rooms for enough years, and nothing really scares you anymore.” She indicated the plastic bag. “Must have suffocated himself. It’s tight around his neck.”

I didn’t want to get too close, didn’t want to see whose face it was, but I found myself tiptoeing around the body at a safe distance, just the same. And that’s how I came to stare into the dead eyes of Bob Webber, the blogger who would never again care if the world spelled his name with one or two b’s.

“Shit. I owe Curtis ten bucks.”

The familiar voice at the door yanked me sharply from the frozen horror on Mr. Webber’s chalk-white face. One edge of his forehead appeared darker than the rest and soft, like he’d hit the ground hard. He was still dressed in his sad, shabby coat. “Mrs. Berns?” I asked. She looked tiny in the doorway, tiny and crazy-sexy in thigh-high stockings and a black teddy under a translucent, feather-lined robe. “What are you doing here?”

She took in my bedhead and bloodshot eyes courtesy of an evening of power hurling. “We’ll have the talk when you get a little bit older, honey. We have a more important situation on our hands. You just cost me ten cucumbers.”

Bernard, the stuffy reporter who yesterday had been in her room at the Senior Sunset, materialized behind her, looking ridiculously bird-legged in boxer shorts and a white v-neck T-shirt.

“Wah?” I asked.

She crossed her arms and leaned into the door frame. “We have a Mira and Corpse pool at the Senior Sunset. Curtis Poling bet you couldn’t make it through Octoberfest weekend without finding a dead body. I figured if I steered you away from your usual haunts and kept a close eye on you, I’d win the bet. Turns out you can’t trick luck as bad as yours, sweetie pie.”

“Wait, is that why you talked Johnny into bringing me here? To win a ten-dollar bet?” Nothing like indignation to arrest your attention.

“Pah.” She strode over to the corpse and knelt down to stare at his face. “It’s that Leeson boy we should feel sorry for. How’d you humiliate yourself this time? And who’s the wormfood here?”

“Bob Webber,” Bernard said from behind us.

“One b or two?” I asked, staring at the face of the deceased and wondering why he looked so frightened. My experience with corpses is that most of them left the world with a disgusted looked on their faces, a final “Really? Is that all?” Bob Webber, on the other hand, looked like his last moments had been awfully scary.

“Two.”

“Well now, how do you know him?” Mrs. Berns asked, turning toward her date and sounding peeved.

Bernard cleared his throat. “He operated The Body Politic blog. Well-known in the business of political reporting, a reputation for mendacity.”

I didn’t like the guy’s arrogance, and I didn’t trust his aim with big words. “Mendacity or tenacity?”

“My dear girl, he didn’t give up when he had a story. He was efficacious.” He talked slowly to give me the opportunity to dig out my thinking cap.

I pointed at the plastic bag sealed tightly around the corpse’s neck. “Was he going through tough times?”

“I didn’t know him personably,” Bernard answered.

I stared from Bernard to Mrs. Berns and back again. “Where did you two meet?”

“Gas station.” Mrs. Berns stood and grabbed Bernard’s hand. “Time to go, honey.” She shot her most threatening look to the cleaning lady, which was difficult to pull off in her Victoria’s Oldest Secret regalia. “We were never here.”

The maid rolled her eyes and reached into her apron for a squirt of Purel, leaving me to decide if I also should never have been here. Lots of questions get asked when you’re standing near a dead body, suicide or no. Besides, my eyes and throat were scratchy and my stomach was still unsettled. I backed out of the room, pausing long enough outside to lift the room list from the maid’s cart and slide it into my jeans pocket before returning to room 20 to retrieve my car keys and purse.

My plan was to scurry down the walkway and never look back, but once past the cart I was slowed by an agitated-looking Grace, barreling toward me. I stepped aside to let her enter room 18, her hands shaking as she slid in the electronic key card. She didn’t make eye contact with me, acted, in fact, as if she dearly hoped she were invisible. When the door glided closed behind her, I had enough time to note that both the beds were made. I returned to room 19 for a moment, peeping my head in. The maid was dragging on an Eve’s Slim in the entirely smoke-free motel, studying the body in the center as if she were considering whether to get one for her den.

“Did you clean room 18 yet?”

She shook her head in the negative. “This is my first room of the day. It was supposed to be empty,” she repeated.

I thanked her and made my way to my car just as a wailing ambulance pulled into the lot, followed by a navy blue Battle Lake police cruiser with its cherries on. What I spied in the police car froze me until a basic instinct kicked in. I zipped to my left and launched between two four-door sedans. I skinned my knees in the process but it would be completely worth it if I was right and that was Gary Wohnt, former chief of the Battle Lake Police Department, persona non grata since August, behind the wheel of the cop car.