Free The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

extraneous; the one who was extra, unwanted; the one with no place to be .
    The Falls X 51
    “We’d better tell her, eh? Take her to the police station.”
    “But if they don’t have the body yet, she can’t identify it. And maybe it isn’t the reverend. Jesus, it would be cruel to upset the poor woman any more than she’s upset now, if—if the dead man isn’t her husband.”
    “But if he is ?”
    “Dale, where the hell is Mr. Colborne?”
    “On his way. He says.”
    Clyde Colborne, proprietor of the Rainbow Grand, was an affable, earnest, but not always reliable employer who delegated most of his authority to his staff. He’d inherited the distinguished old Prospect Street hotel, which had been founded by his grandfather in 1881, in an affluent, ebullient era of Niagara Falls tourist expansion; the hotel was still prestigious, but, like the other old, Victorian-style hotels near The Falls, built at a time when patrons traveled by train, not by car, and demanded luxury services including accommodations for their servants, the Rainbow Grand was beginning to feel competition from motels and “tourist cabins” springing up like toadstools just outside the city limits of Niagara Falls. If Mr. Colborne was much aware of this threat, he rarely spoke of it except elliptically—
    “People will always demand quality. The Rainbow Grand supplies quality. That’s the American way.”
    So far as his staff knew, Clyde Colborne spent a good deal of his time boating on the river and the Great Lakes, playing golf at the l’Isle Grand Country Club in warm weather, and gambling with his friends, who were men very like himself.
    The hotel manager, a woman named Dale who’d been Mr. Colborne’s assistant for a decade, suggested that they check Mrs.
    Erskine’s suite before taking her to the police station. It was a terrible situation for all concerned, but they had to think of public relations.
    Of the other hotel guests who’d come to the Rainbow Grand to have a good time. If poor Mrs. Erskine suddenly broke into hysterics, what a scandalous scene it would be! “Look, this is June. It’s a Sunday in June and it isn’t raining for once. It’s honeymoon season, for God’s sake. A damned happy time at The Falls. ”
    52 W Joyce Carol Oates
    So they talked Mrs. Erskine into reluctantly going upstairs to room 419. The red-haired woman said plaintively that her husband wouldn’t be there—“That’s the very place, in all the world, I can guarantee you he isn’t .”
    By this time Ariah Erskine was moving so haltingly, with such an air of distraction, she seemed to the Rainbow Grand employees hardly aware of her surroundings. When the elevator door opened on the fourth floor she had to be gently urged to disembark. Yet she assured Dr. McCrady with an air almost of annoyance that she was
    “fine”—“not at all faint or light-headed.” She had lost her room key, however. Fortunately, Dale had a master key to let them in.
    At room 419, the concierge knocked loudly, nervously. Just in case someone was inside. “Hello? Is anyone here? Hotel management, coming in.”
    No answer.
    The ornate door’s exterior was covered in crimson plush. A brass plaque read Rosebud Honeymoon Suite.
    Dale unlocked the door, and the red-haired woman and the hotel employees entered hesitantly. There is no emptiness quite like the emptiness of a hotel room with no one in it. Through partly drawn venetian blinds a pale, filtered-looking sun shone. Somewhere overhead, a vacuum cleaner droned. The first room was the ornately furnished parlor, which was obviously empty. A few scattered tourist brochures and maps, a vase of drooping roses, an empty champagne bottle lying on its side; and two champagne glasses, both empty, some distance apart.
    The concierge opened the door to the bedroom, which seemed to be empty also. This room, Mrs. Erskine entered very reluctantly, her eyes nearly shut. “No one. There’s no one.” She spoke so softly, it