Lost Cargo

by Hollister Ann Grant

  “We don’t know what’s in those woods. It could kill us. It’s not from here, and we don’t know what we’re dealing with—we already saw that thing kill a man right in front of us. I don’t want to leave your brother out there, either, but we can’t do this, Lexie. We can’t shoot something we can’t see. You call the police again and tell them he’s missing. They’ve got to look for him.”

  She turned away. That night he stayed on the couch in her bedroom again, but they barely spoke and he couldn’t sleep, worried that he’d let her down.

  In the morning Travis took a cab home, decided to text his sister, fumbled around, and finally just said he wanted to talk. He made coffee and toast and sat down with the paper.

  “Police Officer Disappears,” a headline said. In the predawn hours a police officer had driven up Newark Street to check out a scream and never reported back to the dispatcher. The police found the car an hour later with the keys still in the ignition. Travis skimmed to the end. They didn’t have any leads, but the bloody sidewalk showed up in the story. Sickened, he lost his appetite and put his toast down.

  Someone tapped on the kitchen window. Startled, he looked up to see Lisa waving through the glass. He hadn’t expected her to show up on his doorstep. Something was going on, too. Her hair swung in a fresh blunt cut and she wore a dove gray suit and white silk blouse.

  “They approved the loan,” she said, all smiles when he opened the door. “I got your message and I was in the area, so I wanted to swing by and tell you in person. We got the condo. We’re signing the papers this morning. It’s ours.”

  “Congratulations,” he said, shocked.

  Tell her. Tell her the giant went in her building.

  She studied his face and touched her hair. “Is my haircut that bad? Maybe it’s too drastic. Yesterday I caught myself in the mirror and decided it’s time to look like an adult instead of somebody who just escaped from the eighth grade.”

  “No, you look great. You really do.”

  “Oh, donuts. Let me check my blood sugar.” She took a small kit from her purse and pricked her finger. “No, too high. What’s in the paper?”

  “A cop disappeared on Newark Street.”

  She glanced at the front page. “Oh, yeah? Where’s that?”

  “A couple of blocks from here.”

  She gave a polite wince. “I guess that happens in cities. Anyway, that’s what Ian says. So I got your text. What did you want to talk about?”

  He froze. “It’s not that easy to explain.”

  “I’m a really good listener.” She smiled and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Let’s go outside so I can have a cigarette and you can tell me all about it. Don’t tell Ian I’m smoking. Last week I told him I quit and I don’t want him to find out he’s married to a spineless jellyfish.”

  “That makes two of us, because I’ve got spineless jellyfish stamped all over me.”

  She laughed. “And what’s that about?”

  He didn’t answer and went outside, dreading the conversation. Lisa settled on a stone bench at the far end of the backyard. There wasn’t much left of the garden. The wind had blown leaves under the bench and scattered them across the flowerbeds mulched for winter. He sat down beside her and listened to the click of the lighter and the sparrows on the eaves and knew she was waiting for him to say something.

  Something scrabbled behind them. He held his breath and then exhaled when a squirrel moved across the grass.

  They were too exposed, though. Too many trees grew in the yard. Behind the bench stood several old oaks that were so thick he couldn’t see around the trunks. Towering firs grew beyond the oaks and hid the house next door. Anything could be lurking back there. He thought about the footprints in the woods and sized up the kitchen door. It seemed a mile away.

  How fast could they run if something happened?

  Tell her the giant went in her building, his conscience drummed again. Tell her. When Lisa started talking about the condo, he realized they were planning to move in tomorrow. Everything was happening too fast.

  “I’ve reserved the truck and the elevator,” she was saying. “Can you give us a hand? Some friends of Ian’s are coming over, but we can use you, too. Most of our things are in storage in Alexandria, so we’ll have to go back and forth.”

  He heard himself say, “I have classes tomorrow. I can help you after six.”

  Tell her.

