Lost Cargo (23 page)

The intruder snatched the one-eyed mask back and fled from the closet, scrabbling around the bedroom. Pie came to the door to watch, but as soon as the kitten saw the intruder, her tail puffed out and she raced off down the hall.

The intruder ran on spidery legs out of the bedroom, and Lisa got to her feet and ran after him. The cell phone went flying across the floor.

“Where did you get that phone?” she shouted. “Where’s Ian?”

Through the living room! Around and around the couch they ran like a merry-go-round, the intruder with Lisa at his heels. Over the coffee table! The phone book and newspapers and magazines went flying. Then the intruder found the doorknob and wrenched it open. Down the hall to the exit sign and down the stairs!

“You come back here! Where’s Ian?” Lisa gasped, her shoes slapping on the concrete steps, pounding down after the tiny figure.

Into the lobby and through the crowd!

“Great costume! Is that your kid?” a man howled, grabbing her shoulder.

Lisa pulled away. To her dismay, the intruder slipped out the lobby doors. It had started to sleet, she realized with surprise. The intruder raced past an old woman walking her Yorkie in front of the building. The old woman spun around on the treacherous sidewalk, confused, when the one-eyed thing leaped over the leash.

The intruder was running so fast Lisa couldn’t keep up. He ran through the icy hedge that bordered the grounds, down the well-worn dirt path that twisted around the building, and down the slope to the woods.

“Stop,” Lisa called under the streetlight. “Please, please stop. Where did you get the phone?”

She could still see the tiny figure fleeing into Rock Creek Park. Dense, ghostlike trees marched into the silent white horizon. Suddenly the intruder stood still, took a cube off his belt, turned to look at her, and disappeared in a rippling shimmer like sunlight dancing over a stream. Gone.

“That’s impossible,” Lisa gasped. She took a few steps down the path when her foot shot out from under her. The next moment, she slid two feet, grabbed a branch as the slush flew up, and slid again before she could pull herself around, leaving skid marks of dark exposed earth on the hillside. Ice and forest debris filled her shoes and stained her clothes to the waist.

The small footprints were still visible. When she crawled back to the sidewalk, she stared at the place where they vanished beside an old fir tree. The sleet whispered, ticking and tapping against the trees. The footprints slowly grew harder to see. The outlines blurred. When the boundaries of the path itself disappeared and the icy ground lay smooth and undisturbed, she turned toward home.

Ian still wasn’t back. When Lisa closed the front door, she felt the first throbs of a vicious headache.
Check the locks, change clothes, migraine medicine
. She refused to listen to any other thoughts and moved methodically through the condo.
Windows and balcony, locked
. Then she shook the ice out of her hair and changed into dry fleece clothes.

I did not see that. Yes, you did
.

She pulled on fresh socks, took her migraine medicine from the nightstand, and read the label: one tab at onset of headache, repeat in one to two hours if not improved.

You saw an alien. You’re having a nervous breakdown
.

“No, I’m not having a nervous breakdown,” she said fiercely and swallowed a pill. “I’m not going to pull that number on myself. I saw something. I don’t know what I saw, but I saw something.”

In the quiet the sleet tapped against the windows. Her headache grew, spread to her temples, and the top of her skull.

The pill will start to work in a few minutes. You saw an alien. You’re having a nervous breakdown. You should go to your mother’s house
.

“Stop it,” she said aloud. “I’m not going anywhere until Ian comes home.”

The hands crawled around the clock face. Her thoughts danced from the alien to Ian, back to the alien, and back to Ian.
Oh, please, just come home. Where are you?
He’d never done this before, not in all their years of marriage, not over the worst arguments. The most stupid arguments in the world, squabbles about who didn’t clean the coffee pot, or how he didn’t listen. He’d never stayed away like this. Never.

“I need a cigarette,” she said, reaching for her purse. But when she walked to the door, head throbbing, the dark balcony terrified her. The wild, spectral trees at the edge of the grounds swayed in the wind. Anything could be hiding in those woods. Or on the roof.

What if it’s out there?

It disappeared into thin air. It was some kind of a trick.

