The Hungry Ones Read online

  In all, it had the makings of the saddest pool party ever.

  Jessie pulled her flannel coat tighter about herself, drawing her chin deeper into the collar. The chill brought a throbbing ache to her hip, and she shifted from foot to foot to relieve her discomfort. The metal always got cold before the Jessie surrounding it. Oh, the joys of sporting surgical steel at thirty-five.

  “Jess!”

  She turned back to the parking lot where Steph in her long, purple puffer coat stood waving next to the motel office. A bumper crop of weeds sprouted from the stretch of cracked asphalt that divided them, dead and shivering in the November breeze.

  Jessie turned into the wind and made her way toward her friend. Steph was older than Jessie by a good twenty years and sported a somber disposition that kept strangers at bay. But the woman’s friends knew better—they knew beneath the stony demeanor lay the heart of a prankster, of someone who could throw back tequila with the best of them and come away on top. Steph was a woman of few words, and the fact that Jessie counted her as a friend was a testament to the lack of bullshit Steph brought to the table. Jessie had had enough bullshit in her life recently, enough to last a lifetime. But it was time she changed that, by God.

  The plexiglass cow on the roof of the office leaned precariously to one side, tethered by a single cable and rocking with each gust. Wired about its neck was a For Sale sign—the thing that had originally drawn her to the property in the first place. Driving by a month ago, she’d seen the sign and jumped to the conclusion that it was the cow that was for sale, not the motel. She’d always had an eye for the unusual, and a rooftop Angus certainly fit the bill. When she learned that the Crossroads was up for grabs, the gears in her head started turning. Leading her here.

  As she approached, a flurry of snow whipped down from the office roof as if conjured by the cow, temporarily hiding Steph from view. When the woman emerged, Jessie had a vision of some pioneer woman stoically crossing the plains of nineteenth-century Illinois, wisps of greying hair fluttering about her stern face. There was definitely something Little House on the Prairie about Stephanie Hoyle.

  “I jiggered the lock,” her friend said with a smirk.

  Jessie pulled a ring of keys from her coat pocket and jangled them. “They gave me these.”

  Steph shrugged. “Good to stay in practice. Let’s check it out.”

  Jessie followed Steph into the office, grateful for a break from the wind. The floor was covered in dirt, rocks, cellophane wrappers and, oddly enough, dozens of sugar packets. Jessie gave one of the packets a kick.

  “Coffee station.” Steph pointed to a pile of powdered creamers. “Damn. I could sure use a cup right about now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Said you were going to bring me a coffee. Didn’t bring me a coffee.”

  “Steph…”

  “Would’ve been nice.”

  Jessie socked Steph in the arm, not hard but hard enough to make her point. “I’ll get you a triple, half-caf, mocha whatever you want when we’re done.”

  “Don’t wanna put you out.” The woman loved yanking her chain.

  Steph pointed to the back wall which had been stripped down to the studs. “Looks like the cleaners chucked the drywall.”

  “Why?”

  Steph cocked her head. “It was probably a hell of a mess. Blood. Bone. This is where he started, you know. Here in the office. June 5th. Must’ve been standing right about where you are now.”

  Jessie suppressed the urge to step back. She might as well get back in her Honda and bid farewell forever to the Crossroads Motel if she couldn’t stand her ground.

  The murders occurred over two years ago. June, as Steph had so helpfully pointed out. The same time she was laid up in the Maple City hospital bed pressing her morphine button like a fiend. Time to step up. Time to cut the crap.

  “I want to see the rooms,” Jessie said.

  As the two crossed the parking lot toward the two-story row of rooms, the wind saw fit to give them a respite, and the sun almost dared to show its face.

  “If you take this on, you’re gonna have to learn a lot real fast,” Steph said, a full stride ahead of Jessie. “Laundry, security, payroll. You ever managed employees?”

  “I ran a scene shop with twenty students under me.”