  “We might be finished by then,” she said. “Call me, and if we’re done you can help us unpack. You know how it is when you move. You label all the boxes and then you can’t find your socks for a week. And we’ll get a pizza, so dinner’s on us. Now, enough about me. You said you wanted to talk about something, so I’m all ears.”

  Say something. Tell her the truth.

  “The building. I want to talk to you about the new building.” He felt as if he were falling off a cliff, and his blood roared in his ears. “You shouldn’t stay there by yourself. It’s not a good place to live, and it’s too close to the woods. You can still get out of it. Just tell them that you changed your mind and back out of it. There’s still time.”

  She gave him an incredulous stare. “We have a contract and a mortgage. They would sue us if we backed out. And we’d never do that anyway. We love the place. Too close to the woods—you sound like an old lady. What’s gotten into you?”

  His face burned. What did he expect? He’d known all along that if he told her the truth, even half the truth, she would never believe him. Nobody would. Flat out nobody. He opened his mouth, not sure what was going to come out next. Tell her. But at that moment his cell phone back on the kitchen table rang. The faint rings came across the lawn.

  “The phone,” he said, jumping up.

  She stared at him. “I’ll finish my cigarette.”

  “It’s not safe out here by yourself.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Travis. What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s not safe. The newspaper article. The missing cop.”

  “Come on, you’re overreacting,” she said, but she followed him inside.

  Breaking into a run, he grabbed the phone.

  “It’s me,” Lexie said, sounding relieved. “What’re you doing for lunch?”

  So she didn’t hate him after all. Trying not to melt into a puddle, he fingered the newspapers and magazines on the table. “I’m dining alone with a Time magazine.”

  “Can you meet me at the Hearth & Hook at noon?”

  “You sound pleased with yourself.”

  “I am,” she said. “I have something to show you.”

  “The Hearth & Hook on Connecticut Avenue?”

  “That’s right… Travis, can I borrow the gun?”

  Caught off guard, he didn’t know what to say. His sister looked down and began to straighten up the kitchen table.

  “I would feel safer,” Lexie went on, sounding rushed. “You live with roommates, and with Burke gone, I’m by myself most of the time.”

  He should have thought of it before. “Yeah, sure, of course you can. The Hearth & Hook at noon. I’ll see you in a few.” He closed the cell phone and stood there for a minute on a cloud.

  “I’ll bet she’s something,” Lisa said.

  “She is,” he admitted, still on his cloud. “My best friend.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Lisa said in a too-calm voice, the kind of voice people use on somebody they think needs a serious reservation in a rubber room. “Well, I’m meeting Ian downtown, and we’re going to the closing, so don’t worry about anything, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Everything’s going to be fine. Really, Travis. Trust me on this.”

  She closed the door, and that was that. He’d blown his chance to warn her about the building. Whatever he’d said didn’t come out right, and now she was gone, pulling out of the driveway. He didn’t say enough. He didn’t tell her about the horrific killing on Newark Street. Thinking about it made him feel rotten, so he did what he usually did when he felt ba
d. He opened the refrigerator and finished a coconut pie.

  Lexie was waiting for him when he sat down in the crowded Hearth & Hook. Political cartoons and autographed photos of famous politicians covered the walls, and soft jazz played in the background. He wore his Scottish Games sweatshirt. Lexie wore a green wool sweater, thin silver earrings, and something smoky on her eyes. It intoxicated him to sit across from her again. Their legs brushed under the little table.

  She didn’t touch her salad and seemed full of nervous energy. “You brought it?”

  He handed her a nylon backpack. “Be careful.”

  She slipped the gun into a large black canvas bag under the table and returned the backpack. “I took your advice,” she said, “and I made some phone calls.”

  “Oh, yeah, to who?”

  “The police. I reported Burke as a missing person, but as soon as I said he’d been planning to go to the Adirondacks and Montreal, their faces shut down. That was that. They told me to call his hotel and I said I didn’t know it and he didn’t go on the trip and they kept saying are you sure. And Dallas called.”

