Carpet Diem

by Misty Simon

  I wasn’t short, but the lip was just out of reach from the inside of the Dumpster. I could do this. I jumped a couple times on the carpet and tried to launch myself, but I missed when I tried to grab the lip of the Dumpster and smacked my chin on the cold metal. Ow. That hurt. A lot.

  Resting for a moment, I got my breath back and the stars out of my eyes. Moments later, I crawled back to the carpet and tried again. I could do this. I was not going to get stuck in a Dumpster. If nothing worked, I could always call Max and ask him to come get me out, but I really didn’t want to do that. I could do this on my own. I was a big girl. Literally. I did not need help.

  After I pulled myself to the edge of the carpet, I got to my feet again. Looking up, I gauged the distance I would have to jump. It was longer than I had originally thought. Of course it was. When did anything ever work out the way I thought it would?

  I glanced up at the rim of the Dumpster again and then down at the carpet and saw something I hadn’t registered before while I was trying to get out of this mess.

  There was a hand sticking out of the end of the carpet. A hand. I frantically searched my mind for what it might be and tried to keep my cool. There had been a mannequin in one of the rooms. I distinctly remembered that. A mannequin that had no arms, to my recollection. Okay. Not the mannequin.

  Maybe it wasn’t really a hand. It could be some kind of glove from Audra’s team. Yeah, it could totally be a glove, and I was seeing things that weren’t there. I had to be.

  Except when I took another step toward the edge of the carpet and the hand, I saw that it was most definitely not a glove. Not unless gloves now came equipped with really long nails that sparkled in the light of the afternoon sun.

  Chapter Five

  Oh my word!

  I clamped my hand over my mouth. Was Audra rolled up in the carpet? Could my newish friend be dead and wrapped up tight like a burrito? Oh my word! I did not just find another dead body. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Karma did not always play fair, and I tried to find the silver lining in any hand I’d been dealt, but I felt my bile rising, like I was going to puke.

  Oh my word!

  The nails were the clincher. I didn’t know anyone else who had those nails. I remembered them from last night, when she smoothed her dress around her waist as she stood in the lobby with us at the theater. And now I most definitely had to get out of this garbage bin. Although I thought I should probably check to see if the hand with the nails was attached to a wrist. Because a dead person was one thing, but a severed hand was something altogether different. And if the wrist had a pulse, that would be even better.

  Squinching my eyes closed—I didn’t know why I did that, but I did—I pulled the hand a little farther out of the carpet and was thankful that the wrist and part of the forearm were still attached. There was resistance, which meant that the whole thing was attached to the body, or at least I hoped so. Although, really, was that any better? It still meant she was dead.

  I could feel myself shutting down inside to be able to deal with being in a Dumpster with a dead body. I’d been near them before, happened upon them, spotted them through windows, seen them on the embalming table and in coffins. But I’d never been on top of one. My self-defenses were kicking in fast to save me from falling over and fainting, which would make this whole thing that much worse.

  The hand was colder than I thought it should be if the person in this carpet was alive, but who knew how long he or she had been out here? Today the weather wasn’t exactly warm, but it wasn’t too cold, either.

  I unsquinched my eyes enough to see if the fingernail paint job was the one I’d seen on Audra last night. Hers had been a swirl of purple and blue and a beautiful pink, with what looked like crystals embedded in the paint. This was exactly the same. I wondered how long she had had to sit in the nail tech’s chair to get her nails done and how much it had cost to have what looked like real crystals.

  Not that I was any kind of expert on how long nails took. And I was definitely trying to distract myself from the fact that I was perched on top of what might be a dead person in a Dumpster, one that I wasn’t sure how I was going to get out of.

  Okay, deep breath, I told myself.

  I refocused with that deep breath, and unfortunately, that was when I saw a tattoo of a clover leaf on the inside of the wrist and the very beautiful, big ring on the ring finger. I knew that ring. I’d been shown that ring just three days ago, when Audra announced her boyfriend had proposed to her. Oh my God. I was going to puke.

  I scrambled away, waiting to hear anything, like breathing or moaning, when I moved around on top of the carpet. Nothing. I had to go back and check for that pulse. I had to.

  Forcing myself to do just that, I crept forward, held the wrist again, knowing I would find nothing, and was not surprised when a pulse did not come through her soft skin.

  Oh man.

  I had to get out of here and call the police and her boyfriend and her mother and Letty and . . . my God.

  I scrambled away from her hand again, knowing that I was not hurting her now, but I did not want to be crouched on top of her like a vulture.

  Bumping into the side of the bin, I felt a rung of metal dig into my back. I turned to find myself saved from being stuck in here by some toeholds. Even if they weren’t toeholds, and I was not a climber, I was going to get out of this thing now.

  I did not want Police Chief Burton out here. I did not want to have to defend myself for finding another body when I wanted to burst into tears. My friend was dead. This woman’s life had been cut short, and she would be missed.

  Because there was no way she had killed herself and then wrapped herself in a carpet, or even accidentally fallen into the garbage and had the carpet wrap itself around her. There was just no way, so this was a murder, and I was out here all by myself, with no backup.

