Vacancy

CW: Murder

Neon light flickers in the evening fog, the sign’s red glow blanketing the lone car in the Faraway Motel parking lot. Vacancy, it reads. The ‘No’ hasn’t made itself known since 1993, back when the Harolds rented the place out for their annual reunion. Before the murders.

For three years, Toby Faraway has sat at the same desk, clicking the same pen, waiting for the phone to ring. It has, sure. Debt collectors. Scams. One confused grandma looking for one Tony Farley.

Sometimes, it feels like Toby is one with his desk chair, like his legs have splintered into four, bent at odd angles, and grown wheels that never spin.

Still, he rises, doing his nightly lap of the place. He promised his father he’d keep the doors open. That promise is set to expire tomorrow. He’s used up what little inheritance he had, and every cent of goodwill from the bank.

To be honest, he didn’t care much for his father or the half-hearted agreement they’d made. No, the only reason the Faraway Motel still has the lights on is because of Room 102.

Toby stands in front of the door like he does every night, hand hovering over the knob. It’s endlessly far away, like he’s trying to touch the moon in the sky. He hasn’t opened this door since the week the police cleared it. Couldn’t.

Tomorrow morning marks three years to the day that their bodies were discovered. That makes tonight, right now, the three year anniversary of the actual murders of Lisa and Reagan Harold.

Faraway Motel isn’t big. It’s got six rooms, one of which is Toby’s. There aren’t many people passing through Adelaide, Nebraska, so even before the murders, he was lucky to get one or two guests a week. The Harolds always came, though, every March. Beige walls felt sunshine orange when they rolled into town.

Toby cooked them breakfast, and one of them always kept him company in the kitchen. He took care of cleaning their rooms, and they helped him make up the beds. They were family, in that distant way you see an aunt and uncle only on Christmas.

Edwin and Rhonda, the heads of the Harold brood, always took the room closest to Toby’s. Beside them were Wes and Tracy. Their wedding was held in Adelaide just two springs before everything went wrong. Toby had the whole crew at Faraway for a few extra nights that year.

On the left side of the motel, nearest the kitchen and dining room, were Chris and Christina Harold. Chris was the eldest child, just a year older than Tracy, but he acted like they were decades apart. He was a hair-ruffler, a worrier. He always asked Toby if he was okay running the place on his own, so young. It made Toby feel small in a way that he hated to love. Toby was an only child, an orphan at the ripe age of eighteen. His only home was Faraway, but in those moments, he could imagine what it would have been like to have an older brother.

The middle room, 104, always belonged to Ron Harold and Will Colt. Toby was fairly sure they were a couple, but no one ever commented, and it wasn’t any of his business.

Finally, there was Lisa and Reagan, the last two siblings. Their room was closest to the entrance. Reagan was the youngest Harold, freshly sixteen and wringing out every ounce of her youthful rebellion. She snuck out on the first night of that trip in 1993. The police looked into it, traced her to a bar with a fake ID, but all she’d done was down a single beer and dance on her own. She had only started coming to the motel since ‘91. Toby couldn’t blame her for feeling claustrophobic in such a dull place.

Lisa was… stunning. Toby knew the second he first saw her back in ‘89 that she was going to be the most beautiful woman he’d ever lay his eyes on. Her hair fell into perfect, delicate brown curls around her face and down her spine. Her cheekbones were high and sloped, sharp like the wicked peak of Scotts Bluff out west. It was her eyes, though, that really did it for him, rich and brown like that first sip of coffee on a frigid winter morning.

She was a year older, a senior in high school when he was failing out of junior year. She was Valedictorian, according to Rhonda. Lisa never talked about her accomplishments, even though they took her all the way to Columbia University. He told himself it didn’t matter where she was the rest of the year, because every March she would be in his motel in room 102.

It did matter, a little, though. Toby was stuck inside the Faraway’s stained walls. They were as much a part of him as his hands, as his heart. She would graduate, go to law school or whatever, and he would still be in Adelaide. In the same chair. At the same desk. In the same motel.

He’d asked dozens of times over the years what brought them into town. As far as he could tell, they weren’t from Adelaide. Rhonda talked like she was from somewhere warm, like Georgia or Alabama, though that could just be the way she made him feel. Her voice was soft and firm like a good hug.

Edwin’s accent was stronger. Toby’s pretty sure he said he was from somewhere in Appalachia, not that that means much to a man who’s only barely crossed state lines into Wyoming.