  Steph snorted. “Students. Wait’ll you gotta wrangle moms who can’t come to work because their brat is having his tonsils out. For the third time in two months.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “You have first aid training? You know CPR? When I was working at the Sandburg Inn over in Galesburg, I had five—count ‘em—five ODs. Was able to bring two back, but the other three? Adios. Kind of made retirement all that more attractive, you know what I mean?”

  “Are you trying to scare the shit out of me?” Jessie asked.

  Steph shook her head. “Just want you to know what you’d be getting yourself into.”

  The door to the first of the ground floor rooms was missing.

  “Might wanna get a new door,” said Steph.

  Jessie elbowed past her and stepped into the room. The place was empty save for a mangled ironing board. There were hooks on the walls where bad motel art had once lived, and a frayed cable snaked from the wall.

  Jessie did her little trick and the room populated with furniture in a snap. It was her gift, one she’d never been able to explain. Not even to Donovan, though she credited him with having a healthy imagination. Perhaps it was the hours spent designing sets for various summer stock and college productions. She could look at a space, reduce it to its bare essentials and then decorate it in her mind’s eye. She could shuffle pieces around, swap them out, change the color of the walls, settling on a finished design in the space of two heartbeats.

  If only I could stick a cable in my head and print out the finished product.

  “Or not,” Steph grumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “I said you could use my cousin Eric if you decide to pull the trigger. He’s a damn fine drywaller, and if you hired him, I could stop lending him money.”

  “How many cousins do you have?”

  “Here in Maple City or statewide?”

  “Here in town.”

  Steph thought about it a second, doing the tally in her head. “Twenty-two. Give or take.”

  “Sheesh. You Hoyles breed like rabbits.”

  “It’s part of our charm,” Steph said without cracking a grin.

  Jessie headed for the bathroom. Like the front door, the bathroom door was missing.

  Is there a black market for motel room doors?

  The toilet was cracked and the bowl filled with trash. There was a small shower stall, the cheap plastic type that afforded the bather little room to maneuver.

  A large chunk of the stall’s back wall was missing. Blasted away. The two-by-four frame visible through the opening was pitted with small holes.

  Steph leaned in behind her. “Jesus,” was all she said.

  Jessie put her hands on her friend’s shoulders.

  “Are you still on board if I do this?”

  “It’s a risky move. A settlement like yours doesn’t come along every day.”

  “Well?”

  "If it were me, I'd buy some land. Something that doesn’t need months and months of work. Something that just is. Set. Done.”

  “Are you on board?”

  Steph fixed her eyes on Jessie’s. “Aw, crap. You already did it, didn’t you? You bought the damn place.”

  Jessie tried to grin, but it felt more like a grimace. Steph saved the day by laughing for possibly the first time in her entire life.

  “Your man is in for a big surprise!” Steph hooted. “I’m in. JR’s gonna kill me, but I’m in. You can tell me the particulars over coffee. I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Steph slipped past Jessie and headed for the doorway. Jessie stood alone for a moment in the filthy motel bathroom. Steph was right. Donovan was in for a big surprise. Sh
e’d tell him tonight. She wasn’t sure how, but delaying it wasn’t an option.

  She was about to follow after Steph when she heard a faint squeak. Not a mouse squeak. Not an animal. But the drawn-out sound of skin on a smooth surface. Like a hand wiping down a fogged mirror.

  Jessie quick-stepped it out of the room and into the parking lot. The purchase of the Crossroads Motel was frightening enough. No need to add imaginary ghosts to the mix.

  Chapter Three

  The sun beat down hard, as it had for the past week. Thankful for the lack of rain but still wary of sunstroke, Jessie could almost see the finish line. September was a month away and brought the promise of Homecoming crowds. And after that, the holidays were close behind. The reservation line had already started to buzz.

  As she watched her workers replacing gutters, spray-washing the pool area, putting the final coat of sage paint on the office exterior, Jessie breathed a sigh of relief.

