The clerk called up his room number on her computer. “You complained about a problem with spiders yesterday?”
“Yes. And now they're back.”
“Maintenance sprayed for roaches, ants, spidersâ”
“And now they're back,” he repeated. The girl was young. According to her name tag, she'd been working for The Reata for a year and was from Garcez, Nevada. “I don't expect a resort like The Reata to be overrun with bugs,” he told her. “That's not what I pay for.”
The girl nodded politely. “I'll just give maintenance a call.”
His cell phone rang. Townsend. “Where the fuck are your stories?” the editor demanded in lieu of a greeting. “One fucking piece? That's all you could come up with? If I don't have anything from you by four, I'm running a review by McGrath, you got me? Just because we put you up at a fancy resort doesn't mean you can spend all your time funning in the sun instead of doing your job. Do you understand?”
Patrick had to smile. In Townsend's mind, The Reata had gone from being a joke to a temptation. It served the bastard right for booking him here in the first place. Part of him wanted to calmly inform the editor that he had skipped the festival today and was goofing off, but that was going too far.
“Someone from maintenance will meet you at your room in five minutes,” the desk clerk said, hanging up her phone.
“Who was that?” Townsend demanded.
“Nothing. Talk to you later.” Patrick clicked off his cell. “Thank you,” he told the girl. He nodded a good-bye and walked through the lobby and out the door through which he'd come. A Reata employee wearing clean khaki clothes and carrying a metal toolbox was already waiting for him when he reached his room. “Mr. Schlaegel?” the man said.
Patrick nodded. “Hey there.”
Goateed, with a shaved head, the maintenance man looked nearly as young as the desk clerk, but his voice when he spoke was as jaded and mocking as that fat-assed security guard's. “You think you have a spider infestation, eh?”
“Yes I do.”
“You know, I'm the one who fumigated your room yesterday.”
“You probably killed the ones that were there,” Patrick said, trying to be polite. “But now there're new ones.”
“You think so, do you? I didn't even see any there the first time.” He nodded toward the door. “Why'dn't you just open 'er up there and we'll see what you got.”
In the seconds before he opened the door, Patrick knew the spider was going to be gone or it was going to be shrunk down to normal size or something equally humiliating that would make him look like the biggest wimpâ
fairy
âon the planet. That's the way these things always worked. But the door swung inward, the two of them walked inside, and the spider was still there, as big as ever and twice as frightening.
Only . . .
Only the maintenance man did not seem to care. He stepped calmly forward, put down his toolbox and climbed onto the bed, standing on his knees. The spider rose to its feet, sensing someone close, but the man moved quickly, pressing down on the creature's back with his right hand, while his left hand broke off a leg. It snapped with a loud crack, and the spider screamed, a harsh screeching sound that hurt Patrick's ears. White viscous goo oozed out of the broken leg onto the bed. The spider was thrashing crazily, screaming, trying to get away, but the maintenance man kept breaking off legs, piling up the black leaking appendages on Patrick's pillow. Finally, he said, “Could you hand me that ball-peen hammer out of my toolbox there?”
Patrick bent down and opened the toolbox, drawing out a hammer, all the while keeping an eye on the legless spider on the bed, its bleeding black form
bouncing
under the maintenance man's hand, that terrible agonized screeching issuing from its unseen mouth. He put the hammer in the maintenance man's outstretched hand, then winced as the rounded end of the tool came down on the spider's head with a sickening crunch that put a stop to the screeching once and for all.
The maintenance man climbed off the bed, put his hammer, still dripping with that gooey white substance, into the toolbox and walked outside. He returned a moment later with a black plastic garbage sack and tossed the oversized spider body as well as the eight broken legs inside. Tying up the bag, he dropped it in the wastepaper basket next to the dresser and went into the bathroom to wash his hands. He emerged a few moments later, looked at Patrick and smirked as though he'd been summoned on a completely ridiculous waste-of-time errand. “The next time you need someone to kill a spider for you,” he said derisively, “give us a call.”
