The Resort (35 page)

The phones were out.

Just in case, he tried his cell again, but it still didn't work, and he had the feeling that the same would hold true for all of the guests' phones.

If there
were
any other guests.

The anxious feeling within him was not panic, not yet, but it was on its way, and he quickly left the lobby and hurried down the sidewalk to the closest set of rooms. He knocked on the door of the first one he reached. Putting his ear to the door, he heard the welcome sounds of movement and voices from inside.

He and his family were not the only people who had been stranded here.

He breathed an inward sigh of relief, and when the door opened a moment later and a tired man in a bathrobe squinted at him and said “Yeah?” Lowell could have kissed him.

“Sorry,” Lowell said. “Wrong room.” He'd considered telling the man what had happened, explaining that they'd been abandoned here, but decided against it right now. There'd be time for that later. If it really did turn out that there was no way to leave, all of the guests would have to get together and map out a strategy. Until then, he wanted to make sure he made every effort to find a way out.

The helicopter!

He'd forgotten about that, and once again he found himself running down a sidewalk, this time toward the heliport.

As he'd feared, as he'd known, it was empty. Well, not exactly empty. There was no helicopter on the target-shaped landing pad, but on the flat ground next to it was a burned and twisted hunk of metal that looked like it could have come from a crashed chopper.

From this vantage point, Lowell could see the backs of several of The Reata's main buildings, and he glanced from one to the other, trying to think if there was something that he'd missed, some other means of escape or communicating with the outside world that he was overlooking or had forgotten, but he was all out of ideas.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn: they were inexplicably stranded here.

He made his way back to the suite, walking along the rear of one of the buildings, gratified to see open drapes behind the patios and balconies, with lights and movement in most of the rooms. One of these, he realized as he passed by, was their original room.

Blodgett was still here.

It didn't matter. The man might be a jackass, but he was in the same boat as the rest of them.

Lowell emerged from behind the building to see a crowd gathered on the road next to the pool gate. The waterfall was turned off, and he could hear the voices of angry guests. The throng was fifteen or twenty strong, many of them with sleep-tousled hair and wearing Reata bathrobes. They'd obviously discovered what had happened and seemed to be quizzing someone in authority. Had they found a remaining Reata worker?

They had, but it was a janitor, and he was apparently as much in the dark as the rest of them. Moreover, he possessed limited English skills, and most of the demands and queries made of him seemed to go right over his head.

Lowell felt sorry for the janitor, who was coming under increasing verbal fire.
Leave him alone,
he wanted to say.
The man doesn't know any more than you do.
But the crowd was angry and vociferous, and he wasn't brave enough to stand against them. He searched the faces of the crowd, hoping to find Rand Black or one of his fellow Cactus Wrens, someone he could appeal to, but while some of the faces seemed vaguely familiar, there was no one he actually knew.

His gaze stopped on the face of a dark-haired woman approximately his own age.

No. It couldn't be.

Lowell squinted, cocked his head, moved around the edge of the gathering, examined her from different angles, but no matter what he did, the woman still looked like a grown-up version of Maria Alvarez, his first girlfriend from high school.

Maria Alvarez.

It didn't seem plausible that she was avoiding the reunion, too. And that she'd chosen the exact same resort as he had in order to get away from Southern California . . . but
was
it possible?

Who was he kidding?

He watched her face carefully. Maybe it was someone else, someone who just happened to bear a resemblance to Maria. But she shouted “Where is everyone?” at the janitor, and it was her voice. Even after all these years, he still remembered that voice, and when he saw the way she folded her arms across her chest in an expression of dissatisfaction, the déjà vu was complete. “I want an answer!” she demanded.

He thought about Rachel's recent aggressive lovemaking.

Those were the types of things Maria used to say.