It was a kid.

It didn’t look like a kid. Not any kid I’ve ever seen.

Those pills you took. You could be hallucinating, having a drug reaction. You should go to the hospital
.

“I should call the police,” she said aloud, staring at the woods. Sleet drummed against the windowpanes. Was Ian out there in the storm? How long after a fight with your wife could you be considered missing? And what about Dr. Lynch? Was he on the level, or trying to pull a fast one? Well, there was a way to find that out. Google the SOB.

More disturbing thoughts shoved their way to the forefront of her mind. Did the intruder have anything to do with the animal attacks in the news?

Queasy, she went into the kitchen to check her blood sugar. Sky high numbers, probably up from stress. She took the insulin from the refrigerator and gave herself a shot. Then she turned on the laptop. The kitten came in the dining room to watch. The Windows logo and all the little icons appeared, replaced by a heart wrenching vacation photo of Ian in jeans and a white fisherman sweater, waving at the camera.

The website for Howell and Associates said David Lynch had managed the Connecticut Avenue office for eight years. Only the manager, not an owner. So he’d stolen their money. Ian was right after all.

“Well, I’ve really done it, haven’t I?” she told the kitten. “I can’t believe this.”

The phone pierced the quiet.

It was over. Everything would be all right. Ian was calling. He was sitting somewhere, and she would get the car and crawl through the storm to pick him up, and they would spend the rest of the evening apologizing and making up for the ugliest evening in their entire marriage.

She grabbed the receiver. “Ian!”

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Lynch asked.

Stunned, Lisa stared at the phone.
Confront him. Say something. Let him have it
.

“Don’t ever call here again,” she choked out. She could hear her voice shake. “Don’t you ever call me. You hear me?”

“All right,” he said, sounding disgruntled, and hung up.

Calling this late at night. He probably thought she was really stupid. Her migraine ratcheted up a notch. Furious with herself, she fought back a wave of nausea and picked up the phone again to call the police. There were two messages. Her hopes shot up and then crashed. Travis, both of them. He’d called hours ago.

I
an threw his hands up and headed out of the parking lot, intending to walk home through the woods. An ominous storm front was moving in, but he didn’t care. His wife consumed all his thoughts.

“Impossible,” he muttered.

He’d repeated the word impossible six times by the time he reached the end of the parking lot. He glanced over his shoulder. There she was, still sitting in the car, bolt upright, staring ahead, pretending she was a queen, pretending she wasn’t angry, pretending God only knows what in that mind of hers. If she wanted to strip their savings over some crackpot, then fine. Let her do it. It was impossible to talk to her because she argued about everything. Well, she had the car, she had the keys, and she knew where she lived.

Ian followed the sidewalk to Tilden Street where he waited for a break in the traffic. The shadows deepened. He could no longer see where the road ended and the grass began until the oncoming headlights flashed over the ground. The waning daylight didn’t worry him though. It would only take thirty minutes to get to their building once he hit the trail.

“Impossible,” he said again, jogging across Tilden. He picked up the dirt path between the trees bordering the road and headed into the shadows, past a group of abandoned picnic tables and another empty parking lot. Long shadows overtook the pay phone, trashcans, and a deserted building housing restrooms, a stone fireplace, and more picnic tables. When he hurried to the other side, he found the gravel path along the edge of the woods.

The fading sun sank behind the clouds. There was still time to make it home before nightfall. He strained to see, though, when the path disappeared into the trees. The woods were darker than he’d expected.

You shouldn’t go through the woods. Go back to the car. There’s still time
.

She wasn’t even there now. He could make it, he stubbornly told himself, wanting to avoid his wife, so he went in the woods. Starlings chattered over his head, jostling for a place on the black branches as they settled down for the night. The path rose up a steep incline and threaded around rocks and towering trees. After he climbed for a while, he was relieved to see tiny lights twinkling in the distance. He would be back in the city in a few minutes.

