The Resort (10 page)

She'd seen the gardener, but what did Blodgett look like? She hadn't gotten a clear view of him, but she'd remember his voice for as long as she lived, that gruff angry growl unexpectedly yelling at them from inside their own room as they tried to get in. Barking orders as they attempted to remove their belongings. There seemed something odd and rather ominous about the fact that he had gone to such lengths to keep himself hidden from them.

Maybe he and the gardener were the same person.

That was hardly likely, but for some inexplicable reason, the two were connected in her mind.

That seemed ominous as well.

In the pool, the kids continued playing. Next to her, Lowell read a novel, oblivious.

She glanced up at the sky, an inverted sea of pastel blue in which were suspended great billowing clouds of white, but quickly looked away, bringing her gaze back down to earth. She did not want to recognize shapes in the contours of the clouds, afraid of encountering a fierce face filled with rage and hate glaring back at her from above. Instinctively, involuntarily, her head turned to the right.

The gardener was gone.

She did not know how that was possible. Unless he hopped the fence, the only way he could have exited the pool area was to pass by the bar and then her chair, or walk around the front of the Jacuzzi and out the side gate, which she would have seen in her peripheral vision. It was as if he had simply disappeared, and if she hadn't seen him so clearly, if his presence had not been so concrete, she might have thought she'd imagined the whole thing.

But she hadn't.

There was a pile of pulled weeds on the small square of grass to prove it.

Rachel adjusted the back of her chair to a full sitting position and scanned the areas both inside and outside the fence but saw no sign of the gardener—which made her feel both relieved and nervous.

“Anything wrong?” Lowell asked, looking up from his book.

“No,” she answered, putting her chair back down and closing her eyes. “Nothing.”

This time she did fall asleep, and she awoke some time later with a full bladder. Not too much time could have passed because the sun was still at approximately the same location in the sky, but it had been more than a few minutes because the kids were no longer in the pool, and next to her Lowell had a drink in hand. She scanned the now very crowded pool area and saw Curtis, Owen and Ryan crammed together with David on a single lounge chair several yards away, Cokes in hand, a bag of pretzels between them. Nutritious lunch, she thought wryly. What a good mom she was.

She turned toward Lowell. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she told him. “Watch the boys.”

He grinned. “I have been, Ms. Van Winkle.”

“Very funny.” She got up and started toward the restrooms, pulling out her bikini where it had ridden up and surreptitiously looking around for any sign of the gardener. Thankfully, he did not seem to be around. She passed by the boys, waving as she walked by, but the twins were too cool for the room and were in that phase where they liked to pretend they didn't even have parents, so they ignored her. Ryan smiled and waved back.

The door was locked when she reached the women's restroom, and there was a CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign on it. She could go back to their suite, but it was getting to be an emergency and at this point the lobby was much closer, so she let herself out through the iron gate, hurrying up the steps.

She found a bathroom, making it just in time, and quickly rushed into the nearest stall, pulled down her bikini bottom and sat on the toilet.

She heard voices through the wall as she peed, a man's deep badgering baritone delivering an indecipherable lecture to an obviously distraught young woman who kept interjecting in a frightened unintelligible voice.

What was on the other side of this wall? She tried to visualize the layout of the building but could not determine if it was one of the conference rooms, the gift shop or an office behind the front desk.

“I'm sorry!” the woman screamed, and her voice was suddenly much louder and clearer. “I won't do it again!”

There was a loud thump against the wall, and Rachel jumped, nearly falling off the toilet. She stood hastily and pulled up her bathing suit.

“Not me!” the woman screamed.

Rachel stood in the stall, unmoving, not sure what to do. She felt outrage, yes, and she knew she should immediately report this abuse to, if not the management, then whatever law enforcement authorities had jurisdiction over this area of the desert. But she was also afraid, and the fear kept her from moving, kept her even from flushing the toilet, an action she was sure would alert the people on the other side of the wall to her presence.

So what?
she asked herself. But she already knew what. She was afraid if that angry man knew she was here he might come into the bathroom and . . . what? Hurt her? Beat her?

Yes. That was exactly what she thought. And that was exactly what she believed was happening in the other room. That thump had been the man throwing the woman against a wall. She was being physically abused, assaulted, and it was quite possible that Rachel was the only one aware that it was happening.

There was silence after that, and somehow the silence seemed more horrible than the voices and the noises had. She imagined a young woman slumping to the floor, her head bashed in, leaving a smeared trail of blood on the wall behind her while the man wiped his hands and hurriedly left the room.

What should she do? What
could
she do? The logical move would be to go up to the front desk and report what she'd heard, to demand that resort security find the attacker and turn him over to the police or sheriff. But for all she knew, the person behind the front desk might
be
the attacker, and then he'd grab her and pull her into his secret little room and throw her against the wall. Or worse.

She knew that the likelihood of that happening was practically nil, but she was still scared, and even a ridiculous thought like that did not seem nearly as ridiculous as it should.

That last thump had been
loud.

She flushed the toilet, then ran out of the bathroom as quickly as she could, not bothering to wash her hands. She sprinted past conference room doors and through the wide corridor, then out through a side exit, avoiding the front lobby.

Outside, the gardener was clipping dead buds from a drought-resistant flowering plant. He looked up at her as she passed by.

And smiled knowingly.

 

“That's what I heard,” Rachel insisted. She eyed Lowell suspiciously. He was questioning her story as she knew he would—as he
should
—but there was no conviction behind it. His inquiry was perfunctory; as though he knew what she said was true and had some sort of inside knowledge he was loath to reveal, which, if anything, made her more perplexed than would have simple disbelief.

He nodded, acknowledging that he'd heard what she said but giving no indication that he had an opinion one way or the other.

