I was halfway through a glass of bottom-shelf bourbon when she walked into my office, heels clicking like a metronome, perfume thick as the July heat.
“I need your help, Mr. Ash,” she said. Her voice was smooth as a vinyl record and just as dusty. “Someone’s watching me. Listening through the vents. I’m in Unit 13 at the Sand Dollar Motel.”
I didn’t tell her I knew there was no Unit 13 at the Sand Dollar Motel. The manager told me that himself last month when I holed up there after the Penfield job. They skipped that number on the door plates. Superstition, I guess
But I took the case. For fifty dollars and the curve of her smile, I’d take most things. She was gone before I could ask her name.
–
The Sand Dollar squatted at the edge of town, a washed-up concrete beast in the tropical summer haze. The cicadas were in full throat by the time I knocked on the manager’s door.
He blinked at me like I was a ghost.
“Back again?” he muttered. “Didn’t expect you to return after...well.”
“After what?”
He just shook his head. I explained what I wanted, told him I’d cut him in for a five spot. He handed me the master key ring. “No Unit 13, remember?”
He was wrong.
There it was, wedged between Units 12 and 14 like it had always been there. Peeling numbers. A door warped by humidity and time.
I knocked. Nothing. I let myself in.
The room smelled like old lavender and fried electricity. A record spun on a turntable in the corner, but there was no music. Just static, and a whisper beneath it I couldn’t quite catch.
The bed was made. A single stick of lipstick sat upright on the nightstand. Same color she’d worn in my office. Crimson with a hint of rust.
I reached for the bathroom light.
Click.
Nothing. I flicked my lighter, and the orange glow showed me a fogged-up mirror but a bone-dry shower.I wiped the glass with my sleeve and froze.
In the reflection, she stood behind me. The fifty-dollar lady, all dolled up in red. Not breathing. Not blinking. Her skin was the color of smoke and salt.
When I turned, the bedroom was empty.
Except for the record player, still spinning.
Back at my office, I tore through the old files, the yellowing papers cops leave behind when they stop caring. The ones I can sometimes get my hands on through called-in favors or when someone looks the other way.
And as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s clue.
About an hour down in the stack, there she was. Reduced to an old mimeograph of an even older case.
Claire Raymond. Age twenty-seven. Died in Unit 13 of the Sand Dollar Motel on Friday the 13th, 1947.
Thirteen stab wounds. Lover never found. The case went cold in the heat of summer.
They bricked the unit over. Took it off the books.
But now it was back.
And so was she.
–
The next Friday the 13th, I returned to the Sand Dollar. I asked for Unit 13, and the manager told me there was no Unit 13. He was still wrong, or wrong again, and that’s where I stayed that night – in Unit 13. Just me, a bottle, and a pack of smokes.
Just before midnight, the lights died. The air thickened.
The door creaked open on its own.
And Claire stepped through the darkness like she’d never left it.
“I just wanted to be found,” she said, eyes like floodlights in a storm.
I lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. “You found me instead.”
She smiled. “Maybe that’s enough.”
They never did find her killer.
But I haven’t given up.
And now, every Friday the 13th, I pour a second glass of bourbon.
And wait.
Other Stories You Might Like
Looking for more thrills and chills to kick off your Friday the 13th weekend? Then check out the Fiction Giveaway Extravaganza, featuring more than 60 exciting books that you can pick up for free now through July 8 (including my own Tumbleweeds of Terror).
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