Lost Highway - Chapter 8

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WithoutSpeaking

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Oct 18, 2009
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Title: Lost Highway
Authors: 1screamingangel & wo_speaking
Rating: PG13 for thoughts of Chapter 4...

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Sam and Mel walked down the opposite side of the street from the hotel, hoping to walk past the Broken Horseshoe without being noticed. They were relieved to find the place closed up – Paul probably deciding to sleep in as well.

“Hester said it was a brick place with a white fence. That must be it up the road. Damn though, that is a ways from here,” Sam complained. “Let’s go back and get the car”

“No, then he’ll know we are coming and so will everyone else in town. Let’s just stay on this side of the road and walk casually like we are out for a stroll,” Mel suggested. She was more than a little hesitant about approaching creepy guy’s house.

“Yeah, cause everyone casually walks in the desert in the afternoon, right Mel?” Sam laughed.

“Very funny, Sam. Are we just going to knock on the door and say ‘Excuse me creepy black coat guy who thinks its ok to enter a woman’s hotel room and take her up against the wall, then leave without finishing or telling her your name…’”

Mel glanced at her friend. Sam wasn’t laughing.

“Now you are being the comedian, Mel. Let’s just go back to the bar and say to Paul, ‘Excuse me cute bartender with an Irish accent, why is it that you didn’t have sex with Mel last night...’”

The girls were silent as a truck passed them on the road, kicking up dust into their faces on the hot stretch of gravel road. They were each in their own little world thinking about what they really might say to the men they had met last night, the ones they were captivated by. Mel was trying to figure why Paul drew her to him while Sam was wondering if her unnamed cowboy could actually be the sort of decent guy she was creating in her mind.

“Mel, it’s the Irish accents.” Sam screamed. “They both have them. What are the odds of that occurring in a place like this? You’re the math genius; tell me, what are the odds?” Sam’s revelation had been gnawing at the back of her head since he had whispered “I don’t have a name, not tonight,” in her ear.

Mel stopped walking and looked at her friend with astonishment. “That’s right, you told me that. I forgot. It got lost in the moment of wanting to tell you about Paul. That is weird – it has to be more than a coincidence.”

Mel now had the chance to tell Sam some of the things Paul had told her in the quiet of the night. As she revealed what he had told her, she realized that he really hadn’t told her as much about himself as she thought he had. He talked a good game all right.

Mel told Sam about Paul’s father and brother and how his mother had died when he was a boy, about the house they had lived in.

He had told her about some of the crazy friends he had growing up and how tough it was to make the move into the city after his mother passed. Which city was that? He didn’t say. Was it Belfast? No, it wasn’t that one. Did he say Dublin? Then she realized he didn’t say which city. He didn’t name his friends except to say they all ran around like crazy, like they were a gang on the streets.

“You know Sam, he really didn’t tell me too much. Seems these guys are a complete mystery. We better start digging around to see what we can find out. Best start here,” Mel said as they approached the walk to the brick house with the white fence around it.

Sam tentatively knocked on the door holding the black Stetson carefully in the other hand. There was no answer. She knocked louder. Still no answer.

Mel went over to the window and looked in. No curtains.

“Seems no need for privacy around here. No one seems to have curtains. Doesn’t look like anyone is home, Sam.”

Sam knocked again more forcefully and the door opened with a creak that made both girls jump back from the entrance. They looked at each other, shrugged and walked right into the stranger’s place.

It was immaculately clean. Not a piece of furniture was out of place, no dust on the table. It smelled clean and there were no dishes in the sink. Not the typical bachelor pad the girls had come to expect. The table in the small sparse living room had a bowl of lemons on it and there were flowers in the kitchen window along with some little pots of herbs growing. Looked like weed to Mel. She had seen enough of it at the commune.

Sam looked at Mel and said in a too high-pitched voice, “This is sweet. Look Mel, he is more normal than you think. His house is clean. How many times have we been into a clean bachelor pad? Should we just go and pretend like we weren’t here? He even has a bowl of fruit on his table. Perfectly normal.” Mel thought Sam was either trying to convince herself or sway Mel to creepy guy’s side.

“A clean house of a man that lives alone is not normal Sam, and you know it. Better check to see if there are any woman’s clothes in the closet. Maybe he does live with someone.” Mel said to Sam as they separated and went in different directions in the house.

Mel called out to Sam, “We are already here so we might as well look around. Let’s see if we can find anything, just be careful to put things back the same way they were. There is a desk over here, I am going to look on it.”

Sam shouted from the one bedroom. This room’s door was open and there seemed to be another bedroom across the hall with the door closed. She thought it just a bit too much to look in that one. “No woman’s clothes in here Mel, just some clean and ironed shirts hanging neatly. And some really awesome cowboy boots.” Sam resisted the urge to try a pair on.

Mel went through a pile of important looking papers that included what looked like music sheets with notes written on them. “Guess he does really play the guitar Sam, there is some music here.”

Sam walked back into the room and grinned, smitten. “I wonder if he can sing too? He does have such a sexy voice,” Sam daydreamed as she picked up a couple of old Rolling Stone magazines.

“Hey, look Sam, there is a passport here. Is it our business to look at it?” Mel wanted to know what to do. She always tended to lean towards doing the right thing in life but was unsure at this moment what the right thing was. Her indecisiveness was why she questioned Sam about what to do next.

“Maybe we shouldn’t, Mel. It’s bad enough we are breaking and entering so we should not look,” Sam answered trying not to remind Mel that was exactly what her Irish cowboy did last night in their hotel room. It wasn’t like Sam to take the high road on issues like this at all.

“Let’s go Mel,” Sam said as she walked towards the front door, “maybe he will be back soon and we don’t want him to find us in his house. Come on,” she whined as she held the screen door open.

Mel couldn’t resist temptation. She looked up to see Sam growing tired of holding the door while she searched the road to town. Maybe if creepy guy would have told Sam his first name she would have put the passport down without looking. But he didn’t, so she chose to look.

Mel quickly opened the passport and saw his name. The picture didn’t look anything like the creepy guy she was familiar with, he was actually kind of cute.

As she was just about to replace the passport in the pile, she saw a second passport and took a long look at that one too. It was Paul’s. She put them both down and walked out of the brick house quickly, trying to make sense out of what she had just seen. They knew each other ... why were they being so secretive about it?

Mel exited David’s house quickly and was so surprised by what she had found, that she didn’t notice Sam had left the Stetson sitting on the table next to the bowl of lemons.
 
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