Make, Take, Murder: A Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery © 2011 by Joanna Campbell Slan.
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Monday, December 14
I was rummaging around in the trash Dumpster searching for my lost paycheck, when I reached down and grabbed Cindy Gambrowski’s severed leg.
Of course, I didn’t know it was her leg. I didn’t know whose leg it was.
In fact, I couldn’t even be sure it was a real, live—er, dead—leg at all. I told myself I was nuts. (Which I probably am.) I immediately dropped what I was holding.
“Eeeeek!” I screamed. “It’s … it’s … a leg! I found a leg.”
“Ha, ha, ha. Very funny, Kiki Lowenstein. When you’re finished being a complete dope, how about you find your paycheck so you can get out of there?” said Bama. “We’ve got our Monday night crop to prep for.”
That’s my business partner for you. She has all the empathy of a pet rock. Clearly, she was not planning to come to my assistance. She thought I was kidding about the leg. Or wrong.
Well, maybe I was.
I swallowed hard and told myself to calm down.
After all, how could a human shin complete with five toes get inside the big green trash bin? Why would anyone dump body parts in with the paper garbage we generated at Time in a Bottle, the scrapbook store where Bama and I work?
This had to be someone’s idea of a sick joke. I must have been mistaken. Who’d put a body part in the Dumpster? Especially in our trash bin? Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Concentrate on finding that paycheck so you can get out of here.
If only I could see better!
It’s pretty dark inside a Dumpster with the lid propped open only an inch. The day dawned unusually warm for December, but that’s St. Louis for you. We tend to swing from one extreme to another. Either we suffer from muggy, ghastly hot days, or we rival polar expeditions for bone-chilling cold. You can walk outside to a clear sky one minute, dodge pelting golf balls of hail the next, and finish the twenty-four-hour period with a pea-soup colored haze announcing an oncoming tornado. It sure isn’t boring; I’ll give it that!
Neither was my life.
“I need some help here, Bama!” I called. I figured at the very least she’d hold the lid open for me, but no. She had given me a boost so I could climb into the slime pit. But that was all. After I scrambled over the edge and into the trash, Bama stuck a small stick under the metal lid and backed away. Bama didn’t care how tough a time I was having. This was her passive-aggressive way of teaching me a lesson.
Unless I also learned Braille, this education was going nowhere—fast. Too darn dark in here to see anything!
“I’m not climbing in after you, Kiki. I won’t. Don’t ask. Quit whining and find your paycheck. I still have to count out the register and get the store open.”
Well, I did, too. I was eager for the activity that would take my mind off how horrible my twelve-year-old daughter was behaving lately.
“This is all your fault,” Bama called to me, by way of adding insult to smelly injury.
Duh. That I knew. I should have paid attention. I shouldn’t have pushed all those loose papers into the trash can by the desk. I should have put my paycheck in my purse the moment Bama handed it over.
Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.
And didn’t.
When I discovered my mistake, Bama explained she was not about to reissue my paycheck, thank you. “That costs money. Correction: That wastes money. You tossed it, you lost it.”
I could tell by the smirk she was proud of her little rhyme. In fact, I bet she was standing outside grinning from ear to ear. All right, I would take my bitter medicine. But I couldn’t perform my punishment without more light. “Bama, I’m trying! I want out of here. But I can’t see anything! Lift the lid higher!”
“Can’t. Don’t want to touch it. I’ll get dirty.” She wore a brand-new, cardinal-red wrap coat that I coveted. I had finally, reluctantly, resigned my old winter coat to the garbage. Moths feasted on the sleeves over the summer. The lining drooped sadly out from under the hem. An unidentified stain crept across the shoulder blades.
I hoped our store was making money. If we were, perhaps I could use a part of the bonus to buy a new coat at the after-Christmas sales. I also wanted to purchase a nice Hanukkah gift for my daughter Anya. She lusted after a pair of Uggs. “All my friends own a pair,” she pouted.
But instead of prepping for our upcoming crop or creating displays to entice our customers to spend money, I was stuck here in the trash bin, digging around for my lost paycheck. With no help forthcoming from my “partner,” Bama. None at all!
She is so annoying.
“At least go get me some light!” I told myself I must be hallucinating to think I’d touched anything remotely human. But then, I haven’t been sleeping well lately. No wonder my imagination shifted to high alert status.
“Hang on,” she yelled. “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”
As if I could! I was too short to climb out of the dumpster without (a) a hand up or (b) a ladder. Instead, I snuggled into the corner far away from the icky, sticky human calf-shaped thing I’d tossed back into the mess. At least in the corner, nothing could come up behind me.
I felt a tickle.
“Something fell down the back of my blouse!” I yelled so loud I thought I ejected my tonsils.
But Bama wasn’t around to hear me. I tugged at my top and did the shimmy, hoping whatever small creature was sharing my clothing would vacate the building. Pronto.
