The Resort (6 page)

Did she resent Lowell for this? No. Well . . . maybe just a little. Deep down. But she never thought about it, and she didn't know why she was thinking of it now. They were on vacation, for God's sake. She should be enjoying the luxuries surrounding her instead of creating dissatisfaction where it didn't exist.

Lightning suddenly flashed, illuminating the billowing storm clouds, and her heart jumped in her chest. She had never been one of those people afraid of thunder or lightning. On the contrary, she'd always enjoyed storms, found them to be curiously appealing, almost soothing, particularly at night when she was safely ensconced indoors as the weather raged outside. But it seemed as if the overarching cloud revealed by the lightning had the clear contours of a face.

A heavy masculine face filled with uncontrollable rage.

She tried to tell herself that she had just imagined it, but lightning flashed again, and the visage was still there, closer, the deep-set eyes trained directly on her as though looking across the distance through the window of her room, into her eyes. She stepped back from the shutters, frightened. Maybe she was still asleep, she thought. Maybe this was all part of a nightmare. It did have that sense of foggy surrealism usually associated with dreams, but somehow she knew that this was really happening.

Feeling alone, feeling afraid, she picked up the remote control from her nightstand and turned on the television, but the storm must have affected the satellite reception because only two stations came in. The first was showing a horror movie.
Children Who Won't Sleep
was the title, according to the ID bar that appeared temporarily on top of the screen, and Rachel saw a spooky wide-eyed girl in a windblown camisole standing atop a desert bluff at night. That was too close for comfort, and, chilled, she flipped through the channels until she found the only other station on air—something called AdultVue. The bar said this film was called
Return to Beaver Valley,
and in it one woman had her face buried in the hairy crotch of another woman who was moaning in ecstasy, eyes closed and lipsticked lips parted sensuously.

She shut off the television before one of the boys heard anything.

Outside, thunder rumbled.

Rachel thought of that fierce cloud countenance and the terrible rage she had seen there. She considered waking up Lowell but decided that was stupid. What was there to be afraid of? A random convergence of clouds that happened to resemble a scary face? How old was she, ten?

Still, she looked toward the shuttered window with dread. Between the slats and around the edges, the flash of lightning shone through, a blinding white that made the surrounding darkness even deeper. It reminded her of a scene in a horror movie, and she was unable to make herself move forward to once again look outside, scared that the cloud face would now be right next to the glass, glaring at her with its terrible expression of rage and hate.

She stood there for a moment, trying to think through the situation logically. What else could it be other than a chance coalescence of storm clouds? God? A demon? It made no rational sense for any sort of supernatural entity to manipulate water vapor so that it resembled an evil face, and there certainly wasn't any sort of monster that was made out of cloud. Not that she believed in that sort of stuff to begin with. No, she was upset, her brain was tired and her mind was simply putting a morbid spin on perfectly natural events.

She forced herself to move forward across the darkened room, sidling next to the slightly open shutter slats, looking down this time instead of up. Below, the grounds of the resort were bathed in darkness, low lights along the pathways combining with the occasional flash of lightning to create a shifting world of shadows. The lights of the tennis court were off, as were those on the building housing the spa facility. The palms and saguaros and landscaped bushes seemed menacing and out of proportion, and made her think of the living trees that attacked Disney's Snow White.

A figure walked across the grass below, a dark shape that had been lurking near the edge of the building beyond her sight line but now moved suspiciously across the open expanse of lawn like a thief on his way to rob a house. Rachel could see only a silhouette, no details, but she could tell it was a man not a woman. A gardener. He was carrying a rake but something about the way he held it made it seem more like a weapon than a tool, and there was in his carriage and bearing the suggestion of violence, as though this was a man used to physically intimidating people.

The figure reached the head of a lighted pathway where he stopped, turned, looked up. Though she could not see the features of the shadowed face, she could see the eyes, bright and wide and trained on her.

