Lost Cargo

by Hollister Ann Grant

  She stared at him. “A bridge? I’m not that old.” Her old dentist must have been completely incompetent.

  “I’ll mail you an estimate. We give ten percent off if you prepay, which in your case could be a substantial savings.”

  “But I’m so busy right now, I don’t have time for this.”

  “Evenings, weekends, I see patients at all hours,” Dr. Lynch said. “We can do two or three long Saturday sessions so you don’t have to come back so many times.”

  “That’s nice to know,” she said. “You don’t need to mail the estimate, though. I’m in the building. I’ll just pick it up.”

  His eyes widened for a second. “I’ll put it in your mailbox this afternoon,” he said. “And I’ll give you a call this evening after you’ve looked it over.”

  She left his office. Really personal service, even if he was expensive. Calling her at home. Somehow that counted a lot after all the unpacking and bickering with Ian. Then she remembered where she’d seen the man. In the garage, going back to check his car.

  Back upstairs, Lisa rebelled at the sight of the boxes. The unpacking could wait. Halloween was coming up. The place could use a pumpkin and some candy in case any kids came to the door.

  One more cigarette and she would go shopping, but the moment she opened the balcony, her husband’s voice rang in her ears. “You’re suspicious about everything. Every time you turn around, you think somebody is out to get you.” Feeling guilty, she let her eyes wander to the balcony where the giant had been standing last night. It was empty.

  Relieved, she lit up. She should quit smoking. Someday.

  She drove into Georgetown, had lunch on the harbor, and bought a Halloween witch made of corn husks for the front door. Then she came across an outdoor market, passed up a hefty pumpkin that was too heavy to carry to the car for three small ones, and lingered at a newsstand to read the holiday magazines.

  “Ian would like these,” she mused, reading a recipe for iced apple cookies.

  “Homeless Man Mauled Under Northwest Bridge: Police Suspect Animal Attack,” read the headline on the Washington Times. Stunned, she skimmed the article. Not just mauled, but dead. The man’s remains had turned up three blocks from their condominium under a bridge in a lonely, weed-filled section of Rock Creek Park.

  The rain began, a miserable gray downpour that pounded on the asphalt and sent people scurrying indoors. Four o’clock. She’d blown the whole day.

  When she reached Buchanan House, the concierge gave her an envelope. Dr. Lynch had already dropped off the estimate. He wanted twelve thousand after insurance and reminded her about the discount if she prepaid the bill.

  She winced and stuffed the estimate in her purse. Back inside the condo, she knelt before the hearth and built a fire to chase away the chill. The kitten came into the kitchen to watch her carve the pumpkins. She felt pleased with the way the jack-o’-lanterns turned out and arranged them on the mantel where they grinned like goblins. Then she tackled the cookies, slid them in the oven, swept the pumpkin seeds in a bag, and hurried down the quiet hall to the trash room.

  The heavy door snapped shut behind her. The trash room was a stuffy, windowless place that smelled of disinfectant and old newspapers. Lisa turned to throw her bag down the chute when the elevator on the other side of the wall pinged. The doors slid back and stayed open with a faint hum.

  It’s that awful woman.

  You don’t know that.

  It’s her, and she’s just standing there.

  You’re going to have to say something to her eventually. She’s your neighbor.

  It was probably the contractors. They usually wrapped it up at three-thirty, but maybe they were working late. Still, she held the trash bag. The noise would give her away once she threw it down the chute.

  Something dragged across the carpet.

  What’s she doing?

  Lisa put the bag down and tried to peer through the crack in the door, but couldn’t see anything, felt ridiculous, and stepped outside. She caught her breath. Her terrifying neighbor was moving down the hall, head down and broad back turned, with her gray cape dragging behind her.

  The hall lights shone like white moons above the giant’s head. When she hunched over her door, her cape rose in the back, revealing scaled feet with liver-colored claws. The scales rippled as the claw tips sank into the carpet. The giant took three monstrous steps forward, claws extended, and disappeared through the doorway.