A shiver of cold passed through him. He didn't know why he hadn't remembered it before, but he recalled now her assertiveness, how she would coordinate their sexual encounters and make specific demands of him in the backseat of his car. She'd been the school slut, and he'd been the envy of all his friends. A motherless girl from a poor neighborhood off Main, she had zero self-confidence, was ostracized by many of the other girls, and made up for it by being aggressively sexual. All she needed was someone to believe in her, someone to care about her, and then everything would be all right. Or at least that was his theory. But she'd ended up fucking half the junior class, including his then-best friend John Murdoch. And when he dumped her, she laughed at him.

The thing was, he hadn't really been interested in Maria until she had practically thrown herself at him. He'd had his eye on someone else, a girl from P.E. named Brenda, and even after he and Maria had become an item, he still secretly longed for Brenda. But that had never come to pass, and by the time he was free she was already with another boy.

Something was going on here that defied explanation. A haunted hotel was one thing. Ghosts and strange occurrences and an evil power permeating everything? That he could accept. But these constant allusions to his own life, to his high school days, on the very weekend of his dreaded twenty-year reunion . . .

It wasn't possible, it didn't make any sense, it didn't fit into any theory or framework he could envision.

He was staring at the woman, watching her, and for no reason her head swiveled away from the janitor and turned toward him, her eyes locking on his. She smiled, a lewd promising smile he remembered well, and instinctively he glanced away. But he recovered instantly and looked over at her again.

She was gone.

It wasn't Maria, he told himself. It wasn't anyone. Just a figment of his imagination. But he knew that wasn't true. People had looked at her when she spoke, the janitor had tried to respond to her question.

Another low-level employee, a maintenance man of some kind, emerged from the walkway that led to the generating station, and the janitor told the crowd “Wait!” and ran off to see his coworker.

“Get back here!” a man called.

“Where are you going?” a woman shouted.

Lowell turned away. There were no answers to be had here. He doubted there were answers to be had anywhere. The thing to do right now was go back to his suite, talk it over with Rachel and the kids and decide what they should do next. He felt a little better that they were not completely alone here, but not as good as he had a few moments before. The mood of that crowd was ugly, and he had the feeling that if they turned out to be stranded here for any length of time, tempers would get even shorter, people angrier.

He started down the sidewalk, passed a set of rooms, took the fork that led to their suite and saw, standing between two saguaros on the upslope ahead and to his left, the activities coordinator. The sight chilled him to the bone. He did not know why, but the activities coordinator was the last person he wanted to meet on an empty walkway in the deserted resort. He sped up, quickening his pace, looking only at the sidewalk. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man moving down the slope toward him, and he realized with sudden dread that their paths would cross a yard or so up ahead.

Lowell walked even faster, looking over at the man, and suddenly he was no longer the activities coordinator.

He was the coach, Coach Hendrie, the P.E. teacher who had made Lowell's life a living hell in high school for dropping out of varsity baseball.

No.
It was an optical illusion. His mind playing tricks on him. Stress.
Something.

“Thurman!” the man yelled in the coach's perpetually hoarse voice.

Lowell kept walking, ignoring him, hoping he would go away. Instinct was telling him to run, but he had too much pride for that, did not want to act like a complete candy-ass pansy, as the coach would say.

They did meet on the path, and the coach spoke only a few words before moving on.

“The Roadrunners against the Cactus Wrens,” he said, smiling, his beady eyes boring into Lowell's. “This afternoon. At the driving range. Be there or else.”

Then they were both continuing on their respective paths and Lowell, his heart pounding, had to force himself not to run back to the suite and slam and lock the door behind him.

 

Owen answered the knock at the door, and his heart soared within him as he saw that it was Brenda. He suddenly felt ten pounds lighter. Ever since his dad had explained that they were trapped here, that everyone who worked at The Reata had disappeared, Brenda had been on his mind. The noble self-sacrificing part of himself hoped that she'd gotten away and was on her way back to California safe and sound. But the larger, selfish part of his being wished that she was still here, trapped with them. He'd even come up with several plausible scenarios all of which ended with the two of them alone and naked together.

