The Traveling Corpse (4 page)

Annie couldn't keep still. She whispered to
Art, “They're going. I've got to talk to them.”

He tried to hold her back, but Annie slipped
away and crossed the room in front of the stage. She stopped the
two officers just as they were leaving. “What?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” was all the sergeant said as she
stepped outside.

Annie followed them out, and Art was right
behind her. He heard her ask, “What do you mean, ‘Nothing?' Are you
sure?”

“We did
not
find a body in that
drawer, ma'am,” said Sergeant Menendez, politely.

The deputy, Joe, agreed, “Nothing but
decorations in there, ma'am.”

“But,” sputtered Annie, “I saw a hand, the
right hand and part of her arm. I'm sure it was a woman's hand. It
was smaller than a man's, and there was red polish on the nails. I
don't think the polish was even chipped—and a gold bracelet—and the
hand was dead cold.”

“There is no hand in that drawer, ma'am.” The
deputy said it like he needed to explain it to a child.

“But, there was! There was a dead person, or
at least part of one, in that drawer! I was a nurse for a hundred
years! For heaven's sake! I know when something is dead!”

Patiently, the sergeant replied, “There was
nothing dead in that drawer, ma'am. Just boxes and a plastic
bag.”

Annie started to argue, but her husband put
his arm around her and said, “Let's go back inside, Annie. It's
cold out here.”

Much as she loved and respected her husband,
Annie ignored him again. She implored the officers, “No, don't
leave! Please, go look in that drawer again.” When they shook their
heads, Annie begged. “Then will you at least look in the other
ones? Please look in the other drawers. Maybe it's in one of those.
Please believe me.”

Surprisingly, Sergeant Menendez took pity on
her and said, “Okay, ma'am, we'll look in the other drawers.”

“All nine of them?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

While the Bingo caller announced, “B-11,”
Menendez and Juarez began pulling out the drawers, one by one.
Annie and Art shivered and watched them from outside through the
window of the side door. Annie complained to her husband, “They
aren't searching very hard. They're only pulling each drawer open a
little ways and taking a quick peek.”

Satisfied that none of the drawers held a
dead body, the officers left after suggesting to Annie that she
call them if and when she found the body again.

Annie was far from satisfied, but she didn't
know what else to do tonight except to go back to the kitchen and
say goodnight to her friends. “I don't know what to tell you,” she
began speaking to Barb, Brad, Verna and Von, and Art, too. “I don't
know if you believe me or not, but there was—or at least I saw and
felt part of a dead body in that tenth drawer. Since the corpse has
disappeared, I really think it would be best if you, we, don't talk
about this with anyone else outside of our gang. I'll tell the
Davis's tomorrow. Promise me you'll keep it mum, at least until I
can find out what happened, where the corpse has traveled to.”

They looked at her solemnly, mute. At least
they didn't look as though they disbelieved her.

“Whether we like it or not, this is a real
mystery, a crime has been committed, and I'm smack dab in the
middle of it,” Annie drew in her breath and continued, “And, as my
friends, I hope you'll help me solve it. It doesn't look like we'll
get much help from the law. Those deputies were polite enough, but
they are probably laughing about all this and saying something
like, ‘That little-ole senior woman's got a screw loose!'

“I may sound crazy to you, but I am the same
person I was this afternoon at the bridge table when I bid and made
that grand slam! I hadn't lost my mind then. And I don't have
Alzheimer's—at least, not yet! So, please, just love me, and trust
me, and don't talk about it outside of our gang.”

 

* * *

 

‘The Gang' was a tight group of four couples,
all retired and all living in BradLee Park. Their friendship had
begun a few years earlier. It began one Wednesday morning when the
Andersens went to Old Main, as usual, for nine o'clock Coffee Hour.
The Snowbirds, those who only stayed in Florida seasonally, were
all back for the winter so the hall was crowded. Art and Annie
managed to find two seats together beside the Bentons, an older
couple that they knew from the water aerobics class. They
introduced their daughter, Barb, who was recently widowed. She had
flown down from New York State to visit her parents. Annie liked
Barb right away, and the feeling was mutual even though Barb was
some eight years younger. Before Coffee Hour was over, the Bentons
invited Art and Annie to ride with them on Saturday evening to go
to a spaghetti dinner. The youth of their church were putting on
the meal to raise funds for a charity project. “We're
Presbyterians,” Art said, “but we'll be happy to join you and eat
Methodist spaghetti.”

The round tables in the church fellowship
hall sat eight. Three people were already seated at one of the
tables, an older couple in their nineties and a middle-aged man.
Art and Annie knew who they were although they had never been
introduced. The older man smiled and motioned for the five of them
to sit down, saying, “Please join us if you don't mind sitting with
Roman Catholics in a Methodist church. We're the Bradkowski's.”

“The Bentons here are Methodists,” Art
motioned toward them, then added, “Annie and I are Presbyterians;
so this will be an ecumenical table.” Art shook Mr. B's hand,
“We've never had the pleasure to meet you before, Mr. Bradkowski,
but we do recognize you and your wife, as we live in BradLee. Thank
you for having the foresight to found such an outstanding
retirement park.”

Mr. B thanked Art, then introduced his son.
Like his father, he was also nicknamed, Brad. Although he was at
retirement age, he still enjoyed working as an electrical engineer
at the Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Annie chuckled to herself,
noting that before they sat down the tall athletic-looking Brad had
easily moved so he was seated beside Barb. He was recently
divorced; she was a broken-hearted widow then in her early 60's. At
the end of the dinner, Brad offered to take Barb to the airport on
Monday, saying, “I'll be driving to the Orlando area anyway. I'd be
more than happy to leave an hour earlier so you can make your
flight.” That was the beginning of Annie and Barb's friendship as
well as the romance of Brad and Barb. Six months later, it was
Annie and Art who helped them elope.

The next fall, at a Woman's Golf League
Scramble, Annie and Barb happened to be assigned to the same team.
The two other women making up their foursome were strangers. Verna
was a snowbird from Maine. The younger woman was Edith Diane Davis,
who, since childhood, had been known as DeeDee. She came to Florida
from Ohio but was born and raised in East Tennessee. Verna and
DeeDee were newcomers to BradLee, spending their first winter in
Florida. The four women had an especially good time together; they
thoroughly enjoyed each other's company. Barb suggested that they
meet a few mornings later to play another round of golf. During
that second game, they learned that they all played bridge.

When they were walking back to the clubhouse,
DeeDee said in her East Tennessee accent which she had never lost
even though she had lived in Ohio ever since she married over 40
years ago, “I've had sech a good time with ya girls this mornin'.
Would y'all like ta come ta my place tomorrow afternoon ta play
cards? We've only got an old single wide trailer; it's not very
big, but we can play at my kitchen table. Will ya come? Say one
o'clock?” Surprisingly, none of them had a doctor's appointment
scheduled. They quickly promised to be there.

So, besides becoming ‘The Golfing Gals,' they
were also known to their husbands as ‘The Bridge Buddies.' A few
weeks later, they invited their husbands to go out to dinner with
them. The women were delighted when their husbands enjoyed talking
with each other. It was a most congenial group; so an easy and
lasting friendship formed among the four couples. Art jokingly
called themselves the ‘A, B, D, & V's'—Andersen, Bradkowski,
Davis, and Vigeaux. But mostly, they all just called themselves
‘Our Gang.'

 

 

 

 

That Tuesday night, Annie lay awake beside
her sleeping husband in their queen-sized bed. She closed her eyes
and said her prayers, asking God to lead her, to guide her, to show
her how to prove that a crime had been committed. Her body was
exhausted, but she couldn't fall asleep. Her mind would not stop
running the events of last evening over and over and over. Also,
she wasn't quite sure if Art and her friends believed her since she
couldn't produce a corpse. And, she was very sure those two
deputies didn't believe her. She kept asking herself, “Where has
that corpse disappeared to? Who moved it? Where did they move it?
Why did they move it? How did they move it?” The answers as well as
sleep eluded her.

