The Resort (5 page)

“I'm calling security!” the man yelled.

Lowell didn't know what to do. “You're in our room!” he called out. He glanced over at Rachel, who looked back at him with confused, frightened eyes. He expected the door to open and to be confronted by an enraged Broderick Crawford look-alike, but instead his announcement was met with silence. Had the man gone back to sleep?

“This is our room! You're in our room!” Lowell repeated.

“It's my room!” the man yelled.

Silence again.

Lowell stepped back from the door, taking Rachel's hand. Without a word, they retreated to the parking lot where the boys were huddled next to their car with anxious faces. “That guy stoled your room,” Ryan said.

“What about our room?” Curtis asked. “Is someone in our room, too?”

“I don't know,” Lowell told them. “Come on.”

All five of them took the sidewalk directly back to the lobby. It was getting late, but there were couples on the lobby couches, cuddling under the low lighting, talking intimately. Lowell strode up to the counter, where a lone young woman spoke quietly on the phone. When she saw them approach, she promptly hung up and smiled. “Good evening.”

“There's someone in our room,” Lowell declared.

The young woman—
Eileen. Socorro, New Mexico. Two Years
—was suddenly concerned. “A prowler?”

“Sort of. We went out for dinner, and when we came back and started to open our door, a man was in there and yelled at us, threatened to call security. He seemed to think it was
his
room.”

“He got in there
somehow,
” Rachel said pointedly. “I made sure the door was locked when we left.”

The desk clerk seemed to be at a loss. Her smile was back but it seemed strained, false. “Let me look it up.” She positioned her fingers on the keyboard. “What's the room number?”

“Five twenty-two,” Lowell told her.

“Room 522?” she said, looking at her computer. “That's Mr. Blodgett's room.”

“It's
our
room,” Rachel said, exasperated.

Lowell showed her the keys. “And so is 523.”

“Let me check. What's your name, please?”

“Thurman. Lowell Thurman.” He glanced at Rachel and saw in her expression a mirror of the annoyance he felt.

The desk clerk typed his name into her computer. “This will just take a moment.” She smiled up at him then looked back down at the monitor. Her smile disappeared instantly and Lowell thought that the blanched expression on her face owed more to fear than embarrassment, though that didn't seem to make much sense. “You're right,” she said. “You were assigned rooms 522 and 523.”

“I know we're right,” Rachel snapped. “What did you think? We were lying?”

“No, ma'am. Of course not. I didn't mean to imply—”

“We just want our rooms back,” Lowell said.

“And we want to know how something like this could happen in the first place,” Rachel said pointedly.

“I'm very sorry. I don't know
how
it could have happened. What I can do is upgrade you to a deluxe suite. Two bedrooms, sitting room, luxury bath with sauna shower. It's much nicer than the adjoining rooms you have now. And you'll be closer to the pool.”

“Am I going to have to pay extra for this?” Lowell asked.

“Oh no, sir.”

“All of our things are still in there,” Rachel said. “Our luggage, our personal items . . . everything.”

“Like I said, we're very sorry for the inconvenience. Let me call Mr. Blodgett, and we'll get this straightened out.” She picked up the phone, punched in the room number and the pound sign. “Hello . . .” she started to say.

They could hear Mr. Blodgett's tirade even from where they stood.

The desk clerk attempted to placate the man, but it was clear that he was in no mood to be pacified. “I understand,” the young woman assured him. “Yes, that is why I'm calling . . . yes, I understand . . . yes, it is our fault . . . I know exactly how you feel . . . yes . . . yes.”

Listening to Eileen's side of the conversation, Lowell felt sorry for the young woman. True, it was The Reata's fault and such a thing should never have occurred, but at the same time everyone made mistakes. This wasn't the person who had checked them in; she might not have checked in Mr. Blodgett. Yet she was taking the heat for it.

Rachel, he saw, shared no such sympathy for the girl.