Rock Creek gurgled at the bottom of the boulder-strewn gorge winding away on his left. The ancient stones seemed to grow into each other, suggesting ominous, dreamlike shapes—the thick legs of a giant, its calves stretched out and stony feet planted beneath the black water. There was the hideous head and the stout neck. The Cyclops of Odysseus, grasping tree roots on the far bank, climbing out of the gorge to get its meal of man-flesh. The Kid Chompers of his youth, no longer shapeless ghouls lurking outside the bedroom window, but huge now, round and stony, hiding down in the gully. Pretending to be boulders.

“Just rocks,” Ian said. He picked up his pace.

The sun sank. The temperature fell. An icy wind seeped through his clothes. His cheeks and the end of his nose grew cold, and he stuffed his frozen hands in his pockets. His heart leaped when he caught a glimpse of two dark shapes standing like sentinels on the other side of the gorge, but the shapes only turned out to be ragged cedars.

Ian hurried on, his breath coming out in icy white clouds.

Lisa. What was she doing? Still stewing in the car? He felt a pang of worry when he thought about his wife sitting alone in the parking lot, but she must have driven off by now. He could see faraway city lights through the trees and pictured her just getting home. When he opened the front door, she would go through her silent treatment. There she would be, pouting on the couch, ignoring him. Well, let her pout, if that’s what she wanted to do. Eventually she would come around and act like a human being. It was just a bill. A lot of defensive emotionalism over a bill. They should be able to discuss a bill without a scene.

“It’s impossible to talk to her,” Ian said out loud.

He stopped on the trail to urinate. Out of habit, he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around, ridiculous in the woods, but he was a civilized man, and technically it was a public place. As the philosophy professor pissed away in the dark, he heard a branch snap and pulled up his zipper, heart pounding. It happened again, another snap followed by a long rustle of leaves on the hillside. Then silence. The rustles sounded like a large animal, maybe a man, picking through the trees and stopping to listen.

It was a city. Why did he assume he was the only one in the woods? Did he give himself away, pounding down the path, fuming about his wife? He’d dismissed Lisa’s story about the latest body in the park, but now he wasn’t scoffing. What did she say? A homeless man under the bridge by the library, five minutes from their front door.

Water gurgled at the bottom of the gorge. He would never be able to run through that valley of boulders if somebody came after him on the path.

The noise sounded again. Closer, the crackle and rustle of dead leaves. Something large creeping in his direction. It rushed directly behind him on the hill and stopped. Ian hunched down in terror, blood thundering in his ears, his hand over his mouth to silence his breathing.
Can it smell me?
When the leaves behind him crunched again, he shook his head and let out a sigh of relief. Deer. Ordinary deer, of course. What did he think it was? How ridiculous. He could see their tawny coats, delicate legs, and shining eyes, two of them, and then three more stepped out of the shadows. The deer took several cautious steps, flicked their long white tails, and disappeared back into the dark.

Just get out of here and go home, he told himself. What an ass he’d been to walk through the woods and leave his wife by herself in a dark parking lot.

He could hear the muted sounds of traffic now, the rush of cars and the grinding sound of a Metrobus pulling away from the curb. Civilization. Normality. The dark brick and stone backs of the buildings along Connecticut Avenue appeared through the trees. Yellow lights glowed in hundreds of windows. The silhouette of a cat appeared on a windowsill, a potted plant on another. He could almost feel the warmth, see the comfortable chairs, and hear the solid sound of doors closing, shutting out the wild night.

One last miserable bit of path to cover and he would be inside with his own cats, his own comfortable chairs, and his wife, hopefully. They would work things out. She would come around, and they would deal with the bill. This wasn’t their first fight, and it wouldn’t be their last, but the steam had gone out of him now. He only wanted to go home and spend the rest of the evening with her in some small measure of peace.

But right now he was freezing. His knees hurt from the cold and below his coat his thighs felt like frozen hunks of meat.

Over a little rise he saw a lone streetlight through the branches, lighting up the tree trunks and flooding the gorge with surreal light. The path descended into the gorge, threaded through a bed of boulders, and wound up a rugged, eroded slope, coming out on the sidewalk by the streetlight and three empty park benches. The end of the bloody woods. Relief settled through his veins.