“Thanks,” I told him, once I caught my breath. I was more than half-tempted to take his advice and walk away, but I couldn’t give up now. If I could find Bethany’s bracelet or phone in the trash, maybe I could convince Detective Castillo to reopen the case. Her cell phone could tell me who she’d talked to that morning, along with a trove of data I couldn’t find otherwise. For that matter, the bracelet probably had the killer’s fingerprints all over it. Bethany’s prank medical alert bracelet could end up solving her own murder. “This one has sentimental value.”
I took a step deeper into the shed, and Huckleberry whined. I looked down at him. “You don’t have to come with me. Just don’t go too far, all right?” I wasn’t worried about him wandering off. He was too lazy to go far. I didn’t want him getting underfoot, so I looped his leash through an opening on a post outside the door. Huckleberry lay down in the shade with a sigh and watched as I retreated back inside.
The next hour of my life felt like a year. People always said an impossible task was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but that was child’s play compared to this. It was more like looking for one specific piece of hay in a whole barn full of haystacks.
As daunting as the task was, it wasn’t impossible. Sure, I had a literal ton of garbage to sift through, but I didn’t have to go through it all. If the trucks had last come to empty all the garbage in the shed on Sunday night, then the bags on the very bottom would have been from Monday morning, around the time of Bethany’s death at 10:41 a.m.
Luckily, the taco bar didn’t open until eleven, which made it easy to build a timeline. I dug down to the bottom of the bin, tossing bags over the lip of the container, until just a thin layer of garbage bags was left. I opened up one bag and saw taco wrappers. This was collected too late, and from the other side of the park. I tied the top closed again and threw it out of the bin.
The next bag I checked was more promising. It was full of empty water bottles—didn’t anyone bother recycling?—and miscellaneous trash from cigarette butts to tiny bags of doggie doo. No bracelet, though. No phone, either. The next three bags were more of the same—lots of garbage but nothing interesting.
Right as I had reached the bottom of the bin and was considering rechecking some of the bags I’d chucked over the edge, I heard a deep voice saying, “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
I looked up from where I was crouching, surrounded by the bags I’d already combed through with no luck. “Oh, hey,” I said, smiling up at him. I could only see part of his face from this angle. Even if I’d been standing up straight, the lip of the bin was at chin height. Being vertically challenged put me at a definite disadvantage.
“I asked you what you’re doing,” he repeated.
“My friend lost her . . .”
He cut me off. “You know what? I don’t care. Get out of there so I can do my job.”
“Yeah, of course.” I stood and wiped the grimy gloves on the hem of my polo, realizing for the first time that I had ruined yet another uniform shirt. Oops. At least it was my newest one, the one I hadn’t had time to tailor yet.
When I’d first pulled myself up and over into the bin, there had been a pile of garbage bags threatening to shift and suffocate me. But as I worked my way down, I kept tossing the discards over the side until I was perched on bare metal. And by bare metal, I mean the dirtiest surface I’d ever seen in my life. The problem was, now the top of the bin looked extremely far away. I grabbed the lip and tried to heft myself up, but I’d never been especially good at chin-ups.
“Can I get a hand?” I asked meekly, hoping the garbage collector would take pity on me.
Instead of reaching inside, he shuffled away. Great. What was I going to do now? Wait until they brought in the next load of garbage so I could build up enough bags to get out?
Then I heard a chain rattling and a loud screech of metal as one of the short sides of the bin swung open, revealing a broad-shouldered, muscular man in a bright yellow T-shirt covered by an orange reflective safety vest. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask. He scowled at me. “Scram.”
“Thank you so very much,” I said, hurrying over to the opening as quickly as I dared, mindful of the slippery metal beneath my cowboy boots.
He grunted in response. “Made one heck of a mess here, lady,” he pointed out as I stepped down onto the concrete floor.
He had a point. I’d tossed all of the bags from the bin to the floor, and a few looked like they’d burst on the way. But to be completely fair, the rest of the shed wasn’t much better. Bags were piled up haphazardly, bins were overflowing, and a river of greenish brown slime oozed slowly toward the front door. “Sorry. You want me to clean it up, or . . .”
He cut me off once again. “Get lost before I call the cops.”
I wasn’t sure that rummaging through garbage was a criminal offense, but his warning had the intended effect. I hurried outside, freed Huckleberry’s leash, and gave it a tug. “Come on, boy, let’s go home.”
Hey, that was new.
I was starting to think of Williamsburg as home. Not only that, but even Untapped Books & Café felt like home now. If I felt this connected to Brooklyn after just a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like at the end of the summer.
Huckleberry was enjoying the shade, and the smell didn’t seem to bother him. Come to think about it, I didn’t notice it as much anymore, either. Even as I removed the mask and peeled off the gloves, the stench had dropped from overpowering to merely annoying. I guess people really could get used to anything. “Let’s get going.” I tugged the leash harder this time, and Huckleberry reluctantly got to his feet, stretched, wove between the large garbage trucks that had appeared while I was inside, and followed me out the front gates.
I was exhausted. I was hot. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate how disgustingly filthy I was. But most of all, I was empty-handed. All that was for nothing since I didn’t have a bracelet or phone to show for it.
I trudged back toward the bookstore, Huckleberry trailing behind me. When I first met the unofficial mascot of Untapped Books & Café, I’d mistakenly assumed that the big, goofy retriever mix was named after Huck Finn. I figured, with it being a bookstore and all, that his name was influenced by classic American literature. I’d overestimated the intellectual acuity of my coworkers. Turns out, he was actually named after the old fifties cartoon character Huckleberry Hound.
One guess as to which of my coworkers used to watch old cartoon reruns, back in the days before Cartoon Network existed, when hapless kids had the choice between Saturday morning cartoons and Nickelodeon—if they were lucky enough to have cable. Seriously, I don’t know how anyone survived before YouTube and Netflix. No wonder Todd turned out so weird.
When we reached the alley, I was pleasantly surprised that I couldn’t smell the garbage. At first, I thought that while I’d been gone the trucks must have come by, but as I got closer I realized that the dumpsters were every bit as full as when I’d left to walk Huckleberry, if not more so.
On the plus side, if I had managed to blow out my olfactory receptors then this morning wasn’t a complete waste. Sure, food would never taste the same, but on the positive side, I wouldn’t cringe every time I entered an underground subway station. See? Silver lining.
“Holy smokes, what is that stench?” I heard Todd exclaim as he stepped out the back door.
I looked down at myself for the first time. My polo was covered in so much muck, it was no longer green. My skirt was beyond salvaging. That was no biggie, I’d make a new one. My boots—my favorite pair—were so dirty I couldn’t even see the snakeskin pattern anymore. The exposed skin on my arms and legs was coated in something—several somethings to be precise—that alternated between sticky and slimy. And unless I was hallucinating, a line of ants was crawling up my left leg.
Todd stared at me, mouth agape for a moment b
efore he had to cover his nose and mouth with his hand. He took a step backward. “What on earth happened to you? No, I don’t want to know. Go home and get cleaned up.” He shoved the brick away from the door frame with his foot and closed the heavy door behind him. I heard it click into place.
“I guess we know when we’re not wanted, don’t we?” I said, looking down at Huckleberry. He whined in response. “I hear you, boy.”
I banged my fist on the back door.
A minute passed, then came Todd’s muffled voice. “Go away.”
“You gotta at least let Huckleberry in,” I pleaded with him.
“Not if he smells half as bad as you do.”
I hadn’t noticed any bad smells on him, but right now I doubted if I could smell a corpse flower in full bloom. I’d kept Huckleberry from the worst of the garbage, but that wasn’t saying much, to be fair. “Fine, I’ll take him home and bathe him, but Izzy’s got my keys and my phone’s still in my apron.”
At least, I hoped it was. It wasn’t in my pocket. If it had fallen out while I was rooting through the trash, well, it was gone now.
