A short man with a battered suitcase slipped into the Cumberville Inn and waited silently at the reception desk. When he finally stirred, Miss Prindle, the inn’s owner, nearly fell off her seat. For all she knew, he could have been standing there an hour, blinking behind his huge black-rimmed glasses. Quiet as a mouse on moss, she thought. Maybe he’s a mute. He wore a dusty medical jacket and a green wool cap rolled down to his bushy brows. His hairy arm reached over her desk and signed the register while she fiddled with her bracelet charms. She pushed the room key across her desk and sat back with her shoulders against the wall. Without a word, he turned, picked at the rear of his pants, and hurried up the stairs.

Miss Prindle had operated the inn for thirty years. She lived in a small apartment behind the reception desk where she monitored everyone’s comings and goings. When the guests were out, she rummaged through their rooms and then told everything to her best friend Millie. Millie was brassy and forward, not like Miss Prindle who fancied herself a reserved, polite, and proper lady.

Early the next morning, Miss Prindle picked up the heavy receiver of the big black telephone that was ringing on her desk.

“Got any gossip?” asked Millie. “Anything surprising?”

“I’ve worked at the inn so long, nothing surprises me,” said Miss Prindle. “And I don’t gossip. I just tell you what little there is.”

“You got to talk more to your guests,” said Millie. “That’s how I find things out. Everybody likes jabbering, especially about themselves.”

“That’s not my way. I don’t want to get too close.”

“Squeezing information from you is like wringing out a dry rag. You got something to tell or not?”

The little man came to Miss Prindle’s mind, but what was there to say? She searched her memory elsewhere for something interesting and made the most of it. “I nearly filled the inn last weekend with a group for the Annual Gem and Mineral Swap. They came from all over Maryland, as far as Scaggsville. They towed in cases full of sparkly stones and showed me amber nuggets filled with petrified beetles.”

“Well that’s something,” said Millie. “This week, I got a full house for the Nephrology Convention. I had to put out my no-vacancy sign. Folks from all over the world filled my rooms. A turban-headed doctor from Nairobi or was it Nanking spoke perfect English to me and gibberish to his three wives.”

“Millie, you win. Nothing much happens at my place.”

After Miss Prindle set down the phone’s receiver, the little man hurried out the door. His ape-like arm carried a half-open suitcase secured with a leather belt. She peeped through the window slats as he picked at the rear of his pants again. Then he hopped into an old station wagon and rumbled off.

Wiggles like a reflection in a fun-house mirror like he ain’t got bones. Is he a sideshow clown? Are they props hanging out that suitcase? There ain’t no circus in town.

In the registry book on the desk, she squinted at his scratchy signature. Zenhopper? What kind of fool name is that?

Her finger started dialing Millie’s number again, then stopped midway. I got to find out more.

She tiptoed up the stairs to his room, fumbled for his room key, and began to insert it. Just then, her mind filled with images of his magnified eyes and wiggly posture. She saw him flapping his hairy arms and hooting like a chimpanzee. Miss Prindle’s skin turned white and every patch shot up with goose pimples. She stifled a scream as she pulled her hand from the doorknob and wiped her key and fingers with a handkerchief.

On the way to the reception desk she nearly tripped over a small object on the stairs. “What the dickens?” she muttered, hunching over a metal scoop that protruded from a bulbous wooden handle. “Must have fallen out of his suitcase.” She kicked the object down the stairs and teased it behind her desk with a ballpoint pen. Then she closed the door to her apartment behind the reception desk and took a hot bath.

Meanwhile, Zenhopper returned to the inn and tiptoed past the empty desk and up to his room. He had finished his work in quick time. After shaking out the jumble of instruments from his suitcase and arranging them in an organized row, he sighed at an empty space on the floor, the missing object.

Later that day, in the inn’s basement, Miss Prindle stuffed a load of towels in the washer. The windowless room was dank, dim, and lonely. When the washer stopped sloshing, she reached for the wall-phone and called Millie to bring her up on things. But as usual, Millie interrupted her before she could have her say.

“Lots to tell,“ blurted Millie. “I was driving along minding my business when I spied a child in the car ahead, behind the wheel! I followed him to our church, but when he got out the car, he was no child, just a little man wearing a dirty lab coat, carrying a medical bag with instruments dangling every which way. I parked and hid behind a tombstone. I caught him snooping!”

“Snooping? In the cemetery?” gasped Miss Prindle, pressing the receiver hard to her ear. “Then where’d he go?”

“I don’t know exactly. I got distracted looking through his car window. Full of junk, tubes, wires, and magazines. All I could make out were the gold letters on a black book—The Use and Care of Organs. But he don’t look like no doctor and that ain’t no doctor car.”

“Organs?” choked Miss Prindle. “Is he digging for body parts? Selling them on the black market? Millie, there’s something I should have told you. Brace yourself—he’s staying here at my inn. You got to come over and see this dreadful thing behind my desk. It’s got to be one of his instruments, some kind of metal probe. He must be hauling unspeakable things in that medical bag. I should have grilled him when he signed in, but I couldn’t get my lips moving, he rattled me so. And Millie, it’s the most disgusting thing—he’s always picking at his bottom. I think he’s trying to upset me.”

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