“I just want you to come in there with me so we can figure out what room is behind that wall. I'm not going to make a scene, I just . . . want to know.” She lowered her voice so they wouldn't be overheard by the other guests at the pool. “If someone really
was
hurt, it would be wrong of me to just ignore it.”

He sighed. “And there's the psycho gardener . . .”

“You don't believe me? I'll show him to you!”

But he
did
believe her. She could see that. She just didn't know why. There was something going on here to which she was not privy, and it left her feeling off-balance and uneasy. This wasn't like him. This wasn't like
them.
But she said nothing, did not challenge him, did not acknowledge that his behavior was at all unusual.

Which wasn't like
her.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's go. Curtis!” she called. “Owen! You guys stay out of the pool until we get back. And watch Ryan!”

Curtis ignored him, but Owen gave a dismissive wave of acknowledgement and Ryan shouted, “Where you going?”

“To the lobby!” he responded, and added loudly, “Did you hear me, Curtis Thurman?”

“I heard!” Curtis said quickly, attempting to ward off future embarrassment.

Lowell looked at her, smiling. “Lead on.”

They walked up the stairs and into the lobby. Rachel felt out of place in her bathing suit amid such formal surroundings. Before, she'd had such a desperate need to go to the bathroom that she hadn't noticed, but this time the discrepancy between their attire and the environs seemed glaringly obvious, and she was embarrassed to be parading past uniformed members of The Reata's staff in her bikini while down the wide corridor at the far end of the lobby, business-suited men with drinks in hand and white name tags affixed to their lapels wandered in and out of a conference room.

She led Lowell to the restroom doors, explained where the stall was located, and then the two of them backtracked through the building until they found the room that would seem to be behind the appropriate wall. “It must be here,” Rachel said, stopping, and there were goose bumps on her arms. Lowell had suddenly gone quiet.

The plaque on the door read: MANAGER.

“What do we do now?” Rachel whispered.

Lowell was about to answer when the door to the office opened, and it was only the grounding of his hand instantly grabbing her wrist that kept her from screaming aloud. Instead, she merely let out a quick hard gasp as the manager stepped out. A rotund man in a beige suit, with a thick beard and a jolly face, he smiled at them. “Hello,” he said. “May I be of assistance?”

“No,” Lowell said, and she was surprised by the calmness of his voice. “We're just wandering around.”

The manager chuckled. “Enjoy yourselves.” He strode away from them, turning the corner and heading toward the front desk.

“I didn't see anything in there. Did you?” Lowell looked at her.

She'd been so rattled and startled that she hadn't had the presence of mind to peek inside the office before the door swung shut. “I didn't look,” she admitted.

“So what do you want to do?” They were both whispering, as if afraid of being overheard, and she realized that he had caught her fear. He made a move toward the door, and she grabbed his arm, holding him back, not afraid that he would find something incriminating in there—
a blood-stained wall

—but that he would be caught trespassing.

“We'll just take a quick peek inside.”

“No,” she said. “Let's go.”

“But what if you're right? What if someone was injured? Or worse?”

She pulled on his arm, looking toward the corner where the manager had disappeared. “Let's get out of here.”

He peered into her eyes, and for a second she thought she was going to get one of his moralistic lectures about Doing the Right Thing. But then he allowed himself to be led away, and the two of them walked in silence around the corner, past the front desk and through the lobby, absurdly conspicuous in their bathing suits. At the concierge's station near the door, the manager stood talking to the elderly man behind the desk. He smiled at them as they passed by. “Enjoy your stay,” he told them.

As they stepped outside into the blinding sunlight, Rachel tried to imagine what the manager would sound like if he were yelling angrily, attempting to determine whether he could be the one she heard from inside the bathroom.

And tried to forget the panicked, terrified cries of the girl.

And the thump of her body against the wall.

Gloria Pedwin stared out the dusty windshield of the car at the uninhabited wasteland before them. This was, without a doubt, the worst and most depressing vacation they'd ever taken.

And she blamed Ralph.

For the past three years, they'd spent their summer break in Southern California at a resort in Laguna Beach that overlooked the ocean and gave them breathtaking views of the sunsets. But this year Ralph had read an article in an inflight magazine about the “Indian Loop,” a historic and supposedly spectacular trip that triangulated between the scenic wonders of Arizona's Navajo nation and the Grand Canyon. He'd been so excited and enthusiastic that, against her better judgment, she'd allowed him to prevail in his choice of vacation destination.

They'd flown into Phoenix and rented a car, a comfortable Cadillac, and for a few brief moments she thought everything was going to turn out well. But the vacation went straight downhill from there. Canyon de Chelly had been windy and outrageously hot, and the adjoining town, Chinle, was a poverty-stricken nightmare where the only restaurant was an overcrowded Taco Bell and theirs were the sole white faces in sight. Monument Valley was more of the same, and while the accommodations at the Grand Canyon were much nicer, the place was overrun with tourists: obnoxious Germans and Japanese who insisted on shoving their way through crowds of mild-mannered Americans to photograph the same stationary geologic formations that their countrymen had been capturing on film for decades.

Thank God she'd had the good sense to insist that Ralph book a week at The Reata. It was quite far out of their way, down in the southern portion of the state, but she'd read about it in
Sunset
magazine's “Great Hotels of the Southwest” issue and had instantly been captivated by the contrast between the barren desert landscape and the opulent accommodations plunked right down in the middle of it. The Reata was a luxury resort catering to wintertime visitors from the East, and in the summer months rates were discounted tremendously, as no civilized people would dare brave the heat. Of course, she used both the lowered price and the exoticism of the desert's outrageous summer temperatures to entice Ralph into agreeing to a five-night stay—although she'd been more than prepared to battle it out and insist that since he'd gotten to choose the first half of their trip, she should choose the second.