An Ear for Crime

Hickory, dickory dock,

I selected the Hickory family. I had to choose the right one. There were several families with the surname Hickory in this city, in its suburbs. I drove and drove. So many days, so many nights. I scouted. Studied houses and yards patiently. Until I saw the ones with the clock. Right there in their backyard. I knew then. They were the ones.

The mouse ran up the clock.

It was the sundial in the backyard. The clock. I placed it against the wall which I knew had the best window for a stealth entrance. By then, I knew the Hickory family’s schedule. I knew when the kids went to bed. When the parents did. The rooms were all dark that night when I stood on the sundial and leaned against the wall, next to the pretty trellis. I used the glass cutter. I unlocked the window. I was in to do my business. I must say it all went beautifully. Not a whimper, not a pleading out of place.

The clock struck one,

They actually had a grandfather clock in there. Imagine that. I heard it strike one a.m. And people say there’s no such thing as fate. There was one Hickory left alive by then. Her eyes pleaded with me. Her mouth couldn’t. Not with that gag. I had recited the rhyme enough by then, that she must have known what was coming, what that sound from the downstairs clock meant. She must have known that it was time for me to leave. Finishing time. And so I did.

The mouse ran down!

I went out the way I came in. Down to the clock and off through the backyard, racing into the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then through dark neighboring yards. My car was parked several streets away, where it would not arouse suspicion. I must say I was pleased with the way it all went down. It was the night of the new moon. The cool dark of that night on my skin felt so nice. Thank You, Moon. It took everything I had not to steal peeks at the videos I had recorded of the Hickorys. Such fun we all had. But I waited until I got home.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The obituaries for the Hickory family were sanitized. The news stories splashed across the front pages, and all over the airwaves and internet, were more sensationalized. Television’s talking heads were fascinated by the murders. They loved that I had left the nursery rhyme behind. They loved that I had left a sprung mouse-trap on each of their bodies. That sort of thing plays well in the tabloids.

But not all the details were released. The police like to hold some gruesome facts back. I get it. They have to play the hand they’re dealt. They have to hold those cards close. To see who knows what. So the darling public didn’t get to learn that the dearly departed indeed showed signs that a mouse had visited. None of the news stories mentioned the gnawing.

For those following my work in the press, they’ll have other rhyme crimes to read about in the near future. Unfortunately, some will be discovered out of sequence. There’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that old battle-axe who writes those letters to the editor constantly. I finished that one months ago. But Mary has yet to return to her gardening . Come spring, when she finally gets back to tending her silver bells and cockle shells, she should find them. I mean those pretty maids all in a row.

I hope she writes a letter to the editor about that one.

Happy Birthday

How old was the Eckes boy when he disappeared?

That's what Joe really wanted to know.

Once a year, that creepy old dude who now lived alone in the Eckes house would come into the bakery department and place an order for a customized "Happy Birthday!" cake. Last year, it had been "Happy 9th Birthday!" This year it was a birthday cake for a happy tenth.

"Please just give me your basic, generic boy's cake," the old man had said.

"Who even talks like that?" Joe had muttered to one of his co-workers the second the old creep was gone.

Joe always made the cakes to order and the old man, Edgar, that's all anyone really knew about him, his name, had always picked them up shortly thereafter.

Some of the girls in the bakery said Joe was being too harsh, that it was probably a part of the grieving process for him. It was a way he remembered his son.

"Not son," Joe would correct the women. "It was his stepson."

Joe finally found the article the night the creepy old dude had picked up the "Happy 10th Birthday" cake. It had been archived online by the local newspaper four years ago: "Six Year Old Boy Missing." So the birthday cakes were definitely keeping up with Damian's birthdays. But the date was wrong. Joe read the article again. Damian Eckes was believed to have disappeared somewhere on the walk home from his elementary school. It had only been a five block walk. Joe wasn't convinced he hadn't made it home and disappeared from there. But the police had found nothing which made Edgar anything more than a person of interest, at first, and then he had been cleared. Joe began to wonder if the boy wasn't still alive somewhere in that big house that creepy Edgar had inherited. For the boy's mother had also gone missing. Two years after her son's disappearance. True, there had been a suicide note and her grief at the loss of her son had been crippling. The woman was inconsolable. That had been her only child. So the suicide had been understandable to most. There was little suspicion. Her car had been found parked by a bridge over a river that had been in full spring torrent at the time. But her body had also never been recovered. Joe wondered about that too.

