Hearts Inn

Chapter One-1

Chapter One

Vacancy

Rosalie Campbell didn’t know what

she’d expected to accomplish before her thirtieth birthday, but it certainly

didn’t include becoming the manager of a shitty motel in the middle of nowhere.

Behind the counter in the lobby of the once-beautiful Hearth Inn, she picked at

her nail polish, listening to the drone of the antique air conditioner as it

battled with the New Mexico heat. It had been two weeks since Gran had died and

one week since Rosalie had arrived to deal with the estate.

A guest came into the lobby,

ruddy complexion highlighted by how sweaty she was. She was round to the point

that it looked like someone had inflated her torso and it extended out to her

fingers. She spoke to Rosalie in rapid Spanish, the strange and familiar

cadence of mumbled couplets and triplets sending Rosalie into a panic.

Rosalie hated when this happened.

It rarely did back home in Philadelphia, but here in Ashhawk,

New Mexico, it had happened a dozen times already. A practiced shame flowed

through her, heating her face and making her hands fidget. She felt like an

interloper: a girl who looked Latina but didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

“Um, sorry,” she said. “I don’t

speak Spanish.”

She hoped the woman wouldn’t look

at her strangely or laugh at her.

“Oh, uh…” The woman fought giving

her a judgmental expression. “We need more towels.”

“What room?”

“Six,” the woman said. “Some

might say seis.”

Rosalie looked down at the

counter. “I’ll bring some right over.”

The woman left, and Rosalie

paused a moment before following her out of the drab lobby, heat overwhelming

her as she walked in front of the hotel. The hotel stood two stories high with

little balconies on the top level, and its crumbling exterior was an eyesore.

She noted the obvious areas for upgrades: paint the exterior, derust the window frames, replace

the dilapidated chairs outside the rooms where guests sat smoking

cigarettes and drinking beer near the parking lot. The faded sign of the Hearth

Inn that was peeling and sorry for the wear. Several letters were so faint the

sign looked like it read Heat In. It was apropos; the heat was the only

constant in the town aside from the trickle of truckers and the plodding of

time. Below the sign was a small sign reading Vacancy, with a hook in

front of it where she would hang the part of the sign reading No if she

were to sell out the rooms. The rusted hook hadn’t been used in years.

As she opened the door to the

housekeeping room, Rosalie was met with more dry heat and the choking smell of

fabric softener, chemicals, and lint. She held her breath as she found a stack

of haphazardly folded towels. The room was filthy, the corners almost obscured

by dirt and lint, while the rest of the floor had a layer of fine desert dust

spread across it, such that it crunched under her shoes. The shelves opposite

the washer and dryer were unorganized and full of empty bottles and rags worn

to threads. As she turned to go, she almost tripped over a bottle of bleach

that sat uncapped on the floor next to the door.

Rosalie slammed the towels down

on top of the dryer and looked around for the cap. Had the housekeeper really

left an open bottle of bleach right there where someone could trip over it?

Rosalie looked all over for the

cap and was about to give up hope of finding it when she spotted it tucked in

the corner behind the door, cozying up to a large insect Rosalie didn’t

recognize, belly-up, legs curled.

Rosalie couldn’t hold in a noise

of disgust as she gingerly reached for the cap with two fingers, lifting it out

of the dust away from the insect and screwing the cap on the bottle. She slung

the bottle onto the lowest shelf and grabbed the towels, eager to leave the

room.

When she’d

arrived at the hotel for the first time in fifteen years, she realized her

childhood memories of the place had been rosy; snapshots of splashing in the

pool while Gran watched, roasting marshmallows behind the building, and walking

down the street to get pizza every summer were miles away from the rundown

building that stood in the same spot. Rosalie only intended to stay in Ashhawk for as long as it took to sell the place and get

back to her life in Philadelphia. She couldn’t imagine living here for longer

than a few weeks. How Gran had lived here for forty years baffled her.

Rosalie

knocked on the door of room six, bracing herself with an obligatory customer

service smile. When the door opened, she held the towels forward. The woman

grabbed them without a word of thanks, then said, “You know, our bathroom isn’t

very clean.”

Rosalie

tried to maintain her professional smile, though her will to do so vanished.

“I’ll get

someone to come clean it.” Rosalie gritted her teeth to avoid snapping at the

woman. She wished she could tell her she was no happier with the accommodations

herself, that she’d been saddled with this shitty hotel and had no more desire

to run it than she wanted to clean the woman’s bathroom.

Rosalie went

back to the housekeeping room, tied up her long, dark hair, and put on a housekeeping

apron. She bit her lip the entire time she scrubbed the bathroom, mouth pulled

together tight to avoid cursing at the guests. When she finished, she went back

into the lobby, relishing the coolness but choking on the Freon-thickness of

the air. She opened a rickety file cabinet, flipped to the sparse personnel

files, and opened the record of the single other employee currently working at

Hearth Inn, an old woman named Susan who couldn’t see six inches in front of

her face.

When Rosalie

had seen the poor state of things, her first impulse had been to fire Susan.

But there weren’t enough hours in the day for Rosalie to do all the

housekeeping herself, and Susan had worked at Hearth for thirty-five years.

