Page 14 of The Midnight Knock

She knew the feeling. Kyla had known that leaving those boys on the road had been the smart thing to do. The safe thing to do. But it hadn’t felt like therightthing to do.

Once she and Fernanda had reached the motel, of course, they’d discovered they had much bigger problems than a little guilt.

Now, almost an hour later, Kyla stepped out of room 5 and made her way down the covered porch to the office. After a moment, Fernanda slipped out of their room after her and locked up. “You should not go anywhere alone,” she murmured. “Frank’s men might come at any moment.” Kyla was almost disappointed Fernanda had followed her. If anyone had a right to be paranoid, it was Fernanda, but that didn’t mean the woman wasn’t exhausting company.

If you were looking at the motel from the parking lot, the office was behind the first door of the building’s left-hand arm, on the end that faced the road. Stepping inside, Kyla came into a room that was longer than it was wide, a rectangle that held a glossy wooden desk along one wall and a crackling fireplace in the other. There were a few chairs, a cowskin rug, a side table with a pot of coffee and a few porcelain mugs. Knickknacks on the fire’s mantel. Windows on either side of the fireplace: desert, sky, the main road in the far distance.

A walnut door stood in the back wall of the office. Closed.

The two boys from the road turned to watch Kyla come inside. The taller one was warming his hands at the fire. The shorter one—the one who would have looked right at home working in FrankO’Shea’s outfit—stood at the desk, frowning at the motel’s proprietors. Kyla couldn’t blame him. The motel was run by a pair of twins, a man and a woman, and they might have been two of the strangest people Kyla had ever met.

The twins didn’t look like they’d moved an inch since the last time Kyla had been in this office. They still stood behind the main desk, clad in simple red shirts and black pants that didn’t flatter them in the slightest. They were well-tanned, tall, with thick dark hair and identical embarrassed frowns. The twins were in their early thirties, maybe younger, but with their bland haircuts—a sort of crew cut for him, an old maid’s bob for her—they looked decades older. Out-of-date.

The man’s name was Thomas. The woman was Tabitha.

Judging by the way they spoke, the twins had clearly spent way too long in each other’s company.

“I’m afraid we’re out of gas,” Thomas was saying to the shorter boy.

His sister Tabitha said, “We’ve been waiting on a delivery for days—”

“Almost a week,” Thomas said. “But—

The twins had given Kyla and Fernanda the same exact speech when the girls had arrived an hour ago:

But we’ve been promised fuel will come in the morning.

Tomorrow.

Finally.

At last.

Now, however, when Kyla stepped back into the office, the twins’ shared brain seemed to glitch out. Thomas and Tabitha both turned to stare at Kyla and Fernanda, clearly aghast, like this was some absurd interruption. Unfathomable. Absolutely unprecedented. Kyla had the strangest feeling she was an actress who’d missed her cue and stumbled onstage during a production that had been rehearsed a hundred times without her.

Kyla blinked. She knew she’d never get used to these people. “Sorry. I just came to see if we could get some towels.”

Thomas turned to Tabitha. Tabitha frowned at Thomas.

Thomas said, “Towels?”

“Yes,” Kyla said. “Towels. There’s none in our bathroom.”

“Oh,” Thomas said.

“I see,” Tabitha said.

“We must have been—”

“Distracted,” Tabitha said. “When we were cleaning your room.”

Thomas nodded. “Right. Distracted.”

“We’ll take some to your room.”

“It was our mistake.”

“Our pleasure to make it right,” Tabitha said.