Good People

by Marcus Sakey

  “No!” She had to shout over the alarm. “Grease fire.”

  Grease fire, grease fire, grease fire. Right. Water would just spatter it, send flying blobs of burning oil in all directions. What the hell did you use for a grease fire?

  Anna was answering the question for him, pushing past to open the doors of upper cabinets. Canned soup, pasta, a box of Girl Scout cookies. Teas and coffee. Spices with the price tag still on. A ten-pound sack of flour, blue letters on white paper, the top rolled down and rubber banded. She pulled it from the shelf, knocking glass bottles to clatter on the counter. The flames had spread to a second burner. She snapped off the band and opened the sack, then leaned closer to the fire and dumped it, thrusting the bag like she was flinging water from a bucket. An avalanche of powder poured out over the stove, the wall, the counter. The flames sizzled as the flour hit, and then with a whoomp were buried beneath mounds of white. Particles rose in the heat, spinning and dancing like dust motes.

  Tom felt his breath whistle out, realized he’d been holding it. The world seemed suddenly strange, that post-panic moment when things returned to normal. For a moment they just stared at each other, then Tom said, “Good thinking.”

  “What?” Shouting.

  Tom spotted the alarm mounted above the entry to the kitchen. He stretched to spin it off the wall, then yanked the battery. The shriek died without a whimper. He turned back to her. “I said, good thinking.” He looked at her and broke into a smile. “Casper.”

  She stood with the empty bag in her hand, her face and hair coated white. For a moment, she looked puzzled, then saw her arms dusted with flour and began to laugh.

  He laughed too, and waving his arms to clear the smoke, stepped over to the stove, preparing himself for the damage. Aligning expectations: the fire had been constrained to the stove, thank God. It would be totaled, the microwave above it as well. The back wall would need fresh drywall, and the whole kitchen would need a coat of paint. He expected all of those things.

  What he didn’t expect to see, amid mounds of flour piled like snowdrifts, was five neatly banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

  WHEN TOM SAID HER NAME, Anna had just turned on the faucet to wash the flour off her hands. She had her back to him, and the quiet way he said it scared her.

  She turned, saw him at the stove, thought maybe he’d been burned, or that the fire had done more damage than they’d realized. Then she followed his pointing finger.

  Packets of money lay in the flour.

  The incongruity was startling. Money was something you took care of, folded, kept in a wallet. A dollar bill on the sidewalk leapt to your eye like it was lit by neon. To see bundles of money, bundles, the faded green dusty with flour, that chubby portrait of Benjamin Franklin staring up… it made something in her tilt.

  “Jesus.” She stepped beside him. Together they looked down. Her mind was racing, trying to connect dots that didn’t seem like they belonged in the same zip code. There was a grease fire. They dumped flour on it. Now thousands of dollars lay on the stove. Alchemy.

  She reached out, picked up one of the bundles. Soft and worn and, in the pack of a hundred, heavier than she would have guessed. She rifled the edge with her thumb, and a faint trace of flour leapt up. A hundred hundreds, ten grand. More cash than she had ever held. About two months of paychecks. With the other bundles, nine months’ worth of work. Of twelve-hour days, of voice mail and sleepless nights and conference room battles. Nine months in a bag of flour dumped on a fire. The thought seized her, and she grabbed the rest of the money, her fingers suddenly greedy.

  “What are you doing?”

  She held twenty grand in one hand, thirty in the other. “In case the fire starts again.” It was true, that had been her intention, just to get the money and then set it on the counter. But she found she didn’t really want to let it go. Looked up at Tom, saw his eyes wide, his mouth open half an inch. After twelve, thirteen years together, she could see the thoughts working across his face, the same equation that was playing in hers. The same questions. “The stove was on when we came in.”

  “Yeah. I think that’s how the fire started.” He paused. “Maybe he left, forgot he turned it on?”

  She pointed to the mug and the jar of instant. “He started making a cup of coffee and then left?”