  I clambered up the side of the Dumpster so fast, I almost threw myself over the edge and down onto the hard-packed dirt beneath me. But I slowed down at the top at the last second and made sure to get a good grip before hoisting my leg over the side. I dropped to the ground and ran to my car. After whipping open the door, I grabbed my phone out of the console, then hit the speed dial for the police station and waited.

  “Tallie?”

  My cousin Matt. Phew. At least it wasn’t Burton, who thought I was the bane of his existence. Great. But where was Suzy, the receptionist, who usually answered the phone?

  “There’s been a death out at the Astercromb mansion. The body is in the Dumpster that was rented to clean out the house. I just found it and touched only the wrist to make sure there was no pulse. Please send someone out now.”

  “You almost sound scared.”

  “Now is not the time to mess with me, Matt. I thought it was something else. I was trying to get my vacuum, which someone threw in the garbage, and I saw a hand sticking out of a carpet. Send someone now.”

  “Are you still in the Dumpster?”

  “No, I got out, but I don’t want to stay out here. What if the killer is still out here?”

  “Are you sure she was killed?”

  “Uh, yeah. How else would she end up in a carpet?” I was about done with the twenty questions. I just wanted to hang up and go lock myself in the car.

  A flatbed truck rumbled up the drive just as Matt said he was going to go and get the guys together to come out to the crime scene.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Please stay on the phone with me. A big truck from the trash collector is coming up the drive, and I don’t know who this is or why they’d be coming to pick up a big Dumpster that isn’t filled yet.”

  Now he sounded full of business. “I’ll talk to whoever the driver is.”

  I had never been so happy to hand over the responsibility to someone else.

  The truck pulled up right in front of me, and the driver and I stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity but was probably about four-point-two seconds. I waved him out of the cab. He frowned at
me and then turned the truck off.

  “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be anyone out here this afternoon,” he said as he exited the cab. “I was told that, you understand. What are you doing here?”

  I filed that info away in my brain and held the phone out. “We have a situation. I’m going to need you to talk to the police.”

  He backed away, with his hands up. “Don’t want no trouble.”

  “Well, you just drove into it. Take the phone now or don’t, but you’re in it up to your eyeballs.” And so was I.

  In the end the driver talked to Matt, who must have used his idle time to call all the cops. Ten minutes after I placed the call, three cars zoomed up the lane with their lights and sirens blazing. It had taken them longer than I thought it should have, but who was I to judge?

  At least this time I wasn’t going to have to deal with Burton from the very beginning. My cousin Matt was a much easier prospect than the chief, who tended to roll his eyes at me and pinch the bridge of his nose.

  Matt was the first to get out of the cars. The truck driver and I had been making awkward and stilted small talk, and I was incredibly relieved not to have to talk with him anymore. No one loved the cops, but this guy seemed very scared of talking to them, even over the phone. What would he do when faced with them?

  “Matt,” the driver, Chris Telford, said, holding out his hand.

  “Chris, I didn’t realize it was you. What are you doing out this way? I thought you usually did the cross-country stuff.”

  “Picking up some extra shifts to pay that child support. Sorry for being so abrupt on the phone. I don’t need no trouble, with this custody thing going on.”

  Ah, made sense. But if he didn’t do anything, then why was he worried? And what about the remark that no one was supposed to be out here?

  Matt didn’t shake my hand or even nod at me. He just shook his head and pointed at the Dumpster. At least there was no eye rolling and nose pinching. I’d take it.

  “Yes. She’s in there.” I answered his unspoken question with a soft voice.

  I wasn’t needed anymore, but I knew better than to try to leave. I used the time to call Letty, but I had to leave her a message that we’d hit a problem, though I didn’t mention why or what had happened. I was trying to follow the normal guidelines of staying out of the way, not touching anything, and speaking only when spoken to that I knew Burton would have given me if he was here. Where was he anyway? I had braced myself to be yelled at, and all that adrenaline was rushing out of my body, making this girl a very tired cleaner, even though I hadn’t cleaned a single thing in hours. Where had my happiness about having Max in the area for the next month gone?

  God, Max. He was going to tell me to keep out of this, and I was going to try. I promised myself to do just that. But Audra was my newly gained friend, or at least that had been the direction I thought we were going in before this whole mansion thing. If I happened to come across any information related to Audra’s death, then of course I would not turn it away. I’d helped a lot with the last murder in town, with the one before that, and with the two before that, too, if we were counting. Which I wasn’t, but I would see justice here.

  Of course Mrs. Petrovski returned my call, and I picked it up, just as I was standing outside her mansion, with the woman she’d chosen to clean it not twenty feet away from me and dead. What would this do to her project? Not that it was any of my business, especially when she’d been so mean to me. She was not happy to be talking to me now, while I was trying desperately to get off the phone before I said something I shouldn’t. I’d leave the explanation to whoever had to tell her that the place was now a crime scene. Which would probably be Burton.

