At least two men—she presumed they were men, not women were stalking her.
Overhead, in her own stairwell, the unoiled hinges of that door produced a barely audible, protracted rasp and squeal. The other man evidently had tired of waiting for her to make a covering noise.
She could not go into the hallway. They’d trap her between them.
Though she could scream in the hope of calling forth other guests and frightening these men away, she hesitated because she was afraid the motel might be as deserted as it seemed. Her scream might elicit no help, while letting the stalkers know that she was aware of them and that they no longer had to be cautious.
Someone was stealthily descending the stairs above her.
Tessa turned away from the corridor, stepped to the east door, and ran out into the foggy night, along the side of the building, into the parking lot beyond which lay Cypress Lane. Gasping, she sprinted past the front of Cove Lodge to the motel office, which was adjacent to the now closed coffee shop.
The office was open, the doorstep was bathed in a mist-diffused glow of pink and yellow neon, and the man behind the counter was the same one who had registered her hours ago. He was tall and slightly plump, in his fifties, clean-shaven and neatly barbered if a little rumpled looking in brown corduroy slacks and a green and red flannel shirt. He put down a magazine, lowered the volume of the country music on the radio, got up from his spring-backed desk chair, and stood at the counter, frowning at her while she told him, a bit too breathlessly, what had happened.
“Well, this isn’t the big city, ma’am,” he said when she had finished. “It’s a peaceful place, Moonlight Cove. You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing here.”
“But it happened,” she insisted, nervously glancing out at the neon-painted mist that drifted through the darkness beyond the office door and window.
“Oh, I’m sure you saw and heard someone, but you put the wrong spin on it. We do have a couple other guests. That’s who you saw and heard, and they were probably just getting a Coke or some ice, like you.”
He had a warm, grandfatherly demeanor when he smiled. “This place can seem a little spooky when there aren’t many guests.”
“Listen, mister …”
“Quinn. Gordon Quinn.”
“Listen, Mr. Quinn, it wasn’t that way at all.” She felt like a skittish and foolish female, though she knew she was no such thing.
“I didn’t mistake innocent guests for muggers and rapists. I’m not an hysterical woman. These guys were up to no damn good.”
“Well … all right. I think you’re wrong, but let’s have a look.” Quinn came through the gate in the counter, to her side of the office.
“Are you just going like that?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Unarmed?”
He smiled again. As before, she felt foolish.
“Ma’am,” he said, “in twenty-five years of motel management, I haven’t yet met a guest I couldn’t handle.”
Though Quinn’s smug, patronizing tone angered Tessa, she did not argue with him but followed him out of the office and through the eddying fog to the far end of the building. He was big, and she was petite, so she felt somewhat like a little kid being escorted back to her room by a father determined to show her that no monster was hiding either under the bed or in the closet.
He opened the metal door through which she had fled the north service stairs, and they went inside. No one waited there.
The soda-vending machine purred, and a faint clinking arose from the ice-maker’s laboring mechanism. Her plastic bucket still stood atop the chest, filled with half-moon chips.
Quinn crossed the small space to the door that led to the ground-floor hall, pulled it open.
“Nobody there,” he said, nodding toward the silent corridor. He opened the door in the west wall, as well, and looked outside, left and right. He motioned her to the threshold and insisted that she look too.
She saw a narrow, railing-flanked serviceway that paralleled the back of the lodge, between the building and the edge of the bluff, illuminated by a yellowish night-light at each end. Deserted “You said you’d already put your money in the vendor but hadn’t got your soda?” Quinn asked, as he let the door swing shut.