  “He could have gotten a phone call, something he had to run out for.”

  She nodded. Moved to the counter, set the money down. “Maybe.” Something in her chest was cold. “But maybe we ought to check around.”

  “Check around for-” He stopped. Looked back down the hall toward the two bedrooms. For a moment, they looked at each other, their eyes locked, the unspoken possibility hanging between them. Then Tom walked to the window and opened it. “We should get rid of this smoke anyway.”

  It was a flimsy cover, but it was something to cling to. They started with the spare bedroom. The door was open, though the room was black. She hesitated, then reached in and flicked the light switch. Bright overheads revealed a weight bench and a set of cast-iron plates, a portable radio and a tin ashtray overflowing with butts. Inanely, her first thought was that they had told him the building was nonsmoking, that he had to do it outside. That was about the only time they saw him, smoking out on the porch, but apparently it wasn’t the only time he did it. Tom opened that window too, and they moved down the hall to the master bedroom.

  She knew before Tom flipped on the light. Knew, in truth, back in the kitchen. So when she saw, she didn’t jump or shriek or do any of the things useless women did in the movies.

  The bedroom was as spare as the rest of the house. A small dresser. A night table: reading lamp, paperback, clock, crammed ashtray, prescription bottle. A queen-size mattress and box spring, no headboard, the blankets faded with age. And Bill Samuelson, his skin pale, lips pursed tight together, curled on his side with his hands against his stomach like he had a bellyache.

  The first and last time Anna had seen a dead body was at her grandfather’s funeral. She was eleven, and remembered feeling nothing at all as she followed her mother up to look in the coffin. No, that wasn’t true – her mother was crying, something Anna rarely saw, and that tore her heart out. But the man in the velvet box, the one with the too-rosy cheeks and the concrete expression, she didn’t feel anything for him. He wasn’t her grandfather. Her grandfather was a jovial man, a cardplayer, a scotch drinker, a joke teller. The man in the box was just… absent.

  “Christ.” Tom spoke softly.

  They stood for a moment in the hallway, as if death were a force field, something that filled space. The body on the bed looked, not peaceful exactly, but sort of calm. Resigned. That was the word. He looked resigned, like a man ready to take his punishment. She stared, the air sticky with grease and smoke, listening to the steady beat of the clock, tick tick tick. Measuring out her time, and Tom’s. Their lives subject to the same inane rhythm.

  When she stepped in, the floor squeaked like a laugh in church. She froze, then continued. Reached out one hand, slowly. His chest was still, she could see perfectly well that he wasn’t breathing, but she needed to know, needed to feel it to believe it. The skin of his arm was cool. Not cold, though. Not too long ago he’d been alive. An hour, maybe? Was that all that separated the two worlds, his and hers? An hour?

  Tick tick tick.

  “I guess we should call someone.” Tom’s voice sounding far away.

  She pulled her hand from the body, nodded.

  The worst of the smoke had cleared from the kitchen, replaced by a chilly spring breeze. The money was on the counter where she’d left it, beside the telephone.

  “How do you suppose it happened?”

  Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. Heart attack? Stroke?”

  “He didn’t seem that old.”

  “My uncle had one when he was forty-two. Bill was probably older than that.”

  She picked up one of the bundles of money, tapped it idly against the counter. “I g
uess you’re right. Maybe he had a condition.”

  He nodded slowly. “There was a prescription bottle.”

  “God.” She shivered. “He died all alone. No family, no friends. Not even a doctor. Just alone in his bedroom.”

  “Bad way to go.” Tom lined up one bundle of money against another. “But I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way he would have wanted. Seemed like the way he lived. Kind of a hermit.”

  They fell silent, both of them staring at the counter, at the money and the telephone. The breeze through the open window was rich with the promise of storm, that sweet electric smell of spring. An idea was forming in her head, hatching slowly, and she was letting it. Not nurturing it, but not quashing it, either. Just giving it space.

  She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s like one of those stories you read about.”

  “Which ones?”