Patrick closed the door behind the man and nearly gagged as he saw his bed, the sheets and bedspread all covered with bits of black shell and thick trails of that viscous white goo. The smell was somehow less harsh than it should have been and reminded him of lemon meringue pie, but the juxtaposition with that disgusting mess made it that much more revolting.
From the room next doorâthe
empty
roomâcame a loud knock on the wall. “Quiet down in there!” a deep voice demanded, and it was followed by a round of laughter.
Patrick ignored the laughing voices and picked up his laptop, taking it outside to write. He sat down on the metal chair in front of his room, placing the computer on the small table before him, but his hands were shaking so badly his fingers kept hitting the wrong keys, and it was several minutes before he could finally type a coherent sentence and get down to work.
Twenty-eight
Lowell was checking on the status of the car, the kids were at the pool as usual, and Rachel sat alone in the exercise center, working out on one of the weight machines, trying to burn off some of the excess energy that seemed to be making her so antsy. Lowell had told her not to come hereâthey'd had a fight over it, in factâbut she'd refused to let him tell her what she could and couldn't do, and she'd stormed over, determined to spend all morning in here if that's what it took to prove her point.
She wasn't sure now that had been such a good idea. She was alone in here, but every so often it didn't
feel
as if she was alone, and once she thought she caught a glimpse of movement in the mirror that covered the wall in front of her.
She could ignore those occasional moments, though, because she liked using the weights. There was something exciting about it, on a physical level, and the involuntary flexing of her thigh muscles as she pumped iron, the feeling of tension in her crotch, led her to loosen and tighten her vaginal muscles. Loosen and tighten. Loosen and tighten. She was developing a counter rhythm to the lifting of the weights, and soon she was experiencing what she'd been hoping to experience, the sensation building . . . building . . . until, finally, a wave of joyous release passed through her, and she closed her eyes for a moment to savor it.
She opened her eyes, eased up on the weights, wiped the sweat from her face with a towel, and leaned back for a moment, cradled in the arms of the exercise machine. Already her temporary high was fading, and she looked at herself in the mirror, saw her wild hair, the sweat stains on her clothes, the slight indentation where her chest met her belly, the puppet line wrinkles beginning to connect her nose and her mouth. She looked more like her mother than herself, and in that state of disappointment and disillusionment which usually followed a self-administered orgasm, she realized that her life was nearly half over.
I have left the world the way I found it,
Rachel thought, and to a person of her time and age and background there could be no greater sign of failure. In junior high and high school and college, she had been told that she could make a difference, and she had believed it, vowing never to knuckle under to the humdrum reality of everyday living. She was going to be someone, she was going to do something with her life. But she hadn't, she didn't. She'd had absolutely no impact on the world around her. Her lofty goals and ambitions had never been reached, had only been so much hot air. She'd planned to do great things and live a fascinating life. Now she was a wife and mother with a boring respectable job. She'd capitulated instantly, giving up without a fight, and she was exactly the type of person she swore she'd never be.
It was deep and dark, the place this thinking could lead her, and it took every ounce of emotional strength she had to keep from going there.
She'd been having a lot of dark thoughts since coming to The Reata.
The flipside was that it was exciting here. Being constantly on the alert, watching out for danger that could befall her husband and kids, keeping a paranoid eye out for the creepy gardener or one of those abusive administrators awakened some sort of primal instinct within her that was, if not predatory, at least as far from complacently nesting as she could possibly be. It was scary, yes, and she wanted to get away from the resort and back to the real world as soon as she possibly could, but . . .
But she felt more alive than she had in a very long time.
And, as strange as it seemed, there was an element of sexual excitement involved as wellâwhich was why she'd just gotten herself off while lifting weights. Maybe it was the constant adrenaline rush, but her desire was up, substantially increased from its usual level, and there was an urgency to it, as though she not only wanted sex but
needed
it. Desperately.
