Free The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild Page A

Thursday afternoon, and Millie had a night off ahead of her so she was in one of her more cheerful moods.  She was short, dumpy and would never see forty again, but she never seemed to lack for gentlemen friends.  Though no more husbands, she said—three had been plenty.
    “Come on, don’t be coy.  I creep into the bedroom at six in the morning, I can smell the sex.  Besides, you haven’t slept this good in a year.”
    She grinned, to show she was just taking a friendly interest, and Beth shrugged her shoulders under a blue quilted cotton housecoat that she thought made her look heavy.  After all, it wasn’t a secret.
    “His name is Phil Owings, and he’s just come from California.  He’s inherited a house out here.”
    “What does he do?”
    “I told you—he’s inherited a house.  He’s trying to sell it.”
    “So what is he, a playboy?  What’s he like in bed?”
    Beth considered the question for a moment.
    “Enthusiastic,” she said, and then added, “grateful.”
    This made Millie laugh—her own tastes seemed to run to truck driver types who left bruises.
    “What does he do, lick your hand?  Or does he just lick anything he can find?  God, how I love a man with imagination!”
    They both burst out laughing then.
    “He’s nice,” Beth replied at last.
    “Which means that he doesn’t have any imagination?”
    “He tries hard to please.  He’s been married, but I don’t think he’s had much experience.”
    Suddenly, for no reason she could precisely define, she was embarrassed.  Millie was never embarrassed, but for her sex was just a kind of indoor sport—like ping pong, except not so serious.  Phil wasn’t like that.
    “He’s invited me over to his place for tonight,” Beth said, almost as if she were offering an apology.  “I think he was just waiting until he found a car he could afford.”
    “Then how’s he been getting here?”
    “He walks.”
    “What is he, a health nut?”
    “No, nothing like that.”  Beth smiled, feeling safer.  “His place is only about a mile from here.”
    Millie was instantly suspicious.  “Which place?”
    “He calls it ‘the Moonlight.’”
    “The old roadhouse?  Oh Fuck.”  Millie shook her head and shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her pink terrycloth bathrobe.  “Christ, you sure can pick ’em.  I wouldn’t spend the night in that place, not for anything—not if I could have Burt Reynolds in bed with me.”
    “You probably wouldn’t even like Burt Reynolds.  He probably doesn’t smell bad enough for you.”
    But the joke fell flat—Millie didn’t even seem to be listening.
    “I’m giving you good advice,” she said, somehow no longer willing to look Beth in the face.  “Stay away from that place.  Make him take you to a motel—let him move in here.  Just stay away from that place.  Bad things happen at the Moonlight.”
    . . . . .
    Bad things happen at the Moonlight.   Well, maybe not anymore.
    Because when Millie, who was usually the chattiest woman alive, could finally he brought to spell out what she meant, it just ended up sounding silly.
    “You haven’t lived here long enough to know,” she said, as if excusing Beth for her ignorance, “But I was already working at the Grand Union when Harve Wickham hanged himself up at the Moonlight.  The policeman who cut him down was a drinking buddy of my third old man, so I got to hear all the gruesome details.  I would have anyway.  It was all anybody could talk about for a month.
    “And there’s more.  The place was a motel back when I was in high school. You know the type, where they don’t expect you to come with luggage—hell, half the girls I knew lost it up there.  And then some guy slashed his girlfriend into thin strips in one of the rooms, and they closed the place down.  It was real bad.  The newspapers ran pictures of the room where it happened—bloodstains the size of a bathtub.  God, that scared me.  I think I probably