There was an air of reluctance in this disclosure. Naomi wondered if there were, in fact, many rooms available in the stolid old Muskegee Falls Inn. Many vacancies mid-week.
At the interstate exit some miles away there’d been a cluster of motor hotels, motels, fast-food restaurants, gas stations. These facilities seemed to have been laid upon bare, scoured earth as one might set similar facilities upon the most barren landscape, the moon for instance, or Mars, with no attempt at fixing them in place. They were generic, interchangeable. Yet she’d thought it might be better for her (emotionally) to drive back to the exit, to stay the night in such a place and to return to Muskegee Falls in the morning, than to stay in a hotel in Muskegee Falls.
Naomi asked the price of the room. It was not so high as she’d expected.
The desk clerk seemed to misunderstand her silence: “There’s a room on the second floor, without a river view, if you’d prefer a room at a lower price . . .”
Politely Naomi said that she would prefer a room with a window view. “But I would like to see the room first, please.”
“Of course! I can show you.”
In the elevator the big-haired woman asked Naomi if she’d ever visited Muskegee Falls before. Naomi told her no.
“But my mother visited here. About ten years ago.”
“Did she!” The woman seemed stymied by Naomi, uncertain how to interpret her tone. The affable exchange of banal pleasantries to which she was accustomed as a hotel employee was thwarted here and the result was awkward. “She had relatives here, did she?—your mother?”
“No.”
The room was high-ceilinged but not large: at once, Naomi felt a shiver of claustrophobia.
Quickly she went to the window—the room had but a single window—to draw back dark purple velvet drapes and let in sunshine.
She stared out, leaning her face close to the glass, at the river a quarter-mile away, over a scattering of rooftops and water towers.
“There’s a nice sunset, on the river. You can see it from this floor.”
Adding then, when Naomi seemed not to have heard:
“There’s new TVs in all the fourth-floor rooms. Flat screen.”
But Naomi paid no heed to the flat-screen TV. Nor the minibar. She was far more interested in the view from the window though she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
“Excuse me, is that the courthouse? Over there?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Where is Howard Avenue? Can you see it from here?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
The address she had for the Broome County Women’s Center was 1183 Howard Avenue.
“Can you see Shawnee Street from here?”
“‘Shawnee’? I don’t think so . . .”
“Front Street?”
But the woman had not heard of Front Street.
Naomi heard herself say, as if she were thinking aloud, “My mother once attended a trial here in Muskegee Falls, in the courthouse.”
“Did she!”—the woman smiled uncertainly.
“It was in 2000. The trial of Luther Dunphy. Do you remember?”
“‘Luther Dunphy.’ Oh yes. Everyone remembers that trial.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“It—was a sad case.”
“Why was it sad?”
“Because Luther Dunphy killed two people—just shot them down on the street. Two doctors.”
Two doctors. Naomi considered this.
“Did you know either of the men who were killed?”
“I didn’t. But my husband’s sister lived next-door to one of them. He was a nice guy, a Vietnam vet.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“‘Barron’—I think. Tom, or Tim.”
“And the other man’s name?”
“N-No . . . He wasn’t from Muskegee Falls, I think.”
“Did you know Luther Dunphy?”
“Oh no. Of course not. Nobody in my family knew him.”
Naomi turned her attention away from the big-haired woman who’d begun to frown, so interrogated. Since working as a documentary filmmaker Naomi had become far more aggressive with strangers than was natural for her; it was not a personality trait she admired in others, or in herself.
She noted: a scent of air freshener in the room. A cushioned chair with curved legs, covered in dark purple velvet. A small writing desk with a top that quaintly opened and shut, not very practical for one with a laptop. Queen-sized bed with brass headboard and eggshell-white coverlet upon which a half-dozen pillows had been artfully arranged.
Above a bureau a large mirror framed in eggshell-white in which Naomi Voorhees and the big-haired woman appeared. The younger with a baseball cap shielding half her face, the other a woman in her early or mid-forties, with bright-dyed russet hair.
Naomi asked: “Do you remember much about the trial?”
“Well—no. Not really. I never got to it, I had to work. Some of my friends went, and relatives. But you had a hard time getting in—getting a seat. The courtroom isn’t large. The trial drew a lot of attention. It was in the papers and on TV. And all these people picketing outside the courthouse . . .”
“Picketing? Why?”