Cosmic Hotel by Russ Franklin Page B

I went. I carried our shoulder bags, glanced behind a trash can.
    The mother tore bread apart and fed the little girl who sat with her hands wide on the seat handles.
    â€œPardon me,” I said, “but I had a violin, in a case,” I pointed to where I had been sitting. “It’s missing.”
    â€œSorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I can’t help you.”
    Obviously she thought I was a crazy person or running some kind of scam, although people are usually slightly less suspicious of each other in the Airport Zone.
    â€œIt is a violin, my mother’s,” I said to the woman feeding her girl, choosing the right word— mother —to suggest I was okay. “You didn’t see anyone walking away with it?”
    â€œOh boy, no,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t really paying attention.” The little girl held her mouth open. Her mom turned her head to see the people walking by.
    â€œShit,” I whispered and then saw Elizabeth coming down the concourse. Had she taken the violin to teach me a lesson? It was amazing to watch people steer out of her way as if she were a ship. I looked at her hands. There was nothing but her camera looped to her wrist.
    I took steps to meet her, held up my arms.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” she said, glancing at the bags hanging from my shoulder. “Where is my violin?”
    â€œI can’t find it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt was right here. I was sitting right there.” I pointed to the seats beneath a you-are-here map.
    â€œPlease don’t tell me this.”
    â€œIt’s got to be here somewhere,” I said.
    We walked around. She leaned over and looked between the rows of seats.
    â€œYou fell asleep?” she asked me.
    â€œNo! I closed my eyes for a second.”
    I followed her as she searched the gate area.
    â€œYou were supposed to look after my things,” she said. “That was all you had to do. Now what has happened?”
    People in the gate area began to eye us suspiciously and slowly their legs and hands began guarding their own bags as if to say, see, this is how you do it , and the small U handles on their suitcases seemed to be mocking smiles.
    I stopped. “We are going to have to report this,” I said. We searched the next gate area until they announced the boarding of our flight.

    We reported it to the counter person, Elizabeth demanding to speak with the head of security as if this were a hotel. A regular airport policeofficer came and took the report, telling us that they rarely had problems with theft inside the airport.
    Elizabeth said, “That doesn’t help us.”
    She and I were the last to board, Elizabeth holding the yellow police report in her hand.
    When we found our seats in the middle of the business cabin, there was already a briefcase in the overhead and a jacket folded on top. To a man reading his Wall Street Journal , Elizabeth said, pointing to his bag and jacket, “Is this yours?”
    When he saw her, he got up and took his bag and coat down and tried to smile at her, placed his things under the seat in front of him.
    Elizabeth snapped the “Missing or Stolen Property Report” for me to take.
    On regular days, she always sat in the aisle seat. Today she slid in and faced the window and didn’t speak the whole way to Phoenix, the bright new sunlight slowly moving around the cabin in the exact shape of the portholes as the plane banked. I kept going over the contact numbers in fine print on the bottom of the report and her scrawled signature, the description of the missing item, “violin and case, Master Stefen.” The estimated value of the violin was an astounding $45,000 and next to ITEM INSURED there was a big check by NO . Under the column PURCHASE DATE , she had written a date that I calculated was when she was ten years old, four years after she’d come to the US, back when her family owned