Lost Cargo (31 page)

Lexie turned to face him. “Did you see her? Did you see the way she looks?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Lexie shook her head. “Travis, she had on a maternity dress. She’s pregnant.”

The posters for Monroe remained through the winter, tattered by the wind. Spring gradually arrived. Swelling buds unfolded in Rock Creek Park. Wild dogwood and redbud blossomed under massive oaks and sycamores that began to grow rich green mantles. Predatory eyes blinked open in dark holes. Migrating birds returned to the woods, birds that would never encounter the photographer who’d once wandered with her camera through the trees behind Buchanan House.

Blocks away on Porter Street, Travis opened the door of his mother’s house. “It’s me,” he called. “Banana bread delivery service. Anything else you want me to take?”

His mother gave him a wrapped package and a strange look. “No, but what are you doing with a helmet?”

“Because I have a bike,” he said, gesturing at the ten-speed on the lawn.

“That’s not safe, Travis. You’re going to get hit by a car and you’ll have to have plastic surgery to fix your face. You’ll end up with your nose in your forehead and pins in every bone in your body.”

“I’ll be fine. The bike’s because of the plastic.”

“What plastic? Plastic surgery?”

“Plastic trash. The oceans are full of plastic trash and the plastic comes from oil. We’re all addicted to oil.”

”I should have guessed.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I went through that in the seventies with my love beads and my hippie sandals. It lasted about five minutes. I’ve always been a girl who likes money.”

Travis shook his head and headed for the front door.

“Let’s see you on that thing when it’s ten degrees outside,” she shouted.

He met up with Lexie on her bike and cycled across the city along the Potomac River. They kept pace with a boat churning along the bank and then outflanked it as they hit heavy traffic and crossed a massive bridge. Gulls mewed and wheeled over the gray-green water. As they rode past the city’s famous monuments, he thought about the night they’d flown above them all, heading for the stars.

Ten miles later, they reached Old Town and wandered over the cobblestones, reading the house numbers. The quiet streets smelled of sun-warmed bricks and boxwood. Finally Travis stopped at a two-story townhouse with black wooden shutters and ivy growing up the chimney.

“This is it,” he said, taking off the helmet.

When Lisa answered the door in a Bach Festival t-shirt, they crowded inside.

“How do you like the house?” Lexie asked her.

“Well, the rooms are on the small side,” Lisa said, “and the ceilings are enormous, but it was built in the 1800s. It’s short on space but long on charm. We just moved in, so step around the mess. All we’ve done this year is play musical houses.”

They followed her down a narrow hall that opened into a living room filled with boxes. A few books sat on the shelves, but nearly everything else Lisa and Ian owned seemed to be on the floor or shoved up against the walls. Even the chairs and rugs didn’t seem to be in permanent places. A tabby sunning itself in a window turned to look at them.

“Your cat likes the windowsill,” Lexie said.

“We’re lucky she’s okay,” Lisa replied, walking into the kitchen. “We lost our other cat when the building was ransacked. The whole place was a wreck. At least the insurance paid for everything, thank God.”

“We saw the closet,” Lexie said.

Lisa took down white china cups. “And it took forever to sell the condo because of the stories in the paper. You know, the man who died in the garage.”

“The animal attack,” Travis said.

Lisa turned on a Mr. Coffee. “The same animal that attacked Ian. Somebody owned that animal and must have known what happened. I’ll tell you what really gets me. The management must have known something, too, but they wouldn’t say anything because of the liability. I can’t understand what makes some people tick. I really can’t.” She sliced the banana bread and put it on a tray with a bowl of fruit. “But I’m glad we moved. This is a nice area. It’s better for Ian. More peaceful.”

“How’s he doing?” Travis asked.

Lisa picked up the tray. “He feels good today. You can see him now. He’s in the garden. We’ll have coffee out there.”

They followed her down another narrow hall to a set of French doors. The doors opened into a garden with ten-foot brick walls that blocked the view of the street. Ivy covered one wall and hyacinths and daffodils grew against the others. A magnificent cherry tree that had to be as old as the house spread its great limbs in the center of the garden. Gnarled branches in full bloom grew over the walls and dropped their fragile white blossoms on the brick courtyard.