“Here,” Bama banged her fist against the metal to get my attention. The resulting BONG was as loud as if I were standing inside Big Ben. I could barely make out her next comment, “Got you a flashlight.”
The lid opened wide. Sunlight flooded the interior and blinded me. I didn’t duck as the big blue plastic flashlight flew by and conked me in the h
ead.
“Bama, that hurt!”
“Sor-reee!” she sang out.
I knew she wasn’t.
Ugh. I rotated the plastic cylinder in my hand and clicked it to “on.” The stupid beam flickered twice, then died. I knocked it hard against my palm. The light came on. I dug around in the papers and goo of our leftover foodstuffs. When the light wavered, I banged the flashlight against the dumpster wall, and it stayed bright. I shined the beam in the direction of my feet. I moved it left to right in a sweeping motion.
Five pink toes with painted nails winked up at me from between two garbage bags.
“It’s a leg! Bama, I’m not kidding! Help! Help! Get me out of here!” I stuffed the flashlight into my waistband and tried to scale the wall of the dumpster. “The lid! Lift the lid!”
Thunk.
Instead of lifting the lid, Bama dropped it. “Phone!” Her voice came from far away. “Be right back!”
“Bama! Wait! Please! Let me out! OUT!” I banged on the wall and yelled some more. I jumped up pogo-stick style and struggled to get a purchase on the rim. I couldn’t do it. My fingernails screeched as they slid down the metal.
Carefully avoiding the far end of the heap (or Body Part Village, as I nicknamed it in my head), I heaped bags one on top of each other. When I had a small pile, I climbed them. That didn’t work either. They shifted and sank under my weight. I tried again with the same result.
The whole time I yelled and cried and screamed for help.
Finally, I wore myself out. I sank down in the corner of the Dumpster and started to snivel.
Bama took her own sweet time.
I hate that woman.
I really do.
“Tell me again why you were in the Dumpster.” Detective Stan Hadcho adjusted his weight in the folding chair. My nine-one-one call had brought a Richmond Heights Police Department patrolman who quickly surmised we needed a pair of detectives on the case. We sat across from each other in the back room of Time in a Bottle. His pen poised over an open Steno pad. His dark chocolate eyes never leaving my face. “Go ahead, Mrs. Lowenstein. Take your time. Start at the beginning. You were here yesterday? On a Sunday?”
I swallowed hard and fanned myself. Another swig of Diet Dr Pepper helped me push down the knot in my throat, the bulge threatening to explode along with the contents of my stomach. Staring off into the racks of brightly colored cardstock, forcing myself to focus, I mumbled through the recent events. How a new customer came in right at closing when I worked the sales floor alone. How that new customer was struggling with two howling toddlers. How she needed (a) a break from parenting and (b) more supplies. How I’d bounced said toddlers on my knee while she roamed around the store. Squeezing my eyes shut harder, I visualized the transformation apparent on my customer’s face. She had grown more and more relaxed as she thought about the album she was making for a friend’s birthday.
The kids were thrilled with the graham crackers I fed them, and later cleaned out of our carpet.
I told Hadcho how the new customer left smiling, dispensing hugs and kisses to her little darlings. A different woman all together from the stressed-out mess who’d stumbled over our threshold.
Crafting was like that. We all grew stronger and wiser when we turned our hands to the act of creating rather than fretting. How many times have I seen stressed-out women, ladies with shoulders hunched around their ears, slowly unwind as they became engrossed in a new project? Too many to count, actually.
Since Bama and I came onboard as part-owners, we’d moved Time in a Bottle a bit more toward papercrafting in general than just focusing on scrapbooking. It wasn’t a big change. No way! Just a subtle shift. Dodie Goldfader, the majority stockholder and founder, agreed to give our new, broader emphasis a try.
As a result, our sales numbers were up. Our patron count was rising. A lot of new faces turned into regulars after attending our popular ATC (Artist Trading Card) classes or our latest offering, Décor on a Dime. The young mother of toddlers discovered our store when she saw an ad for our cardmaking class. Despite the downturn in the economy, our business was good.
An inevitable downside of the additional business was more work. Bama and I exhausted ourselves trying to cover all the store hours, plus our prep time and our after-hours work keeping up with stocking, pricing, and market trends. After our new customer walked out the front door last night, toting her happy toddlers and a big bag full of supplies on the back of her stroller, I nearly collapsed against our front counter. Once again, we were closing after our posted hours. Hearing the door minder jingle, Bama stuck her head out of the back stockroom to yell to me, “You still need to clean up after that marathon die-cutting class. You promised to get the holiday decorations up, although those can wait until tomorrow. And, we’ve got to be here early tomorrow to finish prepping for the crop.”