  The past six months had been a whirlwind. Winter took its own sweet time shoving off, so work was relegated to inside. The motel rooms were clean, if sparse. The office was presentable, although the little room she’d be calling home until she lined up more front desk staff was still unfinished.

  The same was true for the restaurant section. Steph had royally pissed her off by telling her to do the work in stages. Save the restaurant for another day.

  “Don’t worry,” Steph had said. “Eric and his boys will rough the whole space out. But trying to launch a motel and do food service at the same time? Don’t make me slap you.”

  So, the restaurant had become a catch-all. It was loaded with rolls of linoleum, paint cans, light fixtures, bags of cement and, of course, the plexiglass cow. During the second of two sleepless nights, Jessie had named the cow. Elmer. Like the glue. He was her watchcow, keeping an eye over all of the construction materials piled up in what had once been the Crossroad’s Steak and Suds.

  Of course, the motel needed a new name as well. The night she’d bought Donovan the most expensive bottle of scotch Maple City had to offer and revealed her purchase of the motel, she offered up the name as a kind of olive branch. Donovan had been equal parts confused and upset that she had gone behind his back. But the money was hers, and if buying the Crossroads Motel was her last act as a single woman, so be it. Since they had met working in the theater department of Maple City College—the school where he still worked—she suggested the name. Intermission Motor Lodge. Theatrical, vintage-sounding, fun. Three things that got Donovan’s motor running.

  It had taken a good week before he warmed to the idea. He was about to open his production of The Tempest, and things were not going well. When the show had a miraculous recovery, and Donovan received a handwritten letter from the president of the college praising his work, he had given his blessing to the project.

  “Let’s do this,” he’d said.

  Let’s do this turned out to mean Go ahead and do it, and I’ll concentrate on my theater program. Not that Jessie minded. Once she had Steph’s cousin Eric lined up, she found she had a knack for project management. Eric begat Dino the electrician, Dino begat Carlos the painter and so on. Even as she watched her settlement tick downward, she never once looked back. “Let’s do this,” she’d say to herself. And do it she did.

  Laundry room finished? Check. Satellite TV set up? Check. Security cameras installed? Check. Pool filled and ready to go? Well…one thing at a time. Although the pool was another item Steph had told her to sideline for her next season—what was the point of filling the pool only to empty it again when the weather turned cold—Jessie had insisted on having it ready for her soft open. How hard could it be, she’d asked herself.

  The filtration system was serviced, and all safety codes were followed. Those were bullet points she’d checked off early on. The holdup was the water itself. In her infinite wisdom, she'd forgotten to schedule the water delivery, and now the Pool King was giving her the runaround.

  Breathe, Jessie. Breathe. At least you’ve got the internet guy scheduled.

  Carlos, in his paint-spattered white shirt and shorts, interrupted her reverie.

  “Miss Voss! Delivery.”

  The man was pointing frantically toward the flatbed truck turning into the parking lot with a car-sized payload strapped to its back.

  It was the sign. The Intermission Motor Lodge’s neon sign she had designed herself, complete with comedy/tragedy masks signifying vacancy/no vacancy. Sheer brilliance.

  She waved down the driver before he could exit the truck.

  “If I give you fifty bucks, can you give me a lift?”

  Jessie guided the driver to the rear bay of the Van Ausdall Theater. She couldn’t wait to show off her masterpiece.

  “Wait here,” she said as she clambered out of the truck and lit out for the steps up to the backstage entrance. Stairs were no problem—she’d been the star of stairs in rehab. While the rest of her maimed companions were content to put in the minimum effort required, eager for the painkillers at the end of their workout, she was busy getting on with getting on.

  Still, she felt a twinge of pain as she hit the top step.

