Cover Of Night

After tossing the dirty bed linens into the hallway, she vacuumed and dusted, cleaned the bathroom, and remade the bed with clean sheets and blankets. She then took the single change of clothing from the closet and neatly folded the garments before placing them in the suitcase Mr. Layton had left behind. The plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag rustled as she moved it aside to make room for the folded clothes, and she eyed it with more than a little curiosity.

"If you didn’t want me to look in it, you shouldn’t have left it behind," she muttered to the absent Mr. Layton, seizing the bag and picking with her fingernails at the knots he’d tied in the handles. The knots loosened and she pulled the bag open, peering inside.

A TracFone was lying loose inside the bag. There was no receipt in the bag, so she didn’t know if he’d bought the phone recently and just left it in the bag, or if he’d put it inside the bag to protect it, in case his suitcase got wet while being loaded on the plane. On the other hand, most people kept their cell phones with them, not in their suitcase.

For all she knew, he could have had the phone on him until he got here and realized there was no cell phone service, therefore no reason to carry the phone around, and put it in the bag rather than leave it lying around in the open. Cate, under ordinary circumstances, didn’t go into her guests’ rooms from the time they checked in until they checked out, though a few did request that she make the bed and clean the bathroom every day – but Mr. Layton wouldn’t have had any reason to trust her, because he didn’t know her.

Double-checking the closet, she found a pair of black wingtip shoes that she had overlooked before, so she put the shoes inside the plastic bag and added them to the suitcase. In the bathroom, she put all of the toiletries inside the leather Dopp Kit, zipped it, and tried to wedge it into the suitcase beside the shoes. The suitcase was a small one, though, and the kit simply wouldn’t fit.

Mr. Layton must have had more than one suitcase, she thought, and left the other one in his car overnight. She had seen his luggage when he checked in, and he’d been carrying only this one bag. Since the possessions he’d left behind wouldn’t fit inside the suitcase, that meant he’d gone back to the car and retrieved something from the other bag – either the Dopp Kit or the shoes. Following that line of thought, she realized, he hadn’t left all his possessions behind, just left the ones that hadn’t been important enough for him to make the effort to carry them with him. After all, he could have packed the suitcase and heaved it out the window, then retrieved it when he was on the ground. He hadn’t taken the time, so she doubted he would ever bother to come back for his abandoned stuff.

Which brought up the question of just what she was supposed to do with it. How long should she store the suitcase? A month? A year? She intended to put it in the attic, so it wasn’t as if the case would be in the way, but ever since Derek had died, she’d tormented herself with what-if scenarios. What if she didn’t get rid of the suitcase and a few years down the road something happened to her? Whoever went through the things in the attic would find this suitcase full of men’s clothing and the normal assumption would be that they’d belonged to Derek, and she’d kept them for sentimental reasons. The most logical thing then would be to keep the suitcase and its contents for the twins, and she didn’t want her boys mistakenly treasuring items from some idiotic stranger who’d gotten himself in trouble and disappeared.

Just in case, she got a sheet of the stationery with the B and B’s letterhead on it, which she put in all the rooms, and quickly wrote out Mr. Layton’s name and the date, and the information that he’d left his belongings behind, then tucked the sheet inside the suitcase. If the worst happened and she got killed, this would explain things.

She hadn’t used to be such a worrier, but that was before she’d become, in short order, a mother and then a widow. Bad things did happen. She had quit rock climbing the moment she’d learned she was pregnant, and though she’d been an even more avid climber than Derek, she hadn’t considered returning to the sport, because she had the boys to consider now. What would happen to them if she suffered a bad fall and died? Oh, she knew that physically they’d be well-cared for; her family would see to that, as well as Derek’s family, though they weren’t as close to the boys as she wished. But what about the twins’ emotional well-being? They would grow up feeling abandoned by their parents, and no amount of logic would offset that primitive response.

So she took what precautions she could, shied away from risky behavior, but she couldn’t offset the hand of fate: accidents happened. And no way would she let her children think Jeffrey Layton’s things had belonged to their father. Besides, Derek had had better taste in clothes.

Smiling at the thought, she hefted the suitcase in one hand and the Dopp Kit in the other and carried them to the hallway, then set them down. She went to her room to get the key to the attic stairwell.

Because she didn’t want the boys going into the attic by themselves, she kept the door locked and the key in her makeup bag, which was in a drawer of the bathroom vanity. On the way into the bathroom she passed by her dresser, on which sat several framed photographs. She paused, suddenly heart-struck, staring at the feeze-frame moments of her life.

It happened once in a while; enough time had passed that she could usually walk by the dresser and not really even notice the photographs. When the boys came into her room on those rare days when she could sleep a little late, they would almost always ask questions about the photographs and she could answer with equanimity. But sometimes… sometimes it was as if a razor-sharp memory reached out of the past and squeezed her heart, and she would stop in her tracks, almost felled by the rush of grief.