I replied. Then I went into my apartment and cried myself sick.
And so summer became fall, and fall a nasty, sleety, early December night with icy roads, and I was finally home.
I parked, climbed out into the cold and wet, and hurried to my trunk, where I’d stashed a case of Diet Coke. The dim light by the walk barely illuminated the area.
I looked uncomfortably over my shoulder. It was dark and spooky back here even on a nice night, but in the rain and sleet, it was worse than usual. The large lilac at the edge of the house was especially eerie tonight, with its branches creaking and complaining about their icy bath.
I eyed the dripping tree, trying to penetrate it to be certain it wasn’t hiding someone. Come May, those blossoms had better be beautiful and fragrant to make up for my heart palpitations the rest of the year.
Although, I told myself with false bravado, no bad guy in his right mind would be lurking behind a lilac tree on a night like this.
Even so, the last thing I expected to find when I raised the lid of my trunk was a dead body.
TWO
Instinctively I slammed the lid down. I stood, shocked, until a sudden, stout gust of wind made the lilac creak alarmingly. I jumped and swung around, but of course no one was there. We were alone, the corpse in my trunk and I.
It can’t be true, I thought. It simply can’t be. Things like this don’t happen to real people, just people in mystery novels. My mind is playing tricks on me because I’m tired and had such a nerve-racking trip home.
I looked at the dark outline of my trunk lid. The slight illumination from the light by the walk glinted on my keys still dangling in the lock.
I raised the lid just far enough for the light to come on, then bent cautiously and peeked in.
There was a body, all right. A man. He had on a green, down-filled jacket, and he was lying on his stomach, his face turned away.
I slammed the lid again and made it to the porch just in time to sit before I fell. I put my head between my knees and stared blankly at the wet cement.
There was a body in my car!
When I could move again, I stumbled into my apartment and called the police.
“Please come quickly!” I hardly recognized my shaky voice. “Please.”
I got out of my wet clothes and into my heaviest sweats. I toweled my hair and went to wait numbly at the front door, my breath frosting the glass of the storm sash.
When the first flashing light turned down the alley, I ran to the parking area. Soon I was standing under my gray umbrella surrounded by men in dripping, bright-orange slickers with POLICE written in black on their backs.
“First question,” said one. “Did you touch anything?”
I shook my head, horrified at the thought.
“Okay, then,” he said. “What happened?”
“I was going to get a case of sodas out of my trunk. I opened it and there was this body.”
He looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for more. “That’s it?”
I looked back, aghast. “A body isn’t enough?”
He smiled. “Open the trunk for us, please.”
Obediently, I did. “See?” I pointed helpfully at the corpse sprawled on top of a cardboard box filled with two dozen cans of decaf Diet Coke.
I swallowed convulsively and looked away. My stomach was teeming with acid, and my mouth tasted like metal. The flashing lights and the crackling car radios did nothing to ease my tension.
The policeman, a beefy man with a heavily seamed face, studied the body.
“Who is he?”
I stared at the policeman, thunderstruck. “How should I know?”
“It is your car,” said the policeman reasonably.
“Well, it isn’t my body!”
“Oh.” The policeman’s voice was neither believing nor disbelieving. “Then you’ve looked at him well enough to know you don’t recognize him?”
I swallowed hard a couple of times against the thought of studying the man. “Are you kidding? I haven’t gone near him. See me? I’m standing with my back to the car so I don’t have to look at him.”
“Then how do you know you don’t know him?”
“I just know.”
“Uh-huh. Well, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened here tonight.”
I had never felt so unreal in my life. My car was now bathed in bright light supplied by portable generators rumbling in a van with RESCUE in red-and-gold letters on its white side. Two policemen were trying to arrange a plastic tarp to shield the whole area from the weather. One tied some ropes to the creaky lilac, and the other hammered some pegs into the macadam of the parking area and looped ropes around them.
The vanity license plate my brother, Sam, had given me for my birthday mocked the intense scene. MERRY, it read.
“So you’ll remember who you are, and so you’ll remember to be happy,” he said when he gave it to me. What he wasn’t saying was that he wanted me to forget Jack, but I knew. I had looked at the plate, knowing the love and concern that went into his ordering it, knowing he couldn’t have foretold that my romantic trials would force me to decide to move just when he planned to give it to me. But the truth was that MERRY was a heart-piercing reminder of the un-Merry person I had become.
Now my car, my trunk, my parking lot, even MERRY had become police business.
I sighed as I watched another heavy peg pounded into the macadam. Hopefully my landlord would understand that it was the police who had made the holes in his parking area, not me. Somehow, knowing Mr. Jacobs, I doubted it.
“Miss Kramer, please tell me what happened here tonight,” the policeman repeated.
I forced my eyes from the activity and looked at him. “Nothing much happened here,” I said. “I opened my trunk, and there he was. I closed my trunk, hoping he’d go away. I opened my trunk and he was still there. I called you.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
A car squealed into the alley behind the official cars. A man climbed out and walked authoritatively toward the open trunk. He leaned under the protective plastic and around the men taking photographs, studied the situation, then walked to the policeman and me.
As he watched the approaching man, the policeman snorted, little puffs of foggy breath erupting from each nostril. “The press already! That’s all we need.”
“Don!” I said as I flung myself at the man. He ducked to miss the points
