This happened last fall when I was staying in a small town in northern Pennsylvania for work.

I do commercial refrigeration repair, and at the time I was driving to different grocery stores and restaurants in smaller towns

because our company was short on people. The town I was sent to was the kind of place where

everything shut down early, and there were more empty buildings than open once.

I was supposed to be there for three nights while I worked on the walk-in freezers at an older family-owned supermarket.

My company booked me a motel on the edge of town because it was the only place nearby

with vacancy.

I got there a little after 7 p.m. on a Thursday.

The motel was one of those single floor places

where all the room doors faced the parking lot. It had maybe 12 rooms total, and only four or

five cars in the lot. The office smelled like old coffee and bleach. The woman at the desk was probably

in her 60s. She was friendly, but there was something distracted about her.

She kept glancing past me toward the parking lot while I was checking in.

When she handed me the key, she told me if anyone knocked on my door at night, not to answer

it unless it was her or the owner, and she said if I heard anything weird outside to call

the office and not get involved. She said it in a casual voice, like it was normal advice,

but it caught me off guard. I asked if that was because the area was bad, and she just said

there were some drifters around sometimes, and they like to ask guests for money.

I remember thinking it was a strange thing to say to someone who had just arrived, but I was tired and didn't really care. My room was near the far end, second to last. Inside, it was clean

enough, but it was kind of old. I noticed cigarette burns in the dresser, and the carpet had dark spots.

I brought my bag in, grabbed food at the gas station down the road, and came back around eight.

While I was walking to my room, I noticed a man sitting in an older dark green pickup truck two spaces away from mine.

...