A sudden breeze rattled the tiny bare window above the kitchen sink. I looked out. At the back of the lot, scraggly trees were swaying. In the fading light, they looked like skeletons dancing, waving their spindly arms.
I didn’t want to be within ten miles of the death in that house when the last of the daylight had fled. I hurried through the living room, trying to shut out the sounds of the glass crunching beneath my feet, the whip-snapping of the ripped plastic against the windows, the moan of the wind. I locked the two doors and stepped down to the ground.
A pair of headlights cut the dusk a few hundred yards down County Road 12, growing larger as they approached the cottage. When they flashed on the red of the Jeep, they stopped abruptly. For a second the car idled, frozen. Then it swung around, sweeping its lights across the fields, and raced back the way it had come. A minute later, its tail-lamps disappeared into the dusk.
I got into the Jeep and goosed the engine until the heater kicked in and I could hold my hands to the dash vents. I felt like I’d been cold for years.
And like I’d been had.
I called Aggert. “You said nothing about her being killed.”
“You might not have gone out there.”
“What happens if I just walk away?”
“The estate reverts to the state,” he said in lawyerly English, “and you return the seven hundred dollars.”
“There isn’t much here. Her stuff, even with the car, can’t be worth a few hundred dollars. Her killer trashed her house. If she had anything, it’s gone. You don’t need an executor for what’s left, you need a guy with garbage bags and a shovel.”
“You don’t know that yet. Look for her files, brokerage statements, savings accounts.”
“Have you been out here? I doubt the woman owned a whole roll of postage stamps.”
“She had to have had something.”
“Perhaps, but her killer got it. Whatever she had is gone.”
“Ms. Thomas must have had some reason for trusting you, Mr. Elstrom,” he said, tossing the guilt card onto the table, faceup.
“I didn’t know the woman.”
“So you say.”
I looked out the tape-free part of the Jeep’s side window. A mailbox was set on a post by the road. Its little red flag was down. “Hold on,” I said, dropping the cell phone on the passenger seat. I got out, crossed the yard, and opened the mailbox. The reclining little flag was right: There was no mail.
“What about your fee?” I asked, back in the Jeep.
Aggert chuckled. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Did you send her a bill?”
“Why do you ask, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Because I want to be a very good executor,” I smarmed, “and because I’m curious why there’s no mail piling up in her mailbox. Did you mail her a bill?”
“She paid me when she came in.”
“Do you know if someone stopped her mail delivery?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she had a post office box. Or maybe she had her bills sent to a bank. As executor, you should check around for both.”
“What did the cops say about Louise’s death?”
“She died during a break-in. Let them worry about that. Our job is to file an inventory of her assets and liabilities with the probate court.”
The last of the light was disappearing across the frozen flats to the west, dissolving the shadows of the bones of the trees that surrounded Louise’s cottage.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.
“You can’t leave,” he said quickly.
“I’m going back to Rivertown. I’ll get on the Internet, make up a list of banks and post offices near Rambling, and start sending out some letters, asking if they have anything for Louise Thomas.”
“They might take months to respond. Better you visit them in person, right now. I’ll make up a list; you can pick it up tomorrow, begin knocking on doors.”
“I like the U.S. Postal Service.”
“Respect the dead woman’s wishes, Elstrom. She counted on you to settle her estate properly. You can be done and out of here in a day or two.”
The mailbox was almost invisible now in the dark. He was right, but he was sitting in a warm office, not outside the cottage where Louise Thomas had been killed. I had only forty-five dollars in cash, and no clean underwear.
“I’ll give it a day. Have the list ready for me tomorrow,” I said and hung up.
I have a theory that, when the apocalypse comes, everyone already will be living inside Wal-Marts and won’t learn that the outside world has ended for at least a generation or two, and then only because the Oreos run out. For by then, the last of the cities and towns will have long since crumbled away, obsolete as buffalo skin tents, as dozens of generations will have been born, lived entire lives, died, and been recycled into puppy food inside huge, windowless Wal-Domes.
They will be the size of villages, these new habitats, and will contain thousands of tiered Wal-Apartments circling miles of display shelving. Aisle thoroughfares will be wide enough for thousands of extended families-great-grandpa and great-grandma, stuffed inside shopping carts, drooling on the chrome, being pushed by tottering grandparents as the kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids, all of them slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, shuffle along behind, under the glow of the fluorescents, admiring the end displays, marveling at the grinning happy-face signs announcing that, once again, prices have been rolled back. No one will miss the sun, or notice that there’s no longer rain. No one will remember them because they won’t be relevant. Only things, things that can be outsourced and price-reduced, will matter. It will be a safe world, that Wal-World, a place where there’s no worry, where there’s nothing left to do but roam the acres of aisles and shop.
It will end, of course; everything ends. It will come by meteor or toxic explosion, a flame-out of the sun or a superheating of some forgotten nuclear bomb dump, left to molder in a used-to-be country that had been too small even to have issued its own postage stamps. When the end does come, word will be sent first to corporate headquarters, to an emergency buying meeting hastily convened in a bunker buried deep in the Arkansas hills: “I think we better stock up on Oreos,” the corporate cookie buyer will say. “Why’s that?” Sam the Eighth, or Twelfth, will ask. “Well, with the world ending and all, people might get curious if there’s no Oreos on the shelves.” Sam will nod, finger the cuff of the flannel shirt he’d just bought for thirty-nine Wal-Cents. “Good thinking; tell the factory”-for by then Wal-Mart will own all the factories, including the crown jewel, the Oreo plant, operating belowground, beneath what used to be the Pentagon-”to ship a few million metric tons of the double-stuffed ones to the Wal-Domes ASAP.” Thus disaster, the realization of it, and therefore the reality of it, will be deferred. Another generation or two will be born in the aisles before the creamy white center of the last Oreo is licked and mankind is forced at last to confront its own end.
These thoughts were on my mind as I walked into the Wal-Mart on the outskirts of West Haven. It was cheerier than thinking about what must have happened to Louise Thomas.
After being greeted by a man old enough to have sailed with Columbus, I bought a three-pack of underwear, toiletries, an orange knit shirt that was being dumped for three bucks, a box of garbage bags, and, after the briefest of pauses, a family-sized bag of Oreos, because it never hurts to plan for the end of the world. Even after buying all that, I still had twenty-eight dollars left from my forty-five.