I told Detective Hadcho, “We’re open seven days a week. With the holidays coming, our hours are extended. By the time our last customer left, I was slap happy. Totally exhausted. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.” I explained how with broad sweeps of my arm, I scooted paper debris into our wastepaper cans. This was unusual. My guilty conscience shrieked, “Recycle! Check for small bits you can reuse!” But, honestly, by that time, I staggered about on my feet. Amendment: My aching feet. In the rush to get home, I grabbed bags from behind the counter, noticed a few official-looking slips of paper that had fallen to the floor, scooped up the whole mess, and wobbled my way through the back door to the Dumpster.
“It wasn’t until I got dressed this morning that it hit me.”
“You couldn’t find your paycheck,” he prompted me.
I nodded. I told him how I had dug deep in the pockets of the pants I’d worn the night before and discovered lint. No paycheck. But I knew it should have been there! Bama had handed it to me shortly before I had eaten lunch around dinnertime, my third day of peanut butter straight from the jar.
Retracing my steps mentally, I formed the only possible conclusion. One of those “official-looking” pieces of paper I’d tossed into the trash must have been my paycheck. It must have fallen out of my pocket and onto the floor.
Ergo, Dumpster-diving.
I must have turned a little green as I recounted my adventure and recalled the squishy feel of cold flesh in my hands.
“You all right, Mrs. Lowenstein?” he leaned slightly forward as if to catch me if I fell.
I shook my head to clear it. “How come … how come what I touched felt so soft?” I wondered out loud to Detective Stan Hadcho. His eyes were the color of twin Hershey’s kisses. His hair was the sort of jet black you read about, but rarely see. His face was tan and craggy, with high cheekbones that hinted he might have some Native American blood in him. He wore sadness like some guys wear a tired raincoat, loose, threadbare and droopy.
“That’s how flesh feels after a while. The body starts to decompose very quickly. Even when it’s cold outside. You’ve probably only ever touched someone newly dead or someone just embalmed, right?”
I nodded. I remembered stroking my husband George’s face when he was in his casket. His flesh felt cool and unpleasantly plump, like an unripe peach. I kissed Nana’s face as she lay on a bed of white shirred fabric, her small body looking shrunken in a way-too-big metal coffin. By the end of her life, her once lovely skin hung on her bones, but even then there had been a certain resistance to the pressure of my lips. “That’s right. I’ve only touched folks after they’ve been prepared. If this wasn’t the middle of December, if the weather had been hotter, that piece of leg would have been … ugh.” I shivered and checked to see if the path to the bathroom was clear.
“Mrs. Lowenstein, don’t dwell on it,” said Detective Hadcho. “It’s my job to see and hear things no one should ever experience. I signed on for that. I am willing to do it so you don’t have to, if you get my drift.” He reached over and squeezed my hand, then released it just as quickly.
I stared at my fingerti
ps. The warmth he’d transferred flowed up my arm. With reluctance, I pulled my hand away from where we were nearly fingertip to fingertip. I didn’t want to offend him, but I badly needed human companionship. So much so that I worried I’d throw myself at him and start to sob. His gesture of kindness came scarily close to opening floodgates of pent-up emotion inside me.
Lately, loneliness had been my constant companion.
My romantic life was in the tank. I couldn’t even go there. It was too frustrating and humiliating to consider.
I’d never had such a bleak period of parenting, either.
Since Anya turned twelve last summer, she has wanted less and less to do with me. This morning was the capper. She instructed me to drop her off a block away from a friend’s house so she wouldn’t be seen leaving my car. Shifting in my chair, avoiding Detective Hadcho’s eyes, I fought an urge to cry.
Blinking fast and hard, I stared at the spot usually occupied by Gracie, my darling Great Dane. She was at the vet’s office. I couldn’t think about her. Not right now. It was too worrisome.
I took in a long and even breath. I needed to get control of my emotions. This wasn’t the time to succumb to negativity. It was the holiday season, for goodness sake. Ho-ho-ho, ah, crud.
A little voice inside me announced, “What you really need, Kiki Lowenstein, is a good old-fashioned pity party. A sob-fest. With lots of wine and chocolate.”
But I pinched myself hard and refused to let even one little tear leak out. Because I didn’t have time for this. I really didn’t.
Detective Hadcho handed me his business card after scratching another number on the back. “That’s my personal cell. You think of anything. You need anything. You give me a call.”
His eyes held mine.
A spark flew between us; I swear it.
I swallowed hard.
I needed this like I needed a frontal lobotomy. What was with me and cops? Would I ever learn? Men in law enforcement and I did not play well together. I hastened to shove the card into my back pocket. With any luck, I’d run it through the wash and pick it out of the lint trap in my dryer. I already had one detective on speed dial, and if I’d had any brains, I would have dumped that particular phone number months ago.
Make, Take, Murder Page 1