Immediately, instinctively, she stepped away from the window, hid in the darkness of the room. There was no way he could see her through the slats. He probably wasn't even looking at her, was probably just checking out the trees next to the building to see when they needed to be trimmed. But she was creeped out nonetheless, and she remained in the darkness for a few moments, away from the window, waiting, giving him time to leave and get to wherever he was going at—she glanced over at the clock—one fifteen in the morning.

Where
could
he be going? While he was carrying a rake, it was highly unlikely that he would be doing grounds work in the middle of the night. True, resorts and other high-end businesses sometimes made their hired help work in the wee small hours so as not to disturb guests. But while custodians could buff lobby floors thanks to inside lights, it was pretty close to impossible to prune flowers or trim bushes outside in the dark.

She thought of going back to bed, wanting to just put this night behind her and wake up when the world was fresh and sunny, but she had to look, she had to know, and once more she moved next to the window.

He was still in the same spot, looking up at her, and the second she peeked down through the slats at him, he raised his weaponlike rake as if in greeting.

And then . . .

he danced.

It was a strange little jig, lasting only a few seconds, but it was clearly for her benefit, and she held her breath as lightning flashed and the man danced crazily, feet stomping furiously on the grass, hands twirling the rake. Then he was gone, disappearing into the night.

Rachel exhaled, unaware until that moment that she'd been holding her breath. She scanned the ground below, looking for any sign of the gardener, but he was gone. Glancing into the sky at a fading flash of lightning, the clouds were once again just clouds. The show was over.

She didn't like The Reata. From the guy who'd stolen their room to the psychotic gardener, it seemed to her that everything was going wrong; this place was turning out to be the antithesis of everything they'd expected, and the thought of staying here another four nights made her feel more than a little apprehensive.

But there was nothing they could do about it now. Even if they took off tomorrow and canceled the rest of their stay, they would still have to pay for all five nights, and she knew Lowell would not be willing to write off that kind of money—even if she did somehow manage to convince him that a spooky gardener had been prowling the grounds at one in the morning and a demonic cloud face had been looking at her through the window.

She was overreacting, she told herself.

Tired and emotionally exhausted, she climbed back into bed. Lowell stirred next to her as she settled into place. “What is it?” he asked groggily.

“Nothing,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

It was after eight when Lowell awoke. Curtis and Owen were already at the pool. Rachel and Ryan were seated at a table in front of the television, drinking orange juice from the minibar and eating Entenmann's muffins that they'd brought with them in the ice chest. The room was full of children's show chatter and bright desert sunshine, and Lowell realized that he must have been pretty damn tired to stay asleep through all that.

He put on one of The Reata robes from the closet and grabbed a muffin, sitting down. A copy of
USA Today
had been delivered to their room and was lying on the table in front of him. “I was thinking of going to that lap pool,” he told Rachel. “Swimming twenty minutes or so each morning to get some exercise while we're here. Maybe checking out the weight room.”

She reached over and stuck her hand between the folds of the robe, pinching the roll of fat around his middle. “That's a fine idea.”

He patted her stomach. “Feel free to join me.”

Laughing, she squirmed away. “I'm on vacation.”

Neither of them mentioned what had happened last night—

—and he wasn't sure if that was because Ryan was here or because they wanted to pretend that it hadn't occurred. Both, probably. But he was acutely aware of the fact that beneath their surface jocularity, a darker layer had been added on to the vacation and no matter how hard they tried to maintain the carefree innocence of the past two days, it was ruined, gone, and the rest of their trip would be tainted by the events of last night.

Damn that Blodgett.

Lowell wondered what the asshole looked like. In his mind, he imagined a heavy, beefy man with a jowly angry face and a bulbous alcoholic's nose, a man not unlike Mr. Mack, his high school science teacher. Mean, petty and vindictive, Mack pretty much had it in for any student who wasn't a member of the geology club or whose life didn't revolve around the physical sciences, and Lowell and his friends had hated the teacher. Hell, half the school had. And although Lowell hadn't been in on the senior prank that had resulted in sugar being poured into Mr. Mack's gas tank, ruining the engine of his brand new Buick LeSabre, he had secretly applauded the incident from afar.