Joe had called the local police and talked to his old classmate Ed Shanks, who was sheriff now, but had been politely told to mind his own business. The missing boy case was ongoing and the case of his mother had been closed. That's all he could tell the baker playing amateur detective and thanks for calling, Joe, see you at the next high school reunion.

Joe decided that wasn't good enough.

It was a moonless night and Joe was creeping around the Eckes house. He couldn't get over how weird the old man was. He saw there was a chicken coop out back now. Everyone put the man's eccentric qualities down to the double loss he had suffered. They all made excuses for him. But Joe couldn't see it that way, and tonight he was putting that serious suspicion into action.

As he crept around the back of the house, he noticed the back door was wide open. It was a warm summer night.  Maybe the guy was baking. The light from the kitchen lay in a long plank across the backyard, nearly touching the edge of a dark cornfield that covered many acres back. There were no other houses in sight back there.

Joe edged along the house and noticed the two basement windows were painted black. There were also rocks piled up against them, blocking all but a soupcon of the basement light, which was so dim as to make one wondered if one imagined it, if there was really light at all.  But there seemed to be a slight flickering. The windows were mostly buried. Flowering bushes and rocks had been banked up against them, curiously.

Joe had made it up to the back door now, edging along the back wall of the house, and he took a quick peek into the kitchen. There was nobody to be seen. The table was covered by what appeared to be a new, attractively colored cloth. There was a centerpiece and the usual assortment: sugar bowl, shakers, cruets, fruit bowl.

Joe could hear music somewhere. He listened carefully. It was "Happy Birthday." He had pulled his head back after that first quick glance, but now he looked again. It was coming from behind the basement door, which was shut.

Joe felt a sudden boiling of bravery that came out of a boil of insatiable curiosity and he charged the door. Just like that. He realized he didn't even have his cell phone on him. How smart a thing was this to do, he wondered. But he knew he could take that old man. He wanted to take that old man.

"Hey!" he shouted as he yanked the door open so hard it banged against the corner of a kitchen counter, scarring the yellow door. "I'm coming down there!"

It was dim and the old wooden stairs were rickety. "Happy Birthday" was coming from an old record player in the corner of the basement. It was a scratchy old record and this version of the song sounded like something from a kid's show in the fifties. It sounded like a television cowboy singing. Joe saw why it was dim as soon as he reached the basement floor. The single, unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling had been coated with red paint. It was unbelievably warm. Joe felt himself start to sweat right away. It was just that hot.

He saw the cake on a low end table in one corner of the room. It had not been sliced. Ten small candles were now burning atop it.

"Hey! Kid! Where are you? Damian, are you here?"

Joe heard a rustling in the corner. He saw something there, a gathered mass, but he couldn't make out what he was actually seeing. It looked like a dark blanket. But it looked full and there was a stirring under it. Was it the poor kid help captive all these years by that freak? And where was that freak right now? Joe's eyes searched for the sort of tool you always find in basements, anything that might be used as a weapon, but he saw nothing.

And then he felt it and screamed. Something had reached out and touched his ankle. It was gripping his leg through the thick denim of his jeans. A hand?  It was so dark he couldn't see. It must be the boy's hand, his mind told him. Get the boy up and moving and get the hell out of there, his mind told him.

But now the "hand" of the "boy" was growing longer and longer, winding up Joe's leg, and down Joe went, struggling. He ended up yanking the blanket for which he had been reaching, and that's when he saw the full size of the creature. Coils and coils of it. It was the sort of pet people warn you against keeping. Because they never stop growing and their appetite grows exponentially too. And it was all over Joe now, all through and around Joe now, tightening. "Amazon" was one of Joe's last thoughts as he heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut. Now he knew why it was so hot. He also knew where Damian and Julia Eckes were. And he knew he was going to the same dark place.

Great Deal

A young woman was left without a couch when her roommate moved out and took it with her. She went on Craigslist and found one she thought was a steal. It was a model that sells for close to two thousand dollars retail and the owner was asking only six hundred and fifty, with no apparent condition issues.

The young woman was very security-conscious, but the seller was up front in dealing with her worries and had actually crafted a very humorous ad designed to assuage the fears of any potential buyers. He joked about having given up cannibalism "five years ago." She talked to the middle-age man on the phone and he seemed trustworthy, a bit bland actually, but she was a very careful young woman. She told him she would be bringing two strong male friends along to load and move the couch for her (this was true). The couch seller was fine with that but explained that with his work schedule he could not be present for the pickup. However, he could leave the couch in his unlocked garage and  and she could just pick it up. She could complete the transaction through Paypal or leave a check in his garage. She chose to do the latter. She thought it was nice of him to trust her in this manner.

