Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Three

There wasn’t much of it, just a dozen rust-colored splotches, the size of dimes, spread far apart on the walls and across the scuffed gray-painted floor. Four more drops had dried on the square windowpanes that faced County Road 12. Combined, it wasn’t enough to indicate a slaughter, but as I moved around the tiny porch, the few spots of dried blood chilled me more than if I’d found great, caked puddles of it. The splatter pattern, sprayed so wide, showed panic. Fast, frantic panic.

The only furniture was a wicker sofa, backed against the wall that separated the porch from the rest of the house. I got down on my knees to look closely at the small dark specks on the faded foam cushion. It was mildew, not more blood.

The porch key also unlocked the white-painted door that led inside. The living room was cold, colder than outside, and dim in the gauzy light wavering through the opaque plastic sheets undulating against the broken windows. I felt for a light switch next to the door, flipped it, but nothing came on. The power had been shut off.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, dark furniture shapes, lying at wrong angles, began to materialize in the middle of the room: a small sofa, a tipped-over reading chair, a lamp, and a table lying next to it. I stepped all the way in. My shoes ground bits of glass into the carpet.

The room had been attacked. As on the driveway, shards of broken glass glinted in the dim light. Dozens of sheets of newspapers lay everywhere, on the floor and across the tilted sofa and overturned reading chair-strewn about by the wind from the shattered windows. Or by someone in a hurry.

A sliver of daylight showed from an almost-closed door to my right. I stepped carefully through the rubble and pushed it open.

The bedroom had been savaged like the living room. White bed-sheets and a blue blanket lay balled in one corner, a mattress and box spring had been dropped back askew onto the wrought-iron bed frame. Against the far wall, the drawers had been jerked from a dresser and upended onto the floor, spilling out proper, no-frilled white panties and bras, some dark sweaters, and a couple of sweatshirts. Scattered over it all, as in the living room, were dozens more sheets of newspapers. In the bedroom, though, the windows were tightly shut; the wind hadn’t blown the newspapers around.

There was blood, another dozen of the dime-sized spots, on the floral wallpaper and the bare plank floor.

Looking strangely untouched, a small, old oak library table with a pedestal base sat under the window. On it was an ancient manual typewriter, an Underwood.

I knew a girl once, a blond girl with a boy’s name, who had an old Underwood Number Five, just like the one on the table. I’d been with her when she bought it. I helped carry it home, watched as she scratched her initials on the bottom of it with a fork, to make it her own.

For a time, years ago, I’d hunted those typewriters. I’d prowled antique stores, resale shops, scrap metal dealers, anyplace I could think of, looking for an old black Underwood like the one that sat on the table. I’d given it up, finally, but I’d never quite healed. Even now, years later, my breath still caught every time I came across one.

I reached to touch it, but stopped. There was one obscene drop of blood on the knurled wheel that turned the platen.

Blood on the porch. Blood in the bedroom. Aggert had said nothing about a crime. I wanted to leave that house; lock it up and hurry away. But I would wonder. Every night, for the rest of my life, I would wonder.

I eased the typewriter onto its side. The rails underneath the machine were smooth, the black paint shiny. Mercifully, they were unmarked. I turned it back over, right side up.

My teeth started to chatter. It was the cold in the house, I tried to tell my head. The cold, and the blood. But my head wasn’t buying: The cold went deeper than that, deeper than my skin, my muscle, and my bones. It was the cold of an old memory.

I buttoned my coat all the way up, kicked at the newspapers littering the floor as I left the bedroom, and crossed through the living room. I didn’t care where I stepped. What happened in that frozen little house was for cops, not me. I’d been hired only to execute a will.

The kitchen at the back of the cottage had been trashed, too. Metal cabinet doors, blue-enameled but chipped, and worn to bare metal around the pulls, yawned open, their contents swept out. Pots and a pan, silverware, and two shattered mugs lay on the green linoleum floor, on top of spilled flour and sugar and the oozing contents of a dozen opened cans of mixed green and orange vegetables, sliced peaches, and what looked like chunks of pineapple. There were sealed cans lying in the mess, too; dozens of them with generic labels. In the middle of it all lay an impossibly yellow box of Cheerios and a black banana, a breakfast for a dead woman. If the house hadn’t been as cold as a refrigerator, it would have stunk to hell.

The bathroom was next to the damaged back door. A stand-up fiberglass shower, a tiny porcelain sink set in the corner, and a toilet had been jammed into a space no bigger than a modest closet. The mirrored door hung by one hinge from the medicine cabinet. An opaque glass jar of cold cream and a lavender toothbrush lay on the floor, mixed in with the shattered pieces of the porcelain toilet lid. I didn’t go in to look for blood. I’d been hired to execute a will.

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.

Fortified, I drove across the street to a blue and turquoise cinder-block motel with an empty parking lot and a lit-up sign saying they had cable television. The desk clerk, a lad of about seventeen, told me a room would be thirty dollars, including color television. “But no cable,” he said.

“The sign says you have cable.”

“We drop our subscription in the winter. We get one regular channel, though, out of Grand Rapids.”

“It’ll do,” I said and gave him my credit card.

My room had a nice view of two perfectly matched Dumpsters, and if that got boring, there was indeed the color television set that the desk clerk had promised. There was also a Bible with its cover torn off and a phone book for the whole area, including Rambling. I looked under the government section at the front of the directory, but there was no listing for a Rambling police station.

I walked back across the highway to the Wal-Mart and sat in a molded brown plastic booth. I had the nacho platter for dinner. It, too, looked to have been molded, though in a different color. Afterward, I passed the rest of the night in my motel room, watching a Starsky and Hutch retrospective on Grand Rapids television and eating Oreos. At midnight, I set the bedside alarm for six thirty and turned out the light. It was too early for the Oreos; they wanted to stay up for a while and play with the nachos, so I lay in the dark and listened to the trucks rumbling by on the interstate, wondering what kind of woman would want to live on a humanity-forsaken, dry bit of ground in Rambling. It didn’t seem like anybody I’d ever known.

Sometime around two in the morning, I said, “Who are you, Louise?” for the hundredth time to the darkness and fell asleep.