Finally, after several hours of rehashing all
the facts, she fell into a troubled sleep only to wake up suddenly
before five o'clock with an idea that gripped her. She knew she had
to act on it; so she poked her husband. “Wake up, Art!” Her husband
of almost 50 years groaned and rolled over. She pulled the covers
off of him and said, “Please, Art, get up. I
need
you to go
with me.”

There was Annie's magic word: ‘Need.' Art
would always help her when she said she needed him. “Where?” he
asked as he tried to pull the covers back over him.

Annie pulled them off of him again, and said,
“To Old Main. We've got to look in all those other drawers. We need
to check them ourselves. Please hurry; I want to get over there
before anyone else goes nosing around. You know, ‘A stitch in time
saves nine.'”

Art groaned at another of her old sayings.
Slowly, he sat up on the side of the bed, stretched and yawned.
When he had gotten his ying and yang together, he realized Annie
was serious; she meant to find that body. He knew she was convinced
that she'd seen something that was dead; although it was hard for
him to believe it when she couldn't produce a body. He ran his
fingers through his wispy, sandy hair and tried to persuade her,
“But, Annie, the deputies looked in the drawers—all the drawers,
just like you asked them too.”

“But they didn't do a thorough enough job.
Please help me. Hurry and dress.”

Art shook his head and headed for the
bathroom. When his wife set her Hungarian/German stubborn
temperament to something, he knew she would not give up.

“You'll want to wear a sweater and a jacket.
It's cold out,” Annie suggested, bringing him a glass of orange
juice. “The temperature really dropped last night after the storm.
There's frost on the ground this morning. Glad I covered my
geraniums yesterday afternoon. They'd all be dead if I hadn't
protected them from that freezing air.”

While Annie waited for Art to dress, she went
out to their shed and backed out their cream-colored golf cart.
Because the weather was so chilly, she pulled at the Velcro tabs to
release the side curtains. She was snapping them down when Art came
out. He did up the snaps on his side and slid into the passenger
seat beside his determined wife. He pulled the long zipper down on
his side as Annie did on hers. She handed him a mug of steaming hot
coffee. “Brr,” he shivered, “This isn't the Florida weather I like.
The mug feels mighty good; it's warming my hands.”

In the early morning January darkness, they
drove down their street of manufactured homes and then took the
path that wound through the park. The huge old Live Oak trees with
their dangling gray Spanish moss were quiet and still now, as
though worn out from all the frantic dancing in last night's wild
storm.

As she drove her golf cart for the half mile
to Old Main through the lovely parklands of BradLee, Annie briefly
forgot the tension of the preceding night, and she let her mind
relax and think about this lovely place that she now called home.
Not many manufactured home parks had spacious common areas like
here.

This reminiscing flashed through Annie's mind
as she and Art rode through the foggy darkness. Art sipped his
coffee as Annie drove. He couldn't help protesting once again,
“Annie, why are you dragging me out before daylight? The clubhouse
won't be open yet, and we don't have a key.”

“But maybe it is! Maybe we can get inside.
Anyway, I have to try. I can't sleep anymore. We need to get in
there before the Coffee Hour volunteers come to do their thing.
Something's wrong; I just know it. Please, Art, I need your
help.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks, Honey. I know I can always count on
you.”

She parked the golf cart in the courtyard.
They tried the door that led to the bathrooms; they were open, but
the entrance from that hallway into the clubhouse was locked.

“I'm not surprised,” Art said. “Security
never locks up the restrooms, but they make sure the other doors
are.”

“Let's go try the front doors.”

As Art predicted, they were locked too. They
tried all the doors on the east side: the door near the stage, the
one into the Annex, the one into the Communications Office—all
locked on that side of the building. Discouraged, they walked
around the back to try the doors on the west side. Locked, but the
screen door to the new patio off the rear of the kitchen was
unlatched.