Time Thieves

corrected.
        
        “What?”
        
        He took his wallet from his hip pocket and opened it. There were two fives and two ones in the money clip. “I had twelve dollars Thursday afternon, in these same denominations. I remember that clearly. I think this is the same twelve. What did I pay him with?”
        
        “I don't understand-”
        
        “That makes two of us.”
        
        To their right, a maid pushed a cart of cleaning tools along the wide cement walkway, stopped before the open door of the maintenance room and pushed her equipment inside, wiped her hands on the dust rag at her waist, then threw that after the cart. As she closed the door, Pete approached her.
        
        “Excuse me,” he said.
        
        She looked up, wide-faced, perhaps Spanish or Puerto Rican. She had been pretty, once, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. The years had worn her down while building her up, and her dark eyes looked at him suspiciously out of the layers of fat that cushioned them.
        
        “Yes?” she asked.
        
        “Have you been cleaning Room 34 these past three days?”
        
        She squinted her eyes, an act that made them all but invisible. “I didn't touch anything,” she said.
        
        “I'm not accusing you,” he said. He took a five dollar bill from his wallet, folded it and held it out to her. “I only want some information.”
        
        She looked at Della, down at the five, up at Pete, then down at the five again. She took the money and stuffed it in one of her uniform pockets. “What do you want to know?”
        
        “Have you noticed anything unusual about number 34? Anything at all, no matter how insignificant it might seem.”
        
        “The bed is never slept in. And the towels are never used. I don't believe anyone's even in there-though they say someone's renting it.”
        
        Della stepped forward now. “Haven't you seen my husband in there, or hanging about the hotel somewhere, waiting for you to finish with the room?”
        
        The maid looked him over as if he were an interesting fungus that had sprung up in the center of the veranda. “Never seen him,” she told Della. She seemed more at ease talking to a woman. “And he wouldn't have had to hang around somewhere waiting for me to finish with his room, 'cause it hasn't taken me even a minute the last three days. I just walk in, check that the bed is empty, look at the towels, run a dust cloth over the desk and leave.”
        
        “Have you said anything to Mr. Simmons about it- about the empty room?” Della asked.
        
        “I said. But he wouldn't listen. He just stares at me, kind of like I'm not there. Then he says, like he didn't even hear me, 'It's none of your concern, Hattie.' I had to ask the afternoon man whether there was anyone there, and he told me there was.”
        
        Pete had been only half paying attention to the conversation. And now, as Della put another question to the maid, he lost interest altogether. Over the heavy woman's shoulder, a hundred and fifty feet down the veranda, a man stood in the dorway, half concealed by the shadows, watching the three of them. His pale face was all that was visible, and only part of that. But he was instantly recognizable as the man who had watched the house, the same man they had seen in the restaurant that night when he had come home from his first lost journey.
        
        Only seconds after he realized they were being watched, Pete saw the stranger draw back, as if he knew he had been seen.
        
        Della asked him something.
        
        He pushed away from her and the maid and ran along the breezeway, keeping the stranger's room at the center of his line of vision. If he looked away, even for a moment, he would never be able to distinguish one room from the next when he looked back.
        
        The watcher slammed the door.
        
        In the next moment, Pete was there, pounding loudly and shouting to be let in. When he got no response, he tried the knob and found that the door was unlocked. He pushed the crimson panel inward and stepped into the room.
        
        The room was unoccupied.
        
        He crossed to the closed bathroom door and pulled that open. The bathroom was unoccupied as well. The window was open, but it did not appear to be large enough to