"Help her to keep from falling into a despair that is too deep to salvage anything from."
I N W H I C H two boys try to save their dearest friend from herself.
The first rest stop declared mandatory by Harry came when we had finally gotten into Maine, right where the highway began to divert from the shore toward the more landlocked places.
"You got the picture ready?" His voice was so intense, the sort that girls would have gone gaga over in our sophomore year of high school. He wanted everything exact and straight to the point, and in cases like Macy's, I can't blame him.
It took an hour, but I had finally found a good one to expose her face, one that looked a lot like she did at the time.
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"Macy N. Kingston," he mused, "How does someone disappear like that?"
"People disappear when they don't know they're lost," I thought aloud, thinking back to a documentary I had seen about people who get lost in the mountains.
He reached his hand out to the door of Lucifer. "Then that gives rise to the question of whether or not Macy was lost, and what had made her lose direction."
He shrugged, almost giving no mind to it, before opening the door. I followed him out, and together we grabbed our suitcases, locked the minivan, and headed into the building.
The scent hit me first, with a whopping cross and jab to my nose. It smelled like a grandmother's basement of things that haven't been touched since she started having hip problems, and then the basement flooded and she hadn't dealt with it in years. It was revolting, and I gagged a bit. Harry stayed solemn, then approached the front desk, where an elderly man sat, his wrinkled hands grasping onto a newspaper from a month previous.
"Sir?"
The landlord was unresponsive.
"Landlord, sir?"
Nada.
"Sir." I could hear the strings getting pulled tighter and tighter with frustration in his voice.
The gray eyes of the man darted up to us, narrow and keen through the glasses perched on his nose.
"Wotcher need, boys?" he said gruffly. "Room? 's fifty bucks a night."
"Yes, but," I said, stepping forward, "we were wondering if you've seen a Macy Kingston around here?"
"What's she look like, son?" His eyes pierced me down to my soul.
I pulled up the image on my phone, then turned it to him. He stared for a long while at the contours of her face, the curls of her hair, the depth and darkness of her eyes, the pattern of her freckles. Maybe that would have just been me.
"You boys should talk to the ladies in rooms 14 and 16, upstairs. She may know what you need to know." He didn't look either of us in the eye. "How many nights you two staying? Pay upfront."
"Just tonight, sir." I forked over a fifty from my wallet, and in exchange, he handed me a key with the number 15 written on it in Sharpie.
