THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 4, 1994 TAG: 9411030164
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
My cousin Bebe called from Bangor Monday night. She sounded exhausted. ``Well,'' she said, ``we've had another luggage incident. It's the third one in a little over a week.''
First, there was my suitcase which didn't show up at the Bangor airport when I got there a week ago last Saturday. The suitcase which wasn't mine showed up in the front hall of Bebe's family home on Maple Street. It belonged to some guy we'll call Tim Franklin who works for the corporate legal department of the company in whose Bangor offices Bebe works.
Only Bebe doesn't know Tim. She's never heard of him as a matter of fact.
And then there's the matter of our Canadian cousin Susan's suitcase which showed up unaccompanied and unexplained.
This strange tale starts, as many of my stranger tales do, with me getting on an airplane. As regular readers know, two things happen when I board a plane. The first is that my knuckles turn white. I normally fly only under duress and sedation.
The second thing is, when I fly the whole airline industry goes off its collective rocker. Pilots and co-pilots get into fist fights in the cockpit. Flight attendants go on sit down strikes. Air controllers have psychotic breaks in the tower. Northbound warm fronts race to beat southbound cold fronts to the runway for which my plane is heading.
The rule of thumb is if I'm in the air, everyone else should stay on the ground.
The one problem I've never had, however, is lost luggage. That is probably because I've never flown to Bangor before. After one flight I've decided that my hometown must be the lost luggage capital of the world. That would explain why no one was surprised when I got there and my suitcase didn't.
There were nine passengers on my flight. Four of us lined up to fill out lost luggage forms. ``Don't worry,'' the guy behind the desk yawned, ``it almost always shows up in 24 hours.''
Sure enough I called the airline in the morning. They'd found my luggage and assured me that it would be in on the noon flight and that they'd deliver it to the house.
Bebe, her mother Charline and I headed south on I-95 and spent the day with L.L. Bean, leaving only when we had made large dents in our Christmas shopping lists and our credit limits had been collectively exhausted.
We arrived back in Bangor to find my suitcase, covered with baggage tags from places whose abbreviations I didn't even recognize, sitting in the front hall. Next to it was Tim Franklin's.
Bebe was the first to spot the corporate logo on his luggage tag. ``If we have someone from corporate legal coming into town, I sure don't know anything about it,'' she said.
We looked the suitcase over and made some assumptions about its owner. I checked the home address and determined that he lived in an upscale, Yuppie section at Atlanta.
``He's in his 30s or 40s, I'd guess,'' I told Bebe, ``and the suitcase probably has a three-piece suit, 100 percent cotton white shirts, conservative ties and a jogging outfit in it.''
``That's probably a good guess,'' she agreed. But one thing had all of us puzzled. The suitcase was one of those tapestry things that no male corporate type would ever be caught dead with.
Why, we wondered, would Tim be using some woman's luggage? And what was he doing in Bangor?
We never did find out. But we did find out something else of interest. We called the airline and within 20 minutes a courier arrived to pick up the tapestry bag.
``You know,'' he told us, ``this one hasn't even been reported missing yet.''
That was strange for a piece of luggage that had been separated from its owner for at least eight hours.
Stranger still was what Bebe reported to me on the phone last night.
``I went to the airport yesterday to pick up Susan,'' she began. Susan, who lives in New Brunswick, had left her car at Bebe's while she flew to Detroit.
``And her luggage was lost?'' I asked.
``No, her luggage was there, but she wasn't,'' Bebe told me.
``Has she shown up yet?'' I asked.
``Not yet,'' Bebe said, ``but she's coming in tonight. I sure can't figure out how she got so far behind her luggage.''
A cold shiver went through me. It was Halloween in Bangor, home of Stephen King, lord of all that is chilling and thrilling and strange things were definitely happening.
If his next novel is about lost luggage taking on a life of its own in the woods around the Bangor airport, I'll know for sure that Susan, Tim and I were caught up in some twisted plot, the ending of which I'm not sure I ever want to know. by CNB