  “Who’s Dallas?”

  “My brother’s business partner. Of course Burke didn’t show up at his office and he stood up a client, so Dallas hit the roof. He’s coming by the house tonight to get some files.” She pushed the food around on her plate. “And I called a reporter.”

  “A reporter?” he said, surprised.

  “The police aren’t going to help me, so I called John Murray at the Post. He wrote the article about the missing cop.”

  “What did he say?” he asked, taken aback that she’d left him out.

  “We’re going to get together.”

  “I’ll go with you. I have classes today, though. When are you talking to him?”

  She picked at her salad. “Now, after I leave here.”

  “Oh,” he said, surprised again. “Well, I’ll skip my classes.”

  “No, no, don’t do that. It’s okay, really. I can go by myself.”

  He stared at her while she looked away. She was still upset because they’d run yesterday. “You said you wanted to show me something,” he said.

  She put a new cell phone on the table, opened the camera, and gave him a triumphant smile. The phone was full of shots of the giant in front of Buchanan House.

  “You followed her. Damn it, Lexie.”

  “She didn’t see me. I waited at the bus stop across from Buchanan House until she came out, and I got her face this time.” Then she took out a stack of prints. “The back of her in the phone matches the first group of pictures. Everything matches. I got her.”

  The images shocked him. The giant in front of the lobby doors, traffic moving by in a blur. More shots of her near the Metro with sunlight on her huge face. A dozen shots that nobody could argue about, and in most of them she was staring at Lexie.

  “Yeah, you got her all right,” he said. “She knows it, too. She’s looking at you.”

  Lexie shook her head. “She didn’t see me. I was in a crowd waiting for the bus.”

  He stared at the pictures, half-listening, deeply worried.

  “I need all the pictures in case the reporter wants to see them later on,” she said. “I need the picture card from the camera you found in the woods, the one with the original photos of the black triangle.”

  “He’ll laugh you out the door, Lexie.”

  “I have shots of body parts on the sidewalk after she murdered that guy.”

  “He’ll just say you Photoshopped them. The minute you walk in with a UFO—”

  “I have to start somewhere. I need the card.”

  “It’s at my house,” he said, not because he thought it would do any good, but because he was ready to do anything for her.

  “I’ll get it from you tonight,” she said.

  So she expected him to stay there again. “When should I come over?” he asked.

  She toyed with her silverware. “I’ll call you.”

  I’ll call you. He left, feeling like a lost dog. And the picture card wasn’t in the Nikon after all. He emptied his desk drawers and went through his laundry, tossing jeans and shirts all over the floor. Not there. It had to be in Monroe’s apartment. When he ran downstairs, though, his roommate had locked the door to the basement.

  Then his cell phone rang. Maybe it was Lexie. He could hear the murmur of voices in the background.

  “Travis,” his mother said, “will you run by my house and take the roast out of the freezer?”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re at the Convention Center?”

  “Yes, all day, and Neil and Ann are coming over tonight.” Her voice was cold. “And another thing. Gram’s gun is missing from the den. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Her gun’s missing? You mean the old World War I gun?”

  “Yes, missing. It’s not in the cabinet. If you took it, Travis—”

  “What would I want an old gun for?”

  She drew an irritated breath. “Well, if we can’t find it, I’m going to have to report it to the police. Somebody might have broken into the house.”

  “Gram probably moved it and forgot where she put it.”

  “If somebody stole it, they’re in for a nice surprise. The firing pin is missing.”

  Blood rushed to his head. “The firing pin is missing?”

  “Your grandfather got rid of the firing pin when your father was a child. He didn’t want a shooting accident. Remember the roast.”

  Travis hung up. So the gun was useless. They’d spent all that time in the woods like fools, thinking the gun would protect them. They could have died on the bank of the creek.

  The four walls, the furniture, the ticking clock pressed in on him. He tried her cell phone, but she’d turned it off, of course, because she was with the reporter. Then he texted and called her house in case she’d gone there first, but the rings went to voicemail.

