THE QUEST
Chapter 5 Adam Meets a Snake.
That night, Joan and her husband lay in the comfortable, luxurious bed of their hotel room, unmoving.
"Jane?" came Adam's voice in the darkness.
"Yes?" Was he going to suggest making love? She wasn't in the mood, though she would be quite eager to do so if this was a real vacation.
But Adam had something else on his mind. "Let's go back home to Arcadia tomorrow."
"With the mission not complete?"
"Yeah. We have free will, don't we? And I'm not being self-indulgent; it's about my Dad. He lost Mom years ago, he's retired from work, he just sold the house. All he has is me. Maybe you can't empathize; your Dad has Mrs. G, and Luke, and Kevin, and Sister Lily, and he can look forward to Lily having her baby."
"No, I do empathize. But I've never just walked out on a mission before."
"If you feel strongly about staying, do you want to separate for a few days? I go home, you stay on the mission? After all the summons just came to you. Not that I want to be away from you."
"NO," Joan said firmly. She thought through the alternatives. "Look, let's give it one more day, OK? If nothing happens, we both go home."
"Hmmm – all right, one more day."
Joan didn't want to abandon her mission, and she didn't have the nerve to dicker with God over the details. But God, being omniscient, presumably knew about what the couple had decided. Would He hurry things up, or at least give them extra information to explain why it was important to stay on the mission? More importantly, would He resent being manipulated like this?
The next morning, Joan put on her bathing suit and went down to the beach again, seeking an excuse to talk to Lizzie again. Adam didn't go with her: there would be probably be people on the beach who remembered his "ROVE-ing eye" and despised him.
Adam, instead, decided to look for the couple's room. Joan had carefully noted the room number yesterday – 512 - before parting from Lizzie. Adam didn't have any plans for what to do when he got there – indeed, he rarely planned anything except his artworks – but decided to improvise.
There was a middle-aged, bearded man fiddling with the door.
He didn't look either of the people in the picture that Cathy had sent. Nor did what he was doing to the door look like simple use of the hotel's electronic keys.
"Who are you, and what are you doing at that room?" demanded Adam.
The man looked up in surprise. "This is my room. Why is it any of your business?"
"It's not your room. It belongs to – a couple I know." Instinct told Adam to give out a minimum of information. "And you're not using your card to get in. Should I call security?" That was a bluff: he didn't know any of the hotel's numbers, and would have to go back to his room to make an internal call. But it was enough to panic the man. The guilty flee whether someone pursueth or not.
The man dashed at Adam, pushed him aside, and ran for the elevators. By the time Adam regained his footing and reached the elevator bank, the man had apparently left the floor. Adam summoned another elevator and rode it to the ground floor, impatient with the fact that machinery always worked at the same speed no matter how frantic you were. By the time he reached the lobby floor and got out, there was no sign of the man.
Adam went to the main desk. "I'd like to report an attempted break-in."
He described the number of the room and gave a verbal description of the man's appearance, but even Adam could tell this wasn't accomplishing much. The security man agreed to go up to 512 and check the lock for signs of tampering; other than that nothing much could be done. Even if they found a bearded middle-aged man among the visitors in the hotel, they would be reluctant to harass him and alienate a paying customer, not when it was just Adam's word against his, and they weren't even sure they had the right suspect.
Adam remembered that he had a particular talent that might make a difference. Returning to the room he shared with Joan, he got out his sketchpad, and carefully drew a portrait of the man whom he had confronted. Provided with a good likeness rather than a vague description such as "bearded, middle-aged man", the security people might be more aggressive.
Joan had left her cell phone behind in the room, in case she ended up swimming or jumping the waves. That was frustrating, because Adam had things to tell her: not just about the attempted break-in, but his own new motivation.
The man had tried to break into somebody's hotel room. He might just have had theft in mind, maybe stealing that computer program that everybody was arguing about. But also it was possible that Lizzie was inside, in bed.
