10. The Honeymoon

“Welcome to Sunrise Villa, the honeymoon suite,” Davis chirped as he carried his blushing bride over the threshold and quickly kicked the door shut behind him as they entered. “Man would you look at that view!” Jennifer turned with a smile before rushing towards the windows as the sun began to set on the small town below. It was just as magical as she’d imagined it to be. A pink and orange sky overlooked a quaint tropical village in the middle of the Pacific that hadn’t yet been ruined by tourist traps and large crowds.

The light breeze that rolled in through the opened windows brought with it the sun-kissed fragrance of azaleas and wild flowers and Jennifer inhaled deeply. Yet oddly enough she found herself choking on a staggeringly pungent stench of rot as she moved deeper into the room towards the overstuffed bed positioned against the wall. “I guess this town is not without its charms,” she kidded as she watched her new husband fan away the putrid whiff of air.

“But luckily for us, there’s room service!” Davis jumped on the bed and Jennifer quickly tackled him, playfully rolling around the silk covers tickling him as he reached for the phone.

Davis laughed as finally she got him to his back and he did his best to fend off her attacks. “Wait, wait a second,” he frowned as the wind blew past the balcony once more and they were both accosted with another sensory overload of decay.

He hopped up, shutting the windows securely and locking them. But the closing of the windows did little to clear the area of the overwhelmingly disgusting odor. “I think it might be the room,” Davis growled and moved around the suite in search of the scent. Believing the source possibly to be a dead rat, he lifted several different objects and furnishings to find it. “It’s gonna be hard to sleep in this tonight.”

“Maybe there’s another suite available?” Jennifer suggested and Davis strolled over to the service phone to call down to the front desk to try. The manager apologized and informed Davis that the hotel was all booked up. Instead, he promised to send Housekeeping up to clean the room and offered a complimentary meal at a restaurant of his choice.  

When housekeepers arrived to the clean the room, they searched everywhere for the odor but found nothing. They changed the towels, cleaned the carpet, replaced the curtains and finally prepared to change the linen. And when one of them lifted the mattress off the bed to corner off the sheet, she made a grisly discovery and phoned down to maintenance who notified the police.

After a nice dinner together, Davis and Jennifer returned to their hotel and were stopped short behind a roll of yellow police tape. Peering up the hallway towards a small gathering, Jennifer’s eyes widened and she gasped in horror as the couple witnessed a pair of paramedics wheel a gurney out of their room. The manager turned noticing the two arrive and hurried over towards them. “I am very sorry to inform you but, we have in fact found the source of the smell,” the manager reported gravely as the officers’ whipped by them towards the elevator. “One of our previous occupants was brutally murdered inside the room. She was stabbed multiple times and stuffed inside the box spring. Police are on the lookout now for her husband.”

Continue---->