CHAPTER 4
A white Bekins truck pulled up in front of the house at ten the next morning—a bright moment on an overcast day in mid-March. Before we left Manhattan, Richard had arranged for everything I owned to be packed and delivered. The arrival of my personal possessions was a tangible connection to my former life. A life where I’d been in control, responsible.
Brenda and I watched from inside the house as Richard directed the men to unload the cartons in the sun porch.
“I’ll make coffee,” Brenda offered, as Richard handed me the inventory.
I rested the pages on my cast, flipping through them with my good hand. Clothes, books, dishes, linens, various pieces of furniture. Obviously missing were items of quick cash value: my stereo equipment, binoculars, TV, personal computer, Nikon—and my gun. The guys who’d mugged me had taken my wallet and keys, then ransacked my place. The cops found fingerprints, but nothing would come of it in a city where scores of muggings or robberies happened daily.
My excitement vanished as I, a former insurance investigator, remembered I’d stupidly let my renter’s insurance lapse. I’d had to let a lot lapse during six months of unemployment. Goddamn downsizing.
Richard watched me carefully, his eyes filled with pity. “Why don’t we get that coffee?”
He clapped me on the shoulder and headed for the kitchen. I didn’t follow. Instead, I waited until the last of the cartons were off the truck and the men started unloading the furniture.
My stomach lurched as two men in overalls struggled down the ramp with the shabby couch. Spray-painted Day-Glo orange stripes crisscrossed the back and cushions. The dressers, end tables, and every other piece of furniture were likewise marked. The movers stacked it all in the garage, save for the bed. I had that moved to Curtis’s—my—room. Maybe steel wool and elbow grease would remove the paint.
The movers finished in record time. Richard appeared at the appropriate moment, opened his wallet, and gave them a generous tip; then the big empty truck lumbered back toward Main Street.
“You want help unpacking?”
“Uh . . . maybe Brenda could give me a hand.” I didn’t want Richard to see all my crap—and that’s just what it was—in the glaring light of day.
“You sure you won’t have some lunch?” Brenda asked as she approached.
I shook my head, trying to pull loose the tape on the top of a box of underwear. Her fingernails were longer than mine and she easily worked one underneath, pulling the tape off. I opened the top, looked inside, and closed it again.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Restacking the boxes would be a big help. A lot of this should go right into the garage. The kitchen stuff—things like that. Maybe Rich can help us with those.”
She reached for another carton and started working on the tape. “I think we have some box cutters in the kitchen junk drawer.”
“Don’t bother with that. It goes outside.”
Brenda examined the unmarked sides of the box.
“It’s the silverware,” I explained.
She shook the box and was rewarded with the faint clink of knives, forks, and spoons. “How’d you know?”
I shrugged, distracted, and attacked the tape on a box from the next stack. It came off, the top lifted—good, my bathroom stuff. The disposable razor from the hospital cost me a pint of blood each morning.
Despite her size, Brenda had the strength of a longshoreman. She opened a box filled with towels. Wrapped amongst them were several framed photos, slightly bent and scratched, the glass missing, presumably smashed. One of them bore a trace of orange paint—Shelley, in happier times. I hadn’t seen the photos in two years. Why had I held onto so many of my dead wife’s possessions—still unable to part with them?
Brenda and I didn’t talk much during the sorting ordeal. She’d hold up an item and I’d give her a yea or a nay. It wasn’t long before the nay pile stretched three times higher than the yea pile. Luckily the garbage men would be around the next day.
Later, feeling weak and sick, I watched Brenda make my bed before she retreated. Napping on my own comfortable mattress gave me my first taste of security since the mugging.
When Brenda woke me for dinner, I staggered from my room like a drunk. Red wine accompanied the entree—corned beef and cabbage.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked, stifling a yawn.
“St. Patrick’s Day. Besides, it beats burgers any day,” Brenda said, placing a huge helping on my plate. “I bought Irish soda bread to go with it. Dig in.”
She served Richard and herself and they started eating. I poked at the cabbage with my fork.
Richard swallowed. “Something wrong?”
“The night I got mugged, I’d been with friends at a pub.” I pushed a potato around. “Nobody came to the hospital. Nobody called.”
They stopped in mid-bite, glancing at each other. “Maybe they didn’t know.” Brenda reached over, clasped my hand. “You’ll make new friends, hon.”
They spent the rest of the evening cooking up plans to paint my room, trying to cheer me. I should’ve felt flattered, but the attention only depressed me. I wanted to be left alone.
By the time I said good-night, they looked more exhausted than I felt.
Darkness shrouded the cold, dank room, the atmosphere charged with dread. Fatigue weighed me down so I could hardly stand. Something nudged me from the side. I turned, hands outstretched to stop its gentle swaying motion. My fingers probed the softness, tried to curl into the lingering warmth, but the hairs were too short.
Hairs?
I fumbled in the darkness until encountering a sticky warmth—blood? Its sickly sweetness turned my stomach. Startled, I backed away until I could make out the still form in the shadowy room. A ten-point buck, dressed out—its genitals and internal organs discarded—and hanging to bleed. Its lifeless, glassy eyes bored into my own.
The back of my throat closed. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, as a wave of horror and triumph engulfed me, obliterating all rationality and what was left of my sense of self.
I awoke, nausea nearly choking me, stumbled to the bathroom, and vomited. I sat, heaving, my head threatening to explode. Spent, I collapsed onto the cold linoleum. This had been no dream. This time I had stood alongside the dead buck, felt and smelled its death tang.
I couldn’t stop trembling. I couldn’t tell Richard something was terribly wrong. Not yet. Not when I had no understanding of what was happening to me.