Mr. Mack. Jesus, he hadn't thought of that old bastard in years.

Lowell wondered if he was still alive.

Rachel stood and walked over to one of the bathroom sinks to wash the muffin crumbs off her hands. “Are you really going to try and exercise?”

“Yeah. Why not.”

“Then take your key,” she told him. “Ryan and I are going out to the big pool to keep an eye on the twins. We probably won't be here when you get back.”

“What's the plan for lunch?”

“Snacks. We have the chips and salsa that we brought, and I think there's one of those cheese samplers in the minibar. Besides, it's hot. You don't eat much when it's hot, you just drink a lot.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“We'll have a real dinner. Maybe we should check the menu at that Grille.”

“That's the one disadvantage of this place. We can't just drive over to some take-out place or something. We're stuck with the food on hand.”

She looked at him meaningfully. “The
one
disadvantage?”

“We just got off on the wrong foot,” he said, for his own sake as much as hers. “It's all uphill from here.”

“Maybe we'll reverse it tomorrow. Go to Tucson or one of the tourist destinations, have a real, reasonably priced lunch, and then snack for dinner by the pool.”

“Yeah!” Ryan said. “Burger King!”

Lowell smiled at them. “Sounds like a plan.”

He couldn't remember where the building that housed the pool and weight room was located, so after changing into his bathing suit and slipping on a pair of sandals, he opened the leather Welcome binder next to the phone on the end table and turned the pages until he found a map of the resort. A walkway led from their building to what was referred to as the “Exercise Center” two parking lots down. As long as he stayed on course and didn't take any of the forks or side paths, he'd be there in three minutes. He slammed the binder shut, took another muffin to eat on the way, grabbed a bottle of water and picked up his key card.

“See you later.” He gave Rachel a quick kiss, then ran a hand through Ryan's close-cropped hair. “Meet you at the big pool, buddy. Tell Curtis and Owen they have to let you play or they can't swim. Tell them I said so.”

Ryan grinned.

Outside it was hot already. Eight thirty and the temperature had to be well above eighty. Lowell was not the most heat-tolerant man on the planet—one reason he was grateful to work in an air-conditioned environment—but there was something very pleasant about vacationing in a spot where a person could swim comfortably in the early morning or late evening. It was humid, though, much more humid than yesterday, and he could tell from the wet gravel and the leaves on the ground that the predicted rain had arrived sometime last night. Despite that, today's sky was clear, cloudless and an impossibly deep blue almost cheery enough to make him forget the debacle of last night.

Almost.

He thought of Blodgett, which made him think again of Mr. Mack. One of the reasons they'd taken this vacation now, at the end of June, was so that he could generate a legitimate excuse—to himself if no one else—to avoid his high school reunion. But his brain had been strolling down memory lane ever since they'd come here, and he was not really sure why. He was certainly not one of those pathetic middle-aged men living off former glories and pining for those idyllic teenage years. Yet he could not deny that he had spent quite a bit of time lately recalling his own past. Even now he saw a quasi-punk teenager dashing through the parking lot without shoes or sandals, yelping “Shit, shit, shit, shit . . .” as his feet hit the hot asphalt, and he found himself thinking about some of his old friends from high school and college, realizing that he could not imagine them middle-aged. They were frozen in his mind at their most carefree and irresponsible, and doubtlessly they had succumbed to the pressures and responsibilities of life to become respectable citizens—everyone did—but he still could not see it and hoped it wasn't true. Toby and Russ and Carlos from high school, Dennis and Lu from college; he still saw them playing hackeysack in the park, partying all night long, and it was sad to think of them balding and in business suits, running in the rat race. He'd rather imagine them as beach bums or professional students, refusing to grow up and grow old, living on the fringes of society in rented apartments filled with strewn CDs and tacked-up posters.