Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  “All right. Let’s do this,” she said, sitting up and taking the ice pack off her foot. Her ankle was totally numb, even if she was shivering.

  She hauled herself up into a standing position, holding her injured foot off the floor, and hopped the five steps over to the fireplace. She grabbed the ornate mantel when she got there, and prayed it was sturdy enough to hold her if she lost her balance.

  When she stopped teetering, she assessed the situation. A pile of old newspapers sat by the iron basket logs. A crazy collection of knickknacks lined the mantel where her fingers gripped it, including three small brass clocks, none of which were running; a creepy porcelain doll in a black Victorian dress; an Army-green pair of vintage binoculars; and a vase of dried flowers that looked like they’d lost their color and fragrance in the 1980s.

  She moved the iron screen to the side and did a weird Cirque du Soleil contortionist move, squatting down without touching her foot to the floor to peer up into the chimney and see if the flue was open, which it wasn’t. She grabbed the damper handle and gently positioned it so the smoke would vent properly.

  “Look at me, adulting all successfully,” she told Bert, who wasn’t paying her any attention. She abruptly wobbled and sat heavily on the floor on her already bruised backside. “Owie.”

  Fine. I’ll stop bragging. For now, she thought, sending silent contrition to the universe at large, thoughts of atonement back on the brain.

  From her vantage point on the floor, she managed to heft a couple of logs into the fireplace and light some crumpled newspaper using a long match from the box she found to the side of it. The effort took some patience and a couple of tries, but she eventually got a small fire going enough that she could stand up and replace the iron screen.

  The fire wasn’t kicking out much heat, but it sounded nice and looked cozy. She felt inordinately proud of herself for having done it, even though she wasn’t sure when she’d next be able to bathe or brush her teeth or make a nice meal.

  Well, this is humbling. I should probably call Drew and admit him that I’m injured, making the cycle of my abject humiliation complete.

  Then again, avoidance seemed a more comfortable and familiar strategy on that front.

  She looked around while she was still standing and ended up grabbing the binoculars off the mantel. Maybe she could find some pretty birds out the window or—yeah, who was she kidding? She was totally going to spy on her neighbors the first chance she got.

  Settling herself back on the couch, this time facing the opposite direction so her back was to the fire and she had a better vantage point out the window, she glanced at the yellow house across the street, not using the binoculars at first.

  Yeah, that lasted about thirty seconds.

  The person who’d last used the glasses had either had a massive face or an unfortunate walleye. She spent a few minutes adjusting the lenses so she could fit them to her eyes, and then trained her line of sight out the window.

  She knew Harris Kane was at home—he with his scowl and super villain name—because he’d glared at Aloysius and her when they’d returned.

  Aha, there he is.

  Her crazy neighbor across the street was scraping ice off his own front stoop with a shovel. Too bad he hadn’t done the same at her house before she’d used the steps as a slip n’ slide. The metallic clank of the shovel head on the cement caused Josie to shiver, but she was happy to note her reaction ended there. Just a few months ago she might have broken out into a cold sweat remembering her own encounter with a shovel and some murderous bastards out in the Arizona desert.

  Harris finished with the front steps and went to the backyard where, disappointingly, she could only see him from about the cheekbones up thanks to the high wooden fence. However, if it was drama she was after, she didn’t have to wait long.

  The back screen door opened. From this angle, Josie could see the inside of the door as it swung back, and only the very top of a woman’s brunette head. While her view was obstructed, the shrewish yelling was loud and clear even through a couple panes of glass from Josie’s front windows.

  “I told you to get full fat whipping cream,” the woman shrieked, her breath coming out in a cold puff of vapor. “How am I supposed to make non-fat work in this recipe? You never listen to me when I’m telling you what to do. I swear to God, you are the most annoying man I have ever known. You are just the worst. I don’t know why I married you. I could have had my choice of four different men, but I picked you. And I have regretted it every day since then. I should have listened to my mother when she said you were a loser, but I didn’t believe her. Now I know the truth.”

