A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [148]
“Yeah. He’s dead. Polie put him in one of them bin things. He filled it with rocks and threw him in the river.”
She dropped the bread bag onto the ground. “No, he didn’t.” She made herself smile. “You’re just saying that.” To get back at her and Polie both.
CHAPTER 23
A strand of yellow police tape dangled from the porch railing. The previous night’s storm had brought down a large tree limb that covered most of the old woman’s backyard. Gordon had just gotten home from work when he saw Detective Kaminski leaving Mrs. Jukas’s house. He asked the detective if he thought it would be all right for him to cut up the branches and remove them from her yard so that Mrs. Jukas wouldn’t have to come home to such a mess. It wasn’t up to him, Detective Kaminski said, and besides, the old woman wasn’t any better. Her niece in Michigan wanted the doctors to take her off life support, but without a living will the hospital had refused.
“Thank goodness,” Gordon said.
“You’re glad?”
“Well, of course. I can’t believe her niece would ask that.”
“I wouldn’t want to be laying there like that, would you, barely alive, hooked up to machines?”
“No, I know what you mean.”
“But if the tree’s bothering you, I suppose you could always ask the niece.”
“It’s not bothering me. That’s not what I meant.”
The detective opened his notebook. “Sheila Brown. She remembers you from years ago when she used to visit here. She said her aunt was always afraid of you.”
“She got over that, I think. For the most part, anyway.”
The detective flipped a page. “I don’t know, according to her lawyer there was some problem about a ladder,” he said.
Gordon tried to explain, but the detective kept interrupting: Why had he taken the ladder from her? Where was it now? How long had he been out of work? Had his brother been giving him money? Things must have been getting pretty desperate, then.
“I was behind on my bills, but I wasn’t desperate,” Gordon said.
“How come you were fired?”
“I’m not sure. Neil Dubbin, I don’t know if you know Neil, he’s . . . well, he’s volatile.”
“Volatile?” The detective chuckled. “He said you tried to burn his building down.”
A few days passed. As its leaves withered in the heat, the huge limb seemed to be sinking into Mrs. Jukas’s yard. Decay was a quicker process when no one cared, eventually a contagion. Every day, Gordon noticed some new deterioration in the neighborhood, in his own house. And it wasn’t just things, but people. First Mrs. Jukas, now Inez and her family were gone. They hadn’t trusted him, but he had enjoyed watching the comings and goings of their large family. He seldom saw Marvella Fossum. The other night she fell asleep on the top step, smoking a cigarette. Jada tried to wake her up, then gave up and sat next to her. She had still been there when he went to bed, laughing and calling out wisecracks to passersby as if this were a perfectly normal situation in a perfectly normal life. Didn’t everyone sit by their stoned-out mother so she wouldn’t topple down the porch stairs? Was anyone sitting with Mrs. Jukas? He would ask Kaminski if she could have visitors.
There hadn’t been any police activity next door unless they came while he was at work. During the day someone had thrown beer bottles from a car. Gordon went out to pick up the broken glass before his pizza came. There were a few pieces on Mrs. Jukas’s front walk, but he was afraid to step onto her property without permission. Her grass hadn’t been cut. A drainpipe leaned out from the corner of her house. Across the street the curb was lined with boxes of trash and an old rug that Inez’s sons had thrown out at the end of the move. Jada had just come out to look through the boxes. From the corner of his eye, he saw her pull out a bent metal shoe rack, then stash it up on the porch. She pushed the rug away from the telephone pole, then rolled it toward the house. Even from here he could hear her grunting as she tried to drag it up the steps. He started into the house when she began