Chapter 25 - The Woman of the House

That night, Brian opens the plastic cap of the prescription bottle and hands me two small white pills with a glass of water.

“Bottoms up,” he says, watching me.

I swallow the pills without the water. “Thanks,” I say.

Once Brian goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, I reach into the back of my mouth and remove the pills wedged between my molars and my cheek. My glance shifts from the pills in the palm of my hand to Brian’s water on the bedside table.

In bed, minutes stretch into hours as I watch the shadows of the bare tree branches dance on the ceiling. Their movements are spastic and unpredictable. Just when I think they’ll be still, the wind disturbs them again. I can’t hear the waves from the water down below, but I imagine them thrashing around the lake, throwing themselves at each other.

Around three a.m., sleep pulls at my eyelids. My head lobs to one side. The muscles in my neck loosen. I feel my body sink into the mattress. The weight of the day lifts itself off my chest. I take a deep breath, and another. Then a noise from the other side of the room makes my body stiffen. At first, I think it’s a mouse running along the roof, its long, untamed nails tapping the shingles above. When I hear it again, it sounds like scratching. It’s too rhythmic to be a mouse, too intentional to be any kind of animal. I sit up in bed, my ears straining to hear the noise once more, but it’s gone quiet. Brian is asleep at my side.

Just when I’m about to lie back down, I hear the sound of nails scratching against wood. It’s coming from the closet. I get out of bed and navigate the squeaky floorboards. With each step I take, the scratching gets louder and more persistent, as if something is trying to claw its way out. When I reach the closed closet door, the scratching stops. I’m so close to the door, I can smell the white paint on the wood. My breath is uneven. I clench my fists and will my racing heart to slow. Whatever is on the other side is taunting me. I turn back to Brian to make sure he’s still snoring soundly, then I swing the closet door open.

I feel it before I see it. Nails dig into the sides of my neck. A cold palm is pushed against my airway. I gasp for air that’s not there. I grab at the hand clenched around my throat, but it’s no use, the grip is too strong. When I try to cry out, only a strained breath escapes. My eyes go wide, but it’s too dark to see who the hand belongs to. My fingers claw at the arm choking me, but the hold only tightens around my neck. My legs flail beneath me. I feel the veins on the side of my head pop out as my vision blurs. I try to take another gasping breath, but air can’t reach my lungs. Soon, I feel my body go limp and I pass out.

When I wake, I’m on the floor. I scramble away from the closet door, afraid that the woman might come back. Sitting on the floor, my back against the bed, I look up. Brian is sleeping with his mouth open wide. His breathing is heavy and a small pool of drool is collecting on the pillow beneath him. His water glass is empty on his bedside table. There’s no sign of the crushed-up pills I put in a few hours earlier.

I run my fingers along the side of my neck, feeling the indentations left behind by the woman’s fingernails.

—

I creep down into the kitchen. The clock on the oven says it’s 5:14 a.m. I scribble a note to Brian on a loose piece of mail, something about watching the sunrise from the other side of the lake, before I grab my keys and head out the front door.

I drive without a destination in mind. I just want to get out of the house and clear my head. After I meander through the neighborhood full of sprawling second homes, I find myself in town. It’s quiet. It’s too late for the bar to be open, but too early for the coffee shop. The streetlight in front of Angela’s store flickers on and off, giving and then taking light away in a flash. I put the car in park and sit with the store on my left and the lake on my right. My eyes hover over the “Closed” sign in the door. I picture Angela fluffing the pillows in the display window and stacking the candles into a pyramid of vanilla-scented goodness. Would Jonathan visit her during his lunch break as she rang people up from behind the register? Maybe the kids would stop by after school to say hi? Maybe here she could hide from whatever it was that bothered her at home.

The streetlight flickers on and off for a little while longer, a consistent rhythm until finally it goes out, and Angela’s shop disappears into darkness. My fingers dance on top of the steering wheel as I try to ignore the growing hole in my stomach that tells me I shouldn’t be here.

I put the car in gear and drive out of town, until I end up on the highway. Golden cornfields stretch out in front of me for miles. After an hour or so of driving, the sun rises, but my eyes get heavier and heavier with each blink. I roll down the window and let the cool morning air wake me up. A sign for a Motel 6 flies by on my right. My body sinks deeper into the driver’s seat as I think about a room inside the motel. Without the threat of a figure looming over me, I’d fall right to sleep.