About twenty-five years ago Adam's mother-in-law Helen Girardi had been resting in bed, feeling safe, when a predator broke into her room and raped her. The act so traumatized her that even now she found it difficult to talk about; she had not told Adam for months after his marriage to Joan, changing her mind only when Sister Lily learned of the tragedy and observed that Adam should not be excluded from what the rest of the family knew.
Adam was now far more motivated in this weird mission. He wanted to step on this worm, as a symbolic blow for his mother-in-law. The time limit he had proposed for the mission no longer mattered.
The artist went down to the lobby, showed the portrait to the startled desk clerk, and sat on a lobby sofa waiting for something to happen.
What did happen was rather unexpected. A few minutes later, a woman in a hotel-maid's uniform came up to the desk with a sack. "Sir, didn't you say that the man in 427 had checked out, so I could go ahead and clean the room early?"
"That's right."
"Well, he must have gone off in an awful hurry, because he left all this stuff behind in 427."
"Hmm, thank you for be careful of his belongings. I'll put it in storage and see if he left a forwarding address."
Adam listened with interest. Could the hastily-departing gentleman be the attempted burglar, trying to get out of the hotel before Adam recognized him again? Or was it an unrelated person? Adam wished that he could have a look at that "stuff".
While he was trying to think of an idea, he was startled by the sound of several dogs barking at the hotel's main door. A shabbily dressed, bearded man with five dogs on a leash was trying to walk in with all his animals. It was the one Joan called Dog-walker God.
"Wait a minute, you can't bring all those dogs here," called the desk clerk.
The dog-walker spoke. He had a wild manner that must have looked to the desk clerk like craziness or drunkenness, though Adam knew that it must be an act. "But I'm here on business. A lady here wanted her poodle walked—"
"Well, give me her room number and I'll call her. But you'll have to keep the animals outside."
Grumbling, the dog-walker tried with apparent clumsiness to maneuver all the dogs back out the door. One dog got loose and started running across the lobby. Shouting, the desk clerk left the desk and tried to catch the dog.
God didn't make mistakes. If he let one dog go, it must have been on purpose. It had the effect of luring the desk clerk away from the sack from room 427, not yet in storage.
Adam dashed behind the counter and crouched down. He might have a few seconds. Rummaging through the junk, he found a passport and opened it to the photo page. It was his burglar. Looking further, he found a plane ticket, with the destination showing prominently: National Airport, Washington DC. The burglar must have really been panicked, to leave this stuff behind. A plane ticket might get reprinted at the airport, but Adam remembered from his summer Europe trip that getting a passport was like pulling teeth.
He didn't dare hide here further. He dashed from the counter and sat in a lobby chair, trying to look innocent. The dog lost interest in creating a ruckus and let the hotel clerk drag it over to the dog-walker. Adam wondered exactly what the dog was. A part of God? An angel in disguise? Or a real dog recruited as a prop? Whatever it was, it had given Adam the opportunity he had needed.
Joan showed up about half an hour later, accompanied by Lizzie and the programmer. Apparently she had managed to wriggle into their confidence somehow. Adam rushed up to the trio with the portrait, which the clerk had returned to him after making a photocopy. Lizzie gave him a dirty look: he belatedly remembered that she thought of him as the skirt-chaser who had stared at her "boobs". For a different reason, Joan glared at him as well, apparently fearing that Adam would undo her work getting their confidence.
That didn't matter. Adam described the attempted break-in and showed them the picture. It didn't have the precise effect he expected.
"I wish people would butt out of our business!" exclaimed Lizzie. "Maybe you did stop a burglary. Or maybe YOU'RE trying to rip us off, and are trying to divert our attention to the other guy. I don't know what you're up to either," she added, glaring at Joan. "Darry, let's pack and get out of here. And don't leave a forwarding address!" She took her boyfriend's arm and they walked briskly to the elevators.
"Damn," muttered Joan. "Now we're back to square one."
"No," said Adam triumphantly. "I know where the next square is. Washington, DC!"
TO BE CONTINUED