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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Down in the Dirt v054

this writing is in the collection book
Decrepit Remains
(PDF file) download: only $9.95
(b&w pgs): paperback book $18.92
(b&w pgs):hardcover book $32.95
(color pgs): paperback book $75.45
(color pgs): hardcover book $88.45
Decrepit Remains, the 2008 Down in the Dirt collection book
The Wilcox Mystery

Pat Dixon

3


    Seven children, two boys and five girls, giggled their way up the patched, uneven blacktop drive to the lighted side door. The two boys, brothers, were pirates with numerous scars, bruises, sores, and wounds painted on their hands, necks, cheeks, noses, and foreheads. As for the girls, they were a ghost clad in a stained tan flannel sheet, a burglar in a pullover with black and white stripes, a ninja in dark blue tights, a witch with green food-coloring on her face and hands, and a Catwoman or, given the fact she was but seven and a half, a Catgirl. The smaller of the pirates—he with the eye patch covering half of his left eye—pressed the doorbell five times in quick succession and stepped back, clutching a large plastic bag of day-glow orange with both hands.
    At the foot of the drive, one of three young mothers shivered and glanced at her wristwatch.
    “Are we having fun yet?” she asked her companions.
    “Push it again, Michael!” said the blonde beside her. “Sometimes they’re in another part of the house and don’t hear you the first time!”
    Michael reached for the doorbell with his right thumb and suddenly leaped backwards with a squeal of fright. The six other children also started and backed up slightly, then began to laugh.
    The blonde was halfway up the drive by the time Michael joined the laughter and stepped forward with his goody-bag spread open.
    “What is it, Tam?” said a young brunette in a short fox-fir jacket, exhaling a cloud of mentholated smoke.
    Tammy, the blonde, waved her hand without looking, indicating that things were all right and she would explain in a minute or two.
    “Trick or treat, mith-ter!” said the ninja, jumping around on the drive as if she were karate-chopping a dozen invisible enemies.
    “Trick or treat, mister!” called out four other voices.
    “Candy will rot your teeth and make you fat—and totally hairless,” said the balding man who squinted at them toothily. “I didn’t know that when I was little, and look what happened to me! And I’m only twelve years old!”
    “No! No, you’re not! No!” said three voices with uncertain laughter.
    “Yup—only twelve—I just turned twelve last week! Candy—my birthday cake and candy—they did this to me!” he said, grinning.
    They looked at him uncertainly, while he frowned theatrically and reached into the right side pocket of his tweed jacket.
    “Anybody here care for—quarters?” he asked, grinning again.
    “Me, mister! Me—me—me!” came the answering chorus of high voices.
    Tammy, her arms folded, smiled as her daughter said, “Four quarters is a dollar, mister!” stepping forward with her orange bag wide open.
    “What sort of tricks did you have in case I didn’t have a treat for you?” asked the balding man.
    “Thoaping your th’creen door, mith-ter,” said the ninja.
    “T-P-ing your house!” giggled the taller pirate.
    “And repainting your car, my pretty one! Bright pink! And your little dog, too!” snapped the witch.
    “OoOOooh! OooOOooOOooh!” moaned the ghost. “Salting your flower beds—so nothing will grow in them—ever again!”
    “Well,” said the balding man, dropping four quarters into each child’s bag, “that certainly is a wonderful array of tricks! I guess I’d better pay you all pretty handsomely to protect my property, don’t you think?”
    Tammy grinned. “What do you say, Amber?”
    “Thanks, mister!”
    “Thank you! Thanks, Mr. Wilcox! Thank you, thir! Thank you! Thanks, mister,” echoed the others, almost in unison.
    At the end of the drive, the smoker tossed her half finished cigarette onto the Wilcox lawn, exhaled, and asked, “So why did they scream when he opened the door, Tam?”
    “He had a rubber gorilla mask on—you know the kind—with all sorts of long black and gray hairs attached to it.”
    “Hunh! Ol’ Wilcox always was a weird old—cluck.”
    “I s’pose so. But the kids seemed to enjoy it once they got over the first shock.”
    “Isn’t his wife some kind of cripple or something?”
    “Yeah, car wreck, I think.”
    “No—it’s MS. She’s been going downhill for the past six years,” said the other blonde, who had not yet spoken.
    “Really? How would you know, Steff? You live—oh—three blocks away.”
    “My husband works in Doc Wilcox’s department over at Witherspoon,” said Stephanie.
    “Oh. Did you know eating apple cores causes MS? One of the girls in my high school was always eating her apple cores, and she got MS,” said Tammy.
    “Hunh—I’d heard some place it was measles germs that caused it. That’s really interesting,” said the brunette.
    Stephanie darted glances at each of her companions and said nothing.
    “I bet a bunch of things cause things, an’ scientists really don’t have a clue,” said Tammy.
    “That’s for damn sure. Anyways,” shrugged the brunette, “I say we just do three more houses and wrap this up for another year. What d’y’ say?”
    “I say let’s make it just two more, Heather. Okay by you, Steff?” said Tammy.

