Lost Cargo (26 page)

“You left this in my car,” she said, as cool as an ice queen.

He took the jacket, feeling foolish. He’d forgotten about it as soon as they’d started arguing with each other. His mother beamed, despite her green pajamas, the hour, and the tension. She obviously thought they were going out with each other, the delusion of the century.

“I’m going over to Lisa’s place to get her insulin,” he told his mother. “And while I’m out there, I’m going to drive around and look for Ian. I need your car.”

His mother frowned. “Ian’s not out there. He’s probably in a hotel. It’s dangerous for you to be driving in the storm. Just get her insulin and come back. People in D.C. don’t know how to drive in this weather.”

“Nobody’s out there now,” he said. “It’ll be fine. The streets are deserted.”

“I’ll take you,” Lexie said.

“That’s too much trouble for you,” Travis said.

“I’m leaving anyway,” Lexie said. “I’m in the neighborhood, so it’s on my way.”

His mother smiled. “Well, that’s very nice of your friend.”

“We’re not friends,” Lexie said. “We just ran into each other.”

The sleet was still falling like thousands of silent stars coming to earth. Neither of them said a word as they turned up Connecticut Avenue and drove all the way to the Taft Bridge where the wind battered the car.

Travis stared at the icy street. No sign of Ian. He probably would have gone in this direction if he wanted a hotel, but it was too far and he wouldn’t be on the street now. They could drive the other way after they picked up the insulin.

The sleet had covered their tire tracks by the time they crossed the bridge. They turned around at the Chinese Embassy, backtracked to Cleveland Park, and slowed down in front of Buchanan House. Travis looked at his watch. One in the morning. How did it get to be so late? A single lamp shone in the empty lobby.

Five minutes in and five minutes out.

“Look,” he said. “You wait out here with the doors locked while I run inside.”

She shook her head. “I’m not staying out here.”

“There’s no place to park. Just lock the doors.”

“I’ll find a place,” she said and swung the car around. Ice-covered cars lined the curbs, bumper to bumper. When they couldn’t find anything close by, she turned down Tilden Street and drove as far as the Kuwaiti Embassy, where they checked the side street going up the hill. Nothing. They struck out in the next block, crossed the avenue, and searched for parking on the other side of Tilden where the road wound away into the dead dark, past last summer’s community garden with its miserable pieces of stubble sticking through the ice, and beyond, along a dense patch of woods that fell away into a godforsaken ravine. Parking that far away was the last thing he had in mind.

“Come on, Lexie. Just go back and let me out.”

She made a U-turn in the middle of the avenue and pulled beside a fire hydrant in front of Buchanan House. He put his hand on the door handle.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “I’m leaving the car here.”

“They’ll tow it,” he said. “Stay here and lock the doors and don’t open them for anybody.” He slammed the door and sprinted across the sidewalk to the lobby. He could hear her outraged cry, but he kept his back turned, fumbled through the keys, and pulled the heavy door open. She would wreck everything.

Remnants of a Halloween party littered the lobby: a pumpkin with a sooty, sagging grin, half-filled plastic drink cups, empty beer bottles, and crumpled napkins. The party was over and the concierge gone for the night.

Once he moved beyond the lobby, the wooden pigeonholes behind the counter caught his eye. The mail. Each pigeonhole had a tiny brass nameplate. Check the ones on the corner of the building, he told himself, and squeezed past the switchboard and the packages waiting for UPS. Lisa and Ian lived in 942. Somebody named Gupta occupied 843, two floors down from the roof. The elephant wall hanging danced in front of his eyes again. The Indian artwork fit the name, but was it the right condominium?

He pulled out the tracker. An image flickered across the surface again and died out. Damn it, why wouldn’t it work? He’d give it one more try upstairs.

Get out of here. Get the insulin, make the call, and get out
.

The elevator finally arrived and crept up to the ninth floor. He stepped out into an empty hall, wary of what might be around the bend, wishing he’d brought a weapon. Everything smelled like paint. Lisa had said something about renovations, which meant most of the units were empty.