Now she stood before him, and he was grateful. “Hi, Owen,” she said, and it was like none of the insanity was happening around them, as though they were the only two people in the world.

“Hi,” he said. He didn't know whether or not to invite her in. Curtis and Ryan knew Brenda but none of them had even mentioned her to their parents and it would be kind of weird to suddenly just announce, “Mom and Dad, this is my girlfriend Brenda.”

This was his chance to introduce her to them, though, and he stepped aside to let her in. He'd just call her a friend at first. Then once they were back in California and they got to know her a little better, he'd let them know that it was a little more serious. “How are you doing?” he asked.

She didn't answer, just walked on by him toward his father, and something in the way she moved made him think everything was not as it should be. He glanced over at his brothers, saw puzzlement on Curtis's face, worry on Ryan's.

They'd noticed, too.

“Mom?” Owen said. “Dad?”

His parents, talking in the sitting area, turned to look. His dad's face suddenly turned pale, as though he'd seen a ghost or was about to puke or both.

“Lowell?” his mom asked worriedly.

Brenda chuckled, and the sound raised the hackles on the back of his neck, turned his veins to ice. It was a horror show laugh, unlike anything he'd ever heard in real life, and issuing from the mouth of a teenage girl, it seemed obscene and horrendously frightening. The expression on her face was sly. “Long time no see, Lowell.”

Lowell?
What the hell was this?

“Brenda?” Owen said, confused.

“Brenda?” his father echoed.

“Do you two know each other?” his mom asked, and at least the hint of anger and suspicion in her voice was normal, had some grounding in reality.

“He wanted to fuck me. But I fucked his son instead.” Brenda sidled next to Owen, snaked an arm around his midsection, and somehow it felt
slimy.
He wanted to pull away from her, but he couldn't seem to move. This couldn't be happening. This had to be a nightmare.

His mom's face was set in stone, and his dad's was drained of all color, frozen in open-mouthed shock.

“She was in my P.E. class,” his dad said lamely. “She went to my high school.”

Brenda giggled in a way that made Owen want to run for the hills. What his dad said didn't make any sense . . . but he knew his dad: the man was telling the truth. And right now Owen didn't know Brenda at all.

“What are you talking about?” his mom said in a voice filled with righteous anger, and once more she cut through the craziness and brought it back to the here and now.

Brenda held him tighter, fingers slipping beneath the belt line of his pants, and that was the last straw. He pulled away from her, moving closer to his parents. Curtis and Ryan had retreated back to the doorway of their bedroom.

“Brenda Hafer was a girl in my P.E. class my junior year in high school.” His dad spoke slowly and clearly. “I had a crush on her. That was twenty . . . twenty-one years ago.” He paused, looked at Brenda and took a deep breath. “This looks like her.” Another pause. “I think it
is
her.”

She smiled cunningly. “You wanted to get in my panties, didn't you, Lowell? You wanted to fuck me.”

“Stop it!” Ryan screamed, and for a brief second, everything was still. Even Brenda's horrible smile was momentarily wiped from her face.

And then their mom took charge. “Get out,” she told Brenda, and advanced on the girl. Surprisingly, Brenda backed up. Owen exhaled, realizing he'd been holding his breath. His mom crowded his girlfriend toward the open doorway, where she backed outside onto the porch before the door was slammed in her face.

His girlfriend?

No, she was not that anymore. She never had been. He still didn't know what was going on, if this was some ghost from his dad's past returning to take revenge (although she'd seemed awfully solid for a ghost) or if some look-alike—the real Brenda's daughter perhaps—was playing some sort of elaborate practical joke. Neither of those seemed likely, however, and Owen realized that he now thought of her as part of The Reata, part of the weirdness that had been swirling about them since they'd arrived. He remembered how she hadn't wanted them to leave the path in Antelope Canyon, had tried to keep them from seeing that other, long deserted resort, and he thought now that that might be important.