The Resort by Bentley Little

where the manager had disappeared. “Let’s get out of here.”
    He peered into her eyes, and for a second she thought she was going to get one of his moralistic lectures about Doing the Right Thing. But then he allowed himself to be led away, and the two of them walked in silence around the corner, past the front desk and through the lobby, absurdly conspicuous in their bathing suits. At the concierge’s station near the door, the manager stood talking to the elderly man behind the desk. He smiled at them as they passed by. “Enjoy your stay,” he told them.
    As they stepped outside into the blinding sunlight, Rachel tried to imagine what the manager would sound like if he were yelling angrily, attempting to determine whether he could be the one she heard from inside the bathroom.
    And tried to forget the panicked, terrified cries of the girl.
    And the thump of her body against the wall.

Nine
    Gloria Pedwin stared out the dusty windshield of the car at the uninhabited wasteland before them. This was, without a doubt, the worst and most depressing vacation they’d ever taken.
    And she blamed Ralph.
    For the past three years, they’d spent their summer break in Southern California at a resort in Laguna Beach that overlooked the ocean and gave them breathtaking views of the sunsets. But this year Ralph had read an article in an inflight magazine about the “Indian Loop,” a historic and supposedly spectacular trip that triangulated between the scenic wonders of Arizona’s Navajo nation and the Grand Canyon. He’d been so excited and enthusiastic that, against her better judgment, she’d allowed him to prevail in his choice of vacation destination.
    They’d flown into Phoenix and rented a car, a comfortable Cadillac, and for a few brief moments she thought everything was going to turn out well. But the vacation went straight downhill from there. Canyon de Chelly had been windy and outrageously hot, and the adjoining town, Chinle, was a poverty-stricken nightmare where the only restaurant was an overcrowded Taco Bell and theirs were the sole white faces in sight. Monument Valley was more of the same, and while the accommodations at the Grand Canyon were much nicer, the place was overrun with tourists: obnoxious Germans and Japanese who insisted on shoving their way through crowds of mild-mannered Americans to photograph the same stationary geologic formations that their countrymen had been capturing on film for decades.
    Thank God she’d had the good sense to insist that Ralph book a week at The Reata. It was quite far out of their way, down in the southern portion of the state, but she’d read about it in Sunset magazine’s “Great Hotels of the Southwest” issue and had instantly been captivated by the contrast between the barren desert landscape and the opulent accommodations plunked right down in the middle of it. The Reata was a luxury resort catering to wintertime visitors from the East, and in the summer months rates were discounted tremendously, as no civilized people would dare brave the heat. Of course, she used both the lowered price and the exoticism of the desert’s outrageous summer temperatures to entice Ralph into agreeing to a five-night stay—although she’d been more than prepared to battle it out and insist that since he’d gotten to choose the first half of their trip, she should choose the second.
    But where was The Reata? Ralph had been mumbling to himself for the past half hour, and this rough primitive road hardly seemed like the way to a luxury resort. They were clearly lost, but Ralph had gotten them into this and he could damn well get them out. Gloria lifted the folded newspaper from her lap and began perusing the front page. At a lobby shop in the Grand Canyon’s El Tovar, she’d picked up several of the most prominent papers from around the country—including her own beloved New York Times —in