The sky was a wash of gray, and I leaned into the steering wheel to watch it darken, like spilled ink coming toward us. I twisted the key and felt the motor rumble underneath me. I’d almost forgotten. I didn’t believe in signs.
I was going to the Queen’s Inn to find Adam for myself. A few minutes later I crossed Main Street on my way to the southeast corner of Hollow Pines. As I drove, the houses got rattier. Weeds scaled the fences of overrun lawns. The windows of a gas station had been boarded up with plywood. Meanwhile, the clouds above me engaged in a valiant standoff with the threatening downpour. The sky held steadfast, with only a few spare drops slipping through the defenses and plummeting to earth like warning missives that splashed onto my windshield.
There’d be more. A lot more. The radio’s weather report beeped with severe thunderstorm warnings and a tornado watch in the area until midnight. I pulled into the seedy lot of the Queen’s Inn. The motel was a squatty two-story building with bars on the windows of the bottom-floor rooms and craggy asphalt with painted yellow lines fading in the parking lot. The place reeked of imagined cigarette smoke and crushed dreams.
Most of the spots in the lot were empty. I parked mine in a back row, nearest the road and the vintage sign with slide-in letters that read VACANCY. Or that was what it would have read if the y wasn’t missing from the end. My hands twisted over the steering wheel. What if he had left town? What if she told someone our secret? My stomach chewed over these possibilities. I still had time to turn back while the experiment was still in the loss column. But, instead, I unfastened my seat belt and climbed out of the car into the part of town that nice girls never went. I looked both ways and crossed the parking lot to the front entrance of the inn, where I pulled open a door with ten years’ worth of fingerprints smudged on the glass.
A sleepy-eyed man with a comb-over slid his elbows off the counter upon seeing me. “Can I help you?” His tone urged me to say no, but that wasn’t going to happen. A roll of thunder so faint it could have been mistaken for my stomach growling seeped through the door.
“I’m looking for a girl’s room. Her name’s Meg.” When he blinked, his hoodlike eyelids had only a short distance to travel. “She’s about this high.” I held up my hand an inch over my own head. “Dark hair. Pointy features. Scrappy. She’s with a boy named”—I hesitated—“John Wheeler.” I thought I saw a flash of recognition, a moment where his wiry eyebrows twitched.
“Sorry. We don’t give out occupants’ room numbers.” This was the type of place that called their customers occupants instead of guests, and I found this to be the most honest thing about the Queen’s Inn.
The clerk returned to picking bits of lint from the front of his shirt.
I cleared my throat. I’d been expecting this answer. After all, it was no surprise that occupants at the Queen’s Inn wouldn’t want to be found. I leaned on the counter. “Then could you call them to let them know someone’s here?” I used my girliest please help me voice, a skill, although not mastered, that was maybe the one plus I’d picked up from the Oilerettes. “I’m sure they’d like to know.”
He looked as if he didn’t want to commit to moving, but, finally, he picked up the receiver. “Meg, you said? Meg what?”
“I don’t really know,” I said honestly. “I—Well, truth is, I’m better friends with John and, this girl Meg and I, we’re on more of a first-name basis only. Know what I mean?”
He grunted but didn’t seem perturbed. In a place like this, there were probably plenty of people who had reasons for obscuring their name for some reason or other.
Behind the counter, he ran his finger down a list.
“She’s skinny,” I said. “Pretty. I guess, anyway.”
He didn’t glance up. “I know the one.” His voice was gruff. “Not a lot of young kids like you staying here.” He perched a pair of glasses on his nose and peered down through the lenses. With a dirty fingernail, he punched the numbers into the phone’s keypad and I watched, holding my breath.
First a nine. That was to be able to dial, I figured. Then a two, followed by a one, then another two: 2-1-2.
Room 212, I recited silently. I waited for the phone to ring in his ear. I worried the guy would go narcoleptic on the phone, but he hung up and stated, “They’re not answering.”
I shrugged. “No problem. Thanks for trying.”
At least I knew that they were still staying here. I left the dingy clerk’s office armed with Meg’s room number and stuffed my hands into my pockets to keep them out of the wind. Without stopping, I climbed up the two flights of steps that ran alongside the fire escape.
I found Room 212 four doors down. The second “2” hung cockeyed from its nail. Inside, the window blinds were drawn.