Ian sat in a wheelchair under the ancient tree. He turned the wheels, revealing the stumps of his amputated legs.

Travis and Lexie cautiously walked across the bricks to greet him.

Like Burke, Ian had changed. He had always been a mellow man and had mellowed even more and grown his hair to his shoulders. Travis glanced at the books on a table by the wheelchair. The Bhagavad Gita sat on top of the stack.

“We like the new house,” Travis began. He didn’t intend to question his brother-in-law about his ordeal, but after they exchanged small talk, Lexie turned to Ian.

“Can you tell us what you saw in the woods?” she asked him.

“The angel of death,” Ian said.

“N
ext week, exams,” Travis told his students. “Be on time, no pencils, practice legibility.” People were getting up, shrugging their coats on and picking up backpacks, not listening as they crowded out the door.

Fifteen minutes later, Travis reached the bike rack outside the Gettysburg College English Department. Cars with their headlights on crawled around a horse-drawn buggy full of tourists. He cycled past the college, across Lincoln Avenue, through a block of aging mansions the students had turned into rentals and fraternity houses, and reached a country road. The road wound past a meandering stone wall built in the 1700s, through a Civil War battlefield, and into the darkness.

He cycled uphill in the headlights of a few cars, but then the traffic died out, and he was alone. Lexie and the kids would be back from D.C., so he’d hear about her brother when he got home. He missed Washington, the international flavor, the bookstores and museums and Metro, but it was a better life here. For one thing, he could see the stars at night.

Three miles later, he turned into the lane that led to their two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, got off the bike, and stood for a moment in the gravel driveway, taking in the night. The sky was so clear the moon’s mysterious rilles and craters stood out in sharp relief. Venus shone over the tree line and Jupiter gleamed in high magnificence against thousands of stars.

Something was always moving around up there. He kept his eyes to the heavens until he spotted tiny lights blinking near the horizon. A helicopter, he realized with disappointed relief. A few miles away a commercial plane slowly flashed its lights as it flew south.

He’d searched the sky for
UFO
s throughout the years, but he’d never seen another one.

When his neck began to ache from looking up, he turned his gaze to his own humble patch of earth. Moonlight lit up the meadow beyond the lane and the well-worn path he walked every day with Maggie, their gentle collie. Insects called and frogs croaked from the bottom of the hill where a creek meandered through the woods. A steer bellowed from a nearby farm. The faint rush of cars came from the highway, followed by the lonely, wild wail of a train as it raced to distant places.

The silhouettes of his wife and children moved in the kitchen window. When he opened the screen door, the puppy raced toward him and Maggie nosed his hand.

Gordy rushed up and grabbed the wagging puppy. “Daddy, Daddy, we named him! We named him Fur Face!”

His big sister Cassidy joined him on the floor. “No, no, he’s Walter P. Puppy,” she corrected her brother.

“Cass, let Daddy get inside,” Lexie said.

Travis closed the kitchen door. “Fur Face is a good name for a dog,” he said. “I vote for Fur Face.” After he kissed Lexie and hugged his children, the children and the dogs moved to the screened porch.

“Exams next week,” he said. “This house is going to be crazy with the two of us grading papers all night.”

She put dinner in the oven. “Tell me about it. The Maltese Falcon is on in half an hour. You want to watch it?”

“Sure. How’s your brother doing?”

“He seems fine,” she said. His wife was still a beautiful woman, but under the kitchen light the tiny scar from the attack in the black triangle still showed on her throat. “He went with us to the zoo and we had lunch in the old neighborhood. I think he enjoyed himself. And you’ll never guess who I saw. Annie Broussard.”

“She’s still at Maxwell’s?” he asked.

Lexie nodded. “I think she bought the place a long time ago. She came into some money or something. It’s been Annie’s for a while. We went in there for lunch. Her twins were there, too. To be honest, I don’t care for one of them, the way she stares right through you. Ten years old and she gives me the creeps.”

“Future lawyer.”