  “You know, ‘News of the Weird’ kinds of stories. The guy who lives alone in a transient hotel. The neighbors say he was quiet, never had any visitors. One day there’s a bad smell. When they break down the door, they find a bankbook with a million-dollar balance.”

  He laughed. “And a hundred boxes of Kraft mac and cheese.”

  “And seventeen cats.” It was morbid, to be joking, here, in a dead man’s kitchen. But it felt good too. Reminded her she was alive, that she stood against the endless ticking.

  “The police will take the money,” Tom said.

  She looked up, startled. Their eyes locked, and she saw that the same idea had been hatching in his head. “He might have family.”

  “What family? Man never had a visitor, didn’t go to work, never had a friend over. Hell, any time we tried to say hi, he’d snap at us.”

  “True,” she said, feeling like she had to argue, though part of her didn’t want to. “Still.”

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.” But he didn’t reach for the phone.

  She exhaled, ran a finger over the bundle. Almost a year’s salary lying on the counter. Enough to pay off most of their debt, the credit cards, the medical bills. Enough to take the pressure off, to relieve that unacknowledged noose that tightened with every envelope marked “Overdue.”

  Enough to let them try again. Another spin of the pregnancy wheel.

  It’s not your money. It would be wrong.

  Whose money is it? Why not mine? Why is it wrong?

  Anna looked around the kitchen. It was a mess: the stove blackened and charred, the wall scorched, flour everywhere, cabinet doors open, revealing food and pans and glasses, things Bill Samuelson no longer needed. Then she saw something else. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she had trouble choking out Tom’s name.

  “Huh?” He looked at her, recognizing the change in tone, and followed her pointing finger to the cabinet where she’d found the flour – and where another ten-pound bag of flour rested, as well as a big bag of sugar and a clutter of boxes.

  EIGHT MORE BUNDLES in the flour.

  Six in the sugar.

  Seven stacked beneath an inch of sea salt, fitting the box like they were made for it.

  One in a box of cornstarch.

  The Girl Scout cookies were worth thirty thousand dollars.

  They went carefully at first, but as they found more and more, it accelerated, blurring like the scenery out a train window. Ripping open the bags and fumbling inside, pulling out bundles of cash, two months of their life at a time. By the end they were laughing, racing, each of them trying to open things faster, to find more: two bundles taped inside a Frosted Flakes box, another two in the Golden Grahams. One in a box of granola bars. Two upright in an oatmeal container.

  Thirty-seven in all. Thirty-seven bundles of ten grand.

  Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars.

  They piled it on the counter, the money covered in flour and sugar, scraps of oatmeal. A wobbly pyramid of wealth. She stared at it. Around five years of her gross salary. God, more like eight after taxes. More than two-thirds what their whole building had cost sitting in a pile on the kitchen counter amid a sea of paper scraps and spilled food, box tops, and sugar piles. She realized she was smiling, fought an urge to tear open the bundles and throw clouds of cash in the air. “Have you ever-”

  “Are you kidding?” He shook his head, the same mad grin on his face. “No. I haven’t even held a hundred more than a couple of times.”

  “If the police find this, they’ll take it,” she said. “It will end up in an evidence locker.”

  “Or in the mayor’s campaign fund.” He straightened, looked down the hall. “We have to call them.”

  She nodded. “I know. But…”

  “Yeah.”

  They stood in silence, staring at the money. It was funny, she thought. In the movies it would have been ten million. Some ridiculous sum. Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars was a lot, no doubt. But it wasn’t completely outside the realm of their experience. They had good jobs, each brought in about seventy. Before they’d bought the building, before they’d started the fertility treatments, they’d lived well. Savings accounts and the occasional two-hundred-dollar dinner. An annual trip, Spain, the Bahamas. The fact that it was a graspable sum made it both more and less real. And to see it all in one place like pirate treasure, forgotten and waiting to be found? “I’m not a thief.”

