The Resort (11 page)

But where
was
The Reata? Ralph had been mumbling to himself for the past half hour, and this rough primitive road hardly seemed like the way to a luxury resort. They were clearly lost, but Ralph had gotten them into this and he could damn well get them out. Gloria lifted the folded newspaper from her lap and began perusing the front page. At a lobby shop in the Grand Canyon's El Tovar, she'd picked up several of the most prominent papers from around the country—including her own beloved
New York Times
—in order to have something to read on the long trip south, and she'd been parcelling the sections out over the past six hours. She was now on the
Los Angeles Times,
and she frowned in disapproval as she read an article that described an event taking place several years prior as occurring “back in the day.” She was astounded that a newspaper of record allowed its reporters to incorporate slang into legitimate news articles, particularly such an ungrammatical phrase as “back in the day.” Hadn't newspapers at one time been the bastions of linguistic correctness, holding the fort against the storming hordes of nonsensical vulgarisms that threatened to overwhelm the English language?

Of course, what did one expect from a
California
newspaper?

“I think that's it,” Ralph said, nodding at the windshield. She looked up from the paper, followed his gaze and saw a sight for sore eyes: a beautiful oasis of lush green vegetation and welcoming Southwest buildings set against the monochromatic brown rock of a low desert mountain.
This
was the exotic vacation getaway she had seen in her
Sunset
magazine, and she supposed the difficult access was needed to weed out the riffraff and the lookiloos. Some guests, she seemed to remember from the article, coptered in and landed at the resort's heliport. Maybe that's what they should have done. It didn't matter now, though. They were finally here; that was the important thing.

The cracked potholed asphalt turned to smooth new pavement as they pulled next to a guardhouse adjacent to a gate that blocked the road. Already she was feeling better, and while Ralph paid the parking attendant or showed his confirmation letter or did whatever it was he had to do, Gloria scanned the rows of vehicles, feeling vaguely reassured by the sight of so many high-end sedans and SUVs. The gate opened, and they drove up to the lobby entrance, stopping beneath a shaded overhang. A smartly dressed valet opened her door and helped her out while another attendant took the keys from Ralph to park the car.

They stepped into the lobby, past the two handsome young men who held open the double doors . . . and it was as if the whole first half of their trip had never taken place. The memory of those five wretched days was erased as they stepped into the posh regional furnishings of the air-conditioned lobby.
This
was what a vacation was supposed to be. She relaxed into the familiar arms of comfort. A very helpful young woman behind the massive front desk checked them in, and a team of bellboys and attendants unloaded their luggage and drove them in a golf cart to their deluxe suite overlooking a desert that no longer seemed quite so barren and ugly but, through the picture window of their well-appointed, climate-controlled bedroom, looked almost pretty.

Gloria availed herself of a mineral water from the minibar and leaned back on the love seat to rest. The suitcases still needed to be unpacked—Ralph refused to have hired help do
that
for them—but the unpacking could wait. It had been a hellishly long trip, and she deserved a little me time. She picked up a magazine from the coffee table while Ralph went into the bathroom.

“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed seconds later, and she heard him gagging.

Gloria jumped up from the love seat and hurried into the bathroom. “What is it?”

“Stay out!” he ordered, but it was too late. The toilet seat was up, and in the bowl she could see spattered blood and what looked like a clotted clump of dark tissue floating in the stained water.

The mess in the toilet certainly did not resemble anything even remotely human. But the image of a young woman forcefully expelling fetal tissue in a spontaneous miscarriage was forefront in her mind, and she backed away in shock.

“Gloria?” Ralph said.

She held up her hands, shook her head, continued backing off.

She knew exactly why she'd thought of such a scenario. Her mother. Her mother had had a miscarriage, although by the time she learned of it Gloria was an adult and her mother was practically on her deathbed. It had been a girl, three years before Gloria had been born, and she'd felt sadness and also anger at her mother for depriving her of a sister with whom she could have grown up and shared secrets, and whose advice she could have sought during those troubled teen years. She knew intellectually that it was not her mother's fault, that her mother had no doubt felt far worse about it than she did, but the anger was still there, and the only way to dissipate it was for her to imagine the gruesome circumstances of the miscarriage. Gloria had received no details from her mother—she had not asked for any—but she'd invented a whole mental tableau to which she had returned repeatedly over the years.

And the end result always looked like the scene in their bathroom: a blood-spattered toilet.

Ralph seemed confused. “What should I do, do you think? Flush it?”

His indecision brought back her resolve, and Gloria was suddenly able to function again. “Don't touch anything,” she snapped. “It might be a crime scene for all we know.”

“Then—”

“Call the lobby and tell them to send someone over here right now. Then help me with our bags. We are
not
staying in this room another second.”

 

“I'm very sorry,” the girl at the front desk was saying. She was obviously extremely dismayed. Her face was red, the space above her upper lip wet with sweat, but Gloria didn't care. Something like this should not occur in a Howard Johnson's, let alone The Reata. It was inexcusable.

“I want to speak to the manager,” she said coldly.

“Right away, ma'am.” The girl picked up a phone hidden just below their sight line and pushed a button. “Mr. Cabot? We have a guest emergency. Could you come immediately to the front desk?” She hung up the phone. “The manager will be right here.”

Seconds later, a portly bearded man of obvious breeding strode around the corner and into the lobby, greeting Ralph with an outstretched hand and offering Gloria a courtly bow. He immediately looked familiar, though it took her a moment to place him.

He looked just like Sebastian Cabot, the actor who had played a butler on that god-awful television show
Family Affair.