  Click went the lock.

  Lisa found her own feet and fled to her condo, horrified to find she’d left the front door unlocked. Once inside, she fumbled with the deadbolt and managed to lock all the windows. The cookies were burning. She turned off the oven, turned on every light in every room, and hid in the bedroom. The smell of burned cookies grew stronger, but she didn’t move. Pie came in to sit beside her. The fire in the fireplace consumed all the wood and hissed itself out.

  She called Ian, but when his phone rang and rang and went to voicemail, she hung up. She couldn’t leave a message.

  And she couldn’t call 911. They would think she was crazy.

  “We’re leaving,” she told the kitten. “We’re not going to live here.”

  “The woman who lives next door to us has claws,” Lisa said when Ian came home. The ache at her temples was threatening to turn into a full-blown migraine.

  “What did you say?” Ian shut the door, put his briefcase down, and reached for a lamp, looking troubled. “Why do you have all the lights on? The hall light, the closets, the bathroom. What’s going on here? And what’s that smell?”

  “I burned something in the oven. She has claws. I saw them under her coat when I was coming out of the trash room.”

  “Oh? What kind of claws? Big fingernails?” He turned off more lights and began to open the windows. “Lisa, it smells terrible in here.”

  “I didn’t say fingernails,” Lisa said. “She has claws on her feet. Leave the windows alone.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She can’t have claws on her feet.”

  “Well, she does! I bloody well saw them with my own eyes. Big, thick claws like some kind of a horrible animal.”

  Ian’s facial muscles worked up and down. “She had on a costume,” he said at last in a tone of dismissal, and moved to the kitchen. “Where’s the air freshener?”

  Lisa followed him. “In a box somewhere. You’re not listening to me. She has claws like an animal.”

  He turned around. “This is Halloween weekend.”

  She felt like an idiot. Of course, that was it, the only reasonable explanation.

  “It’s Halloween weekend,” he said again. He opened the refrigerator and took out a Heineken. “This is Friday. Halloween is Sunday, and people go to parties the whole weekend. Half the people at the university were in costume today. I saw a Frankenstein and a pirate in the library. Some of the students had monster teeth. The woman you saw bought her claws at some shopping mall.”

  “You’re right. That has to be it.” She could feel her whole system shutting down, all the alerts turning off, and she just wanted to collapse. “The claws looked real. Her feet even had scales. It was just awful.”

  He laughed. “She was going to a party, or she just came from one.”

  “Well, I don’t care if it’s Halloween. I don’t like her. She frightens me. She’s the most enormous woman I’ve ever seen, and she stares. She was staring at me the other night when I was on the balcony.”

  “You’re probably misinterpreting her. Maybe you’re staring at her, and you don’t realize it, so she stares back, which is a natural reaction. She’s probably very nice. We should invite her over sometime.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lisa said coolly.

  He kissed her on the forehead. “Did I ever tell you about the Kid Chompers?”

  “Ian, I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Yes, you do.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “When I was seven years old, my cousin Jack ca
me home from the army and spent the summer with us. Jack used to tell me and my brother stories at night. The roof of the house next door was right outside our bedroom window. The roof was lower than the windowsill, and it had a big chimney, and he would tell us that the Kid Chompers lived in the chimney.”

  “The Kid Chompers,” she said.

  He nodded. “The Kid Chompers would come out at night. Not every night, just when the moon was out. The Kid Chompers were like genies in a bottle, and when they came out of the chimney they would get bigger and look in the windows for kids. They would never come in the houses, just peer in the windows. And that’s why kids in the city should never crawl out a window because the Kid Chompers will chomp down on them. That’s how they control kids who climb out on the rooftops. They eat ’em up and you never see the little bastards again.” He laughed. “You should’ve seen us. My brother was so scared he peed his pants.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been married to you all these years, and you never told me about Kid Chompers. You know, you’re my favorite.”

