The Sun Down Motel

It’s November 1982 in Fell, New York, and 20-year-old Vivian Delaney sits in her car at the Sun Down Motel listening to the radio report on the discovery of 18-year-old Tracy Waters’s body in a ditch. It’s 11:00 p.m. and Viv is dreading the start of her overnight shift alone at the front desk. Inside, she has brief and occasional interactions with Johnny (a coworker), Janice (the owner), guests such as alcoholic Mrs. Bailey, and at least three ghosts of those who’ve died there: the smoking man, the little boy, and Betty.

Carly Kirk is 20 years old in 2017 and drove to Fell, New York, from Illinois the day prior with the inheritance money from her mother. Her mother passed from cancer at 51 and split her belongings between Carly and Carly’s older brother, Graham. In Illinois, Carly is enrolled in business school. Graham and his fiancée, Hailey, are concerned about her trip to Fell, which she’s undertaken to find out what happened to their mother’s sister, Viv, in 1982. The only information she has comes from two newspaper articles, one of which names Jenny Summers as her aunt’s roommate.

Vivian ends up in Fell, New York, after hitchhiking from Illinois to New York City to pursue her dream of studying acting. The man who she hitches a ride drives the wrong way at a detour. She insists that she said New York City, but he says he thought she meant she needed to get to Upstate New York. He offers to take her to get a meal in Rochester, where she can take a bus into New York City. Viv sees the motel coming up ahead and asks him to pull over and let her out. He asks if she is sure, as the place looks sketchy, and puts his hand on her thigh.

Viv hurries to gather her belongings and goes inside, where she meets Janice, the motel’s owner. Janice says it’s dangerous to hitch rides along this road and offers her a discount for the night; alternatively, Viv can work Janice’s shift for her and stay the night for free. Viv agrees in order to save her money for food. Viv smells someone smoking nearby, even though Janice said nobody else is there. Janice gives her the key to room 104 and tells Viv she can nap and wash up before her shift starts at 11:00 p.m.

Viv goes outside with her room key and $20; there’s nobody there. Every room is dark, and she hears a shoe scrape gravel in a dark corner of the lot. She tentatively says hello, thinking of the man who put his hand on her leg. She showers and lies in bed listening, but the motel is silent. Her thoughts spiral before she manages to fall asleep.

Carly goes to an address on Greville Street that she found tucked in her mother’s drawer. The building is unlocked, and she goes inside. There’s a short hallway with mailboxes. She crosses paths with a college student named Heather Atkins who is looking for a roommate and thinks Carly is there about her advertisement.

Heather doesn’t really need the money because her parents pay for the apartment, but she doesn’t want to live alone because the apartment makes noise at night. Carly tells Heather she’s looking for her missing aunt. Heather, who is a local, says that she doesn’t know Carly’s aunt but that there have been a lot of deaths in Fell. Heather offers to help Carly get the tenant records for the apartment since her dad is friends with the landlord.

They bond quickly over their shared interest in true crime, and Heather says Carly can stay at the apartment with her for as long as she needs. Carly brings her things back to the apartment from the motel, and they order pizza for dinner. Heather lays on the floor due to her back pain from a bicycle accident two years prior. She refuses surgery and has a shelf of prescription pills in the bathroom. She is studying medieval literature at Fell College. Heather suggests they try to find her aunt’s roommate in the phone book. She tells Carly that The Sun Down Motel is haunted, and they decide they should go to the motel to see if they can find more information on Viv.

Viv ends up staying in Fell and continues picking up shifts from Janice. She gets an apartment on Greville Street with Jenny, a night shift nurse at the local nursing home who works the same hours as Viv. Jenny is newly single after a bad breakup. Viv tells Jenny she didn’t really want to go to New York City, but she wanted to leave home and it was something she had told her mother. Jenny doesn’t want to be in Fell but she hasn’t left because her job is good. She wants to marry a rich man, while Viv doesn’t want to get married.

Viv’s life has been about others’ expectations rather than her own, so she enjoys living in Fell, which she feels “belongs” to her alone. When she’s not working, Viv watches cheap second-run shows at the movie theater, eats sandwiches from the deli, and sometimes treats herself to a milkshake. She cut her hair shoulder length even though her mom said good girls don’t have short hair. When Viv speaks with her mother on the phone, she is furious at Viv; she’s not sending money and asks why she can’t be like her little sister Debby. Debby is 18 and wants to be a teacher, working extra shifts at the ice cream shop in Illinois to pay for college. When Viv speaks with Debby, she talks as if their father will call again, but Viv says he’s never coming back.

3:00 a.m. is when Viv becomes delirious during her shift at the motel. She feels that night people and day people live completely different lives. The motel is different at night too: “The Sun Down itself seems alive in the middle of the night with the noises” (35). Viv smells the cigarette smoke again and is determined to find out where it’s coming from. She checks two men into the motel, a salesman and a trucker, and then follows the scent of the cigarette smoke to the walkway: Nobody is there. She hears a man’s heavy footsteps and thinks it must be a ghost. The motel sign goes dark. She heads back toward the office as the motel lights start blinking out. The office light is the last to go out. The motel room doors start opening on their own.

As Viv reaches the office, a door on the second floor bangs open. She hears footsteps pounding down the stairs and a child’s voice echoes, saying that he wants to go in the pool. Viv hurries inside the office, where the air stings her eyes as though smoky. She clutches her bag, terrified as a man cries out from the other side of the desk for someone to call an ambulance. In a panic, she runs to her car.

Viv’s car won’t start. A 30-year-old woman with curly blond hair and dark eyes steps in front of it. She is wearing a long-sleeved dress and slams her hands down on Viv’s hood with a bang. The woman’s mouth moves as she stares at Viv through the windshield: “Viv could hear no sound, or perhaps there was none. But it wasn’t hard to translate the single word. Run” (40). The woman is gone when Viv looks back up. The motel is still dark. Viv crawls into the back seat and curls into a ball. When the lights come back on, she is still crying.

In Carly’s timeline, Heather and Carly arrive at a seemingly empty Sun Down Motel. Carly guesses it looks exactly as it did in her aunt’s time. Carly tries to imagine where her aunt would’ve gone; her car would have been left behind if she had left on foot. Carly asks Heather what else is around the motel: It’s mostly farmland and trees divided by the road the motel is on.

Heather tells Carly that the motel pool is closed because somebody died there. A man asks them what they’re doing there, and Carly says they’re just looking. He warns them they shouldn’t be around the pool. The man, named Oliver, is about 30, and Carly asks him to see the office. Heather gives Carly a hiring ad for the same night shift that was her aunt’s. Heather convinces Carly to stay with her at her apartment and take the job at the Sun Down. Carly thinks it over and decides she will.