By then Mary Beth was looking over her shoulder and backing up. She didn’t see which way Alma pointed and went in the opposite direction, distracted by what she was doing and the ringing of Alma’s phone.

The older woman reached for the purse at her feet and peered at the screen. “Your dad,” Alma said happily. “My goodness. Howard sent me a text. I do believe that’s a first for him.”

“I think you’re right.” Mary Beth smiled. “You’re a bad influence.”

Alma was all about communication. Howard did his best to keep up with modern life and he liked gadgets as much as the next guy. But he’d stayed away from texting, insisting that he liked to talk to people.

Evidently Alma had persuaded him to change his mind.

“I’m gonna answer it right now. If I don’t, he’ll think he did it wrong.”

Alma fumbled for her reading glasses and slipped them on her nose, tapping at the on-screen keyboard.

“Tell him I said hello,” Mary Beth instructed.

“I will.” Alma and Howard exchanged messages for several minutes.

Mary Beth kept her eyes on the road and left Alma to it. She sensed the older woman’s mood brightening with each incoming and outgoing beep.

Eventually Alma looked up. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know.” Mary Beth glanced down at the odometer. “About five miles outside Brickell.”

“You went the wrong way.” Alma’s low voice sounded serious.

Mary Beth glanced at her. “I can turn around up ahead. Looks like there’s a place to pull off.”

Alma put the phone back in her purse, along with her reading glasses, as Mary Beth pulled into the weed-choked driveway of a boarded-up motel. The room doors were sprayed with graffiti and a couple stood open, offering glimpses of empty rooms with scarred walls where fixtures and pipes had been stolen for scrap.

There had to be more than one resident snake somewhere in the overgrown grounds, which Mary Beth had no intention of exploring.

The front office windows had been smashed in long ago. Shards of glass lay on the walkway that led to the rooms. A rat scurried into one of the rooms. Mary Beth shuddered. She hoped Alma hadn’t seen that. The other woman said nothing.

The tires bumped over potholes as Mary Beth drove slowly in a half circle, pointing the car out toward the road before she rolled to a stop. The one-story structure was crumbling in places, held together by thick foliage that almost swallowed the old sign. But not quite.

Below the cracked neon tubing that spelled out VACANCY/NO VACANCY were faded letters in paint. ROOMS BY THE HOUR.

Mary Beth wasn’t going to read that sign aloud. “Looks like the kudzu is winning,” was all she said. “It always does.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t torn this damn place down.”

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen