He lifted it in his hand and tried to estimate its weight. A couple of pounds, maybe a little bit more.
Like maybe 2.2 pounds? A kilo?
Was he holding in his hands a kilo of cocaine from Colombia or one of those other God-forsaken countries down there in South America who transported their illicit goods north to the United States?
His mind went wild, conjuring up images of his sweet and gentle wife toting a machine gun, slicing off the heads of rival cartel members. Perhaps laughing to her friends about her gullible gringo husband back in the states who knew nothing of her real profession. Who believed she was a church-going school teacher and mother who winced when she had to swat a fly and made Dave remove the fly’s carcass because she was too squeamish to deal with it.
Was his whole marriage a scam? A lie, perpetrated by a vicious woman who just needed a front to hide her activities?
Then he laughed at his stupidity. Whatever this was, it wasn’t cocaine. That just wasn’t his Sarah.
Still, it looked just like the ones on the television. Even had some numbers written on it in black marker. Just like the ones on the news.
He’d taken Sarah’s jewelry upstairs to the master bedroom to put it away.
He almost put it in her jewelry box, but stopped. What if there were more Mikeys out there? What if someone else would have the nerve to just walk into his home at some point in the future and try to take this stuff again?
He needed to find someplace where a looter would never check.
Like the back of Sarah’s lingerie drawer. No self respecting looter would ever think to look in such a place for jewelry.
He opened the drawer and took out one of Sarah’s nightgowns. It was the one she’d left on the bed the day she got on that plane. He’d taken it a few days later, folded it and placed it in the drawer. He held it to his face. It still smelled like her.
He could have gotten lost in the moment, but he was running out of daylight and he wanted to get this finished.
One by one he took Sarah’s “toys” out of the drawer and examined them. Most he knew about, of course, but there were a couple of them he’d never seen before.
Of course, a woman who led a double life and was really a murdering drug kingpin was bound to have other secrets as well. So he didn’t dwell on it much.
Until he picked up the last one. The last one made him scratch his head. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was intended to do. He’d never seen anything like it before. It was just… bizarre. He made a mental note to ask Sarah to show him what it did after he brought her home.
As he placed her jewelry and other things back into the drawer, it dawned on him that there was way too much light coming into the room. It took him a moment to figure out why, and then he realized that the blinds had been opened all the way.
He exclaimed aloud, “Damn it, Mikey, you son of a bitch.”
In the early days of the blackout, Dave had taken great pains to make his house appear to be vacant. He emptied the front room downstairs of every stick of furniture and took everything off the walls. He raised the blinds all the way up, to encourage looters and bandits to peek inside and see that no one lived there.
In all the other rooms, he closed the blinds. It was that way in most vacant houses in the neighborhood. Sarah told him that realtors preferred it that way when they showed the homes to prospective buyers. Something about artificial light not showing dust and carpet stains as well as direct sunlight. He couldn’t remember exactly.
He was upset to see that Mikey had opened the blinds the night he stole Sarah’s jewelry. Obviously to allow more moonlight into the room.
That had been weeks before.
Dave was conflicted. Had any of the neighbors noticed the difference? Had any other looters? Would he do more harm than good by closing them now? If he did, he’d give passersby or the neighbors something else to notice. If one of them had seen the blinds open the day before and then closed the next day, they’d know someone secretly lived here.
In the end, he decided to leave them alone. The windows were far enough away from the bed and dresser to prevent anyone from seeing him as he walked around the room. At least as long as he remembered not to go near the windows.
The safe room was downstairs and on the other end of the house, so there was no chance the light from the safe room would be visible through these windows at night.
In the end, it was best just to leave it the way it was.
He found the brick of cocaine as he hid Sarah’s jewelry beneath her lingerie, and took it and the nightgown downstairs. He put the brick on the kitchen counter. He’d check it in a minute.
First, though, he took Sarah’s nightgown, the one that still held the faint scent of her perfume, and took it into his safe room. He placed it over his pillow as though it were a pillowcase.
He didn’t know how long Sarah’s sweet scent would remain on the nightgown, but he liked the idea of savoring the smell as he lay down his head every night to sleep.
That done, he returned to the kitchen and took a small filet knife from the utensil drawer.
He wanted to find out if the brick was really cocaine.
He held his breath and sliced open one end of the brick.
Then he laughed out loud.
-37-
Hi Sarah.
Do you remember when we used to put the girls to bed, and then snuggle together in our own bed?
Well, sometimes we didn’t snuggle, we did other stuff. More about that in a minute.
But anyway, we used to snuggle and talk and watch old TV shows until we got drowsy, remember?
One of our favorite things to watch were the old black and white I Love Lucy shows. We always laughed at the trouble Lucy got into, and I always told you she reminded me of you.
Do you remember when Ricky would walk into their apartment and call her, and she’d come out of the kitchen with a guilty look on her face?
He always said, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Well, my dear Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Last night I was in our bedroom, trying to find a good place to hide the jewelry that Mikey had taken, so that someone else didn’t take it again. I decided to hide it in the drawer where you keep your “dainties,” as you call them.
Anyway, I found what appeared to be a brick of cocaine tucked in the back of the drawer under your nightgowns and stuff.
Maybe I’ve been drinking too much nasty and stale coffee lately and my brain was working overtime. Or maybe I’m just going nuts. I don’t know. But I started imagining all kinds of things about you leading a double life, and having a secret identity that I knew nothing about.
I thought maybe you were secretly a Mexican drug lord, running a big cartel or something.
I know, I know, you’re not Mexican and can’t speak a word of Spanish. But when my imagination runs away with me, it doesn’t stop to pack things like logic or common sense. It tells me to leave the suitcases behind, get in the car and we go.
So, I was imagining that you were rich and powerful and had secret villas all over the world and now that I knew your secret you were going to have me killed and have my body parts spread out all over the desert for the coyotes to munch on.
I imagined that you had a Latin lover named Juan and another named Carlos, and I even looked at the pictures of Lindsey and Beth to make sure their eyes were blue instead of brown.
Then I stuck a knife into your brick of cocaine. I figured that if you were going to kill me anyway, I might as well die of an overdose. At least I’d die with a smile on my face.
I have to say I was more than a little relieved when it wasn’t cocaine that poured out onto the counter, but rather coffee beans.
I’ll have you know, Lucy, that I’ve been looking for those beans for months. I wanted to find them when I planted everything in the spring. I looked in every nook and cranny in the house (or so I thought), and never found them.
So I searched again. All the same places, inch by inch, foot by foot, all through the house. Well, all through the house except for the one place nobody in their right mind would ever hide coffee beans.
Now, of course, it’s in the dead of winter and I can’t plant them. The package that came with them said they’re raw, so I don’t know if I can grind them and use them. And I won’t be here in the spring to plant them.
The instructions didn’t say how long they were good for. Hopefully they’ll still grow. I can’t imagine a world without coffee. It would be terrible. The only thing worse would be a world without you guys. And I already have that.
Anyway, obviously I’m glad you don’t have two Latin lovers named Juan and Carlos. And I’m glad that Lindsey and Beth have my blue eyes. And I’m glad you’re not going to kill me and chop me into pieces.
But, Lucy, you still have some ‘splainin’ to do. Like why on earth would you hide coffee beans in your drawer with your lingerie and other stuff?
And speaking of that other “stuff,” let’s talk about that for a minute.
I knew you had things in that drawer that you could never show the children. But I came across one I’d never seen before. It has a little plastic paddle and switches and spins around and all kinds of stuff. It looks like some king of weird alien device. Maybe you can show me when you get home what you use it for.
Hey, it just occurred to me that maybe it’s a kitchen device. I mean, you were always buying all of those weird kitchen gadgets on the late night infomercials. You’d swear they would slice and dice garlic better than ever before, or make great smoothies for the girls. And then after they got used once or twice they would go into a drawer for a year or two until you got tired of looking at them. Then you’d throw them away to make room for even more gadgets.
Perhaps this thing is one of those gadgets that you decided to keep in your lingerie drawer for some reason.
Go ahead, ask me. Ask me who in their right mind would ever store a kitchen gadget in their lingerie drawer?
Ahem. Maybe the same kind of fruitcake who would store coffee beans there.
Anyway, I got a good laugh out of the whole thing. And I got some coffee beans that may still be good when I can finally plant them.
But most of all, I have a nightgown on my pillow that smells just like you, and it’s silky and soft, and when I close my eyes I can almost imagine it’s you.
Almost. My imagination’s not quite that good.
So all in all it was worth the effort. I slept on the nightgown today for the first time, and I slept better than I have in weeks.
Now if I could just figure out where you hid the information you printed out about bunny rabbits and whether or not they hibernate in the wintertime.
Yes, I already looked in your underwear drawer to see if the bunny information was mixed in with your bras. It wasn’t.
Let’s see, where would be the next logical place for you to hide information about bunny rabbits? Maybe stapled to the roof? Under the bathroom sink? In the oven?
I want to find it because if they’re supposed to be hibernating but can’t because their tunnels aren’t big enough, I want to make some kind of insulated shelter for them or something.
I’ll find the information eventually, but I wish you were here to help. Shoot, I wish you were here for a million different reasons.
Mostly because I need you by my side. That’s where you belong. Not a thousand damn miles away.
-38-
Perhaps asking Sarah for her help with the rabbits was just the magic Dave needed.
Or maybe he was just on a roll after finally finding the coffee beans.
More likely, though, it was probably just pure coincidence that an hour after he asked Sarah’s help he stumbled across what he’d been looking for.