  Holy geeze.

  Even Josie, who didn’t think the best of Harris, cringed on his behalf.

  The poor slob had kept scraping the back steps, the rhythmic clang of the metal unceasing until the very end of his wife’s diatribe. Abruptly the woman’s words were cut off as she disappeared from view. She had seemed to slip on the steps and fall out of sight. From what Josie could tell from her limited point of view, the woman had fallen much the same as Josie herself had. A sharp cry of surprise rang out in the cold winter air.

  Josie waited for the sob, the whimper of pain, the resultant haranguing that should have followed.

  That woman is not losing a fight against gravity without blaming her husband.

  But there was nothing. Absolute silence.

  Josie stared, unblinking, through the binoculars.

  Nothing happened. Harris just stood there with only the top of his head visible and frozen above the fence, as if he were hunched over, watching his wife and waiting for the impact of her next barrage of cruel words.

  The neighborhood remained silent and frozen, all motion at a standstill.

  And then, he raised the shovel and brought it down with a sharp clang.

  Part 3: Freezer Burn

  Freezers can be winter wonderlands of joy, paradises of popsicles and flash-frozen fresh spring peas. They are frosty havens of orange Creamsicles, Fudge Pops, and yogurt Push-Ups. Raspberry Italian ice, chocolate-covered bananas, quick meals, and a frozen deep dish set aside for a no-cook Monday.

  Sadly, my freezer is where good intentions go to languish and die. Single-serving portions of beef bourguignon or French lentil soup, delicious at the time of their conception but forgotten in the frozen wasteland of unlabeled Tupperware and recycled margarine containers. Half of a raspberry jelly roll cake I couldn’t bear to throw away. In life, so delicate and dusted with a sparkling frost of powdered sugar, but in icy stasis now, stale and lifeless, never to be consumed, but pushed back further and further among the pale, anonymous packages until it is trapped against the back wall, forgotten.

  —Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food

  Chapter 22

  Josie flailed and dropped the binoculars in her lap. She scrambled to pick them back up.

  What in the ever-lovin’ heck did I just see? Did I just witness an assault?…a murder?

  She pressed the field glasses to her face again and stared out the window, frozen and barely breathing while she waited to see something, anything more—a sign of life from the woman across the street. A flailing arm, an indignant and outraged head of hair, the top arc of a hand slap on its way to connect with her husband’s face. Seriously, anything.

  Harris Kane, she could see. The top of his head bobbed out of sight as Josie watched, unable to blink even though she could feel her eyes drying out. His harridan of wife, however, had vanished.

  I have to be imagining things, right? My mind is playing tricks on me. Is this because of what happened to me in Arizona?

  “Come on, lady. You’re not dead. Don’t be dead. Say something. Get up, girl. Yell at him. Remember the non-fat whipping cream. Do something.” Even cranky people didn’t deserve to be murdered with a shovel. Josie was living proof of that.

  She finally tore her gaze away from the window and glanced down for a millisecond to locate her phone. She was a pounding hea
rtbeat away from calling the police. If she didn’t see evidence that the woman was all right, Josie was going to sic the po-po on Harris so fast, his stupid checkered hat would spin on his head.

  He bent over and disappeared out of sight again, and at last, his wife stood up. Josie couldn’t hear them talking. Only the very top of the woman’s head was visible as he helped her into an upright position. Harris seemed stooped over, his head at even level with hers, possibly speaking softly into her ear. Josie breathed a shaky sigh of relief as the couple retreated back into their house together.

  But why was the woman so quiet? Was she injured? Based on what Josie had witnessed of her fiery temper and habitual haranguing, she should be blistering his ears by now. Josie had expected a record-breaking litany of curses, a gold medal performance in the Olympics of hen-pecking.

  Maybe the police would do a well-being check anyway if I call them.

  Josie couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just witnessed something terrible. Kind of witnessed it. She cursed her ankle because she really needed to get up and pace around until this nasty sense of dread left her system.

