SEPT.
THE RJB WAS DOWNTOWN so from there it was easy to get on the I-111 and head south.
It didn’t take long to get to the neighborhood where Mr Hunter had lived—or, technically, where he still did live, although Mitch wasn’t one of the believers.
He pulled up to the hollow steel gate outside the complex and waited.
One needed a clicker to get in, which a resident could purchase from the HOA for $125 (replacements $250), but of course Mitch wasn’t a resident. There was a small metal box implanted in a median before the gate where one used to be able to type in the code to get in, but this was no longer an option (security risk) and anyway, he didn’t have the code either.
So he waited.
What day was it? To a man like him what did it matter?
Crime never sleeps and neither does mystery.
Neither did it matter to the residents of the Clawfoot Condominiums, who were by and large older folks, retired. They spent their days running errands, seeing friends for lunch. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday and people came and went through the gate all the time.
It only took a few minutes for a tiny lil old lady to roll up.
This lil lady was so tiny and so old her medium-sized sedan looked like a monster truck with her lil frame behind the wheel and her lil head pokin out just barely. She had a clicker. He watched as she pointed the clicker at the gate and squinched up her face and pressed down as hard as she could.
He followed her in, found the street where Mr Hunter lived, and parked along a brick wall across the street.
Sat there studying the place for a while.
Something about its apparent normalness unnerved him.
The white stucco, the teal accents, the thick wooden shutters slanted just so. Only a diminishing amount of fresh inoculating sunshine could creep in to what appeared to be, from Mitch’s vantage, dark empty rooms.
The houses on either side of Mr Hunter’s were of the same model, but they had cars parked out front on their sloping driveways or gardening equipment left out on the porch, or a window with the blinds fully drawn.
Signs of life that seemed to invite the opposite of suspicion.
Mr Hunter’s abode however, with its black-tint-and-teal colour scheme, its sunshine on faded white facade, seemed to beg for some positive connotation.
And yet, this need unfulfilled was precisely what gave it away.
Mitch was in the midst of letting these associations mingle with the afternoon heat and bake into him, when—and he couldn’t believe it even as he watched it actually happen—a car drove slowly around the bend, pulled up without hesitation to Mr Hunter’s house, heaved up the slope of the driveway, and parked.
“Holy shit,” Mitch whispered.
Who could it be?!
He’d find out soon enough, he reckoned, all he had to do was wait.
And wait he did, until the tension building up inside him almost made him burst out of the car and demand why the mystery driver was taking the piss!
He held off the urge to explode, assuredly, and his patience was rewarded when the door of the small coupe popped open, hung teetering a while, was held open by a socked foot in a birkenstock, and finally steadied enough so that the driver could fully emerge.
She was a short, round woman in a shapeless floral dress with a thick grey t-shirt on underneath visibly stained at the pits. Her hair was short but thick, cut into stiff edges and mussed up, in keeping with her overall unkempt appearance in general.
She gave off the energy of someone who had prepared hastily, who’d been called into work on a day off perhaps, awoken out of an engrossingly bad dream and made to fulfill some cumbersome obligation at short notice.
It took some time for the woman to get out of the car and find her feet on the steep slope of the driveway. It didn’t make it any easier that she decided to bring the large bucket of cleaning supplies (broom, mop, etc.) through the driver door instead of going around.
The maid.
The one who had reported Mr Hunter missing to the police.
(Although, seeing her in this uncanny way recalled to him the fact that he still hadn’t been able to find the newspaper article alluded to in Jordan’s report. Could it have been a computer hallucination??)
“We’ll just sit here and see what happens...” he said to himself, tip-tapping his chin with an index finger.
He was certain he hadn’t been made and wasn’t worried about it even if he was. He wasn’t breaking any rules by being there. And if he was and they asked him to leave, he’d leave.
As for the sudden appearance of the maid, he would catch her on the way out. She seemed to have some preordained reason for coming in the first place, and he felt he had more to gain by watching her play that out than interrupting.
In the meantime he would sit back and bask in the sun with the windows cracked, and chill.
The old maid waddled with arthritic effort along the paved footpath toward the front door. The bucket of disorganized cleaning things weighing her down on one side. The sound of a dog barking issued from someone’s backyard, followed by the steady trill of mockingbirds.
He didn’t see what caused it.
But something spooked her.
Something made her flip out. She produced an instinctive reaction of pure fright.
He saw her skip around—suddenly as nimble as old Jack—toward the side gate that led to the backyard.
It was here her figure was lost in a camouflage of speckled shadow cast on the grass from the neighbor’s acacia tree.
Mitch was bolt upright now, debating, hand on the door handle.
Go or don’t go.
Go or don’t go.
He leaned into the corner of the windshield for a better look.
The maid was furiously trying to unhitch the gate to the backyard by reaching up and over the wall. She looked back and all around her as she did this, but what did she see? No one was chasing her, no masked madman walking slowly at her wielding a machete.
Then in a single swift action she bounded up onto the brick wall so that her padded abdomen teetered half over/half not, and in a flail that sent her legs over her head and one of her birkenstocks flying, she went completely over and landed in the backyard, out of sight.
Mitch was out of the car.
He trotted stealthily up Mr Hunter’s driveway and along the path toward the front door, veering off into the treeshadow of the lawn, and crept ever closer to the black wroughtiron gate leading to the backyard.
Closer,
he stepped,
feet sliding soundless on the slick newly-sprinklered lawn.