All the kids talked a little differently from one another. Toby’s had dozens of theories over the years. The one that stuck, the simplest, is that the older kids all lived in different states long enough for time to erode that heavy twang. Chris was 27 when the girls died, a whole eleven years older than Reagan. He surely had a life out there, somewhere. They all must, even if they never talked about it.

Maybe they all met up in Adelaide because it was the most convenient midpoint. Hell, maybe the middle of nowhere was just the best place to play baseball. Lisa once mentioned they whole family plays, but an altered version with two strikes instead of three. It was as good a guess as any.

Toby never got his answers. Never would, now. The Harolds never came back.

He’s not sure how long he’s stood there, hand idling mid-air over the door knob. Too long. There won’t be another chance. He takes in a deep breath of musty air and turns the handle.

It’s dark. Of course it is. He flicks on the light switch and marvels as the overhead bulb manages to sputter on.

The dresser and nightstand are coated in dust, thick like February’s late snowfall. Every step he takes is stilted, littered with pauses and the creak of floorboards unused to holding a man’s weight.

Between the dust, mildew, and bitter pain boring into his cheat, the air in the room is suffocating.

He never replaced the bed. Even if guests had come to the motel, he wouldn’t have booked out room 102. The mattress was taken by the police, and the frame sits empty, vacant. Reagan’s body was found there, hands bound and chest bleeding.

There’s still a stain on the hardwood. He covered it up with an ugly brown rug, but Toby’s eyes fall to the spot anyway. It’s there, under moth-riddled wool, the last trace of Lisa. He knows what she looked like. He saw it. Tracy went to wake the girls up, opened the door they never locked when they stayed, and screamed. That scream is seared into Toby’s mind just as much as the sight that followed.

Lisa was face down with a single slice across her throat.

Toby spent nights staring at the popcorn ceiling wondering if it would have been better to find her with multiple wounds, something that alluded to a killing of passion. One slice is so distant. Clinical. It’s like whoever did it had no feeling behind it at all.

Now, Toby finds himself at the carpet’s edge, kicking it back before he can think about it. The stain has faded into the dark wood, but not enough to hide the truth. He drops to his knees and touches it, gently at first before laying his whole hand over the center. He presses down like it might help him find the pulse of a ghost long gone.

Toby presses his lips to the stain. A hello again, a goodbye. One last kiss for the woman that would never be his.

He pictures her as she was, a bundle of curls and confidence, fair skin made pink at the slow caress of his fingers. They had four Marches together. He didn’t know where she was really from, who she spent her time with, or if she wanted children, but Toby knows her favorite song, Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman.” He knows the soft, off-key lilt of her voice as she sang along. He remembers the rhythm of her heartbeat and the press of her lips on his.

His eyes blink open, and all that life is gone in a cold bloodstain. He rolls over so the back of his head sits where hers had. From here, he can trace the path of the curtains up to the ceiling. He follows across broken molding that probably split in that quake back in ‘94.

There’s a thin crack that trails from it down the wall to an empty nail. There was a painting there before. Something with boats on a sea that always felt a million miles away from reality. Toby’s always wanted to go to the ocean. Any ocean.

Where that distant dream once sat is a hole in the wall as big as his hand.

Even though he hasn’t been in here in years, he knows this room as though it were his own. He played in it as a child, hid in the closet when his dad got too rowdy, snuck out through the window as a teen with a blunt and a lighter.

Through it all, there’s never been a hole in the wall. It doesn’t look like damage from the earthquake. It’s a clean square, like someone sliced the drywall out.

Slowly, Toby rises, crosses the room, and lifts his hand. It settles in the air, like it had with the doorknob. He knew what he would find on the other side of the door to room 102. This is uncharted territory. It’s the brand of unknown that comes from primal evolution. Don’t touch fire. Don’t charge at wild animals. Don’t reach into a mysterious hole in the room where your lover was killed.

He does it anyway, battling that angry voice in the back of his brain. His fingers brush against smooth leather. He pulls out a book. A journal, more like.

He unwinds the leather string holding it closed, opens it, then slams it shut. He knows that handwriting. He’s still got a stack of letters signed “Love L” in the same elegant script.

Toby forces himself to open the book again. He leaves through the pages, but there are only four entries.

March 12, 1990.

We’re back at the Faraway Motel this year. I don’t want to be here. Not here as in this building or this state. I don’t want to be trapped with these people. It’s been two years since I “joined The Family.” I hate the way they phrase it. I didn’t join anything. I never chose to be a part of this.

