“Mr. Blake,” she said professionally, what with Owen only a couple of feet away fiddling with a fax machine, “how can I help you today?”
I explained that when I’d rented my room, I’d had Syd’s stuffed moose Milt in my bag, and now I couldn’t find it.
“When she comes home, I want it to be there for her,” I said.
Veronica nodded, understanding. “Let me just check our lost and found,” she said, and disappeared into an adjacent office.
I paced the lobby, five steps this way, five steps back. I did that three or four times before Veronica came back, empty-handed.
“Nothing’s been turned in,” she said.
“Is the room in use? Could I go up and have a look?”
Veronica consulted the computer. “Let’s have a look-see… The room’s empty at the moment, but our damn system for programming new keys is down for a minute. I’ll come up with you and let you in with my passkey.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
She came around the counter. She had her cell phone in one hand, like she was expecting a call, the key card in the other.
We went to the elevator together. “It’s possible, if one of the maids found it,” she said, “they might not have turned it in.” She gave me a sad smile. “It happens.”
“Sure,” I said again.
“You think it’s possible you might have lost it someplace else?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think it was here.”
The elevator doors parted. As we started down the hall, Veronica’s phone went off. She glanced at the ID, hit the button, put the phone to her ear. “Hang on a second,” she said. She extended the passkey to me and said, “You mind? I really have to take this.”
I nodded and took the key as Veronica hit the elevator button to go back down, phone stuck to her ear.
I reached my former room, inserted the key, waited for the little light to turn green, and went inside.
The room was all made up, waiting for the next guest. Stepping into the center of the room, I didn’t see Milt anywhere. It was possible, of course, that one of the housekeeping staff found Milt and, rather than turn him in to the office, decided to keep him. Milt was pretty threadbare from years of hugging, but then again, the staff here probably didn’t make a fortune, and coming home with any stuffed toy for your daughter, even one whose antlers were nearly falling off, was better than coming home without one at all.
I walked around the room, glanced under chairs, opened the drawers of the dresser-all empty.
Then I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. Clearly, vacuuming under here was not something hotel management insisted be done on a daily basis. There were dust balls the size of, well, golf balls.
I found a skin magazine, a package of cigarette papers, a paperback novel by John Grisham. Where the bed met the wall, there was a dark blob. I reached my arm under, grabbed hold of it tentatively.
It was furry.
I pulled it out. It was Milt. I picked the larger bits of dust off him and tried to blow off the rest.
“Got ya,” I said, holding Milt, looking into his goofy face, touching the right antler, which was hanging by a thread. “I thought I’d lost you.”
And then, suddenly, sitting there on the hotel bedroom floor with Milt in my hands, I felt overwhelmed.
Cried like a baby.
I allowed myself three minutes to feel bad, then got to my feet, went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, dried off with a fresh towel, and left the room.
I WAS HEADING BACK TO THE ELEVATOR, Milt in hand, when I heard muffled screaming coming from a room at the end of the hall.
A woman’s screams. Short ones. Every few seconds.
Not frightened screams. Not screams of terror. They were cries of pain.
I started heading to the end of the hall, pausing at the doors, trying to figure out which room the cries were coming from.
That meant waiting a moment at each door, listening for the next cry to determine whether
I was hearing another voice now, another woman. She was shouting, “You don’t go home! You here to work! You try to run away again, they make me do this even harder!”
I had the right door.
Then a noise that sounded like thwack.
And then the woman screamed, “Aww!”
Something horrible was happening in that room.
I reached into my pocket, felt the key card. Veronica had called it a passkey. I took that to mean that it would let me into any room, not just the one where I’d stayed.
I like to think I would have gone through that door to help any woman who was in trouble, but at that moment, I was going through that door because I thought it might be Syd.
I put the card into the slot, waited, hoped for the light to turn green.
It did. I withdrew the card, turned the handle, and burst into the room.
“What’s going on in-”
And I stopped, tried to take in what I was looking at.
Standing in front of me was the woman I’d run into in the hotel breakfast nook. Cantana. She was in her hotel uniform. She was holding in her right hand a thin chrome wand, or stick. I looked a little closer and realized it was an old car antenna.
The other woman in the room was kneeling at the foot of the bed, bent at the waist so that her upper body and arms were splayed out on the bedspread. She was dressed similarly to Cantana, but the big difference was, there was blood seeping through her uniform on her buttocks. She turned her head toward me, and there were tears on her cheeks. She was Asian, mid-twenties.
“What you want?” Cantana asked me. “How you get in here? What you doing with that?”
She was pointing at Milt.
I was speechless. I started backing out of the room, Cantana still yammering at me. “What you doing in here? Can’t you see we having a meeting?”
Once I was all the way into the hall, Cantana slammed the door in my face. I stood there, dumbstruck, then turned around slowly.
What the hell was that?
That was when I found myself staring directly at the fire extinguisher station recessed into the opposite wall. The extinguisher sat behind a labeled glass door.
The letter “I” in the word FIRE was nearly worn away.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE PICTURE.
The picture that was emailed to me, to make me think that Syd had been spotted in