  I should not have thought of Burton, because then, of course, he appeared, like a bogeyman, when I was still trying to get off the phone with Mrs. Petrovski.

  “Yes, I’ll get my things out right away,” I said into the phone.

  Burton glared at me. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Mrs. Petrovski,” I said, answering his question while also addressing the woman who would not seem to get off the phone. “I have to go. Someone’s here asking questions, and I need to give them my full attention.”

  “What are you doing?” Burton demanded while Mrs. Petrovski squawked, “Who’s there? Who’s asking questions? I need to know what’s going on. You don’t seem to be telling me everything. I can feel it and hear it in your voice. I have to have this house ready in ten days for a potential buyer. This is critical.”

  “Give me a moment,” I requested into the phone. Burton must have thought I was talking to him, because his glare intensified, accompanied by a fierce scowl.

  I hit the MUTE button on the phone and faced the man who seemed to think I was always a thorn in his side, even though I tried very hard to just be a rose in his day.

  “I’m talking to the owner.”

  “Of course,” he said, stepping into the hard-packed dirt. “Of course.”

  “Look, it’s not like I try to find these things. She returned a phone message I’d left her hours ago, and I picked up before I thought better of it. I didn’t mean to.”

  “No, of course not.” His face did not convey what his words were saying.

  I harrumphed in disgust. “I didn’t. I was here to pick up my things after I unceremoniously got kicked out of the place earlier today, due to false accusations. I went to go get my vacuum cleaner and landed on a carpet and saw a hand. You cannot blame me. In fact . . .” I thought about it for a second and then smiled. “In fact, you can thank me, because if I hadn’t found her, she would be in the back of that truck, in a Dumpster, right now, and we wouldn’t have ever found her.”

  “Let’s not get too carried away.”

  I could hear Mrs. Petrovski still squawking and knew I had a limited amount of time to get back to her.

  He looked pointedly at the phone and then back at me. I knew what he was going to say before the words rolled off his tongue. “Why on earth did you call the owner before we could? This is not something you can just go around telling people about. Surely you’ve learned that by now, if not anything else.”

  I harrumphed at him again. It was becoming an issue. Of course I knew about that rule. Not that he’d give me credit for it, but I didn’t expect him to act that out of character just because I had helped him last time. “As I said, I did not call her, and I certainly was not telling her anything, except that I would take my cleaning equipment out of her house right away, which was a little white lie, I guess. I’m assuming you’re not going to let me leave with anything, since this is now a crime scene. I thought I’d let you tell her why. If you want to do it now, I can just hand the phone to you.” I held it out to demonstrate my willingness to let him get involved right now, right here.

  Shaking his head at me, he put his hand out, and I relinquished the phone. He raised an eyebrow when I stood at his side to show him how to unmute the phone. After hitting the button, he shooed me away with his unoccupied hand, but I wasn’t going far if I could help it.

  Another shake of his head while he turned his back to me. I could still hear him, though. “Marg, it’s James. Yeah, sorry to bother you. No, not a burglary. No, not a break-in. Actually, we’re going to have to cordon the place off for a little while. Found someone in your trash can. No, they weren’t rummaging around for building materials.”

  I would have put that a little bit differently, and I knew Burton should have when he pulled the phone away from his ear. It was very easy to hear Mrs. Petrovski yelling.

  He swiveled around and glanced at me, then hunched his shoulders and turned back around. “Someone died in your Dumpster.”

  More yelling, at a volume, I thought, that made it possible for the next-door neighbors a mile away to hear what she was saying.

  “Calm down. Calm down. Yes, I’ll get things cleared up as soon as possible. My mom knows what I do for a living. You can tell her if you want to. No, please don’t talk to h
er to get me to move faster. I don’t need the threats, ma’am.” He pulled the phone away from his ear again, and this time shook his head at it instead of me for once. “She hung up on me,” he told me.

  I wanted to say that this was not exactly surprising, but I didn’t want to get more involved in this moment, because I planned on getting involved in all the ones to come.

  After handing my phone back to me, he pinched the bridge of his nose. So typically Burton. I expected an eye roll at any moment. Standing there in his black uniform, with his bulletproof vest underneath, he looked like a grim reaper that might be at the end of his own time. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost, that is, until he looked up at me and glared.

  “Why?” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what his question pertained to, so I kept my mouth shut. He turned and walked away.

  Obviously, I had been dismissed. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to leave, in case they needed me, but I was also positively itching to go back to town and talk with Max about what I’d seen.

  Matt walked over as I was considering whether to ask if I could leave and talk with them later, once they got back to the station.

  “So what happened?” he asked with his ever-present notepad. He was turning into Burton. I was going to have to stop that before he got too far into the nasty chief-of-police track in his life.

  “I saw my vacuum cleaner and wanted to rescue it. When I was in the Dumpster, I saw a hand sticking out of the carpet and wanted to see who it was.”

  “Did you know who it was before you touched her on her hand?” He scribbled furiously on his notepad. Oh, to be able to see what he was writing! But he held the pad too close to his face.