Page 129

I hurry into Sam’s room, where her knapsack still leans in the corner. I can’t open it. My hands are shaking too much.
I take some deep breaths, aching for a Xanax despite knowing I need a clear head. Yet addiction wins out, pulling me into the kitchen long enough to pop a single Xanax into my mouth. I then take several gulps of grape soda, continuing to drink long after the pill has slipped down my throat.
Properly fortified, it’s back to Sam’s room. My hands are steadier now, and the knapsack opens with ease. I root through it, pulling out stolen clothes, black T-shirts, an array of worn bras and panties. A bottle of Wild Turkey emerges—a fresh one, still unopened. It clunks to the floor and rolls against my knees.
Inside the knapsack, I swat against items that have slid to the bottom. A brush, deodorant, an empty pill bottle. I check the label. Ambien. Not anitrophylin.
I find the iPhone Sam took from my secret drawer. The same phone I had stolen from the café. It’s turned off, the battery likely dead.
At the very bottom of the knapsack, my fingertips skim across a cool slick of glossy pages. A magazine.
I yank it out, flipping it over to look at the cover. It’s a copy ofTime, dog-eared and threatening to rip from its stapled binding. The photo on the front shows a ramshackle motel surrounded by cop cars and scrub pines dripping with Spanish moss. The headline, in red letters slammed over a slate-gray sky, reads:HOTELHORROR.
It’s the same issue ofTimeI devoured as a child, shuddering beneath my covers, dreading the nightmares to come. I riffle through the pages until I find the article that prompted so much childhood fear. It features another picture of the Nightlight Inn—an exterior shot of one of its rooms. In the open doorway, there’s a flash of white. One of the victims covered with a sheet.
The article begins next to it in a narrow column of text.
You think it only happens in the movies. That it couldn’t happen in real life. At least, not like that. And certainly not to you. But it happened. First at a sorority house in Indiana. Then at a motel in Florida.
The passage has the ring of something familiar. A kiss of déjà vu. Not from my childhood, although I had certainly read it back then. This memory is more recent.
Sam said it to me during her first night here. The huddled girl talk. The Wild Turkey passed between us. Her sincere soliloquy about the Nightlight Inn.
It was a load of bullshit, lifted word-for-word from this magazine.
I stuff her belongings back into the knapsack. Everything but the magazine, which I can use as ammunition against her, and the stolen iPhone, which can be used against me. The magazine is rolled undermy arm. I shove the phone down the front of my shirt, securing it beneath a bra strap.
Satisfied I’m leaving the room in almost the same condition as when I entered, I hurry back to the kitchen and grab the grape soda, carrying it with me to my laptop. I take another sip as I crack open the computer and click my way to YouTube. In the search field, I type “samantha boyd interview.” It yields several versions of Sam’s sole TV interview, all of them uploaded by the same freaks who run murder-porn websites. I click on the first one and the video begins.
On-screen is the same TV newswoman who had slipped the Chanel-scented interview offer under my door. Her expression is benign—a mask of impartiality. Only her eyes betray her. They’re black and ravenous. The eyes of a shark.
A young woman sits with her back facing the camera, barely in the frame. What can be seen of her is in silhouette. She’s a half-girl, blurred beyond recognition.
“Do you remember what happened to you that night, Samantha?” the newswoman asks.
“Sure, I remember.”
That voice. It doesn’t sound like the Sam I know. Interview Sam’s voice isn’t as clear, the diction less precise.
“Do you think about it often?”
“A lot,” Interview Sam replies. “I think about him all the time.”
“You’re referring to Calvin Whitmer, right? The Sack Man?”
There’s a tilt of darkness as Interview Sam nods and says, “I can still see him, you know? When I close my eyes? He had cut eyeholes into the sack. Plus a little slit right over his nose for air. I’ll never forget the way it flapped when he breathed. He had tied string around his neck to keep the sack in place.”
She stole that line too. Saying it to me as if for the first time.
I go back to the start of the video, slightly dizzy as Miss Chanel No. 5 trains her shark eyes on Interview Sam.
“Do you remember what happened to you that night, Samantha?”
I blink, my eyes suddenly tired.
“Sure, I remember.”
The voices on the computer become distant and vague.