Creepers

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?" Vinnie asked. "A child wrapped in-"

"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?" Vinnie said.

"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 grinned and reached toward the camera as if the photographer were holding up a banana.

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," Vinnie said. His camera flashed.

"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." Vinnie lowered his camera. "Some buildings make the past so vivid, it's like they're batteries. They've stored the energy of everything that happened in them. Then they leak that energy, like the emotion coming from that suitcase."

"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," Vinnie said. "My imagination got carried away, too. I wish I hadn't brought us in here."

Cora smiled. "Always a gentleman."