She liked that feeling, though she knew it was dangerous, and in the logical part of her mind she thought it was probably a feeling induced purposefully, somehow, by The Reata to gain her allegiance, to keep her here.
Odd how she had started to think of The Reata as an entity, not as a collection of buildings but as a singular being with thoughts, plans and motivations.
Evil
thoughts, plans and motivations.
That was true, and it was what kept her from embracing the experience. Last night, in fact, she'd had a nightmare about the resort, a dream in which she'd accompanied the chef on a midnight tour of his gourmet garden and had come across a plot of black, foul-smelling carrots overseen by a scarecrow made from her stolen underwear. Working the patch, pulling weeds, was the gardener, and he chuckled lewdly to himself as he periodically reached up to stroke the scarecrow's pantied face. She, the chef and the gardener harvested the carrots, which they put in a big basket and presented to a dark figure at the far end of the garden, a scraggly haired skeletal man wearing vaguely western clothes who sat upon a throne. She and the other two men were serfs, she realized, and he was their master. They were presenting him with an offering.
Rachel had no idea what any of it meant, or if it meant anything, but she had a sneaking suspicion that the dream was intended as a message, that it contained some sort of hidden meaning for her to decipher.
She was glad they'd be going home this afternoon.
There was movement in the mirror again, someone or something that ducked behind one of the larger pieces of exercise equipment just before she looked at it, and Rachel decided that it was time to leave. She stood, picking up her towel and tossing it in the wooden bin on the right side of the door. It was midmorning, but hers was still the only towel in there, and she wondered why no one seemed to be taking advantage of this state-of-the-art weight room with its expensive and truly amazing exercise equipment. Then she thought of Lowell's crazed overreaction and the constant feeling that she was not alone in here, and it occurred to her that maybe that was why.
Behind her, on one of the machines, a weight fell with a too-loud clang, and she jumped. Maybe it was a stray bar from her machine that had gotten stuck at an angle on its way down and had only now fallen into place, but she couldn't be certain and wasn't about to check, so she hurried out the door into the hot heat of the day.
She was still sweating from her workout, but though the desert sun was scorching, the dryness of the air actually evaporated the perspiration from her face. Rachel checked her watch. Ten fifteen. They'd promised the car by noon, but maybe Lowell had been able to harass them into getting it done quicker. She'd go by the room first to see if he was there. If not, she'd leave him a note and check on the kids at the pool, make sure they weren't getting into any trouble, make sure they were safe.
She walked down the gravel path between landscaped barrel and saguaro cactus, past a burbling fountain that reminded her that she was thirsty. She quickened her pace. From around the thick trunk of a cottonwood tree up ahead, another woman came toward her on the path, a haughty, ferret-faced woman of approximately her own age whom Rachel had seen cheering fiercely for Blodgett's team yesterday at the volleyball tournament. The woman met Rachel's gaze, then looked disdainfully away.
You're here for the off-season bargain rate just like we are,
Rachel thought, but smiled agreeably as the two of them approached each other, the same way she would smile at any person she happened to meet.
The woman stopped walking for a second as Rachel passed and purposely stuck out a foot to trip her. Rachel stumbled, almost fell, but caught herself and whirled to face her attacker, who was now calmly walking away.
“Bitch!” Rachel yelled, and instinctively reached down to pick up a stone. She threw it as hard as she could, and was gratified when it slammed against the woman's upper back, just above the U of her tank top, and drew blood.
The woman screamed and dropped the oversized bag she'd been carrying, crouching to grab a small rock of her own, which she heaved at Rachel, hitting her tennis shoe. Seconds later, they were in the midst of a full-fledged rock fight, and even as she dodged incoming pieces of sandstone and threw semisuccessful salvos of her own, Rachel wondered how it had come to this. This was insane. Two grown women throwing rocks at each other in the middle of a luxury resort? How could something like this happen?