It’s then that I have a thought that makes me pull over to the side of the two-lane highway. What if, like me, Angela was unable to sleep in the house? What if she sought refuge at a Motel 6? Would she go there to catch a few hours of sleep after she dropped the kids off at school? Would she get ready in a small motel mirror before heading to work at the Lake House Home?

Within five minutes, I’m pulling into the nearly empty parking lot of the Motel 6 and making my way toward the reception desk. A bell rings above my head as I enter. Inside, it smells like cigarettes and old furniture. A middle-aged man with a receding hairline and thick glasses sits behind the counter.

“Hi,” I say. My voice cracks and I realize how dry my mouth is. “I have sort of a weird question.” The man behind the counter raises his eyebrows like he’s asking me to try him. “Have you ever seen this woman here before?” I have Angela’s picture pulled up on my phone. I hold it up so he can see.

“Hmm,” the man says as he squints his eyes. “She’s not one of our regulars, but she does look familiar.” His voice trails off.

“She would have come in six or seven months ago. Maybe longer.”

“Wait a minute.” The man taps his chin with the end of his pen. “I do know her. That’s the missing woman up in Lake Moss, isn’t it?” I can feel my face turn a deep shade of red as I nod. “Yeah, a couple cops came in here a while back and asked me the same thing. You a cop?” He raises a hairy eyebrow as he takes in my small frame.

“No.” I shake my head and tuck my thick hair behind my ears. “I’m, uh, a friend of Angela’s.”

“Well, the cops wanted to know if I’d seen her. Said maybe she would have been with a guy.”

“A guy? What guy?”

The cops had it all wrong. Angela wouldn’t come here to cheat on Jonathan; she would come here to get some rest, that’s all.

The man behind the desk shrugs. “Beats me, but I told them I hadn’t seen her.”

I feel my stomach drop. “You’re sure? Maybe take another look at the picture?” I hold my phone back up to his face, but he just shakes his head.

“I’m sure.”

I thank the man for his time and leave the same way I entered. Back in the car, I pull up other nearby motels on my phone. Little dots populate the map on the screen, letting me know there are about half a dozen of them within thirty miles.

In ten minutes, I’m at Mary’s Motel. This one doesn’t have a little bell above the door that jingles when I walk in, and the chair behind the front desk is empty.

“Hello?” I call. Small giggles sneak out from underneath the closed door behind the desk.

“Just a sec,” a voice says while stifling a cough. A young man who looks like he’s barely out of high school emerges from the back room with a cloud of smoke around him. His arms dangle at his sides with his fingertips nearly touching his knees. He’s so thin I think he’d disappear if he turned sideways. “Need a room?”

“No,” I say, trying not to cough as the smell of weed wafts toward me. I watch as this man’s eyes get more bloodshot by the second.

I pull up the picture of Angela and ask him if he’s seen her.

“Nah,” he says before he even looks at her image.

“Would have been six months ago, maybe longer.” I hold the phone up closer to his face, forcing him to take another look.

“Sorry, lady.”

I sigh, realizing that I’m getting a standard response from this guy. I could have held up a picture of me and he would have said the same thing. I think about what Frances would do if she were here. She’d tell me not to leave, to probe harder.

“Did the cops ever come by here and ask if you’d seen her?”

“Whoa, cops? What cops?” His voice has an edge of defensiveness to it now. “Nah, there’s no trouble here.” His shakes his head of shaggy brown hair from side to side.

“Is there anyone else who works here who might have seen her?” I glance behind him toward the back room, where the laughter was coming from earlier.

He puts his hands on the desk and leans in. His jaw is tight, and for a moment I’m afraid. If Brian found out I was here interrogating motel clerks about Angela, he’d be furious. “No.”

I nod as I shove my phone into my pocket and head back toward the car.

At the next motel, I talk to a middle-aged woman who has a soap opera blaring on the TV next to her desk. I show her Angela’s picture and she shakes her head no while a man on the screen professes his love to a woman who—I’m guessing from the shocked expression on the receptionist’s face—isn’t his wife.

