Page 86 of The Midnight Knock

“It’s the desert, kid. Everything’s suspicious.”

“And do you believe her?”

“I do,” Ryan said. “I went to room seven a few minutes ago, the room where Stanley and Penelope were staying. No sign of Penn, but I did find a long black hair next to Stanley’s bed along with some blood on the nightstand. The hair looks like one of Fernanda’s.”

Ethan’s eyes were still closed, his thumb and finger trying to rub some relief into his head. “So that explains why Fernanda came to dinner a few minutes after Kyla, looking all flustered. She’d just finished trying to put the fear of God into Mister Holiday.”

“And it explains why Stanley’s got a busted lip. Fernanda gave him a good thwack with her gun when he tried to talk shit.”

“Why didn’t Fernanda take his gun while she had the chance?”

“He probably had it stashed somewhere and she didn’t have time to look for it. Remember, Penelope was sleeping in that same room.Stanley’s a thug, but he wouldn’t want to leave a Deagle laying around where a kid could just grab it.”

“And what did Stanley get up to after that? It was another ten minutes before he came to dinner.”

“I… asked him that myself.” Ryan chewed his lip. “Whatever it was, he’s afraid to talk about it. He hasn’t said a word since I asked him.”

“Isn’tthatsuspicious?”

“We’ll get back to it. Here’s the first important point: there isn’t a single man unaccounted for tonight. No one who could have been in room four arguing with Sarah Powers at seven thirty. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t you or Hunter, it wasn’t Thomas, it wasn’t Stanley. I don’t think the motel is haunted, or breaking the rules of Newtonian physics—”

Ethan shook his head, eyes still closed. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.Somethingis off about this place. About tonight.”

“I agree with you there. But I think we have an easier explanation, at least in regards to the conversation at seven thirty. There’s someone who wasn’t in their room and who hasn’t been accounted for.”

Ethan finally caught on to what Ryan was saying. He opened his eyes, blinked, stared. “You don’t think it was…”

Now that Ethan was looking at him, Ryan couldn’t look back. Here was a fact he’d been avoiding all night, a question he’d been desperate not to answer. There was no escaping it. The answer, really, had been staring at him since Mexico.

“Penelope,” Ryan said. “I think Penelope was in Sarah’s room at seven thirty.”

ETHAN

“Penelope has always been good with voices. Like, uncanny good,” Ryan said. “When she was a kid, her sister, Adeline, used to come up with people for her to imitate. You know—the lunch lady at school, Stanley after a bad day, Uncle Frank complaining about the weather. The girls called it The Game. It was their favorite thing. It was like if Penelope had ever met anyone, even just the one time, she could imitate their voice almost perfectly. It’s where we got our nickname for her. Polly. Like a parrot. ‘Polly want a cracker.’ Get it?”

Ethan still didn’t trust this guy Ryan. Who would? But Ethan found himself growing convinced about this if nothing else. He had the strangest memory of a time he’d heard Stanley’s voice rolling in out of the black desert, here and gone, like the stray broadcasts of a twitchy radio. The voice had sounded out of place. Wrong.

And then, the longer Ethan thought about the memory, the more he wondered when exactly he’dheardthis voice. Ethan seemed to remember he’d been on the motel’s back porch at the time, Kyla by his side. She’d heard it too. They’d both been confused.

But that had never happened tonight. Ethan hadn’t stood on the back porch with Kyla. He hadn’t seen the girl since Stanley knocked her unconscious in the office.

It was another of those strange double exposures.

“Penelope scared the shit out of me more than once in Mexico,” Ryan said. “We’d be on the bike, or at our hotel, or out grabbing food, and I’d suddenly hear Frank O’Shea talking behind me, or Stanley, or both of them having a whole conversation. Penelope asked me if I had any requests, like Adeline used to do. ‘For you to stop,’ I said.”

Ryan grinned at his own joke, in spite of everything. Ethan said nothing.

“Tough crowd.” Ryan rubbed a spot on his jacket.

Ethan’s head was hurting too much to smile. “What exactly are you saying? That Penelope went to Sarah’s room at seven thirty andhad some sort of fake conversation with her? She pretended to be Frank O’Shea just to scare us?”

“I think that was Penelope we heard at seven thirty, yes.”

“Does it follow, then, that Penelope must have been the one who killed Sarah Powers?”

“No. Or at least not necessarily. Because by seven thirty, I think Sarah was already—”

Another of those horrible booming moans struck the motel like a heavy tide. It was somehow even louder than the last one. Every time Ethan thought the pain in his head couldn’t grow any worse, something like this showed up to surprise him.