He made it inside their condo, slid the deadbolt and the chain on the door, and stared at the silent rooms. It was the first time he’d seen the place since their move. The boxes were gone, and they’d poignantly placed the chairs so they could talk to each other by the fireplace.

But there was no time to stand around. He found the insulin in the refrigerator door, but what did Lisa say about the cat? He picked up the cat’s medicine on the kitchen counter, but didn’t see a black cat.

Terrible sadness struck him when he saw their wedding photos in the bedroom. God help Ian if he went through the woods at the wrong time.

And he had to make one last stab at finding the cat. “Shadow,” he said out loud. “Where are you, you meatball?” He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed where a brown kitten sat in a ball.

“Where’s your friend Shadow?” he asked the kitten. “And where’s Ian?”

The kitten stared at him.

A sudden knock made him almost leap out of his skin. Somebody was tapping on the front door, soft, rapid knocks as though the knocker didn’t want to be heard but urgently wanted in. It couldn’t be Ian. He would have a key.

Travis crept to the door and stared through the peephole. To his shock, Lexie stood in the hall with the Nikon around her neck and the camera bag over her shoulder. “How did you get in here?” he scowled, but he was completely relieved to see her.

“You’re not ditching me like that,” she said, came into the living room, and threw her purse and cell phone on the couch. “Some man let me in.”

“What man?” he asked her.

“How should I know? Some man came out of an office off the lobby, and unlike you, he didn’t leave me stranded.”

“Where did you park the car?” he asked her.

“In front of the fire hydrant.”

“They’ll tow it, Lexie!”

“Nobody’s out there. Nobody’s going to tow anything.”

“I’ve got to make a phone call,” he said. “Here, you find their black cat and give it one of these pills. Lisa said it hides in a closet.”

Before she could argue, he stuck the pill in her palm, shut the bedroom door on her, and took out the tracker. Still nothing but a ten second glimmer. He was going to have to take a chance that Gupta’s condominium was the right one, but as soon as he picked up the phone to call the police, Lexie opened the door.

“You’d better come see this,” she whispered, all the anger gone from her face.

Everything was falling apart. He was never going to make his call. “Did you find the cat?” he called, but she was already down the hall, motioning for him to be quiet.

When she turned on the light, the sight took him aback. U-Haul boxes and furniture jammed every inch of space. The junk room where Lisa had thrown anything and everything she couldn’t figure out where to put yet. He followed Lexie around a mattress propped against the wall and stepped over sliding piles of magazines and books, a vacuum cleaner, rolled-up rugs, and piles of clothes.

They reached the closet. Lexie looked at him expectantly, so he went along with it and peered inside. No cat. What was she getting at? She nodded, eyes wide. Still not getting it, he leaned inside, reached out to balance himself, and put his hand through a hole in the wall.

He jerked his arm back.

Bigger than a hole. The back of the closet was missing.

When he dared to peer closer, he saw shreds of plaster on the floor and long claw marks along the massive opening.
Shadow
was his first shocked thought, but an ordinary housecat never could have ripped through the closet wall. Something with thick claws must have worked away at the plaster hour after hour until it made a yawning opening from the condominium next door. Faint streetlight cast enough light to make out the shapes of overstuffed furniture and a hall mired in darkness.

Horrified, he moved back.

“Ian could be in there,” Lexie said, and stepped through the wall.

Without stopping to look for a weapon he went after her.

O
n the other side of the wall Travis caught Lexie’s arm. She wheeled around, gripping the Nikon, eyes wide. The wind blowing through the dark rooms said the place was probably abandoned, so he took one more uneasy step to stand by her side.

Ian, are you in here?

As if in answer to his thoughts, pale drapes billowed into the room, swayed, and blew out through the open balcony doors. A faint
rap rap
sounded, a hollow, ghostly tapping, but when the tapping repeated itself, he realized the wind was knocking the balcony doors against the building. Sleet blew across the floor and fluttered through the pages of a magazine at his feet.

They had stepped through the closet wall into a living room filled with massive white couches and chairs, serpentine-patterned pillows, and glass-topped bamboo tables, as though the owner once lived in the tropics and had tried to import the flavor to chilly Washington, D.C. Behind the couch stood a screen painted with brilliant parrots, ebony macaws, and other exotic birds that were so realistic their eyes seemed alive. A series of handsome photographs ringed the wall: herons fishing at twilight, a woodpecker on a limb, a hawk waiting for its prey.