Her muscly guy friends helped her get the leather couch into her apartment, enjoyed the pizzas and beers she had provided as "payment," and then went home to their respective partners. She couldn't stop admiring the lovely couch. It was pristine. She sat on it for a few hours, watched her favorite shows and finally went to bed.

The next day she was missing. She hasn't been seen since. Video cameras in her apartment building showed (presumptively) the man from whom she had bought the couch leaving her apartment, carrying a sleeping bag with a body in it. It is virtually certain she was the one in the sleeping bag. Whether alive or dead, nobody knows. The police discovered a compartment in the bottom of the large couch where they figured the man had secreted himself and from which he had emerged after she had gone to bed. She had supervised the carrying of her abductor into her apartment. The house from which she had removed the couch was discovered to have two corpses in it, the former residents and true owners of the couch. Nobody knows who the man is or his present whereabouts. The check the woman had left was made out to a fictitious name, Hugh Lusall. The police  detectives working the case believe this to be a sick pun for "you lose all."

Real Steal

The worst thing that ever happened to Steve Touloumes was the disappearance of his girlfriend Karen Byers, when he was seventeen and she was sixteen.

They had been technically camping illegally in a forest, not an official campground, a pretty piece of private property at the base of a mountain, less than ten miles from their hometown. They had fallen asleep in the same tent after getting sloshed on some whiskey Karen had stolen from her older brother's stash. Steve woke up the next morning and Karen was gone. Forever. The true story was as simple as that. But few believed it. There were detectives (and many others) who went to their graves convinced that Steve had gotten away with murder. They had spun the usual, predictable narratives and clung to them. It's worse to think some boogeyman in the shadows can just swoop in like that, isn't it?

Steve had gotten away with nothing but a stone in his heart and a lifelong regret that he had ever stolen away with a beautiful young girl all those years ago. He was sure then Karen had been abducted and murdered, as sure then as he was today.

Steve would still think of Karen whenever he saw a young woman who looked the way she looked that summer, or when he looked at his own daughters growing up and worried about their safety and counseled them with an urgency they might not see in other fathers warning their daughters about what to do or not to do in a world of strangers.

But Steve's daughters were all women safely ensconced in their own complicated lives in other towns, other states, that day he walked into his favorite Salvation Army store, located in a strip mall not five miles from his home.. Home now lay in a town a mere thirty miles from his original hometown.

Della, a whie-haired comedian who worked the register, liked to greet Steve and joke with him. She knew his preferences.

"We've got a bunch more old cameras in. Film, not digital. Woo-hoo. You're probably the only person on the planet interested, if you are up for more of that Stone Age tech. You know where. The usual aisle."

Steve called out his thanks and made a beeline. Photography had become a passion for him over the past decade.

Once he reached the aisle with the mostly junky old cameras, his eyes zeroed in on an antiquated little Minolta. This one seemed to be in pretty decent shape. It didn't appear to have been used much at all. Steve smiled when he remembered all the old commercials back in the days from this now defunct Japanese company, which was actually one of the best makers of cameras for decades. "From the mind of Minolta," the commercials would always intone somewhat portentously. Minolta had launched in Japan (in the thirties, was it?) but it was a cooperative venture back then with German lens makers. You got the best of both worlds, as you couldn't beat the German lenses at the time. By the time the camera Steve was now turning over in his hands had been produced, the company had begun making forays into digital and had begun incorporating those advanced features into their cameras. This little camera was just such a hybrid. It was still a film camera, but it had a few nice digital features. It had a decent zoom capacity.

Then Steve noticed there was film in the camera. He smiled. It was always fun to drop off these rolls and peer into the lives of strangers. Quite possibly these people were no longer walking the planet. But here were their most cherished moments, on a dusty thrift store shelf. Film would keep those memories safe for half a century if need be, possibly longer. Because every found roll Steve had ever dropped off for developing had come out fine. Heat could damage an old roll of undeveloped film, but you'd still usually be able to see what was photographed through the colorful distortions which heat causes. No doubt about it, film is a small miracle of memory.

The camera was a real steal. They always were here. Della was right. Steve was one of the few who even gave these old machines of yesteryear a second glance.

On the way home, Steve dropped the film off at at a CVS that had an in-store lab. He always made it a point to tell the girl (rarely it was a young dude) behind the counter that it was found film. Just in case it turned out to be naked photos of someone's girlfriend or boyfriend. You could never be sure what you were getting. It had never happened to Steve, but he had heard the funny stories.