  She'd stayed away from the theater since the accident except to support Donovan on premiere nights, sitting through two-plus hours of mediocre acting and bad lighting so she could smile at faculty members and sip Chardonnay out of a plastic wine glass. This had been her world too, for a time. Before her life had tilted.

  As she stepped into the wings, she caught sight of Donovan center stage, locked in an embrace with a willowy girl. She recognized her from various play openings—Terebeth, the girl with the odd name. Her mind muscled in to protect her.

  It’s Dramafest. Happens every summer. It’s a scene. He’s acting in a scene.

  When the kiss continued past the point of any dramatic value, the truth hit home, and the bottom dropped out.

  She turned and left him there, in the arms of the ingénue. She returned to the truck and told the driver to head back to the motel.

  Jessie Voss took a deep breath.

  Well, that’s that.

  Despite the fact that Friday’s soft open was for friends only, Jessie was starting to get nervous. Although the big and scary grand opening wouldn’t happen for another week—just in time for the influx of college families returning for Homecoming—the fact that the soft open was only two days away kept her busy.

  Jessie was determined to have the office painted by Friday. She was okay with her friends seeing the Aerobed sprawled out in the back office, okay that the dumpster company had missed its pickup, but she’d be damned if she was going to greet her guests in an unpainted office.

  She could already imagine the awful, pitying smiles as her friends carefully avoided any mention of Donovan and his young student, who had apparently moved into his studio apartment.

  Enough. Back to work.

  She was busy loading up the roller with Persian red paint—her final choice after sorting through dozens of options in her head—when she heard the door open behind her. She turned to find a woman about her age sporting a Def Leppard t-shirt and a determined look.

  “I need a room with a queen-sized bed and a rollaway, and I’m too tired to haggle,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessie said, pushing the hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “We’re not open yet.”

  The woman gestured to the neon sign in the window. It was glowing orange. Open. One of Steph’s little tricks. She’d been pushing Jessie to open her doors early.

  “Tear the seal off the sucker,” Steph had said. “Make a few bucks.”

  Jessie glanced past the woman to where a Ryder truck sat parked next to an old Prius. She could make out a slender man standing at the car in the light drizzle, leaning through the window to talk to a young child. A thin boy in a baseball cap, half-wrapped in a blanket. Jessie could make out the logo on the kid’s cap, as could any good Midwesterner—the good ole Cubbies.

  A father. A son. And a mot
her who could obviously use a break.

  “Our restaurant is being renovated, there are no quarters in the change machine. The internet is acting up, and the rooms smell like paint. But if you need a room, you need a room.”

  “Thank you.” The woman’s relief was palpable as she fished her driver’s license from her purse and handed it over. Hannah Larson—New York State.

  Jessie set down the roller, nudged aside the can of paint she’d set on the desktop and entered the woman’s info into the computer. “Welcome to the Intermission Motor Lodge, Ms. Larson. How many nights will you be staying with us?”

  After letting the woman use the restroom in the hallway that attached the office to the once and future restaurant, Jessie handed over the keycards to room 201 and realized that, ready or not, the Intermission Motor Lodge was now open for business.

  She peered after the woman as she rejoined her family, reconnoitering before splitting up, moving truck and car into place outside their room. The boy in the blue cap pointed out the pool to his mom.

  I’m glad I got it filled. That kid looks like he could use a little fun.

  A loud thud startled her, and she cried out. Turning, she found that the paint can had fallen behind the desk. Its contents were splattered across the back wall as if shot from a cannon. Or a gun. A violent bloom of Persian red.

  Chapter Four

  “Spider!”

  Michael Larson raced for the bathroom, abandoning his half-unpacked suitcase.

  “Don’t hurt it, Mom!” he cried.

  His mother hated spiders. Even more than mice. But mice, she’d leave for Dad to handle. Spiders she’d dispatch herself.

  Michael burst into the bathroom and caught his mother with tissue in hand, ready to smash the little black intruder that sat poised on the edge of the sink. Ready to smash and flush.