Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [48]
After some research, however, Martin found that many homeowners, particularly gardeners, kept latex gloves on hand in order to safely remove poison ivy and other irritating plants from their backyards. Martin didn’t keep a garden, but the rear of his property was bordered by a constantly encroaching copse of trees and shrubs, and although poison ivy had never been a problem before, he was certain that he could make it a problem.
That, however, turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined.
After more than two weeks of searching, Martin was unable to locate any gardening store, nationally or abroad, that stocked poison ivy seed or seedlings. Most of his inquiries were met with perplexed and skeptical responses from shopkeepers who thought they were being made the punch line of some ridiculous practical joke. When he realized that purchasing the seed would be impossible, Martin decided to transplant existing poison ivy plants onto his property. Armed with a botanical field guide, Martin made his way on a Sunday afternoon to a forested section of land between a local elementary school and a park, and quickly found the plant in abundance. Despite poison ivy’s invasive and persistent nature, transplanting proved to be a challenge. Martin’s first three attempts ended in failure, and it wasn’t until his fourth try that the plant finally took hold and began to thrive. Several years later, Martin doubted that he could remove the poison ivy even if he wanted to. Consistent watering and the seasonal application of fertilizer had helped his initial three transplants spread and grow into a veritable jungle of the three-leafed irritant.
Disposing of the gloves had also been a concern for Martin, and he had never arrived at a method that he considered satisfactory. He desperately wanted to rid himself of each pair of gloves immediately after use, so that if he were ever pulled over by the police, there would be no used gloves in the car to explain. But this would mean leaving evidence behind, out there in the world for anyone to find, and though this is just what Martin had done for a long time, a scare eight years back had forced him to adopt a new policy.
Following a visit to the Pearls’ home on an early April morning, Martin had made his way to a trash can on the south end of the tennis courts in order to dispose of his gloves. As he dropped them into the can, he happened to glance in and notice another pair of gloves still sitting at the bottom of the trash, barely covered by a candy bar wrapper and an empty tennis ball container. Without pause, he plucked both sets of gloves from the can and hurried back to the Subaru, where he sat in the front seat, breathing heavily and waiting for his rapid pulse to return to normal. Though he hadn’t used the trash can in more than two weeks, the gloves from a previous visit were still sitting there, covered with his fingerprints and the microscopic bits that they had acquired from the Pearls’ home. His pulse began to race even faster as he thought about the thousands of latex gloves he had left about the world over the last several years, in random trash cans and dumpsters around his clients’ homes, each one loaded with microscopic evidence of him and his visit.
Though he realized that the chance of someone locating one of these gloves and using the evidence that it contained against him was slight, police officers seemed to canvass crime scenes quite thoroughly on television, and it wouldn’t take an exceptionally bright cop to connect the presence of latex gloves in a nearby trash can to one of his visits. So, following his scare, Martin began bringing his gloves home and burning them daily. Latex, he found, burned quite well and left no proof that the gloves had ever existed. And though he concealed his used gloves in a well-hidden space underneath his dashboard (created by the removal of some unnecessary