Whoever lived here was a bird lover and an expert photographer, but the overturned lamps, slashed cushions, and scattered books and mail told an ominous story.

Rap rap
came the knocking from the balcony.

The drapes floated in again.

When Lexie tried to turn on the Nikon, Travis shook his head and whispered, “Broken.” He picked up a heavy walking stick. It would probably be useless as a weapon, but it was better than nothing. They found more madness in the small galley kitchen: broken vodka and tomato juice bottles, overturned trash, and shattered dishes, but there was nothing to indicate Ian had ever been there. Then they crept down the narrow hall to a bathroom and turned on a lamp shaped like a fleeing seagull.

Bloodstained tiles. Bloody towels on the floor. Travis fought the urge to dry heave. To his horror a pair of forlorn, dust-covered tortoiseshell glasses lay in the sink. Ian wore glasses, but they weren’t his. He had wire-rims.

Two closed doors remained in the hall. Travis opened the first to a musty linen closet. Behind the last door they discovered an empty bedroom littered with broken glass and trampled sheets. Something had ripped the curtains down and smashed the long window over the bed. Everything smelled of damp earth and leaves, and forest shadows roamed the walls. Sleet blew through the broken windowpanes as if nature was determined to tear down every last vestige of civilization.

“Ian?” Travis whispered, but he had to face facts. Ian wasn’t there. They’d gone through all the rooms. Time to get out, and get out fast. They headed back, but when they came to the couch Lexie knelt down, sifted through a pile of debris, and handed him a framed photo.

The pale drapes billowed in again.

They were wasting precious time, but to please her he glanced at the picture. It showed a group of people standing around in the woods on a foggy morning. Educated, polite faces, the kind of people you would see wandering through a museum on a Saturday morning. They all wore field hats and hiking boots and carried cameras and binoculars. A birding club. He shrugged, wondering why Lexie had picked it up. He was about to put it down when a stout woman with pale blonde hair caught his eye. Her hiking boots, chambray shirt, and khaki trousers peeked out from under a short gray cape, a poncho she’d probably worn to ward off the rain. Like the others in the group, she carried a fine camera.

A gray cape. The giant. It couldn’t be her, but yet it was. Her smiling face sat in proportion to her natural looking neck and shoulders. The blocky shape of her face said she had eastern European heritage, maybe ancestors who’d once owned German or Austrian farmland.

Human. And worst of all, she looked nice.

He knew they should hurry, but the life force brimming from the woman stunned him. Instead of impossible meaty appendages, her large-boned hands seemed clever and capable. Instead of a swollen monstrosity, her thickset body looked normal. She was tall, but there was nothing unusual about her height. Her spirited eyes said she got up to film the dawn and walk down country lanes. She must have taken the photos of the birds lining the living room walls, waded out in far-flung streams to get the right shots.

And somewhere along the line, she had been swallowed whole.

“It’s her, the way she used to be,” Lexie whispered over his shoulder.

He picked up a piece of mail. “Her name was Jane Fogg.”

The mysterious initials on the camera bag he’d found in the woods finally had a name. He looked at the photographer who’d taken the pictures of the black triangle, the birds, the woods, and finally the thing that copied her form. She must have been desperate when she shot the last one.

Time to go. He put the photo down, startled by two gleaming eyes in the hall. Shadow. So the missing cat had gone through the wall after all. The cat sneezed, twitched its tail, and slunk into the closet.

“The cat,” Lexie whispered.

“Let him go,” Travis whispered back. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No, we can’t leave him,” she insisted, moving toward the closet. The drapes floated into the room. Outside the same hollow
rap rap
sounded as the wind knocked the balcony doors against the building. Then something else made a soft thump.

Travis froze. He waited, rooted to the floor, but the thump didn’t repeat itself. Maybe the storm had blown a branch against a window. The pale drapes billowed in and out, pulled by the wind. The hole in the living room wall was twenty feet away. They could make it if they ran.