Suspicious River Read Online Free Page A

lip, which tasted bitter, like iodine, and I nodded. Millie put the scaly tip of her left thumb between her teeth and said, “What does he act like at home? Weird?”
    “Normal,” I said, and I pictured Rick on the couch in boxer shorts watching the television blink. “He goes to work. He cooks.” I held my hands up in front of me as if to show Millie there were no clues in them, or trouble.
    “Wow.” She shook her head as she pushed backward out the door.
    In a casual flash, like tonguing your teeth quick and tasting something sour, I hated Millie for being so pale and inquisitive—a slow perplexed look even about her hair. But then she took her hand out of her mouth to wave good-bye, the tin bells on the glass door jangling as she stepped out, and I remembered she wasn’t family, or a friend, just someone whose job I shared, who wouldn’t bother to think too long or hard about the details of my life, and the bad feeling passed.
    After Millie was gone, the shadow of her Pinto moving briefly over the wet parking lot tar like a phantom horse, the empty office hummed its familiar silence, and I heard an empty click in my ears like the hammer of a toy gun, fired, when I swallowed.
     
    After a while, I opened the leather-bound guest register.
    There were seven names penciled onto the weak red lines under Friday October 15. Six of them were in Millie’s loopy handwriting, so I knew they were likely to be stuck under the wrong dates, wrong arrival times, last names misspelled or inaccurate altogether. Millie was a bad receptionist by any standards, and she’d most likely be fired soon, I thought—though she didn’t seem to be aware of that herself, complaining daily about the job as though she’d always have it. But all Millie needed as far as I could tell was one more major blunder like Labor Day weekend: Not a vacancy in all of Suspicious River, and Millie’d given the same room to a family of four and a couple from Ohio within a few hours of each other.
    It was an accident.
    Millie had checked the family in first, but they’d gone to Grandma’s house for dinner across town before taking their bags upstairs. The couple from Ohio came later, wearing matching polo shirts, purple, confirmation number for their reservation firmly in hand, but Millie couldn’t find their names in the ledger.
    Of course, the motel was packed, but it was impossible for Millie to know that since she hadn’t bothered to do the paperwork for a crowd of couples and their kids who’d come in just as she was eating her sack lunch and talking to her mother on the phone. Millie just handed out keys and ran credit cards, eating, chewing her fingers, talking long distance the whole time.
    Perhaps Millie simply panicked when the couple got articulate and angry, college-educated and exhausted from their drive, and asked Millie to produce a manager. Or, more likely, Millie knew she’d be out of there, at the drive-in necking or watching
Psycho II
with her boyfriend Ed before the trouble started. In any case, the Ohio couple waited, impatient and tapping their Nikes officially on the dull linoleum of the office floor while Millie wandered around the Swan Motel with her master key, knocking on doors, looking for an empty room to give them. When no one answered, Millie opened the door and peeked in to see if there were any bags, if the beds were mussed. Of course, one family’s room was untouched: They were just that minute sitting down to pork chops on the other side of Suspicious River.
    So Millie assigned that one to the couple, gave them the duplicate key, thinking, or so she said, that she’d just misplaced the original. And when the family of four came back to their room, the couple from Ohio was naked in it, sitting at the edge of one of the double beds, smoking a joint and watching a blank-eyed woman writhe on a leopard skin bedspread while a man stood over her, masturbating into her mouth.
    For only six dollars you could have this film