Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

A new clerk was working the front desk, an acned non-Sarah in his late teens or early twenties. I held up my registration binder like an overlarge badge, trying to look harried and committee-bound. “I don’t suppose if I gave you a name and ID code, you’d tell me what room someone is staying in? Official business?”

He nodded. I flipped to the DJ’s name and pointed. After a moment’s typing, he looked back up at me. “107. That’s in the annex. Do you know where that is?”

My room was in the annex, but if the committee members were all staying in the tower, I didn’t want to break the illusion. I let him point me in the direction of my room. Her door was a few down from my own.

I knocked a few times before she heard me. When the door swung open, I recognized the person on the other side. “That makes sense! I didn’t realize you were the DJ.”

She smiled blankly. I pointed at her T-shirt. “We met outside earlier? When you were smoking? No Good Deeds?”

“Oh, yeah.” She replaced the empty smile with a warmer one. “It’s hard to keep everyone straight. Can I help you?”

“I’m, uh, investigating the death of the Sarah you found. I’m a detective. Do you mind if I come in and ask you a few questions?”

She opened the door wider, and I followed her into the room. The first bed’s bedspread lay in a heap on the floor. Her duffel’s contents were scattered across the second bed, in some sort of half-organization. A pile of grayed-out underwear, a few T-shirts, neatly folded, a pile of tampons, pack of cigarettes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I always spread out in hotels. You can have the chair.” She flopped down on the first bed. “Did you say you were investigating her death? She looked like she fell off the stage to me. Not that it wasn’t freaky to see her, you know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But the hotel manager asked me to look around a little. Because of the circumstances.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Are you alright with me asking you some questions?”

“Go ahead. It’s all a little upsetting, though. I’m not sure I’m thinking straight.”

That might be chemical, if the pills I’d found were hers. “Can you walk me through the afternoon?”

“I loaded my stuff into the room around four. Set up, soundchecked. Came back down here to get my second crate of records. When I went back, that’s when I saw her.”

“Do you know how long you were gone?”

She shrugged. I tried to remember when I’d run into her. She must have gone out for a smoke before going back with the crate.

“Where were you when you saw her? Where in the club, I mean?”

“As I was coming down the aisle toward the stage. She was just sitting there. I thought she had sat down, but then I realized the posture was funny.”

“And—sorry—was she definitely already dead by then?”

She bit her lower lip, bringing it to the white of her teeth. “Her eyes were open. I nudged her leg, but she didn’t respond, so I checked for a pulse.”

“Was she warm or cold to your touch?”

“Warm. I’ve never seen a dead person before, and she looked so…” She shuddered. I did too.

“And then you left her there? To go for help?”

“No! I made a call on her walkie-talkie. I figured the other people in charge would be on the other end, and maybe someone from the hotel.”

I closed my eyes to mentally revisit the scene. “There wasn’t a walkie-talkie there.”

Her eyes widened. “There was. I swear, I called on it. Ask the manager. It was next to the body. She’d been carrying it around before, complaining it dragged her jeans down.”

“Her jeans? Before she changed into the dress and came back?”

She gave me a quizzical look.

There wasn’t really much point to asking her anything else if she couldn’t even get basic details right. Her confusion felt genuine. “Thanks for letting me in. ‘Questions lead to questions lead to answers lead to answers,’ right?”

“I hope so,” she said absently, standing up and ushering me out. “I hope you get her home okay.”

She’d completely ignored the No Good Deeds lyric I’d used as a peace offering. Second and last album in my world, their one hit single. I wondered if it was the drugs or the shock, or she just wasn’t the fan I’d thought she was earlier.

Back in the hallway, I dug in my bag for a pen. I’d normally have taken notes while she talked, but I’d had a feeling it would have shut her up. Instead of a pen, I came up with the dinner roll I’d taken earlier. I ate it in two bites. Diving in again, my fingers settled on the key card I’d found in the nightclub. Room 517. In the tower, I guessed. Might as well check it out.

I rode the tower elevator—much faster than the one to the nightclub—with two Sarahs who were making eyes at each other in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable. I was happy to escape.

Room 517 was around the corner and down the hall. My shoes sank into plush carpeting. Pushing a luggage cart through it wouldn’t be any fun, but maybe tower people paid bellhops to do the grunt work. The halls up here had actual wallpaper, tasteful stripes, in contrast with our bare-walled wing.

I paused for a moment outside the room, trying to hear if there was anyone moving inside, preparing myself to find… I didn’t know what. I hadn’t gotten clearance to do this. Then again, nobody had told me not to, which was basically permission. I knocked, waited for an answer, knocked again.

The swipe card worked on the first try. I stepped inside. The light had been left on. The furniture looked like hardwood instead of plywood, and the room was maybe a foot or two wider, but I didn’t really see anything to justify the cost difference between this space and mine.

Three dresses hung in the open closet, in styles similar to the dead woman’s. Worn gym clothes lay crumpled in the corner next to the first bed, a pair of sneakers half buried underneath the pile. The closer bed had obviously been slept in; if she was the organizer, she’d probably been here a night or two early to get situated before the rest of us arrived. She’d dumped her suitcase—mostly underwear and bras—out on the second bedspread. Maybe in her world hotel bedspreads got washed along with the sheets.

A toiletry bag had been emptied on the bathroom counter. Ipana gel toothpaste, the exact same product I used. How much could toothpaste change from world to world? The makeup was an assortment of familiar and unfamiliar brands, so maybe I was wrong. A damp towel hung over the shower curtain rod. So far, this was the room of someone who had assumed she would be coming back. I flushed the toilet for her, as a courtesy. Immediately regretted it as disposing of evidence.

The room door clicked shut, startling me. Had I left it open? I didn’t remember closing it when I’d entered. Maybe someone had gone into another room on the hall and the wind had pulled this one closed. I’d lived in houses where that happened. I opened the door and peered down the empty hallway.

I’d left her second bag for last, under the hope there was a clue waiting somewhere for me. A clue, like I was a real detective, not somebody who flushed away evidence. The bag was an expensive-looking leather satchel. My style, if I had the cash for it.

There were a few things I was expecting to find and didn’t. I’d expected a registration binder like the one I had in my bag. I didn’t see a walkie-talkie or charger, though maybe the charger was in the convention’s Ops room the manager had mentioned earlier, wherever that was. I did find a program, with a couple of items circled. Not the ones I expected. “Sarahs in the Sciences” on Sunday morning and a penned-in Information Desk shift from 12–4 PM on Saturday. Not the keynote. Maybe she didn’t have to circle it because it went without saying.