I stop at three other motels along the highway, but the people working the front desks all tell me the same thing: They’ve never seen Angela. All of them are hiding something—I’m just not sure if it’s drugs, hookers, or information about Angela. The more I try to pry, the more these people shut down. It’s like they can smell the out-of-towner on me. They take one look at my eager eyes and the expensive leather jacket Brian got me for Christmas, realize they haven’t seen me around before, and decide on the spot not to talk to me. I want to shake the people behind these reception desks and tell them that even though I look like a rich bitch, I’m not. Underneath the jacket and the perfume with the French name I can’t pronounce, I’m just a low-income, white-trash girl from a broken home. I’m one of them.

I pull into the parking lot of the last motel on my list. A sign that says “Welcome to the Harvard Mote” greets me. I wonder how long the l has been missing.

The rooms of the two-story motel are all located off an outdoor walkway. A man smoking a cigarette on the balcony of the second floor gives me a nod as I walk toward the door with a “Check-In” sign hanging in the window.

The young woman working behind the desk doesn’t look up when I walk in. “Roxxxy” is written in purple Sharpie on a laminated name tag pinned to her chest. Her thumb is moving up and down on her phone’s screen, scrolling. Her eyes are glazed over, taking in the content as if by osmosis.

“Excuse me,” I say after standing in front of the desk for what seems like several minutes. I check the time on my phone. It’s almost noon. I have a text from Brian asking me when I’ll be home, but I haven’t responded yet. “Hello?”

I shift my weight between my feet and sigh before I ring the dull silver bell sitting on the desk between us. The sound stops Roxxxy mid-scroll. Now I have her attention. My lack of sleep and the morning’s frustrations rise up like a wave crashing onto the shore. I ring it again. Roxxxy raises an eyebrow. Someone knows something about Angela, I’m sure of it. The bell barely has time to finish its ring when I flick it again. If only these people would talk to me. I ring it over and over, the bell tripping over its own noise and disrupting the quiet until Roxxxy grabs it and throws it into a drawer.

“Jesus! What’s your problem?” Roxxxy asks. Her mouth is gummy. The tips of her bleach blonde hair are dyed blue and her stubby nails are speckled with chipped purple nail polish.

“Sorry,” I say. I take a step back and rub my eyes before running my fingers through my hair. “Long morning.”

Roxxxy gives me a blank look while her tongue plays with a piece of gum in her mouth.

I take my phone out of my pocket and pull up Angela’s picture. Her smiling face looks up at me from the bright screen, and for a second I think her expression changes to one of pity.

“Have you seen this woman before? It wouldn’t have been recently, maybe six or seven months ago.” I repeat the same thing I’ve said at all the other motels and brace myself for the shaking head and dumbfounded expression I know is coming.

“Yeah, yeah, I recognize her,” Roxxxy says, leaning over her forearms. My mouth drops open. “She used to come in here all the time. Haven’t seen her for a while, though. Like you said.”

“This woman? You’re sure?”

“Um, yeah. Isn’t that what I said?”

“Right. Right,” I say. I pick at the skin on my forefinger as I think of what to say next. I didn’t think about what I’d do once I found someone who had actually seen Angela. “Did she come alone or…” My voice trails off.

Roxxxy shakes her head. “Yeah, alone. Never with a guy or anything like that if that’s what you mean?” She sits back in her seat. “She didn’t seem like the type.”

“What type?”

“The type we usually get around here. You know, drunks sneaking around with people they shouldn’t be sneaking around with. But this lady was different. She kept her ring on, seemed like she had a family.”

“How often did she come in?”

“Jeez, it was so long ago. If I had to guess, maybe a couple times a week?”

“What did she do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did she do when she came here?”

Roxxxy looks around. “Um, rent a room? Probably wanted to get away from her kids or something. She always seemed dead tired—that’s one thing I remember about her. Looked like she’d seen a ghost or something.”

Listening to Roxxxy, I feel vindicated. The cops, the townspeople, and even Jonathan all hinted at the fact that Angela was having an affair, but she wasn’t. She didn’t come to this motel to cheat on Jonathan. She came here to escape.

“Did something happen to her?” Roxxxy asks, tilting her head ever so slightly.

“I’d like a room,” I say, putting my credit card down on the counter and ignoring Roxxxy’s question. Even if I wanted to answer her, I wouldn’t know how.

Roxxxy clicks the mouse a few times, lighting up the computer screen in front of her. “Room 202,” she says, holding out a key.