Closer still he heard nothing but the sound of the blood pumping in his ears and the faint muted calling of the birds.
When he touched the black spike of the gate that’s when he heard a voice.
“What do you think you’re doing, mister?!”
He was so shocked by the shout—to him it had been his touching the gate that had triggered the voice, set the alarm—that he immediately assumed it was the maid, and that the voice had come from the backyard. But it couldn’t be.
“I saaaaaaaaid, what do you think you are DOING?!”
He whirled around to see the source of the complaint.
A skinny lady in faded pink shorts and a thin vintage tee the color of ocean water was standing in the middle of the street, in the full sun, a hand over her sunglassed eyes. She was tanned to the extreme and everything about her—her hair, her skin, her expression, her attitude—drooped.
Despite such a languid disposition she nonetheless reached her gnarled fingers upward at the sky and screamed,
“I swear I will never be ignored!!!”
Quite a pickle Mitch was in just then. Caught between two people he didn’t know who were both doing very weird things. He marked the occasion with an involuntary laugh that the lady in the street definitely noticed.
In defiance of her vow, however—for what choice did he have?, he turned his back on the plaintiff and hoisted himself up the wall. He had to get a good look at the backyard.
He was just in time to see the maid, ever the diddle diddle dumpling, one birkenstock on, one birkenstock nowhere to be found, drop on to the other side of the backyard wall, which was the wall to the entire neighborhood, and disappear completely from view.
An escape.
Mitch was left with the image bereft of the scene’s key player, a backyard with a small rectangular lawn, well-manicured grass, bright green, and the swirling aqua of the humble five-foot swimming pool. What an ideal image of middle class life.
The lady was waiting for him when he at last made his way back calmly over the lawn and emerged haloed in sunlight from the shadow of the tree.
She stood in the middle of the road, her skin getting cooked more cayenne by the second.
It appeared that she would rather burn alive than encroach in any way upon HOA statute, which stated that thou shalt not step on another’s yard without prior authorization.
She held her plexiphone in her hand, trigger-finger ready to dial, watching him with a stern mix of hatred and righteous defiance that produced in her a kind of addict’s outrage, as Mitch came close enough to chat.
“Now you’re in it,” she spat.
“In what?” Mitch replied, walking calmly closer, causing her to back away and to hold her phone out in front of her for mystical protection.
His steady stare in the face of her threats brought a further flush to her already natural rouge.
“In trouble!" she shrilled, "What else?!”
“Trouble for what?”
The lady’s eyes went wide behind the dark lenses.
“You can’t go sneaking into other peoples’ homes! Not in my neighborhood!”
“Who’re you?”
She balked at such audacity, but couldn’t resist explaining that she was, “Mrs Foggagill, President of the Clawfoot Condominums Allied Homeowner’s Association!!!”
“OK,” Mitch replied. He wasn’t the best with names and that one, along with its prolix amendments, was sure to go straight into the do-not-remember bin.
The lady looked at him in a way that made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was now supposed to explain himself. And when he failed to take such prompting she nigh came unglued.
“That’s it!!” she screamed, clawing the phone in one hand and a bundle of her shirt in the other, the force of her indignation enough to send a thrill of transgressive pleasure throughout her whole body. “I’ve had enough of this…. nonsense!”she growled. She began to breathe with a great deal of labour, and in between gasps of breath she would shriek hoarsely, “I’m calling the police!”
“Yes,” Mitch said, nodding in his calm way that only added fuel to the fire, “I think that’s a good idea.”
“I—— I—— I will!”
“Yes, call them,” he said again, with what she took for the same aloof preoccupation that so enraged her but also so turned her on. “I need to speak with them anyway.”
Mrs Foggagil had no answer for this turn of events. She wasn’t used to ever being agreed with. Furthermore, he simply would not be intimidated by her and thus she was left powerless as she stood there boiling in the sun. The frustration was visibly apparent.
“The car parked in the driveway,” Mitch asked, acknowledging but not indulging what vexed her, “Do you know who that belongs to?”
La Presidente was shocked again, at the idea of being interrogated—when it was she who asked the questions around here!
“Wut...” was all she could say, however, an echo in a complete daze. She looked over at the driveway, at the car, which she hadn’t even noticed until then. Another unconscionable infraction that left her paralyzed.
“I saw someone who looked like the maid get out of that car just now. Then she went round back and hopped the gate. I went over to see what she was up to but she bolted, hopped the neighborhood wall too. C’est très bizarre, non?”
This was information that Madam President could not compute. She could only insist in short painful-sounding coughs that they wait for the police, despite his telling her each time that he planned on doing just that.
He welcomed the idea. Hopefully they’d find the maid and in turn find out why she had been there, and what had scared her so bad. Did it have something to do with Mark? Where was Mr Hunter, anyway?
“Can we knock on his door?” he asked, but La Presidente was incapable of hearing anything he said. Her internal turmoil had made her deaf.
He thought about pressing Mrs Foggagil on the matter but one look at her spazmatic figure was enough to prevent him.
No, he’d wait for the police. If they didn’t believe him and his story about the maid he had not only the car, but the cleaning supplies the impromptu parkour expert had left behind, and the birkenstock she’d been too afraid to come back for.
And if these weren’t enough exhibits of evidence, he would gladly lead them over by the gate and point out the shaded blades of grass wherein sat, quite easily to be missed, a sponge.
🧽