The Things People Ask You to Do

by Dennis Rice

Fifteen years ago….

I talked to the man one time. I was standing in my back yard, he in his rented yard next door. He was telling me how he painted on the Golden Gate bridge, had fallen, and was now suing that company plus just about everybody he had met and planned on meeting.

Not wanting to be sued myself, I avoided any further meetings.

Later that summer, on a Wednesday in August, his fourth wife and her two kids (that were still at home, how many others she had I never knew) went out boating on a local lake. She reported boat trouble and didn’t return home until late that afternoon. When entering the home, she found her husband locked in their bedroom — dead from an overdose of various drugs.

There was no funeral. The wife had him cremated and gone by Friday. She was reported to have gone to a sister’s house 50 miles away.

That Saturday night, friends and I celebrated another friend’s thirtieth birthday with mass consumption of wine and beer.

Sunday morning around 8:30 there was a pounding on our front door that matched the wine pounding in my head. It was the neighbor lady and she explained that she needed to go into her house but was afraid. Just waking up and hung over to the max, I found it easier to just go with her. (I ain’t afraid of no ghost!)

The phone was ringing when I entered the house. She ran past me like a flash, grabbed the cordless phone, and ran back outside. Her answering machine was on and the speakerphone was announcing that the party on the other end was a return call from the local sheriff department. They asked if everything was all right. She said that because they hadn’t had an officer available, she had gotten the neighbor to check the house for her.

As I stood in the living room she instructed me — go into all the bedrooms and turn the lights on, check the closets, go into the bathroom, turn the lights on, check the shower. Now check the master bedroom. (Nothing but a big stain on the bed there.) Check the kitchen. Open all the cabinets. Look in the oven, the refrigerator. (What ghost would hide in the refrigerator? I wondered.) Check the garage.

By this time, her yelling from outside was slamming through my head and all I wanted to do was get this inspection over and go back to bed.

With every light on in the house, every door opened, and the house free of any ghost, I exited and informed her it was clear.

She then told me what she’d told the sheriff department dispatcher earlier — that her husband and his second wife had 2 boys in their twenties who lived down in Kentucky. “Those boys accused me of murdering their dad. They said they were going to blow me up!”

It took a fraction of a second for that to sink in.

I had been looking for a bomb.

I didn’t say a thing.

I looked at her through my eyebrows, turned, and went home and back to bed.

Copyright © 1999-2007 by Dennis Rice
All rights reserved.

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1. Tortured Travel
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3. Ode to PMS

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