she hung up.
5
THE NEXT MORNING, THE MORNING OF the day that I found my first dead guy, Trixie asked me, “So what, exactly, was The Backpack Incident?” She was sitting in our kitchen, taking a sip of her coffee.
Trixie lived two doors down and, like me, didn’t head into an office every day. I try hard to be interested in what other people do for a living, but when Trixie first told me about running a home-based accounting firm, I kind of glazed over. Any occupation in which the majority of your time is spent filling in lots of forms and adding up columns of numbers is one I want to stay as far away from as possible.
We had regular curbside chats, like the ones I had with Earl, and we were dragging our garbage to the end of the drive two days after I’d decided to teach Sarah a lesson about leaving her keys in the door.
“Hey,” I said.
“How’s things?” she said, dropping a recycling box full of newspapers by the edge of the street. She looked smart, even in a pair of ratty jeans and sweatshirt. Trixie’s a good-looking woman, late thirties, petite, with dark hair and green eyes, and the first time we introduced ourselves I commented that I couldn’t recall hearing the name Trixie since
We got talking one day about what we each did for a living, and she asked whether I was taking advantage of all the possible tax deductions for a person who works from home. She gave me a couple of useful, and free, tips. As someone who ran a business from home herself, she seemed to know all the angles.
This day, when she asked me how things were, I guess I didn’t respond positively enough. I merely shrugged, so she strolled over. “What’s up?”
“I’m sort of in the doghouse,” I said. “Sarah’s barely talking to me. It’s been a day and a half now.”
“What did you do?” she asked.
“You feel like a coffee?” I asked. “I was just getting ready to work and put on a pot. Unless you’re busy.”
Trixie glanced at her watch. “My first client isn’t coming by till after lunch, which still gives me time to get into my workin’ clothes, so sure, why not.”
While I got out cups for the coffee I told her about hiding Sarah’s car, and how things had unraveled from there. Trixie didn’t express any real shock. She wasn’t a judgmental person. She was open-minded on social issues and tolerant of human frailties. Over earlier cups of coffee, she’d advocated same-sex marriages, defended Bill Clinton’s personal behavior, refused to demonize welfare recipients. And she called things as she saw them.
“God, Zack,” she said, shaking her head and reaching for one of the Peek Freans cookies I’d set out on a plate. Sarah’d taught me never to serve right out of the bag. “You’re a piece of work. And a control freak. Where do you get off, trying to control everyone else’s behavior?”
“Sarah called me an asshole.”
Trixie nodded. “Big surprise there.” She had a bite of a jelly cream. “What do the kids think when you pull a stunt like that?”
That’s when I told her about how both of them had suggested that this was a sequel to The Backpack Incident. That was when Trixie asked her question.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” I said. “It’s like a sickness with me or something, that I have to take desperate measures to make my point. Usually matters related to personal safety and security. That’s the whole reason why I hid Sarah’s car. Not to make a fool of her, but to teach-”
“Yeah yeah, I heard all that. So what’s up with the backpack thing?”
“When the kids come home from school,” I began, “they walk in the door and drop their stuff wherever they happen to be standing. Jackets, shoes, whatever. They haven’t opened the front-hall closet door once since we moved in here. I don’t even know if they know it’s there. The concept of slipping a coat onto a hanger has eluded them right into their teens.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And their backpacks just get dumped wherever. You come in the front door after the kids come home and there’s a good chance, if you’re not watching where you’re going, you’re going to fall over them.”
“No one knows the hell that is your life.”
I smiled. “Gee, is Sarah home? That could be her talking. Anyway, I was yelling at them to take their backpacks upstairs, and for a while there it’s like they were actually listening to me, but that just created another problem, because they’d lug their backpacks up to the top of the stairs-and I don’t know whether you’ve ever lifted a high school kid’s backpack these days but you’ll throw your back out if you try-and they’d leave them there.”
“Where?”
“At the top of the stairs.”
“But that’s where you wanted them, right? Upstairs?”
I nodded furiously. “Yes, yes, but not right at the top of the stairs. Okay, picture this. You’re carrying a laundry basket or you’ve got something in your hand you’re looking at, and you get to the top of the stairs and generally assume that the way is clear.”
“But it’s not.”
“They’ve left their backpacks right there, in the way, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll trip on them and break your neck.”
“Okay, so you talked to them about this?”
“Oh yeah. Many times. And they’d always say the same thing. ‘Okay, Dad, we hear you.’ In that really tired way kids have of talking. I know you probably told me this but I don’t remember-you don’t have any kids, right?”
Trixie shook her head.
“So anyway, the next day they’d come home and leave them in the same place again. Sarah nearly killed herself, grabbed onto the railing at the last second to keep from going headlong down the stairs.”
“She got mad.”
“She blew her stack. Took the backpacks and literally threw them down the stairs. I thought that would do it, better than anything I’d ever done. But a couple of weeks later, they both came in after school, ran upstairs, and dropped their backpacks in the same place.”
Trixie nodded slowly. “The last straw.”
“Yeah. I decided it was time to take action.”
Trixie smiled, rolled her eyes. I continued: “They’d both gone into Paul’s room. They’re not like a lot of brothers and sisters. They fight, but not all that much. They talk to each other, find out what’s going on. There’s things they talk about, Sarah and I have no idea. So Angie was in Paul’s room, and they’d turned on some music in case I decided to put my ear up to the door and listen in.”
“Which you would never do.”
“So I take the two backpacks, and arrange them along the stairs on the way down, as though they’d been knocked by someone who hadn’t seen them.” I paused. “And then I went down to the bottom of the stairs, and arranged myself across them.”
“What do you mean, arranged yourself?”
“Like, you know, I’d fallen. I worked my legs up the first four steps or so, lying on my stomach, then put my head down on the carpet at the bottom of the stairs, with my arms stretched out.”
Trixie didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally: “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“You didn’t spread some ketchup around? Like from the corner of your mouth, or out of your nose?”
“The broadloom is really new,” I said.
“You pretended to be dead.” Trixie wasn’t asking a question, just making a statement.
“Well, wounded, anyway. I could have been knocked out. Not necessarily dead. A concussion or something.
