Act of God

want VCRs would rather be on the top floor, no feet thumping above their heads, and that way there wouldn’t be so much risk for me from thieves, too, like there might be on the downstairs units. But no, your Darbra girl and her friend, they wanted a downstairs unit and no two ways about it.”
    “Why?”
    “Be on a level with the beach, I suppose.”
    I looked around me. “Can I see then room?”
    Utt did the pit-shooting routine again with his fingers on the chin. “Don’t see why not. Won’t even charge you for it.” He reached behind him to what might have been a rack I couldn’t see, because he came back with a key on a clear plastic tag. Hipping up the hinged part of the counter, he said, “Come on.”
    We walked out the door and away from the beach along the concrete sidewalk outside the first-floor units. He stopped at number 123.
    I said, “They were willing to take this unit?”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “You have second-floor units closer to the water?”
    “Available for that week, you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “I did, even a couple you could see the surf from, you didn’t mind craning your neck a little at the window. But like I said, they wanted one on the first floor.”
    Utt put the key in the lock and turned it, waving me across the threshold. The room had a queen-sized bed centered on one wall. Centered on the other wall was a low bureau with a seventeen-inch Zenith on top of it and a VCR on top of the television. Past them on the same wall was a doorway opened so you could see part of the bathroom. As Utt closed the unit door behind us, I saw a short refrigerator in the corner, a small table with two dinette chairs in the other corner. The air inside the room was cool, but stale. “Has anybody been in here since Darbra and her friend?” Utt shook his head. “Just the maid. And me to clean up the sink.”
    “The sink?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    We walked to the bathroom. The facilities were all almond porcelain, but there was a darker discoloration at the bottom of the wash basin.
    “Took me most of an hour to get it that good. Damned if I shouldn’t check these things before they leave, but you can’t always.”
    “What color was it when you first saw it?”
    “The stain?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t know from colors that well. Kind of yellowish?”
    “Any idea what it was?”
    “No.”
    Yellow convertible, yellow paint, maybe? I looked around {he bathroom, but it didn’t have any character to it, and it had been cleaned since they’d been there.
    We came back into the main room. Even with the window closed, the traffic sounds from Route 35 were noticeable and probably annoying, you were trying to fall asleep through them.
    I went over to the bureau. “Mind if I go through these?”
    “The drawers?”
    “Yes.”
    “Help yourself.”
    I did. Nothing but contact paper, in little clown shapes. “You said something before about noise?”
    “Noise? Oh, right. Their last night here.”
    “That would be what?”
    “Friday.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning nine days ago. I rent the weeks Saturday after-noon to Saturday morning if I can. Out by eleven, do a whirlwind, then in by two with the next one.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Well, it must have been only about ten p.m., and being that it was a Friday and all, I wouldn’t have cared too much about the noise. But I had an elderly couple above them, I and the old folks come down to me to complain. Fairness to them, I could hear it soon’s I opened the office door. So I told the old folks I’d talk to the people in 123.”
    “To Darbra and her friend.”
    “Right.”
    “And did you?”
    “Put on a sweater—we get a real chill off the water here, saves like you wouldn’t believe on air-conditioning. Back in Fargo , we got our electricity cheap on account of the Garrison Conversion, but around here, you like to save every kilowatt you can.”
    I didn’t want to know what the “Garrison Conversion” was.
    “So you came down to this room?”
    “Right. The noise was so bad, some kind of rock music,
    I thought the door was going to shake right off the frame.
    I knock, and I don’t get anything, so I start pounding when the douchebag—that’s what they call real jerks around here, ‘douchebag.’ ”
    “So I’ve heard.”
    “I thought of her boyfriend like that. Great name for him, too.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Well, Darbra, she couldn’t have been more sociable. I don’t mean coming on to men, either.