  “Me either,” he said. Then, “But we could always give it back, right? If he did turn out to have a family?”

  “Wouldn’t we get in trouble?”

  “We wouldn’t have to tell. Hell, we could leave it on their doorstep.”

  “Ring the bell. Ding-dong, here’s a fortune.” She rubbed at her chin. “What if it’s stolen?”

  “Stolen? From who?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he embezzled it or something.”

  “I guess that’s possible.” He paused. “But even if it is, it’s not like the city is going to be on a campaign to find the rightful owner. It would be like those impounded cars, or houses people lose on back taxes. They’d probably run a two-line ad somewhere, and then when no one claimed it, it would just vanish.”

  A cool breeze blew through the window, and she hugged her arms across her chest. “It’s like finding a twenty on the sidewalk. If someone is looking at the ground, you give it to them, but nobody expects you to walk it to a police station.”

  “We’d have to be careful,” he said. “We couldn’t put it in our bank account. They can trace that.”

  “Sure. We probably shouldn’t even keep it in our place.” She noticed that they’d moved from if to how. Wondered if she should feel bad about that, didn’t want to.

  “Get a safe-deposit box or something.”

  “Leave it as cash. Keep our jobs, use paychecks for bills.”

  He nodded, staring at the pile of money. She did the same, her eyes tracing the edges, the geometry of freedom, weathered green, marked with sweat and wrinkled with time. The house was silent, just the breeze through the window and the sound of their breathing.And the faint, imperturbable ticking of the clock from the bedroom.

  When she looked up, their eyes met, and she realized they were done talking.

  HE LEFT HER IN THE KITCHEN to start cleaning while he ran upstairs for something to put it in. Something to put $370,000 in. Jesus. He felt an urge to giggle, not laugh, giggle, like a little kid or a madman. This was crazy. All of it.

  In the hall closet he found his gym bag, unzipped it, and turned it upside down, dumping sour shorts and shoes. He bent to gather the clothes, then decided to hell with it, kicked them into the closet, feeling wildly alive, something nervous and free in his chest. Took the stairs three at a time. He could feel every bump and polished divot of the handrail, could taste the air he sucked in.

  In the kitchen, while she used a broom and dustpan to scoop up the spilled food from the counters and floors, he stacked the money in the bag. Each packet was worn as an old blanket. It reeked of humanity, oil from a hundred wallets, a thousand hands. When he was don
e, Tom zipped the bag. “It’s heavy,” he said. “I didn’t realize money weighed so much.”

  She leaned on the broom. “Where should we put it? For now, I mean?”

  “Maybe in the linen closet, under some blankets?”

  “I don’t know. If it’s in our house…”

  “What if we hide it in the basement? That way if they find it, it looks like he stashed it himself.” He saw her wince. “I’m just saying.”

  “No, you’re right.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “The crawl space,” he said. “I could take the maintenance panel off, stick it way back in there. They’d only find if they searched pretty thoroughly. And if they’re searching that thoroughly, they know to look for the money, and it would be better if they found it.”

  She bit her lip, nodded.

  By the time he’d hidden it and climbed back up the stairs, she was nearly done, the boxes and bags gone, cabinet doors closed, oatmeal and sugar and cereal swept from the floor. He looked around. “What about the stove?” Mounds of flour still spilled across it and dusted the surrounding countertop.

  “This has to look like we came down, put out the fire, then found his body and called the cops. We wouldn’t stop to clean up the flour, right?”

  It was a good thought, smart, one of the things he loved about her, one of the reasons he’d fallen for her in the first place. He tended to take problems head-on, bull through them, but she could work it from all angles, find the surprise solution. He stepped forward and pulled her to him. She returned the kiss passionately, arms flung around his back, hips grinding into his, tongue darting and soft, and he felt heat rising in him, alive to every sensation, the pressure and warmth of her body, the cool air against his neck, the bite of her teeth behind her lips. They held it a long time.

  “Is this crazy?” She spoke into his shoulder. “Are we crazy?”