After a too-long conversation filled with almost constant apologies and a promise to halve Blodgett's room rate, Eileen finally got the man to agree to open his doors and let them take out their belongings. She gave them card keys to their new suite and said that a porter would meet them in front of their old rooms to help them move. “Again,” she said, “we're really sorry for the inconvenience.”

“You should be,” Rachel told her.

The porter was waiting for them outside of the room when they returned, a clean-cut young man who looked like he should be a cast member at Disneyland (
Lance. Las Vegas, Nevada. Four Years
). He'd brought along a luggage cart and parked it next to the door, and when they walked up, he nodded politely, then knocked on the door. “Mr. Blodgett?”

“Give me a minute!” Blodgett yelled roughly. “Jesus Christ!”

The porter smiled at Lowell apologetically.

A moment later, they heard a muffled “All right! Hurry up and do it, then!”

There'd been no click, no sound of a disengaging latch, but Lowell tried to open the door anyway. As he suspected, it was still locked, and the porter had to let them in with a passkey. They stepped inside. The bed was unmade, as though Blodgett had been sleeping in it, and a single suitcase was lying open on the dresser. Otherwise, everything was as they'd left it. The man himself was nowhere to be seen in the bedroom/sitting room area or the large open bathroom, but the door to the small alcove housing the toilet was closed. “Make it quick!” Blodgett said from inside.

Lowell opened the door separating 522 from 523 and told the kids to get their things together. He and Rachel started gathering their belongings. He glanced at the closed door to the toilet. It seemed increasingly suspicious to him that the man had taken the room as his own without asking any questions of the resort staff. Hadn't he noticed the wet bathing suits hanging from the shower rod? The clothes in the closet? The bags of food on the table? The luggage? Blodgett was either singularly unobservant, a complete moron or some type of psycho. Lowell was beginning to suspect the latter. There seemed something very odd about the way the man was hiding in the toilet closet. Even if he slept in the nude, it would have taken him only a moment to pull on a shirt and a pair of pants. On the other hand, maybe he was embarrassed and didn't want to face them.

Although he didn't seem like the type to be easily embarrassed.

“Are you through yet?” Blodgett demanded.

No, there was definitely something weird going on here.

In the adjoining room, the boys had gathered all of their bags and suitcases together and were carrying them out into the corridor, piling them on the luggage cart. This had become something of an adventure for them, and he could tell that though they were moaning and complaining under their breath, they were relishing the experience and would be reliving this moment endlessly in their conversations for the next week and retelling it to their friends for the rest of the summer.

Rachel had finished shoving the last stray paperback into a tote bag, and the porter helped them carry their suitcases and ice chest and plastic sacks out of the rooms and onto the cart. The second they brought out the final load, the door slammed shut behind them. There was a loud angry click as the security lock was engaged. He had not seen Blodgett, although the man must have been right behind them as they headed out the door, and when he met Rachel's eyes, he saw that she had not caught a glimpse of him either.

Something about that made him uneasy.

They had no idea where they were going, but the porter—
Lance
—obviously knew the way to their new suite, and they followed him up a winding cement pathway, past occasional couples and families out for leisurely evening strolls, past other hotel workers hurrying through the darkness to provide for guests' needs.

This building was smaller than the one housing their previous rooms and was in the shape of a V. It contained only four suites—two up, two down—and the porter led them to the upper right, where Lowell slid his card into the reader and then opened the door. If their previous room was the largest and most luxurious he had ever seen, their new lodgings made that look like ship's quarters. And the view was breathtaking. They were slightly higher than they had been previously, and in addition to the panorama of the desert, they could see much of The Reata laid out before them, its buildings and tennis courts and lighted pathways looking like an oasis of civilization against the vast darkness of the wild.

With the porter's help, they unloaded their belongings from the luggage cart. Lowell was unsure whether he was expected to tip the man or not—he
had
helped them move, but then again there would have been no
reason
to move had The Reata not screwed up and double booked their room—but when he made a move to reach for his wallet, Rachel stopped his hand and gave a quick angry shake of her head. So Lowell merely thanked the man and closed and locked the door behind him.