  “It’s just adrenaline, right? I got scared for a minute, that’s all,” she told Bert, switching the binoculars from one hand to the other and shaking out her wobbly wrists. “I’ve been crippled for less than a day and I’m already hallucinating like a paranoid shut-in.”

  She was acting just like a character out of a black-and-white noir movie, gaslighting herself. Totally trapped in a crazy situation born of her own imagination. A mind trip in black and white on the big screen, complete with the harsh winter backdrop and creaky old house.

  But what if she was right? Maybe if her gut instincts—which were screaming bloody murder at the moment—were correct and she shouldn’t ignore them? What if a woman’s life was on the line—albeit, a terrible, noisy woman—and Josie’s intuition shouldn’t be ignored?

  A sharp knock sounded at the backdoor, causing her to yelp and drop the binoculars into her lap again.

  “Helllooo? Are you decent? No pajamas, right? You promised!” Aloysius called out. “I brought you a sandwich. Is your rabid hellhound going to attack me if I bring it to you? Don’t bite me. I’m too skinny to taste good and too pretty to die young. I don’t have any milk bones, dog, but I can give you a piece of salami.”

  On the rug in front of the fireplace, Bert sprawled on his side, oblivious to Josie’s front-window drama and to the possible intruder entering the house. When he heard Aloysius, he opened one eye and thumped his tail.

  “Oh, no. Don’t get up,” Josie told him. She turned her head and called out to Aloysius, “Come on in.”

  “Here you are, missy,” he said. He was wearing what looked like a stylish woman’s North Face full-length fitted quilted coat, but no hat or gloves. “I brought you a sub sandwich with my homemade herbed aioli. I didn’t know if you’re vegetarian or not, but you can take off whatever you don’t like.” He eyed her. “Although you could stand to eat a few more carbs, if you don’t mind me saying. You look like a little Chinese Tweety Bird. If my mama were here, she’d be cooking for you all the time.” He held up a wrapped sandwich approximately the size of a newborn child.

  Josie was in fact half-Thai—not Chinese—and only about 5’ 2” if gravity would just relax a little, but she thought she could do some serious damage to a lunch like this if no one was looking. It was tough to eat a sandwich as if she were a human wood chipper while she had an audience.

  Speaking of which, Aloysius looked like he could use a good meal or two himself. If his designer clothes were any indication, maybe he was a diva about his weight, too.

  He caught her skeptical look at his own skinny frame and shook his head. “Don’t look at me like that. I eat all the time. I just can’t put the weight on. I have a metabolism like a hummingbird. I snack all day and I can’t put a pound on. No junk in my trunk no matter how I try. My mama gave up on me. Luckily, my man likes me just the way I am.”

  And isn’t that the recipe for a long and healthy relationship? That, coupled with liking yourself, of course…which was the hard part sometimes. And not whacking your partner over the head with a shovel.

  “I just saw something really weird,” she said, taking the sandwich offered to her. He really was going above and beyond helping her when they were practically strangers. She’d chock it up to Midwestern hospitality, but she wasn’t sure she could rightly call Aloysius a Midwesterner. Illinois via the Caribbean maybe. Chicago with an islander flair.

  “What’s that?” he asked from the kitchen. He banged a cupboard door and emerged from the other room with the gigantic sandwich unwrapped, nestled in its paper on top of a plate. He handed her a paper towel to use as a napkin and waited for her to settle herself into a more comfortable position before he gave her lunch.

  She was momentarily distracted by the fabulous feast on her lap and forgot to answer him. The flow of words from her mouth had halted as she stared at the light, crusty Italian bread split from top to bottom with a layer of herbed tomatoes in vinaigrette, delicately sliced meats, and a lovely layer of creamy white cheese in the center. Possibly fresh mozzarella which, sadly, she was going to have to remove unless she wanted to hurt her stomach. The aroma of Italian meats and seasonings filled her nose as she inhaled deeply, and drool pooled in her mouth.

