My great-grandmother would have stomped out to the middle of the street and inquired what the person’s business was, quite assured of her own safety in doing so, too.
But I know better.
The person was pushing something, something on wheels.
Peering intently into the darkness, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen anyone out on my street before when I was up and wandering. I’d seen a few cars go by, residents or visitors of people in the apartment building, but I couldn’t recall ever meeting up with anyone on foot in the past four years-at least in this part of town.
On the bad nights, when I ghost all the way downtown, it is sometimes a different story.
But here and now, I had something to worry about. There was something furtive about this odd incident; this person, this other inhabitor of the night, was pushing what I could now tell was a cart, one with two wheels. It had a handle in the middle of the longer side, and legs on it, so that when you let go of the handle and set it upright, it would be steady and straight. And it was just the right size for two thirty-gallon garbage cans.
My hands curled into fists. Even in the dark, I could identify the familiar shape of the cart. It was my own. I’d bought it at a yard sale from some people who were moving; the man of the house had made it himself.
It was loaded down with something wrapped in dark plastic, like the sheets you buy to put in flower beds to keep weeds down; I could see the faint shine off the smooth plastic surface.
I felt a rage I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Something illicit was happening, and the cart thief was trying to involve me in it. The peace that I’d worked so hard to achieve was going to be ripped away, through no fault of my own. I could not confront this thief directly; that wouldn’t make sense-the thief might be armed, and was obviously in the middle of doing something he or she wanted to conceal.
So I clenched my teeth, and watched and waited.
Across the rough surface of neglected Track Street, the thief trundled the garbage-can cart with its heavy burden; I could tell it was heavy because of the strain in the cart thief’s posture.
This was absolutely eerie; I found myself shivering. I pulled the sides of my dark windbreaker together and, with a tiny sound, zipped it shut. With deliberate movements, I pulled a thin dark scarf from my pocket and tied it over my light hair. All the while, I was tracking the cart thief’s laborious progress. The thief was heading for the park; I felt my lips twitch up in a smile as I observed the thief trying to get the cart from the pavement up onto the sidewalk. Wheelchair accessibility had not been a priority when those sidewalks were paved many years ago.
Finally, the cart bumped up onto the sidewalk and across it. The thief’s feet had to hurry to catch up. Into the darkness of the arboretum, following one of the narrow paved paths, the thief rolled the loaded cart. I began to count seconds. In three minutes, the thief returned, still pushing my cart.
Now it was empty.
My anger was taking second place to curiosity, though that would only be temporary.
I watched the thief roll the cart up my driveway, barely making it through the narrow walk space between my car and the carport wall. The thief reappeared from the back of my house, walking quickly, and had to go down my driveway to the curb and then walk around the end of the fence to walk up the apartment building’s south driveway. The thief circled around back; he or she would enter the building through the quieter back door; the front door squeaked. I always remember things like that.
I am in and out of that apartment building quite a lot.
Sure enough, the thief didn’t reappear at the other side of the apartment building. It was someone living there, or the overnight guest of someone living there. With one single woman and four single men living there, overnight guests are not infrequent.
For a few more seconds, I hugged close to the trunk of the tree, waiting to see if a light would come on. From where I was, I could see the side windows on the south side of the apartment building and the front windows, too; no lights came on in any of them. Someone was being extra careful.
Well, I, too, would be careful. I waited five minutes, according to my digital watch, before I made a move. Then I went deeper into the arboretum, following no trail, moving as quietly as possible in the darkness. I’d estimated where I’d intersect the path; I was as familiar with the layout of the arboretum as I was with the floor plan of my house. I’d spent hours wandering Shakespeare by night.
It was so black in the thick of the trees that I wondered if I would even be able to find what the thief had dumped. If my jeans hadn’t brushed the plastic, which emitted that typical dry rustle, I might have groped around the path for another hour.
But the second I heard that rustle, I dropped to my hands and knees. Patting around in the darkness, I discovered the wrapping was not plastic sheeting but two large garbage bags, one pulled from the top and another from the bottom to overlap in the middle covering-something soft and big. I poked the bag; there was something hard under the softness. Something bumpy. Something an awful lot like ribs.
I bit my lower lip to keep from making noise.
I struggled silently with an almost-overwhelming urge to jump up and run. After several deep breaths, I won. I steeled myself to do what I had to do, but I couldn’t face doing it in the dark.
I reached into my windbreaker pocket and pulled out a narrow, lightweight, powerful little flashlight that had caught my fancy at Wal-Mart. I shifted in my squatting position so that my body was between the apartment building and what was on the ground. I switched on the flashlight.
I was angry at myself when I saw my hand was shaking as I separated the bags. I fumbled them apart some four inches and stopped. I was looking at a torn, rather faded shirt, a man’s plaid shirt in green and orange. The chest pocket had caught on something; it was partially ripped from its stitching and a fragment was missing.
I recognized the shirt, though it hadn’t been torn when I’d seen it last.
I worked the bag up a little at the side and found a hand; I put my fingers on the wrist, where a pulse should be.
In the chilly Shakespeare night, I squatted in the middle of the trees, holding hands with a dead man.
And now I’d left my fingerprints all over the plastic bags.
About forty minutes later, I was sitting in my bedroom. I was finally tired to the bone.
I’d taken the bags off the corpse.
I’d confirmed the corpse’s identity, and its corpse-dom. No breath, no heartbeat.
I’d worked my way out of the arboretum, knowing I was leaving traces but helpless to avoid it. My incoming traces were unerasable; I’d figured I might as well make a trail out, too. I’d emerged from the bushes on Latham and crossed the street there, well out of sight of the apartments. I’d gone from cover to cover until I circled Carlton Cockroft’s house, silently crossing his yard to arrive in my own.
I’d found that the cart thief had replaced my cart and reinserted the garbage cans, but not as I’d had them. The blue garbage can was always on the right and the brown on the left, and the thief had reversed them. I’d unlocked my back door and entered without turning on a light, then opened the correct kitchen drawer, extracted two twisties, and lifted out and sealed the garbage bags already lining the cans. I’d relined the cans with the garbage bags that had been used to cover the body, then put the bagged garbage in them, sealing the second set of bags over the first set. I’d figured I couldn’t examine the cart in the middle of the night, and wheeling it inside would have created too much noise. It would have to wait until morning.
I’d done all I could do to erase my own involuntary complicity.