  Feeling like a stalker, he rang the paper and got the reporter’s voicemail. “This is John Murray,” the reporter said in a pleasant, measured voice. “I’m not able to take your call right now. Please leave me a message.”

  He started to speak, thought better of it, hung up, and called the city news room.

  “Is John Murray there today?” he asked. “I want to drop off something for him.”

  “Yeah, somewhere,” a man answered. “I think he’s at lunch.”

  Travis ran outside and hailed a cab. They were probably still talking to each other. Maybe he could catch them in front of the building.

  The cab driver argued with a talk radio show and kept a reclining Happy Buddha on the dashboard. “He helps me with the traffic,” the cabbie explained good-naturedly, waving at the gridlock. The Happy Buddha needed a bra and wasn’t doing his job because they hit street construction and got stuck behind a Metrobus going ten miles an hour. Every car in the city seemed to be on Connecticut Avenue. Office workers on their lunch hour flooded the crosswalks at Farragut Square.

  The cab finally swung into a glass and granite canyon of office buildings and reached the Washington Post. No sight of Lexie. Maybe he was too late. Travis peeled off the fare, ran through the cars, took the steps two at a time, and crossed the lobby to a man who looked like an employee.

  “I’m trying to find John Murray,” he began.

  “Right behind you.” The man pointed to someone on his way to the elevator. Lexie wasn’t with him. Damn it, but maybe she’d said where she was going.

  “John Murray,” Travis called and set across the lobby.

  The reporter turned around and lifted an eyebrow. In his thirties, good-looking, shaved head, jeans, steel gray shirt and steel gray tie, dressed like somebody in advertising. Travis hated the guy on sight.

  “Travis Maguire,” Travis started, feeling like a stalker again. “My friend Lexie Collins, you know, the one with the missing brother, said she was meeting you today, and I’m trying to catch up with her, and—”

  The reporter held up a hand.
“Wait, wait, wait a second. Who are you again?”

  “Travis Maguire, a friend of Lexie Collins, and she said that she was meeting you today.”

  “I’m not meeting her,” the reporter said.

  Travis felt his heart race.

  “I don’t have an appointment with her.” The reporter raised an eyebrow again, stepped into the crowded elevator, and gazed past Travis while the doors closed.

  Travis stared at the lobby.

  So she lied. Why?

  Even the sunlight seemed to be mocking him, the great pretense of the day written into everything he could see outside the plate glass windows. He was in the wrong place in the wrong part of the city, a schmuck worried about a girl who’d blown him off with a tall tale. He could see her again, refusing to meet his eyes. He’d been so smitten with her that he didn’t see it coming. An idiot, that’s what he was. Worse than an idiot.

  But the firing pin was missing and the gun wouldn’t fire.

  Maybe she was still at the Hearth & Hook, reading the paper, taking her time. She lived nearby. Or maybe she was in the same shopping center, in another store. Maybe he would run into her if he went back to Cleveland Park.

  Low on cab fare, he took the Metro. He sent another text on the way up the escalator and then paced the blocks of restaurants and coffee bars, peering in windows. Inside the Hearth & Hook sat two lovers, a lush young brunette in a red sweater holding hands with a gray-haired man, but the other tables were empty. Lunchtime was over. The day was wearing on.

  No Lexie. Travis stared up the avenue. The traffic had thinned out. One lone figure wove through the crosswalk, Harley, a homeless man who always wore a Harley Davidson shirt. Harley disappeared behind the library.

  Travis felt his stomach tighten like a fist. Why would she lie? They’d established a relationship. They were close. He’d slept on the couch in her bedroom. Her damned best friend. He almost got killed with her.

  He stared down the block at Buchanan House. Behind its walls the Rock Creek Park wilderness spread as far as he could see. Thoughts about Lexie formed like thunderclouds in his mind. It was obvious. She’d taken the gun in the woods to look for her brother.