Creepers

"Handy skill," Rick said.

"Well, I once did a story about a master locksmith, a guy the police send for when they really need to open something and nobody else can do it. He showed me a few easy tricks."

"The next time I lock myself out of my car, I'll give you a call," Vi

"So who wants to do the honors?" Balenger asked. "Cora?"

She rubbed her arms. "I'll pass."

"Vi

"Thanks," Vi

"Okay, but remember, if this is a monumental discovery, it gets named after me." Balenger lifted the suitcase's lid.

As a bitter smell escaped from the interior, five helmet lights and flashlights blazed on the contents.

16

No one moved.

"I feel like I'm going to be sick," Cora said. "What am I looking at?"

The suitcase was filled with fur. A mummified torso and head. Paws. Hands.

"My God, is it human?" Vi

"A monkey," Balenger said. "I think it's a monkey."

"Yeah, welcome to Wild Kingdom."

"Why would anybody… do you think somebody put it in there, locked the suitcase, and smothered it?" Rick said.

"Or maybe it was already dead," the professor suggested.

"And somebody was carrying it around for old times' sake?" Cora raised her hands. "This is one of the sickest things I've ever-"

"Maybe it was a pet and somebody tried to smuggle it into the hotel. But it suffocated before the owner could let it out."

"Sick," Cora said. "Sick, sick, sick. If it was such a prized pet, why didn't the owner take it out of here and bury it?"

"Perhaps the owner was overcome with grief," Balenger said.

"Then why lock the suitcase before leaving?"

"I'm afraid I don't have an explanation for that," Balenger said. "In my experience, all the human-interest articles I've written, people are more crazy than they're sane."

"Well, this is crazy, all right."

Balenger reached into the suitcase.

"You're going to touch it?" Vi

"I'm wearing gloves." Balenger nudged the carcass, which felt disturbingly light. The fur scratched along the bottom of the suitcase as he moved it. He found a rubber ball with flecks of red paint on it.

Noticing a flap on the inside of the suitcase's lid, he looked inside. "Here's an envelope."

The paper was yellow with age. He opened it and found a faded black-and-white photograph that showed a man and woman of around forty. They leaned against the railing of a boardwalk. It stretched to the right while the ocean extended behind them. Presumably, the boardwalk was Asbury Park's. Balenger thought he recognized the shape of the casino at the end. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt, squinted from the sun, and looked to be in emotional pain. The woman wore a frilly dress and smiled desperately. Each wore a wedding ring. They had a monkey between them. It held a ball that looked like the one in the suitcase. It gri

Balenger turned the photograph over. "There's a film-processing date. 1965." He looked closer at the envelope. "Something else is in here." He removed a yellowed newspaper clipping. "An obituary. August 22, 1966. A man named Harold Bauman, aged forty-one, died from a brain embolism. An ex-wife named Edna survived him."

"'Ex'?" Rick asked.

Balenger used his flashlight to study a name tag on the suitcase. "Edna Bauman. Trenton, New Jersey." He took another look at the photograph. "They have wedding rings in 1965. Within a year, they divorced, and the ex-husband-what's his name? Harold?-died."

"A portrait of despair," Vi

"Shut the suitcase," Cora demanded. "Lock it. Put it back where it was on the pillows. We shouldn't have disturbed it. Let's get out of this room and close the damned door."

"Reminds me of what I said back at the motel." Vi

"Rick?" Cora asked suddenly, continuing to rub her arms.

"What?"

"Do me a favor. Go into the bathroom."

"The bathroom? What on earth for?"

"Go in there, and look in the bathtub. Make sure there's not another body in here, someone who slit her wrists or took pills or…"

Rick studied her, then touched her hand. "Sure. Whatever you want."

Balenger watched Rick guide his light back the way they'd come, to the bathroom. The young man went in. A silence lengthened, broken by the scrape of hooks on a shower-curtain rod.

"Rick?" Cora asked.

He remained silent a moment longer.

"Nothing," he finally answered. "Empty."

"Thank God. Sorry, everybody," Cora said. "I'm embarrassed that I let my emotions get carried away. When I was a kid, I had a cat that disappeared just before my family moved from Omaha to Buffalo. Her name was Sandy. She used to spend most of the day sleeping on my bed. The day we moved, I looked everywhere for her. After several hours, my dad said we needed to get in the car and leave. We had two days of driving ahead of us, and he said we couldn't waste any more time-he had a new job in Buffalo and couldn't arrive late. He asked the neighbors to look for Sandy and let us know if they found her. He promised he'd pay them to send the cat to us. Two weeks later, when I was unpacking some of my toys, I found Sandy in a box she'd crawled into. She was dead. You wouldn't believe how dried out her body was. She suffocated in what my dad said would have been the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat that accumulated in the moving van. A month later, my parents told me they were getting a divorce." Cora paused. "When I saw that dead monkey in the suitcase… I don't mean to be a… I promise I won't get upset again."

"Don't worry about it," Vi

Cora smiled. "Always a gentleman."

17

Outside, after everyone left the room, Vi

As Vi

"The photograph appears to have been taken on the boardwalk outside." Rick's voice was tight as he tried to express what troubled him. "I wonder if the woman came back here to try to revive better memories. The likely time for her to do that would have been while her grief was strongest, right after her ex-husband's death, not a couple of years later when she wasn't in as much shock."

"A reasonable assumption," the professor said.

"So let's say 1966, or 1967 at the latest."

"Again, that's reasonable."

"Carlisle died in 1971. The suitcase sat on that bed at least four years prior to that. Professor, you said Carlisle had peepholes and hidden corridors that allowed him to see what his guests were doing in private. He must have known about the suitcase. Why the hell didn't he do something?"