Usually, at the start of my shift, I would toss my messenger bag into a designated cabinet in the kitchen where employees could leave their belongings. All of the skirts I designed had pockets, but they were hard to get to when I was wearing a waitress apron, so I usually transferred my phone to one of the apron pouches, next to my pad of paper and a handful of pens.
I don’t know how every place runs, since I’ve only ever waited tables at two restaurants. But at both places I’d worked, it was the server’s job to provide pens along with the check. If just one table an hour kept the pen, at the end of my shift I would be empty-handed. I collected free pens anytime I saw them, but still ended up buying them in bulk every few weeks, which came out of my own pocket. Considering I made less than minimum wage, that expense bit into my food budget.
In other words, people who stole pens from restaurants were not on Santa’s “Nice” list.
Right now, I wasn’t worried about my cheap bulk pens. I wasn’t worried about my order pad. I could live without my messenger bag, which contained my (mostly empty) wallet. But I needed my phone, and my apartment keys.
I banged on the door again.
“Todd, I tell you what, if you don’t let me in this very minute, I’m coming around front and walking through the whole shop until I get my phone and keys.”
“Hold your horses,” came his muffled reply. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” The door opened a crack and Todd’s hand appeared, clutching my cell phone. I took it from him. Then he lobbed my keyring at me. It landed on the pavement. The door slammed again, and this time I could hear the bolt being thrown. As if I couldn’t take a hint.
The walk home was long and hot. On the plus side, I didn’t have to worry about crowded sidewalks since everyone was more than happy to give me a wide berth. Every half block or so, Huckleberry would lie down on a patch of grass or in a spot of shade, and I had to cajole him for several minutes before he would get to his feet again. Not that I blamed him. The next bench I passed might be as far as I went.
As luck would have it, there were few benches between the bookstore and my aunt’s apartment. Benches had gone the way of payphones and paper checks. It seemed odd to me that even bus stops didn’t have benches in them, but according to Izzy, it was part of a citywide initiative to keep the homeless population from adding an “undesirable” element to otherwise nice neighborhoods. That sounded like malarkey to me. I wasn’t sure what the best solution to the homeless problem was, but taking their ability to sit down on a clean, comfortable surface seemed needlessly cruel to me.
After what felt like a hike across Death Valley, we reached the door to my aunt’s building. I looked down at Huckleberry. “You be a good boy. Think invisible thoughts.”
I pulled the door, and cringed when it opened easily. The front door was only unlocked when the concierge was on duty. Maybe I’d get lucky and he’d be on a break.
I wasn’t lucky.
“For heaven’s sake, what the devil is that smell?” Earl’s familiar voice greeted me before my eyes could adjust. The lobby was well lit, but after the searing sun reflecting off the buildings and the sidewalks, I couldn’t see a thing. I needed to invest in sunglasses, even if it was just a cheap pair I bought off one of the corner vendors that catered to the tourists.
“Hey, Earl,” I said, hoping that the casual greeting would deflect suspicion off of me. Like maybe he’d think it was someone else in the lobby that smelled like a ripe dumpster.
“Don’t ‘Hey, Earl’ me, Miss Odessa,” he said, rising from his seat. “And what’s that you got with you? A dog? You know well as I do you ain’t got no dog registered to your apartment, and no way is that mutt under twenty pounds.”
Frankly, I don’t get the arbitrary twenty-pound-dog limit. In my experience, small dogs were more inclined to bark at every little sound they heard and drive their neighbors absolutely up the wall in close quarters. It’s not like a twenty-pound dog was less inclined than a twenty-one-pound dog to tear up the carpet or scratch at the front door. But what did I know? Rufus was the closest I’d ever come to having a pet, and he was a cat.
“It’s just for an hour or so,” I explained, urging Huckleberry toward the elevator. But the big dog got one blast of cold air from the air conditioner, collapsed onto the freezing marble floor, and was now doing his best impersonation of an immovable object. I bent down, put my arms under his front armpits, and started dragging him across the lobby.