For a brief instant, she thought that this might be the actor's son or brother, but then a more sinister idea came to mind, and she was suddenly certain that this man was a fake and a phony, modeling himself after Sebastian Cabot and even going so far as to steal the man's name. But why and for what purpose? Imitating a long-dead character actor was hardly the way to earn the trust of staff and customers. The feeling persisted that the manager was not what he seemed, and the banality of his disguise unnerved her, putting her on the defensive when she had come to excoriate The Reata's staff for that horror back in her suite.

“What seems to be the trouble?” the manager—

—asked.

Ralph looked to her, and she shoved her unfounded concerns aside to angrily describe what they'd found in their bathroom and demand to know how such a thing could have gone undetected in a resort that was supposed to have such a sterling reputation. She pointed to their suitcases, piled high on a luggage cart. “This is completely unacceptable. There is no reason my husband and I should have to vacate our room, particularly not for something as outrageous as this.”

“I understand completely,” the manager said in a smooth reassuring voice, “and I can assure you that a full investigation will be conducted not only to determine how this occurred but how it could have gone unnoticed by our cleaning staff.”

“Someone had a miscarriage or performed an abortion in our bathroom. How could this happen without anyone noticing?”

“I would like to know the answer to that question just as much as you do, Mrs. Pedwin. Believe me.”

Ralph chimed in. “What happens if there's some sort of medical emergency here? The Reata is
very
far from the nearest city.”

“We have our own medical staff: a doctor and two nurses on-site and on call at all times. In the event of an extreme accident or medical exigency, there's also a helicopter to take guests to Desert Regional Hospital in Tucson. We are, I daresay, prepared for every eventuality.”

The reassurances were logical, proper and should have made her feel better, but Gloria still didn't trust the manager and found that his pat answers made her very uneasy. There was nothing specific to which she could point, nothing he said that was wrong or even unusual. But he himself was unusual, and that colored everything he said.

They were transferred to another suite, this one inspected by Mr. Cabot himself before they entered, and though it was clean and well-appointed, in her mind it carried the taint of their previous room. This first night's stay was free, comped as a result of what they'd experienced, and the manager assured them that for the rest of their visit, they would receive a free night for each night paid. Originally, their plan was to remain at The Reata for five days, but now she wasn't sure she wanted to stay more than one. She had a bad feeling about this place, and while she wasn't some young New Age nitwit or superstitious old hippie, she would definitely feel a lot more confident if they finished out their vacation at another resort.

Why couldn't they have just gone to Laguna Beach the way they usually did?

They unpacked, settled in, waited to find out the verdict on that bloody mass from the toilet, but when Gloria hadn't heard back from anyone on staff after an hour, she dialed the front desk, irritated. “This is Mrs. Pedwin,” she said in a voice meant to convey her dissatisfaction. “My husband and I—”

“Mrs. Pedwin! I'm glad you called.” She recognized the voice of the unhelpful girl behind the front desk. “We just got a report from Dr. Randolph.” There was a long pause.

“And?” Gloria prodded.

“The doctor says it
was
a fetus. A dog fetus.”

A dog fetus?
Somehow that was even more disturbing, and she tried to figure out by what strange confluence of circumstances an unborn animal could end up in the toilet of their hotel bathroom. She recalled the scene in her mind, and what troubled her most was all of the blood on the side of the bowl. It looked as though the miscarriage had taken place by someone sitting on the toilet, not by a person tossing the dog fetus into the commode. The only scenarios she could come up with were someone holding the dog above the toilet as it miscarried; a large dog such as a Saint Bernard actually sitting on the pot; or a pregnant woman expelling the dog fetus from her womb.

It was the latter that seemed to her most likely.

What in God's name was she thinking? Her mind was concocting wild impossibilities, and the fact that she was seriously entertaining the idea that a woman could have been carrying a dog fetus—

—spoke to her state of mind. This entire trip had been nothing but an unmitigated disaster, and she seemed to be reacting to it by going off on gruesome flights of fancy. The girl from the front desk was still prattling on, but Gloria wasn't paying attention, and she said a short “Thank you” and hung up the phone.

Like the rest of this hellish vacation, their stay at The Reata was not working out as planned, and she turned toward Ralph. “I—”
think we should go home,
was what she had intended to say. But her husband was dead asleep on top of the covers, mouth open, and after the long trip from the Grand Canyon and all they'd been through since, she didn't have the heart to wake him and tell him that they were going to pack and drive all the way to Tucson in order to find another hotel to spend the night. No, they'd stay here tonight and tomorrow they'd talk about cutting their stay short and heading back east.

She looked out the window.

She'd had enough of this damn desert to last her a lifetime.

Ryan didn't like the indoor pool.

The outdoor pool was fine. In fact, it was great. Bigger than any pool he'd ever seen, with a fast slide and cool waterfall that looked like something from Disneyland, it had a huge shallow end big enough for him to swim across and not worry about drowning. He loved it. But the indoor pool, the lap pool, the pool reserved for health freaks and athletes was . . . well, creepy.

Their dad had told them to stay away from it, which he supposed was why his brothers had made him come, but now that they were here, Ryan wished he had stayed with his parents. There'd been something weird, something off, about their dad's warning, as though he was concealing information from them, and they'd all picked up on it. Curtis and Owen, of course, had been intrigued, but Ryan had not liked it from the start, and if his brothers hadn't threatened to cut him off for the rest of the vacation and not play with him, he would not have come with them.

But he had come and he was here, and he didn't like it one bit. The weight room had been eerie enough with its rows of unused exercise equipment and fun house mirror walls, but the pool room beyond was even worse. The ceiling lights were dull and dim, the deep end of the water murky. There was about the chamber the aura of a tomb or temple, and even the twins' usually loud voices were quiet and subdued.