“Future criminal. I did say hello to Annie, but there were too many people to really talk to her. She looks the same. Sad. I probably made her think about Monroe. I wish we’d found some way to tell her the truth.”

“She never would have believed it,” he said.

“I know, but it doesn’t seem right. It didn’t seem right years ago, and it still doesn’t.” She turned out the light over the sink. “We finished our scrapbook for Gram’s birthday. Could you put the photos back in the attic for me?”

Upstairs he opened a small door off their bedroom, climbed the narrow attic stairs, and pulled the light string. The bare bulb clicked on. One more step and a blast of hot, stuffy air hit him in the face. The attic had been baking under the sun all day and retained most of the heat. It was the kind of attic you would find in a lot of old Pennsylvania farmhouses, with a slanted wooden ceiling, exposed brick walls, and tiny dormer windows.

He stacked the flowered photo box against the wall beside the luggage and bins of winter clothes, but he had something else to do before he went downstairs.

His biggest problem had been finding a place to hide it.

He’d dismissed the blanket chest. Lexie would go through that at some point. And he’d skipped storing it anywhere in the main part of the attic for the same reason. The house downstairs was out. His children might find it. In the end he chose the floorboards. People had been hiding treasures under the floorboards for centuries, and if it was good enough for the rest of humanity, it worked for him.

When he lifted the loose floorboard, a soft glow spread through the attic. He took the alien tracker from the hollowed out space underneath the floor and held it in his palm.

The cool silver metal gleamed, spread like flowing mercury, and molded itself around his fingers as if it knew him. Lines formed on the surface and settled into a humanlike symbol with a blue sun in the chest.
Me
, he thought, reading the familiar symbol. Then the image moved through the house to the fields where it raced across the tall grass to the black woods on the horizon. Once the image stopped, it lifted beyond the bright, cold face of the moon to the stars, waiting, searching.

Bu there was no symbol of a net that slowly spun into a helix. He’d never seen it again.

He weighed the tracker in his hand. Years ago he’d figured out how to keep it on all the time as a beacon for Monroe. He faithfully checked it every month, quietly climbing the attic stairs, looking over his shoulder, making sure nobody was around before he pulled up the floorboard. It seemed wrong not to let Lexie know he still had it, but he knew she would show it to somebody.

Travis placed the glowing tracker back under the floor, tapped the floorboard into place, and walked over to the window. Three cautious deer drank at the creek. Somewhere in the darkness a red fox called to another fox. More stars had come out.

He looked for moving lights again, but the night sky was still.

Of the three men who’d disappeared, two had come back. Ian’s marriage to Lisa survived the night he left her in the parking lot and walked home through the woods. He had adjusted to his terrible injuries and continued teaching. Burke recovered his footing in life, but he was never the same man again. Over the years he’d let the edges of his perfect world soften and adopted a small, loyal dog, a black and white Shih Tzu. Sometimes they would find him reading a book with his dog beside him and his feet propped on his antiques. He’d never mentioned the black triangle again.

Travis leaned against the window. The stars glimmered.

Monroe Broussard was up there somewhere, circling one of those faraway points of light. Two of the three men had returned, and the third would, too. He felt certain about it, even a decade later. Someday Monroe would remember Annie. He’d loved her too much to leave her forever. Someday he would remember his wife and earthly home, and he would come back to discover he had twin daughters waiting for him.

Someday it had to happen.

“Travis?” Lexie called. “The movie’s going to start.”

“Coming,” he said. His own wife and children were waiting for him. He crossed the dusty attic floor, looked back at the window full of mysterious stars, and turned off the light.

My gratitude goes to my father Murray, who loved books and classic sci-fi films (I hope one day we meet in heaven to talk philosophy and watch a monster movie together), and most of all to my beloved late husband Jack for his love and encouragement. This book is for Jack.

My thanks also go to these writers for their support: Chuck Zetterholm, Kim Dana Kupperman, Dustin Beall Smith, Barbara House, Ian Bontems, Kathleen Rockwood, Andrew Stone, the writers of the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, and Nathan Bransford’s blog and forum community.