  “You’re my favorite, too.”

  The phone rang, breaking the mood. Ian reached across the counter to pick it up. “Hello… yes, she’s right here,” he said, and handed the phone to Lisa.

  “This is Dr. Lynch,” the dentist said in a bright voice.

  Caught off guard, Lisa scrambled around for the calendar. “I looked over the estimate, and I’ve decided to go ahead. I’ll prepay to get the discount. You said you can do some of the work on the weekend.”

  “Great,” Dr. Lynch said. “Can you come to my office in Maryland?”

  “In Maryland?” Lisa said, surprised.

  “I live in Maryland, and I have an office next to my house. It would be easier to have a long session here on the weekend.”

  “No, that’s too far,” Lisa said. “I don’t want to drive all the way to Maryland when you’re right here in the building where we live.”

  Hemming and hawing, Dr. Lynch finally said he could see her Saturday morning at eight at the Connecticut Avenue office.

  “This Saturday, tomorrow?” Lisa said, confused. “You can see me that soon? Okay, great. So I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Ian gave her a peculiar look after she hung up. “Why is he calling you this time of night? I thought dentists had receptionists and worked nine to five.”

  She shrugged. “He’s trying to go the extra mile. He’s a nice guy. I keep having these headaches, and he says I need some work done, so I’m going to go ahead.”

  “You’ve been diagnosed with migraines.”

  “But I only get those once a year. I’m getting a headache almost every day.”

  Ian put his arm around her. “It’s stress. Tomorrow is Saturday. Let’s go for a walk in Rock Creek Park. You can get claustrophobia stuck in here with all these boxes.”

  “I forgot to tell you what I saw in the paper. They found a body in the park.”

  “In Rock Creek Park?” he asked.

  She nodded. “A homeless man under the bridge down the street. The paper said it was an animal attack. I want to stay out of the park until they find out what’s going on.”

  “It’s probably drug related and they all know each other. I’m not going to become a prisoner in my home every time something shows up in the news.”

  “I don’t want to go off in some abandoned area, Ian. It’s not worth it.”

  He sighed. “The park is wall to wall people on Saturday. There’s no way anything can happen. I’ll go by myself then. I need the exercise.”

  “I’ll come,” she said reluctantly, afraid for him to go alone.

  “We’ll stick to the trails where everybody else is walking. It’ll be fine.”

  Roused out of a deep sleep, Lisa squinted at the nightstand clock. The glowing red numbers changed from 12:59 to one in the morning. She turned over and sat up.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sound was coming from a room off the hall. She realized she had been dreaming about the scratching, but the dream began to fade like fuzzy fog the more she tried to remember what it had been about. Something about Kid Chompers outside, scratching at the bedroom window.

  “What’s wrong?” Ian groaned.

  “I hear something,” Lisa said.

  They lay still.

  “It must be the contractors,” he told her.

  “They go home at three-thirty. It’s one in the morning.”

  “It’s the cats,” he said. “They’re into something.”

  “It must be Pie.”

  “Pie’s on my side, hogging half the bed.”

  “Then it’s Shadow.” Lisa reached for her bathrobe. “He must be scratching on a box.”

  “I’ll check on him,” Ian offered.

  “No, I know where he is. Believe me, you’ll never find him.”

  Lisa felt her way across the room and flipped on the hall light. She could still hear the scratch, scratch, scratch, a persistent scraping of claws against a solid surface. It was coming from the guest room at the end of the hall.

  “Shadow,” she called, exasperated. “What are you doing in there?”

  The scratching stopped. When she came to the guest room door, she turned on the light, stepped over the vacuum, squeezed around an armchair, and peered in the closet. The bags of clothes and boxes looked the same.

  For a moment she couldn’t see the cat, but then she spotted him. Shadow had wedged himself all the way in the back again. The cat looked comfortable with his paws tucked in front of him as if he’d been curled up in the same position for hours, watching the wall.