Rosalie didn’t want to fire her without an immediate replacement and plan for

her retirement. Rosalie was there temporarily, and Susan appeared to be related

to one of the local Native tribes.

Rosalie sat

back down behind the counter, trying to make sense of a business she knew

nothing about. Having a degree in accounting, Rosalie had foolishly thought she

should know how to run the business until she could sell it. It couldn’t be too

hard, so long as the rooms were clean and there were no bedbugs. She could

manage the books and the payroll and, if worse came to worse, call law

enforcement to ask some of the less savory guests to leave. But the job was

proving more difficult than she imagined, which made her miss the

predictability of her nine-to-five office job in a clean, well-maintained

building in Philadelphia terribly.

The lobby

was more spacious than it needed to be. A worn carpet bearing the brands of

local ranchers stretched from the tired wooden counter across the large room to

a stone fireplace that hadn’t seen a flame in decades. There was a single

sagging couch set against the window opposite the door, and light strained in

through dusty blinds. A weary plant drooped in the corner. The walls and

furniture were too dark, all wood and forest greens and browns. At twenty-nine

years old, with her pink blouse and lively brown eyes, Rosalie was the youngest

thing in the room. But listening to the drone of the air conditioner drown out

her computer speakers as the Internet struggled to load even the simplest

pages, Rosalie felt herself aging.

As she flipped

through a file reading REV MGMT 07, the air conditioner in the window sputtered

and coughed. Used to the constant drone, Rosalie looked up. The lights

flickered. She held her breath, hoping it was a blip. The lights came back on,

then flickered off again, remaining off as the air conditioner whined to a

halt, leaving Rosalie in a silent panic.

She turned

to her computer, determined to call a handyman to come fix whatever had gone

wrong, but realized the Internet wouldn’t work without power. Her cellphone got

some data service in this part of the state, though it was unreliable. Rosalie

figured it was her bad luck when no signal came up and even a basic search

yielded a blank page.

A large man

in a denim shirt with the sleeves pulled off opened the door, letting the bells

clang against the glass. He was a regular who came to stay when he and his

“lady friend” were on the outs.

“Power’s

out,” he said.

“Sorry about

that. I’m working on it.”

The man

nodded and turned his burly body back toward the outside of the hotel.

“You

wouldn’t happen to know any reputable electricians in town, would you?” Rosalie

asked.

“Check the

fuse box first. No use paying for an electrician to come flip a switch for

you.”

Rosalie bit

her lip and nodded, feeling foolish. She was a numbers and lines girl, not

someone useful with her hands. She debated asking the man if he knew where the

fuse box was but didn’t want to embarrass herself.

Rosalie left

the fading chill of the office and wandered around the building. She had no idea

where the circuit breaker might be, but looking for it was better than

doing nothing. She walked around the building, finding nothing resembling a

utility box, though she did locate the gas meter. Then she remembered the

maintenance shed out back where there had once been a fire pit for roasting

marshmallows.

The land at

the back of the hotel sat crisping in the sun, the cracked earth and scraggly,

dry shrubbery appearing exactly as they had fifteen years ago. A pile of bricks

lay forgotten where the fire pit used to be. The land stretched on and on out

into the desert, and Rosalie wasn’t sure where the property line was. In the

distance were sage-colored hills, appearing motionless by day but alive with

the sound of coyotes at night.

Daring to

enter the rundown shed with its clutter of old tools and cobwebs, Rosalie saw a

promising lead—a metal box against the wall. Grateful it wasn’t locked or too

far inside the hazardous shed, she opened it, squinting to see one of the main

breakers was flipped in the wrong direction. Faintly proud of herself, she

reached forward. But before her hand met the switch, anxiety took hold of her.

What if there was something wrong with the electrical system? What if she got

shocked or electrocuted? Glad the soles of her shoes were rubber, she lifted

the hem of her blouse, feeling it pull tight around her waist, and used the

material to flip the switch from off to on. She heard a few air conditioning

units shake back on toward the hotel, but nothing else happened. She let her shirt

fall back against her body and tiptoed out of the shed, careful not to let her

foot catch on a wayward shovel.

Back in the

office, the lights were on, the printer was making a faint buzzing sound, and

nothing was on fire. But after the door closed behind her and the bells

clanged, she realized her air conditioner hadn’t come back to life. She

approached it, frowning at the ancient monstrosity. She turned the dials and

pressed all the buttons, but nothing happened. She unplugged it and plugged it

in again, hoping it just needed a reboot. Still nothing happened.

Fed up with

the crumbling building, Rosalie let out an exasperated sigh. Living in New

Mexico was bad enough with air

conditioning. She debated retreating to her room to lose herself in a book but

knew she needed to work if she was to ever escape Ashhawk.

She plopped

down in her swiveling chair, twisting her hair into a bun that unraveled down

her back as soon as she leaned forward. She

Googled HVAC Ashhawk, hoping for a few

seconds as the Internet chugged along that a decent result would appear. But

the closest HVAC service was in Albuquerque. Rosalie couldn’t live without the

AC, so she packed up her laptop, locked the front door, taped up a sign with

her cellphone number on it, and got into Gran’s vintage Oldsmobile parked

outside. The diner down the street would have air conditioning, Internet, and

most importantly, coffee.