I got him halfway into the elevator, and then came around and pushed on his back end until he reluctantly crawled the rest of the way in under his own power. I hit the button for the fifth floor. As the elevator whirred to life, Huckleberry’s ears perked up. Then the doors opened and he looked at me, abject confusion on his face.
How on earth was I supposed to explain an elevator to a dog? He got in a room. The door closed. The doors opened again, but now he was in a completely different place from where he started, like magic. “Come on, Huck. Almost home,” I assured him.
He followed me reluctantly, tail tucked between his legs. Between his failing eyesight and the overwhelming stench of garbage clinging to both of us that probably clogged his nose, too, I couldn’t fault him for being confused. “It’s all right,” I told him, scratching his big head right in front of his left ear. He leaned into my hand as I fumbled the keys into the lock with my other hand. “No one’s gonna hurt you, buddy. You’re gonna be fine.”
I opened the door, and Rufus launched himself at us.
14
Odessa Dean @OdessaWaiting ∙ June 26
I’d rather be doing literally ANYTHING else, but life had other plans today. I can’t even. #adulting
I GRABBED FOR RUFUS, but I was too exhausted, too slow, and too surprised to be effective. The turbocharged ball of fur and claws that was my aunt’s normally sweet-natured cat latched on to the back of Huckleberry’s neck, yowling at the top of his lungs. The big dog twisted away from me, ripping the leash out of my hand as he tried to rid himself of the cat by turning in a tight circle and attacking his own tail.
I reached for Rufus again, and this time, instead of missing, I accidentally grabbed his ear. He hissed and swatted at me. I jerked my hand back, but not before his nails raked down my arm, causing me to yelp. Between the cat’s battle cries, the dog’s hysterical barking, and my own yell of pain, I was starting to see why apartments had such strict pet policies.
Luckily it was the middle of a weekday and no one came out to investigate the ruckus, or worse, call the cops. Technically, both Rufus and Huckleberry were my responsibility, but I had no idea if either of them had tags or were current on their shots. The last thing I needed was animal control taking them both into custody. Then it would be a competition who killed me first—my aunt, or the entire staff of Untapped
Books & Café.
“Stop!” I yelled, to no avail. I managed to hook an arm under Rufus’s midsection and pull him free. Hissing and thrashing, he sank his teeth into the soft tissue of my upper arm. Freed from the demon cat, Huckleberry took off like a shot. Moving quicker than I’d ever seen him go before, he dashed toward the elevator and pawed frantically at the closed door.
Knowing that Huckleberry had nowhere to go, I wrestled Rufus into the apartment. I carried him into the bedroom and closed the door behind me before he could escape. One down, one to go. Huckleberry growled at me when I approached, showing a snarl that would have been impressive if he hadn’t lost most of his teeth years ago. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him inside. He broke free as soon as we were across the threshold, but I managed to corral him into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.
Rufus meowed plaintively from the bedroom. Huckleberry barked angrily from the bathroom. And my sense of smell chose that moment to flip back into the on position. I caught a whiff of myself and almost cried.
All in all, not one of my better days.
Instead of giving in and feeling sorry for myself, I gave myself a stern pep talk as I stripped down to bare skin in the middle of the kitchen. I stuffed all of my clothes, including my bra, into the trash can, pulled the bag out, and tied it shut. That bra had cost me forty-five dollars. It was my favorite—purple with pink, white, and blue polka dots.
Anyone who wears a bra knows how hard it is to find a cute one that fits.
It was not easy to watch it go into the trash.
Then I remembered that my cell phone was still in my skirt pocket. I opened the trash bag, dug out my filthy skirt, retrieved my cell phone, and tied it all back up again. I carried the bag—and my boots—to the sliding balcony door. It was one thing to throw out a bra, it was an entirely different matter to give up on a pair of broken-in cowboy boots without a fight. Careful to keep as much of my unclothed body as possible hidden from the outside world, I pushed the garbage bag and boots out onto the balcony, where I could deal with them later.
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