“There's a TV in the bathroom!” Ryan called.

“You can take a dump and watch cartoons!” Curtis said, giggling.

“Curtis . . .” Rachel warned.

It
was
a great suite, the type ordinarily seen only in the glossy magazines in their mundane little hotel rooms. Each of the bedrooms had walk-in closets and large Santa Fe- style dressers with overstuffed earth-toned couches big enough to sleep on, a fact that the boys picked up on instantly. “Can Ryan sleep on the couch?” Owen asked. “I don't want him in my bed.” There were two queen-size beds in the room.

“Me either,” Curtis echoed.

“It's up to Ryan,” Rachel told them.

“I want to sleep on the couch!” Ryan announced.

The phone rang, and Rachel answered. “Hello? Yes, we did . . . yes . . . okay . . . all of it? That's great. . . . Yes . . . yes . . . okay. Thank you.” She hung up and grinned. “Everything in the minibar,” she said. “Comped.”

They turned the key to open the small refrigerator. In addition to cans of beer and bottles of liquor, there were soft drinks, orange juice and a selection of candy bars.

“The Milky Way's mine,” Curtis called.

“After we unpack,” Lowell said. “Put everything away and then you can have candy bars.”

The boys dragged their bags and suitcases into their room and started putting their clothes in the dresser while he and Rachel did the same in their room. Suddenly Rachel paused, stopped. A funny look came over her face, and she started digging through each piece of luggage and then searching the tote bags and the plastic sack with the wet bathing suits.

“What is it?” Lowell asked. “Is something missing?” He thought of Blodgett's angry complaints and gruff shouting.

She looked at him, her face flushed, anxious. “Yes.”

“What?”

She glanced out the open door to make sure the kids weren't outside and couldn't hear. “Panties,” she said quietly. “A pair of my panties is gone.”

Rachel heard the thunder and got up from bed to look out the window, cracking open the louvered shutters just enough to be able to see outside. Lowell was dead asleep, sprawled over half the bed, and the kids were in the next room, zonked out from the heat and the swimming and the generally chaotic events of the day. She knew this was the monsoon season in southern Arizona from reading the
Tucson Living
and
Southwest Lifestyle
magazines provided by the resort, and indeed the weather forecast on the local news that they'd watched had predicted a thunderstorm sometime after ten. Tomorrow, however, was supposed to be clear and over a hundred degrees.

Humidity really did make a difference, she thought. People were always joking about the cliché “it's not the heat, it's the humidity,” as though the phrase were false or inane, but this afternoon, lying out by the pool in hundred-degree heat, it honestly had felt cooler and more pleasant than a typical eighty-degree day in Southern California.

Not that she would ever want to live here.

It was a nice place to visit, but . . .

The truth was that it wasn't even that nice of a place to visit. She couldn't say why exactly, couldn't put her finger on anything, but ever since they'd arrived at the resort, even before the mix-up with the room, a part of her had been thinking that she'd rather be back home, back at work.

That was silly, though. This place had everything. Gym, spa, pool, hiking trails, tennis courts, luxurious air-conditioned rooms with satellite television, a wonderful restaurant. So why would she rather be at work? She didn't even like her job all that much. It was just a stopgap position, something to do until . . . until . . .

Until what?

She realized suddenly that she had a job rather than a career, and she wondered when that had happened. Lowell had always had that attitude, had always considered a job to be merely something one did in order to make enough money to support a family and a lifestyle, but she had started out more ambitiously, more optimistically. She'd always loved art and drawing, which was why she'd earned her degree in graphic design in college. And the first few years after graduation, she'd worked at a local design firm, rising upward through the ranks. When the company went under, she'd been forced to take a day job at a bank, although she continued to apply at various graphics houses, even doing a couple of freelance jobs that led to additional contract work. Somewhere along the line, though, she'd gotten derailed, had stopped freelancing, stopped applying, made friends with her coworkers and settled in at the bank. When, though? When the twins came along, perhaps. With kids and a full-time job, she simply hadn't had the time or energy to pursue her own career goals.