On my way to the room, I walk by the guy smoking a cigarette. There are a couple of burnt butts at his feet. This time, he smiles at me. His teeth are yellowed and decaying. In the room behind him, a woman is yelling incoherently.

Room 202 has a bed, a bathroom, and a lock on the door. I splash some cold water on my face before I sit on the edge of the bed. I picture Angela collapsing onto the mattress, drifting off to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Or maybe she sat here, just as I’m doing now, trying to make sense of her life. Images of the woman in the house, hunched over and covered by shadows, run through my mind, just like I know they ran through Angela’s. If she were still here, maybe we’d be friends. Then I remember. If she were here, I wouldn’t have moved into her house. We never would have met.

My stomach rumbles. I can’t remember the last time I ate. I fish some change out of my purse and walk down the hall to the vending machine. The guy I saw smoking moments before has abandoned his place on the balcony and joined the screaming woman inside. Their voices compete with each other for air. I stop a few feet ahead of their door.

“You lousy piece of shit,” she says.

“Dumb bitch,” he says in response.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here with you!”

“So go! Go on, leave! See how far you get.”

“I will!”

Their door opens. I pretend like I’m mid-step, but it’s obvious I was listening. The woman’s face is streaked with mascara. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her faux fur jacket.

“You okay?” I ask like we’ve known each other forever. Red lipstick is smeared across one side of her face. Her right cheek looks redder than the other.

“Fuck off,” she spits back before descending the stairs to the parking lot.

The selection in the vending machine is slim. Candy bars and energy drinks line the rows behind the glass. I insert my change and select a chocolate bar and a diet soda before heading back toward my lime-green door.

The lights are off when I go inside, even though I thought they were on when I left. I flip the switch a couple of times, but it doesn’t work. Despite the fact that it’s midday, the blackout curtains are drawn, covering the room in total darkness. There’s a lamp next to the bed. I trip over my feet as I walk toward it, spilling diet soda down the front of my shirt. As I wipe soda off me, something in the corner moves. I freeze. There’s movement again. It almost looked like the air was swaying back and forth, like a haze. My hand fumbles around in the dark, feeling for the lamp’s switch. Finally, I find it on the cord tucked behind the bedside table. Light floods the room. The corner is empty. There’s nothing there.

Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do next. I wanted to see where Angela came for refuge so I could understand her better. I lie down on the bed. Maybe if I lie down like Angela did all those times she was here, I’ll feel closer to her. Maybe it’ll help me figure out what happened to her so I can stop the same thing from happening to me. I take a deep breath. The popcorn ceiling looks like it’s about to collapse from water damage. Someone in the room above must have left the bathtub running. They were probably drunk. Their body limp from the alcohol, unaware that water was seeping into the maroon carpeting and through the ceiling. I shake my head and close my eyes. My shoulders relax. The tension releases from my fingertips. My feet splay out, ever so slightly. I curl onto my side and let sleep take hold.

The sound of my own snoring wakes me up. I check my phone. 3:30 p.m. I slept for over three hours. There are two more texts from Brian asking where I am and when I’ll be home. My fingers dance across the screen, the lie flowing out of me with ease. Sorry! Was at a boutique shop with Frances and didn’t have service! Be home soon xo.

I wipe the drool off the side of my face, grab my keys off the bedside table, and head toward the door. I drop the key in the drop box next to Roxxxy’s desk, who just nods when I pass by.

Without all the motel stops, the drive home is quick, and within thirty minutes I’m pulling into the gravel driveway of the house.

“I’m home!” I yell as I open the door. “Sorry I’ve been gone all day. We lost track of time.”

“Back here,” Brian yells from the kitchen.

“We watched the sunrise from the other side of the lake, then decided to go antiquing,” I say as I walk toward the back of the house. When I get there, I realize Brian isn’t listening to me. He’s standing in his sweaty gym clothes with his back to me as he looks out toward the water. “What’s going on?” Reflections of flashing blue and red lights bounce off the windows.

“There’s some kind of a search down by the water,” Brian says.

Police boats are gathered along the shore. Men and women in uniform stand on the edge of the water as a group of divers in wet suits make their way toward one of the docked boats on the pier. Once they’re inside, the boat takes off toward the middle of the lake.

“They better not find anything close to the house. Property values, you know?” Brian says.