It was a crazy kind of situation. Larry Abell was sent by his company for training to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is sort of crazy just to start. Major computer center and all. But there was some sort of convention in town that January, and the hotel he was taking the training at had overbooked, and when he got there his room was gone. So that hotel gave him a free room at another hotel... many miles away.
The second hotel was glad to see them. (The them being Larry and a woman who also got bumped out.) They served a ski-resort, and expected a big crowd in less than a week. This week, though, they were hurting for business, with a third of the rooms in their main building taken.
But the main building is not where they put the pair. The manager talked to them and said that if they would stay in the outlying building, they could get rooms with built-in jacuzzis and meals on the house. He said that the corridors around the swimming pool might be chilly the first night, but unless someone stayed in the building they would have to shut it down, and the meals came up to less than the cost of sealing the building and restarting the heat later.
Larry and the woman felt that this deal would be hard to beat. They introduced themselves, since they were going to be sharing a 50-room building. She was Janet Sharps, working for RK Electronics in Harrisburg, a kind of bony but interesting-looking woman standing about five foot eight and weighing maybe 140 pounds. They decided to share rides to the training, first in his car and then in hers. And to simplify things for the hotel, they would take their meals together. This was only logical anyway, since they were leaving and returning to the hotel together.
Their cars were parked close together, and Larry helped Janet with her luggage. It was kind of spooky walking into that two-story thing, built like a barn, and think that they might be the only ones in it until almost the time they left. (The crowd was expected on Friday, noon or later, and they were checking out Friday morning.)
The hotel said that they put two other people in rooms there later, but the two of them never saw anything of those people but a closing door.
The places right outside the rooms were carpeted, but the staircases and the tennis court and swimming pool, built in the center of the building, gave off echoes when they stepped there that went through the whole building.
Once they had moved in, they walked back to the main building for a late dinner, then back to their rooms. Larry had just decided there was nothing on television he wanted to see and got out a book when a knock came on his door.
Janet had gotten a bit, well, lonely or something, sitting in her room and she didn't want to bother the lobby clerks or drive somewhere, and was he still up?
So they sat and talked, shop-talk partly but also about themselves. Janet was about 22, like him, and she was unmarried. She said, though, that she once came very close. After a while she went back to her room for some wine, which they sipped.
Eventually she began dozing sitting up, and Larry decided they should call it a night. Janet smiled at him, agreed, and walked back down the hall. Her steps seemed a little unsteady, but whether from wine or sleepiness was a moot point. It was still chilly in the corridor.