Steve hadn't yet gotten around to stopping at a battery supply place to find the specialty batteries the Minolta required by the time he picked up the developed film two days later. He sat in his car with the windows down and opened the film packet and entered another world as soon as he looked at the first print.

His head began to spin. He felt a tightness in his chest.

The first photo was of himself. He was in the woods. Camping. He had the long hair of his youth. There was the tent. The tent. He had never gone camping again after that Friday night and Saturday morning when his life changed for the worst, forever.

The second photo took away any doubt. There was Karen sitting on a boulder beside the creek in her cut-off shorts. She was smiling into a green space of shadowy trees across the creek, smiling at anything, at nothing. Smiling from the feeling of being sixteen, the feeling of being beautiful and free. Smiling at the feeling of having absconded for just one night, the feeling of being wild.

Almost all of the photos were surveillance photos like this, clearly taken with the little camera's zoom. He could see the primary focus in the photos was Karen.

Steve called his wife and began to explain what he was looking at. She was instantly worried he was having a heart attack or a stroke. He could barely speak. She actually insisted that he not drive anywhere. She made him promise. She drove to the CVS parking lot and they looked at the photos together. They agreed the police must be called. They needed to take custody of this evidence.

It was the last three photos which were most disturbing.

The third from last photo showed Karen in the back of a van, wearing a long green dress with a floral pattern. It was not like anything Karen would have owned or ever have worn. It looked like something you would see Loretta Lynn wear back in the day. It was the look of terror in Karen's eyes that really turned a screw somewhere in Steve's heart. It was an image he would carry to the grave.

His wife kept asking him, "Are you sure it's her? It looks like you, but I can't even be sure about that. Maybe we're both crazy. It certainly does look like you. But is it really her?"

The second from last photo showed a prayer service that had been held for Karen in the early days of her disappearance. Steve could see the back of his own head in the photo. This guy had clearly been enjoying this whole torturous process an entire town had been going through.

"We need to give these to the police, Steve. Do you think they can trace who dropped off the camera at the Salvation Army store? You didn't handle the camera much did you? There might be, well not fingerprints, but DNA? Can DNA last that long? Maybe he handled it recently when he donated it."

"He's probably dead," Steve said flatly. "That's probably why the camera was donated. The bastard probably slipped away."

The last photo was the worst. Somehow even worse than the photo of Karen in her terror. Though it would seem nothing more than a pretty landscape shot to someone who casually glanced at it. If the photo were not seen in the context of the roll.

The last photo showed a little pond in the woods with two sticks in the shallows making a rude cross. They had been lashed together with string. Just stuck in the mud. They would be long rotted away. They would not be there anymore. Steve knew that much. He also knew that's where she was. That's where Karen is, he thought. He knew. Her lonely, watery grave.

But now Steve's wife was second-guessing herself about the police. "They're going to be suspicious of you. All over again, babe. Should we even do this. It won't bring her back."

"I know. We have to. It's the right thing. If there's even the slightest chance..."

So that's what they did.

And the local police and the FBI were suspicious of Steve all over again. The DNA was a dead end. The photos went viral on the internet and still the case would not crack open.

The greatest hope lay in the chance that someone would recognize that little pond where the two crosses once were, but where, by now, there would be nothing.

Hundreds of leads poured in, but the resources and patience grew thin and nothing ever came of it.

After that, Steve felt trapped into searching the Salvation Army store not just for the cameras that came in, but any other possible clue that might surface. And then he began going from one thrift store to another, manically searching. He would often be there when the stores first opened their doors. He would virtually interrogate the employees about new arrivals of donations to the point of making himself a nuisance. He knew Monday mornings were important because that's when so many donated goods would be put out on the shelves. It consumed him. Once, he thought he recognized a comb that had belonged to Karen. There must have been millions like it produced. Then it was a t-shirt that proved to date from a period long after Karen's disappearance. In brief, he began to lose it all over again. He went back into therapy.

His marriage was strong but it ended. Karen was back again. His own children pleaded with him to let it go, but he knew this time he was back with her, his first girlfriend, to the end. On his bad days, he wished that day godspeed. On his better days, he had hope that the impossible thing would happen. The walls of this darkness would crack open. But he knew in his heart that the man was dead. That Karen would never escape that pond. And that he would be living that day all over again on the day he died. Little by little, he became a ghost to his own family. And you know how people will eventually push a ghost away. No matter how much it was initially loved.