  Aloysius repeated his question and her mind stuttered as she tried to return to the issue at hand. The first bite was halfway to her mouth when she remembered the soap opera she’d witnessed through her binoculars.

  “I thought I saw something across the street, but now I think I might have imagined it,” she said, sandwich poised in midair. “It looked like Harris Kane hit his wife on the head with a shovel.”

  “What are you talking about, girl?” His eyes went wide…and then really narrow as disbelief took over his face.

  Now that she’d said it out loud, it seemed ridiculous.

  “I couldn’t have seen that, right? There’s no way that happened.”

  Aloysius’s slender eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He checked the gold watch on his wrist. “Baby, you’ve only been on that couch for an hour and forty-five minutes. How can you be going stir crazy already? There’s no way you’ve gone all Rear Window yet. You need to take a nap or watch some Hallmark movies. Or maybe you just need to eat your lunch and relax. Do you get low blood sugar? My Auntie Shirley went into insulin shock once, but we all thought she was drunk. I honestly could not tell the difference from the way she acts on a good day.”

  “No, I swear. Harris and his wife were out on their back stoop arguing,” she explained and recounted the whole sequence of events that she’d witnessed up until that terrible clang of metal on cement and the eerie silence that followed.

  Describing it in detail didn’t make it sound any more reasonable. In fact, even she was starting to think she made the whole thing up. She wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. She probably had more reason than others to know when a situation with a shovel was potentially deadly since she’d been through one such incident—and survived it—herself. But it had all happened so fast…and she’d had a traumatic morning in the ER with her ankle.

  Aloysius pushed the sandwich at her when she was finished with her crazy narrative. He watched her take a bite and chew before he said, “Look, you’re getting yourself all worked up over something that probably wasn’t what you thought. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll go over there and check it out.”

  “But—really?” She hadn’t been expecting him to agree to do it. “You’d do that for me?”

  “Sure, it’s only a few steps across the street. Lord knows I’ve been nosy a time or two in my life. If it makes you feel better, I’ll go take a look. But you have to do something for me. Sit here and eat your lunch that I went to all the trouble to make for you with my own two little hands.”

  Eat a mouth-watering sandwich? That wasn’t going to be difficult for her. No sir, no hardship at all.


  She nodded. “Absolutely, and thank you so much, both for bringing it and for humoring me. And for taking me to the ER, too. You’ve been a life saver.”

  As a show of good faith that she was going to level out her blood sugar—if that was indeed the problem with her Jimmy Stewart-esque flight of fancy—she took a big bite. Savory flavors filled her mouth and she was so distracted that the next time she looked up, she found that Aloysius had made it halfway across the street. In no time at all, his lanky frame was headed up Harris Kane’s driveway, big puffs of cold breath trailing his disappearing back in its designer coat.

  “What’s he going to do?” She leaned forward, sandwich back on its paper and set on the coffee table.

  They hadn’t discussed an approach. To her utter surprise, he went directly to the door of the enclosed front porch and knocked on it with all the confidence of a Girl Scout about to make her cookie selling quota.

  A six-foot tall Girl Scout in high-end outerwear.

  Seconds went by. Then a minute. No one came to the door.

  “Harris’s car is right in plain sight. They’re clearly home.” She reached for the binoculars so she could scan the yellow house to see if there were shadowy figures lurking behind the curtains in its windows.

  Aloysius glanced back at her and shrugged. She thought he was going to turn around and come back across the street, but instead he hopped off the front steps and followed the line of feathery evergreen shrubs around to the back fence. With his height, he had no trouble peeking over the wooden slats into the yard—something she wouldn’t have been able to do even if both ankles were in working order. Not without a step ladder.

  “Right there,” she told him, even though he couldn’t hear her. “That’s where he whacked her.” She could still hear the metallic clank of the shovel hitting the cement even though she hadn’t directly seen Harris strike her. It was a miracle Josie hadn’t broken out into a cold sweat thinking about it. She filed that victory away to celebrate another time. Maybe her sessions with Victor were helping after all, despite her skepticism.