He found it sandwiched between information on weather patterns in south Texas, and information on how to tell a poison ivy rash from a case of heat rash.
It occurred to him that Sarah was about as random a person as he’d ever met.
But he wouldn’t change a thing about her. She was also as close to perfect as any woman he’d ever known.
He read the article she’d printed out, entitled Everything you ever wanted to know about rabbits, and learned that rabbits do not hibernate.
“Most species merely limit their movements during cold weather months. They may look like they’re hibernating, but in reality they are just conserving their energy by remaining perfectly still much of the time.
“Species that live in cold weather climates also shed their thinner summer fur and grow very thick winter fur that keeps them from freezing to death. They take shelter wherever they can find it, frequently in burrows or old buildings to escape the wind.
“Some species of rabbits that live in snowy environments grow a thick layer of white fur during the winter. Such fur helps hide them from predators in a snow pack. They typically make tunnels in the snow pack at ground level, which enable them to eat dead grass and foliage until the spring thaw comes.
“The heavy snow also helps insulate them from wind and extreme temperatures.
“Some of the more sociable species huddle together for warmth during extreme cold, and breeding for some species comes to a stop in extreme cold temperatures to keep tender offspring from freezing to death.”
Dave finally had his answer. He wouldn’t have to devise some kind of living quarters for the rabbits to protect them from the cold. They’d be just fine left alone.
It was a huge weight off his shoulders. Even though he certainly had the time to take on such a project, and it would certainly have helped while away the hours until spring came, it would have been an outdoor project.
And he hated being out in the cold.
He stapled the four pages together and wrote at the top: Information: Rabbits.
Once he got both boxes of research material sorted and marked, he’d come up with some type of filing system to put it all in order. But since he had at least six thousand more pages to go through, it might take awhile.
He hoped it would take most of the winter. For this was a project he could do inside the safe room, in front of a roaring fire. Instead of outside like those poor pitiful bunnies.
He briefly thought of the two rabbits he’d named Lindsey and Beth. He wondered how they were faring in the weather.
And he wondered if he should make an exception for them. Maybe bring them into the house, out of the wind, and lock them up in the pantry or something, where he could easily clean up after them. For awhile now he’d considered them more as friends than main ingredients in a stew pot. Before Mikey came along, and even after, he sometimes carried on long conversations with them.
He decided that the next time he saw them out, eating from the food pile he’d thrown over the fence after the corn and wheat harvest, he’d try to trap them. Thus far they’d avoided most efforts he’d made to pick them up, or even pet them.
So he’d leave it up to them. If they cooperated enough to come to him, they’d spend the rest of the winter in relative comfort.
If they insisted on being stuck up and unsociable, they’d have to weather the cold with the rest of the rabbits.
He wondered what it would be like to share his house with two rabbits.
He decided it wouldn’t be so bad. After all, he was already sharing it with a dead guy.
-39-
Dave had been in a general funk for several days, ever since he realized that Christmas was coming up.
Christmas was a big deal in the Speer family. It was by far the most joyous event of the year.
They did everything as a family during the Christmas season. They made paper and popcorn garlands, worked together to hang lights on the shrubs in the fr
ont yard and decorated the tree together. Dave always built a small campfire in the back yard for their annual Christmas Eve wienie and marshmallow roast. After the event, they’d go caroling in the neighborhood, then go home and warm up with a cup of hot chocolate before bedtime.
It was by far the best family tradition they’d developed, and each of them looked forward to it every year.
But not this year.
When Dave looked at the calendar and noticed that Christmas was four days away, he went into an immediate depression. He spent the entire next night in bed, feeling sorry for himself and being angry at the world.
He knew that just laying there was the worst possible thing he could do. That he needed to stay busy, so he could focus on other things.
But he just couldn’t muster the energy or desire to get up and do anything.
For two straight days all he did was stay in the safe room, sleeping off and on, crying a little bit, and being miserable.
Then he had an epiphany.
Instead of mourning Christmas, he should be embracing it. In the absence of his family, it was up to him to carry on the tradition as best he could. They would all be together again before the next winter rolled around. To allow the tradition to lapse in their absence would be doing the family a disservice.
It was an amazing turnaround. One minute he was lying in the bed in the middle of the night, which was normally his day, with tears in his eyes.
The next minute he was in the attic, searching desperately through boxes, for Sarah’s tiny Christmas tree.
Sarah had grown up in a family that always cut their own fresh tree at Christmas time. For most of her childhood she lived in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was a desert community, and its supply of suitable Christmas trees was therefore pretty pathetic.
However, the resort city of Cloudcroft was less than an hour away. Ruidoso was an hour and a half in another direction. Both had mountains and fresh air and lots of snow. And also lots of trees suitable to cut down and take home for Christmas.
An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) Page 14