Chapter Three
Let’s go,” Alex said, ducking his head back into the hybrid RX 450h.
Peter Hasselstrom unfolded his lanky, six-foot-three frame from the front passenger seat and gave his shaggy mane a shake. “Dude ripped you off.” Peter was the palest blond person Alex had ever met in Los Angeles, but he was a skilled cinematographer. Even more significantly, he was available and interested in Alex’s project. “He would have jumped at any chance to stay open. You could have taken two rooms and he’d have creamed himself.”
Alex shrugged. “It’s only money.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever heard say that who meant it,” Ellen Playfair said. The pixyish brunette sitting in the backseat was Peter’s sound tech. Also his girlfriend. Alex had deduced that she was more skilled at the latter than the former.
“I guess it just doesn’t mean that much to me.” A facile answer, he knew, but honest. He had never not had money. He had been born with it, raised with it, and had inherited much, much more. Ellen, like others he had known who had spent their lives without it, was obsessed with money. He had it, but it was blood money and he didn’t like to talk about it.
He went to the back and grabbed a couple of equipment cases. Peter was in charge of the actual shooting, while Alex would be doing on-site research and showing Peter what to shoot. Peter was fanatical about his cameras—or Alex’s cameras; he had purchased them, but Peter treated them like they were his, and as precious and fragile as Fabergé eggs. So Alex carried in the other gear and left the cameras to Peter. The documentary was Alex’s project, conceived by him and self-financed, but he wanted to be seen as part of the crew. Unless there was disagreement, at which time he would not hesitate to pull rank.
When he had deposited the cases on the flagstone walkway linking the rooms, he tried to peer through the darkness at the trees beyond the parking lot. In daylight, on the way up the mountain, he had seen plenty of healthy-looking evergreens. At some elevations, bark beetles were destroying the big pines, but he didn’t know the situation right around Silver Gap. He would find out, come morning, whether the surrounding trees were a vibrant green or a dull, rusty red.
“I’ll check us in,” he told Peter and Ellen. “I guess you two have your pick of the rooms, so let me know if there’s one you want.”
They were still standing in the parking lot. The rooms were individual cabin units, pine-walled and steep-roofed, spreading out around them and disappearing into the trees. “Far away from yours seems like a good idea,” Peter said. “Ellen’s one hell of a screamer.”
“Thanks for the warning.” Alex started toward the office. He didn’t mind if Peter and Ellen were way out in the woods. He hadn’t brought them along to be his friends, but to do the job he was paying them for.
When he stepped through the doors into the lobby, bare but for a pile of what looked like furniture under a blue tarp, he heard the motel owner saying goodbye to someone on the phone. Alex made his way to the front desk, which, like the rest of the room, had been stripped of everything functional.
He had his mobile phone, if anyone needed to reach him, and he didn’t expect any calls through the motel’s switchboard. As long as there were still beds in the rooms, they would be fine.
Charles Durbin passed through a doorway behind the counter, smiling, and Alex reached for his wallet. He had a feeling he would be doing a lot of that over the next few weeks.
There were beds in his room, two of them. Those and a straight-backed chair and an empty dresser with scratch marks on it where a TV had sat were the only furnishings. Two nights earlier he’d been at home in Santa Monica, in a nice California bungalow eight blocks from the beach, on a street where the neighbors were appropriately progressive and culturally diverse. He owned two homes next to one another; the second served as the offices for the Alex Converse Foundation.
The night after that was spent at a Hilton in St. George, Utah. Nothing special, but the bed was comfortable and the room had a TV and a dresser, towels and sheets, a working sink, inoffensive artwork on the walls—all the amenities one would expect.
This place, not so much.
The room had been stripped. The mattresses were bare. The TV and anything resembling the traditional clock radio were gone. Dark spots on the wood-paneled wall showed where pictures had once hung. There was no toilet paper or tissues, much less little shampoos or paper-wrapped soaps.
The Durbins had promised to bring linens soon. Alex guessed they had canceled their linen service and would have to rummage up somebody’s personal sheets and towels. He just hoped they were clean.
Before leaving LA, he had checked out the motel online. He had tried to make reservations, but the phone was never answered, and finally he had decided to take the chance and drive up. If the place had been full, he would have offered somebody cash to check out early, or rented a house or cabin locally.
Renting the whole place might have been extravagant, but such a small indulgence was a drop in the bucket. A minor sin. He was responsible for much greater, and the fortune that weighed on him came from a catalog of horrors he didn’t like to acknowledge, although it confronted him every time he looked in the mirror, and haunted his dreams at night.
He had to shake off this mood, try to focus on the positive impact his film could have if he could bring it off right. But it was hard; he was tired and he was starving and at this moment, his greatest desires in life were for clean sheets and towels and maybe some toilet paper.
Just in case.