  “Shadow, are you scratching something?” she asked him.

  The cat blinked at her.

  “Well, I guess you can stay there as long as you knock it off. You’re keeping everybody up. Come on, now.” She turned off the lights and went back to bed.

  “Was it him?” Ian asked.

  She pulled up the blanket. “It must have been him, but he’s just sitting there now, looking at the wall.”

  One in the morning. Travis rubbed his bleary eyes, unable to sleep, grateful for the company of the dog curled up on the floor. The house seemed to have developed more creaks since Monroe moved out, or maybe he was hearing them for the first time.

  He shook the tracker, frustrated. The ghost of an image glimmered over the surface, but in seconds the image dimmed and disappeared. How hard did the tracker fall into the gutter? Enough to break it? Why would the alien have equipment that fragile? It couldn’t be broken. He’d never really understood how to turn it on, anyway. He’d just lucked out.

  Or a car ran over it. After all, he’d picked it up in the street.

  He put the tracker down and paced around the room, obsessed with Lexie and their strange predicament. He’d thought about her every waking moment since their blow-up.

  “Coward or realist?” he asked the mirror. Gruesome thoughts about the giant alien filled his mind. He had no intention of becoming a meal in the woods, but if the black triangle’s pilot was dead, he was going to have to come up with a plan fast.

  “Just lie,” he said, thinking out loud. “Make up something and call the cops.”

  His voice hung in the quiet. Make up what?

  Tell them you heard something in her condo.

  He turned on more lamps, amazed by the simple idea that had just floated past him. In the lamplight his room seemed bright and safe, suggesting a world full of things he could get a handle on. The giant was hiding in Buchanan House. Tell the cops he heard something in her condo. It was perfect, really perfect—except he didn’t know where she was hiding. His plan was worthless without an address.

  He picked up the lifeless tracker. “This is the key, this thing,” he said, weighing it in his hand. The tracker would show her location if he could get it to stay on for more than a few seconds. What was the thing’s range? Not that far. He’d have to be inside the building.

  And days ago they saw her on a balcony. The room behind the balcon
y had artwork, something with elephants. An oriental wall hanging with three elephants. The wall hanging would confirm everything.

  The idea gripped him. Lexie’s plan to risk their lives running around in the dark to get pictures nobody would believe wouldn’t matter. And no Lexie blurting out the crazy truth. Make up something and call the cops. A fight, glass breaking, gunshots, screams, a simple story any cop would swallow. The cops would come if he said gunshots. They would have their own guns ready, and when they saw what she was, they would kill her.

  And it wouldn’t happen in the woods. They would nail her in somebody’s living room where she would have nowhere to run.

  The phone rang in the quiet.

  “It’s me,” Lexie said in a quiet voice. “I know it’s late, but I was driving around and saw your lights.”

  “Where are you, outside?” he asked, trying to stomp out the feelings doing cartwheels in his heart. She sounded like she wanted something. It was too much to think she’d just missed him.

  “No, at home. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Okay, you got me. What’s up?”

  She hesitated. “I met with the reporter from the Post and a couple of cops that he knows. They’re going with me into the woods tomorrow to look for Burke. I want you to come with us.”

  “I don’t know, Lexie.”

  “You could help me remember where we walked before.”

  “We already did that,” he said.

  “But maybe this time we’ll recognize it. And it won’t be the two of us with an antique gun that doesn’t work. The cops will have guns, and they’ll shoot anything that moves.”

  “We’ve been all through the woods. We didn’t get anywhere.”

  “Well, I have to keep looking. I can’t just let him die out there.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he told her.

  “The reporter wants to talk to you,” she said.

  She was waiting. He knew what was bothering him. The finality of it all, going in the woods with armed police. What if the black triangle’s pilot was still alive? The alien was probably dead, but what if he wasn’t? What if they shot him?