Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

“Sorry,” he said. He allowed himself a smile. “I’m looking forward to tonight.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I was just wondering about allergies. Or if there’s anything you hate. ”

“Nope,” he said. “I’m wide open.”

He wasn’t going to tell her that he was nearly a vegetarian, eating meat less than once a month. He didn’t love spicy foods; they made him sweat unattractively and go red in the face. He tried to avoid dairy. Certain wines gave him heartburn. Women didn’t like it when you were fussy about food.

“Good,” she said. “Food is life.”

“So true,” he said. He liked that; he did think it was true.

“I had another reason for calling.” Her tone dropped, went more serious. He prepared himself for whatever disappointment was coming.

“Oh?”

“Do you know Cole Carr well?” she asked. “The boy from the woods the other afternoon?”

“He’s new to the school,” Henry said. “But he does fine. All of his teachers seem to think he’s a good kid, if a little reticent and withdrawn. Why?”

“Well, he stood Willow up last night. He was supposed to come by and never did. She’s crushed.”

Henry glanced at the boy’s name on the screen, the two red absence marks by his name. “I was just about to call his family. He’s been out of school for the last couple of days. Maybe he’s sick. Or there’s some family emergency. The parents haven’t called.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Willow said she saw him yesterday. That’s when they made plans.”

He heard worry and disappointment in her voice. And even though he knew that it didn’t have anything to do with him, he felt responsible.

“He might have been here but not attending class,” he said. “He has a car.”

“I’m sure he was,” said Bethany. She didn’t sound sure at all. “I really don’t think she was lying.”

Henry knew all about Willow’s issues with the truth. Lots of teenage girls lied; it was a self-esteem thing. They generally grew out of it.

“I’ll be reaching out to the family in a while,” he said. He wanted to make her feel better somehow. “I’ll let you know what I learn.”

“Okay.”

“Try not to worry, Beth.” He liked the way her name sounded on the air. There was a beat where he wondered if he had been too familiar. When she spoke again, he heard that warmth in her voice.

“You’re a good man, Mr. Ivy,” she said. Somehow when she said it, it didn’t feel like a punch to the gut.

The Regal Motel wasn’t the worst place Jones had ever seen. Some motels like this-a depressing concrete U of shabbily appointed rooms-were nests of illegal activities, drugs in one room, prostitution in another. Recently a place like this closer to The Hollows had burned to the ground after the explosion of a small methamphetamine lab.

But the Regal was at least clean on the outside, with a fresh coat of paint. There was a decently maintained pool area, chairs and pool covered for the winter. The shrubbery along the sidewalk was trimmed. Someone was taking the time to keep the place in order, which meant management was also keeping an eye on the guests. The sign could use a little work. The g was missing, so from a distance it read THE RE AL MOTEL.

A little bell announced his entry into an orderly, quiet office. It was cool, the heat not yet on. A large woman with a head of tight gray curls tapped on a keyboard behind a desk. She didn’t look up to acknowledge him right away. So Jones glanced around the room. Fake plant. A dingy love seat and coffee table. A magazine rack with overused, outdated women’s magazines. The dark, wood-paneled walls were inexpertly studded with photographs of children in various poses of play, certificates from various agencies announcing compliance or excellence. There were some amateur line drawings of area sights. The carpet was stained, and a path was worn thin from the door to the desk.

“Help you, sir?”

She still hadn’t looked up from her computer.

“I’m looking for a friend. I heard she was staying here. Robin O’Conner.”

She lifted her eyes from the screen then, pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose, and gave him a cool once-over.

“Cop?” she said. She had the aura of proprietorship; she was not an underling or a worker. She had authority here, wouldn’t be worried about her job. This could be a good thing or a bad thing.

“No,” said Jones.

“Retired,” she said. She wasn’t asking.

Jones offered a slow shrug. With a woman like that, it was better to stick to the truth. “I’m doing a favor for a friend. Robin’s got a boy who’s missing her.”

“You can leave a message. I’ll see that she gets it.” She turned back to the screen. He could see blue and white reflected in the lenses. She was on that social network. It was weird how into that everyone appeared to be. More into it than the real world, it seemed.

Jones waited. He walked over to the wall, peered more closely at the certificates. When he was a cop, he’d do things like that to unsettle. If the documents were fake or out of date, people would get nervous, start chattering.

“I run a clean place here,” she said. When he looked back at her, she was staring at him hard. He was annoying her. She wanted him to leave. Good.

“I can see that, ma’am,” he said politely. A little too politely, almost but not quite mockingly so.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Jones glanced at his watch, an old Timex he’d had since college. “Just before noon.”

She gazed toward the window. Jones looked to see a small diner across the road. “She’ll be headed over there soon, if she’s not there already. She works the lunch shift.”

Robin O’Conner must have been working off the books, or it would have popped on her credit report. The woman hefted herself from the chair, and it hissed with relief. She had a slight limp as she moved through a door behind the desk. Jones took this to mean that he’d been dismissed. He could just have left, but curiosity got the better of him.

“Her card was declined here yesterday,” he said. He raised his voice a bit so that she could hear him in the next room. There was silence, and he didn’t think she would come back, but then she filled the doorway.

She wore a deep frown. “I thought you said you weren’t a cop.”

“I’m not.”

She took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. He could see the red impression of her frames.

“Sometimes people need a break. Don’t you think?” she said.

“I do,” he said. “But in this business I wouldn’t think you could afford to give too many of them.”

“True. And I don’t. But Robin’s a good girl. She’s not our usual patron.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

This time when she disappeared through the doorway, he knew she wouldn’t come back. He liked people like that, solid, sure of themselves. They were good judges of character, good witnesses. He remembered what Paula had said about Cole, that he was a good boy, that someone had loved him and done a good job raising him. It jibed with the old woman’s assessment of Robin O’Conner.

He knew her right away, because her son had inherited all her beauty, the raven hair and almond-shaped eyes. She looked tired and too thin, her collarbone straining against the skin, the knobs at her wrists too prominent. Something about that made him think of Eloise, then in turn about Marla Holt. And he wondered how he had wound up with all these missing and injured women in his sights. You never could resist a damsel in distress , Maggie had said. Maybe she was right.

Robin O’Conner was working the counter. There was one trucker there, with more food on his plate than Jones had eaten in two days-eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage, and two biscuits drowning in gravy. And yet the guy, stooped over his meal and eating with gusto, was about the size of one of Jones’s legs. Was there any justice in the world?