David Morrell - Creepers

"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."

Outside, after everyone left the room, Vinnie closed the door. Balenger stood across from the group, his headlamp showing Vinnie and Rick next to each other. Vinnie was thin, with slightly rounded shoulders and pleasant but soft features, while Rick had an athlete's solid build and was outright handsome. All things being equal, it was easy to see why Cora had chosen the latter, Balenger thought. It was also easy to see that Vinnie still cared for her. That was no doubt one of the reasons he went on expeditions with them.

As Vinnie and the professor looked toward Cora, Rick stroked her shoulder. He was clearly bothered about what had happened in the room. In the harsh lights, his face was stark, his eyes now darting toward the door.

"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?"

"Have it removed? I don't know. Maybe he liked the idea of gradually shutting down the hotel, leaving each room the way it was when its final guest checked out, wanting every room to have a memento that he could visit."

"What a wacko nutjob," Vinnie said.

"Yeah, we've come a long way from calling him a visionary and a genius." Rick's face remained stark. "How many other rooms have stories to tell?"

Vinnie moved toward a door farther along. He tested the knob, pushed the door open, and stalked into blackness, the door banging against the interior wall, the noise reverberating.

The others followed, Cora reluctantly. Balenger heard drawers being opened and closed.

"Nothing," Vinnie said, his light probing the room. "The bed's made. Everything's tidy. Apart from the dust, the place looks ready for its next guest. Nothing in the drawers, not even the customary Bible. Hotel toiletries on the bathroom counter, but nothing else, and nothing in the waste cans. Towels on a rack next to the shower. Everything the way it should be, except for this."

Vinnie opened the closet doors wider and showed them a Burberry raincoat, its wide lapels drooping, its tan belt dangling. "Back then, these things were a status symbol even more than they are now. Dustin Hoffman talks about how much he wants one but can't afford it in Kramer vs. Kramer. Okay, that movie's more recent than when the hotel closed, but the point's the same. Burberrys were exclusive and damned expensive. So why would somebody not take this?"

"An oversight," the professor suggested. "We've all forgotten something when we're traveling. It happens."

"But this isn't a pair of socks or a T-shirt. This is a very desirable overcoat. Why didn't the owner phone the hotel and ask a staff member to look for it?"