The bare-bones, photo-free website said the Sunset Motel had plenty of its rooms available-I could now see why-and a customer review raved about “good heat, AC, and hot water” although, unfortunately, “there isn’t a good place to pull your boat and four-wheelers up to your door.”
The strip of rooms faced the main road with barely enough concrete parking in front to keep the end of the cars out of traffic. No office in sight.
As I crammed my car sideways into the lot, searching for a sign of life, I decided it was probably as good a place as any to hide from the mob. Bullets wouldn’t fly through steel, for one thing. I’d kept one eye on the rearview mirror all the way here, looking for more Louies. I was sure there were more ants in the pile he crawled out of.
I honked twice, and after a few minutes, a scraggly man in a white T-shirt and jeans came out of one of the units. He stuck his head in the car window, providing a suffocating whiff of bad breath and body odor.
“Sixty dollars a night, cash,” he said. I opened my purse and handed over $120. From his happy expression, this didn’t happen very often.
“Two nights,” I said. “I have a reserva-”
“Don’t need to know who you are.” He thrust a metal key at me through the window. It dangled off a crudely whittled pine bear, a homey touch, maybe what he did in his spare time.
“Key says thirty-two,” he said, “but you’re in number five. No service after eight.”
Uh-huh.
I watched him walk back to his unit, which probably served as both office and home, before making a tight U-turn into space No. 5.
I opened the door to a room more pleasant than its manager-a wood-paneled space right out of the 1960s, including a red phone with an old-fashioned round dial. I liked the clicking noise when I stuck my finger in a hole and gave it a whirl. I thought briefly about calling Hudson again. The room smelled musty but not too bad. And it was deliciously cool.
The king-sized bed sank easily from the weight of a thousand bodies before me and boasted a scratchy polyester bedspread with a pinecone motif, a few mysterious stains, and pillows that were hard as rocks. I fell asleep instantly.
CHAPTER 25
Jennifer Coogan’s childhood home was a small gray box on the outskirts of town. It looked sad, like it gave up after her murder. Slack curtains hung in the windows on either side, making me think of weeping eyes. A wreath with faded yellow daisies that should have been tossed years ago hung on a front door with black paint peeling off in little curls.
Granny said black doors kept demons in. Or encouraged them to come. I couldn’t remember which.
Before I got out of the car, I wondered for the hundredth time why Mama would save a story about a college girl’s murder that took place more than two hundred miles away.
I knocked on the door, my stomach protesting a breakfast of a melted Snickers bar and a warm can of Coke from the Sunset’s vending machine. A woman with bright red hair opened up instantly, as if her hand had been on the knob. Unsmiling, wary.
“Are you the reporter?” A slight Oklahoma twang.
“I’m Tommie,” I said. With effort, she stretched her mouth into something resembling a smile.
“I’m Jen’s mother. Come on in. I got my family here waiting.”
The living room was painted a harsh yellow, an unsuccessful attempt to make the room appear cheerful. While most people reserved the shrine for the bedroom, the Coogans had crowded the tiny living room with everything Jennifer-soccer and pageant trophies, track ribbons, framed fingerpaint drawings, even a dusty volcano science project with a blue ribbon hanging off it.
The pictures of her that covered the walls and the tables and the mantel were an assault. There was no other way to describe it. I couldn’t turn my eyes without seeing Jennifer as a baby, as a pageant contestant, as a graduate.
Jennifer wasn’t just pretty, I realized. She was at least five steps up from pretty. Big green eyes, softly curling auburn hair that fell past her shoulders, and a permanent, genuine smile. I wondered what tiny flaw made her the Miss National Teenager runner-up instead of the queen.
“Please. Sit down.” Jennifer’s mother gestured toward a highback rose-and-vine-printed chair with dark wood trim that matched the small couch. It held a weary-eyed gray-haired man and a plain young woman who looked ready to run from the room.
“I’m Leslie. This is my husband, Richard, and our daughter, Amanda. Amanda took off from her job at Wood’s Auto to be here. She was eight when Jen died.” I did the math. That would put Amanda in her early thirties. And desperately unlucky to have to grow up in this claustrophobic house with a ghost she could never live up to.
I let an awkward silence lay among us and studied the three of them, now in a prim row on the couch. Above their heads, a large silver crucifix hung between two Olen Mills portraits of a smiling Jennifer in the head-tossed-over-the-shoulder pose, probably taken shortly before her death. She was one of the few people I’d ever seen who took to that pose naturally.
Leslie Coogan’s red hair, surely gray underneath, was bottled. My hairdresser said anyone could be a redhead, you just had to find the right color red, but he hadn’t met Leslie Coogan. Another morbid salute to Jennifer? Amanda’s left hand sparkled with a tiny diamond. She was getting out, thank God. Richard Coogan’s grimace reminded me of a patient whose morphine had worn off.
Still, I felt something that resembled hope emanating off that couch. It was as if all three of them were waiting for me to tell them that, twenty-five years later, it was all just a big misunderstanding and that Jennifer wasn’t the bloated thing dragged out of the river, after all.
“Do you think you’ll be able to find the killer after all these years?” Mrs. Coogan asked, eagerly leaning forward, saving me from an introduction.
“I can’t even begin to promise you that,” I said.
Richard Coogan contemplated me as if I were another giant disappointment in a life crammed with them. “Nothing could make it worse. Our lives have been over for years.”
I’m not sure anybody but me noticed the slight twitch of Amanda’s lips when he said that.
Richard spit out the saga of Jennifer’s murder like a well-rehearsed speech, mostly things that matched my internet research. But I didn’t interrupt. I needed to feel his pain for myself, a part of my process. Sadie had warned me for years that it was dangerous for me to carry around so many people’s hurt.
“Jen always closed up alone every third Saturday night,” Mrs. Coogan told me. “I told Richard he should go up and check on her when she wasn’t home by midnight. But Richard said nothing bad ever happens in Idabel. And we went to sleep.” Tears welled in her eyes.
“Tell me about her boyfriend at OU. The one who disappeared. Did you meet him?”
Mrs. Coogan pulled a tissue out of her sweater pocket and dabbed her eyes.
“No, but she really liked him. They talked on the phone a lot. His name was Barry. They’d been dating for about five months. Jennifer said he didn’t like his picture taken so we never knew what he looked like. The police found that real suspicious.”
“What about the letter?” Amanda prodded her, in a barely audible voice.
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Coogan got up and opened a drawer in an end table stuffed with letters and cards. “He did write her letters over the summer. I couldn’t find them anywhere when the police asked for them, not in her room or her car, but this one arrived a few days after she died. The police fingerprinted it but couldn’t find anything. Maybe he used gloves. Here it is.”