I should have stayed home that night. If I hadn’t been in that park, I never would have seen it. I could have avoided this whole miserable life.

No matter how many deaths I see, I can’t forget the first. When I fall asleep at night, I see Edwin holding that man down as Tracy stabbed him.

I shouldn’t have screamed. They say I’m lucky they took me in instead of taking me out. I don’t feel lucky.

What would Toby think if he knew what our family was really here for? I hope he never finds out. I hope he does. I hope he calls the police and they arrest us all. Anything to make myself free again.

March 11, 1991.

We’re here again. This journal is right where I left it, so I guess Toby never found it. Another year for the Harold Family to roam free, I guess.

I’m in college now. I thought it would be freeing, but it’s just another cage. They’re watching. They’re always watching. I tried to contact the police, but they knew. They took Reagan. They kidnapped my baby sister from our parents’ home and brought her into this mess because I tried to escape.

I hate them. I hate this.

I should just go tell him. They know I sneak into his room. I’m sure that’s why Rhonda and Edwin took the one next door.

I should write him a note, tell him he’s housing a little mafia. But then they would kill him. Like they did his dad. I’ve bathed in enough blood to drown myself. I can’t add his.

March 15, 1992.

I love him. I don’t think I’ll ever get to tell him. I don’t think he’ll ever get to love me, Lisa Duncan.

I’m sorry neither of us will get that chance.

March 14, 1993.

I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to tell him.

His skin is ice and his stomach stone. Every kindness, every interaction shifts.

Toby cooked them breakfast, and one of them always kept him company in the kitchen. To make sure he didn’t poison the food. He took care of cleaning their rooms, and they helped him make up the beds. So he wouldn’t open the wrong drawer and find something he shouldn’t see.

What were they doing here, in Adelaide? What reason did a… a mafia family have to stay at Faraway? What did his father see? Nausea clenches at his throat. His father. They killed his father. It wasn’t just a car crash.

Toby drops the book and runs to the phone. He calls the cops. His head is on the desk, the one he’s been tied to his whole life, and thinks of the blank pages after March 14, 1993. There are other things he should focus on, but the only thing he can focus on are all those blank pages.

Someone walks inside, their heavy boots thudding against the chipped linoleum. Toby can’t force his head up, even though he knows he needs to tell the officer what he found.

“Hey, buddy.” A hand ruffles his hair, a familiar hand.

Toby’s head defies his bone-deep exhaustion as his gaze meets cold blue eyes.

“Chris?” He’s dreaming. He has to be.

Chris Harold leans against the desk, plastic solemnity on his face, an honest-to-God police uniform wrapped perfectly around his form. “All you had to do was close this shit-hole down and keep your mouth shut.”

“What are you doing here?”

He smirks. “You called me.”

“I called the police.”

Chris taps his badge. “I never went far, Toby. You were our one loose end here.”

He starts to round the desk, and Toby runs. Chris’s footsteps follow, unhurried.

“You’ve always been a good kid. We all hoped you’d fare better than your daddy.”

Toby slams open the door to room 102 and darts for the window. His foot catches on the rolled-up corner of the carpet and he hits the ground hard. He scrambles to his knees, but Chris is there, shoving him down. His face is flush against the bloodstain.

“Why’d you kill her? Your family did it, right?” Toby asks. He can almost taste the copper as his lips brush against the stain.

Chris pins him with his bodyweight, and Toby can’t shake him.

“She was going to be our man on the inside, you know? Get to know all the lawyers and future politicians. We’d have blackmail that would set us up for life. Then she fell for you. We warned her. Told her she shouldn’t.

She and Reagan were plotting that night. They were going to tell you everything.”

“Then why kill them and not me?”

“In our family, you only get two strikes.“ Chris pats his head one more time, then something sharp pierces

Toby’s back. “Say hello to them for me.”

Toby can’t reply as the blood drains out of him right onto Lisa’s bloodstain. He was right. One wound does hurt more when it’s from someone he cared about.

His eyes blink shut. He can hear her, now, singing her off-key rendition of “A Natural Woman.”

When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along, to claim it. I didn't know just what was wrong with me, 'til your kiss helped me name it.

Familiar lips press against his. A goodbye, a hello again.

Neon light flickers in the evening fog, the sign’s red glow blanketing the two cars in the Faraway Motel parking lot. Vacancy, it reads. A crow’s caw cuts through the air as the sign changes. NO VACANCY. At Faraway Motel, there never will be again.