How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Gillian Roberts

roster a lot of times. Otherwise, the hairdos change, the music gets worse, but all the same, they blur, Miss Pepsalt.”
    “Does the name Dunstan Farmer strike a chord?”
    She gasped. The chord had been struck. Would it be trophies or detentions she recalled?
    “So you do remember him? The boy who moved there from England when he was young?”
    “Is this a prank call? Because I don’t find it funny at all.”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
    “Of course I remember Dunstan Farmer. Everybody in these parts would. We knew his parents, too, since they were born. They didn’t move here from any foreign country. They’ve lived here forever, for generations, except for when the family moved South and the tragedy happened. Atlanta, or Mobile—one of those places. They came back after. And stayed.” She sighed, twice. “Broke the town’s heart, how bad we felt for them.”
    “How…what happened?” I whispered.
    “Broke his neck in one of those freak accidents during a practice scrimmage down in Atlanta—or Mobile. I never can remember. He was a junior in high school. He was a good young man and it was a hard loss when he died. Family never got over it, either. Whoever you met, whoever sent you those photographs, was most certainly not our Dunstan Farmer.”
    When I hung up, I was dizzy, light-headed. The man who’d borrowed the identity of a dead teenager could be anybody—Edgar from Yorkshire, that married man who’d made himself seem dead. Or he could be a murderer. And where did Sasha fit into all this?
    I felt as if I were in that Poe story where the walls contract and crush their inhabitant. Something dreadful had happened and was continuing to happen, and I wanted desperately to do something about it, but I had no idea what that something could be. In lieu of action, I accepted motion.
    I left my room and walked down the hall toward the elevator bank, pondering the past twenty-four hours spent in the Twilight Zone. Nothing whatsoever made sense, yet it had all happened, starting with the mysterious motives, methods, and identities of the people who’d used Sasha’s and my room as their killing ground. And how the devil had they gotten in?
    And then I stopped in my tracks. At the other side of the elevator bay, a chambermaid’s cart piled high with towels and cleaning apparatus propped open a door. The most ordinary of hotel sights—but now it looked like one of the puzzle pieces.
    I tested my hypothesis by rushing through the open door. “Oh!” I said to the startled woman making up the bed. “I’m interrupting, sorry! I had wanted to use my bathroom, take a shower, but I’ll come back later.”
    “No, no. Is fine.” She waved me toward the bathroom. “Has clean towels already.”
    I went into the bathroom, closed the door, ran the taps and flushed. I went back into the room, sat down, picked up a book on the desk, flipped through it, then smiled at the chambermaid, who was nearly finished. “I’ll come back later,” I said. “No problem. Thanks for making the room look so great.”
    And that was how it could be done. Nobody had needed a key to our room. Chambermaids couldn’t be expected to know the ever-changing guest faces. So anyone could enter, look as if she belonged, and wait out the maid. And then later, after propping the door to make sure it didn’t lock, reenter along with an accomplice and a future victim.
    And the entry technique was possible twice every day. The same open-door policy held in the evenings, when towels were replaced and bedspreads removed. Sasha had mentioned that throughout the carnage, my bed had remained pristine, turned down, a chocolate on its pillow.
    A good thing to know if I ever wanted to murder or even simply ambush somebody. A bad thing to know if I ever again wanted to feel entirely comfortable or safe when entering a hotel room.
    It was only after I was downstairs and out on the boardwalk that I inventoried what I’d seen at the site of my