2


    “How many children were there, Harold?” asked Brenda Wilcox as her husband reached in his shirt pocket and retrieved his glasses.
    “Four this time, Hon—each one cuter than a bug’s back molars.”
    “Do you still have enough quarters in case any more come by?”
    “I got twenty rolls of ‘em at the bank last Friday, special for tonight. If I ever run short—and there’s little danger of that—I can always hand out pennies, dimes, and nickels. Lord knows, we have enough loose change around the house. And then, if I run out of that, I can start handing out dollar bills.”
    “What kinds of costumes did they have on?”
    “Oh—one was a devil, and one was a hobo—not much of a costume, just jeans and a torn sweater and a ball cap, with a little mud on her cheeks—and one was a ghost—that’s twelve ghosts tonight—big night for the ghosts, y’know—and one was—umm—a cowboy! Now there’s something you don’t see every day—a cowboy trying to scare people in Connecticut. Sounds like something Mark Twain might’ve dreamed up. And—oh—a Godzilla monster. That was the best costume of the batch, for my money. Get it? For my money? And—I don’t know—they’re all blurring together at this point. But they were all cute, especially when I slowly opened the door an’ then poked my head around with my King Kong mask on—an’ gently roared at ‘em.”
    “You don’t think it would be too scary for the littler ones, Harold, do you?”
    “Too scary? Why would I think that, Brenda? Nah. Kids love this sort of thing. Later on, they’ll be paying twenty bucks at the movie theater just to get half the joy of a good scare or two. Whoa—duty calls yet once more!”
    In response to an insistent ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-donging, Harold Wilcox took off his eyeglasses, donned his gorilla mask, and crouched behind their side door.
    When he returned to the kitchen where Brenda sat in her wheelchair, he said, “I’ve shut off the porch light. It’s getting dark now, and the only ones that’ll be out are the teens in high school who aren’t supervised an’ who don’t have any costumes on or any real business being out, to my way o’ thinking. Oh—beans!”
    “What is it, Harold?”
    “My damned glasses! I don’t have ‘em here in my pocket where I always put them! Cripes Almighty! All I can think is they must’ve fallen out of my pocket into one of the damned candy bags this last batch o’ kids had. You know, when I bent over to drop quarters into their bags, my glasses must’ve fallen out.”
    “Maybe they fell on the carpet—or on the doormat or the step. You could check,” said Brenda.
    “Always the optimist. Well, I think I would’ve heard them fall, but I’ll go check, just to see if you’re right or not.”
    A minute later he returned.
    “Nope. No luck tonight. And those damned things’ll cost me maybe $50 to replace. Cripes! Lucky I’ve got an old pair to tide me over till I get the new ones.”
    “Maybe you put them in one of your other pockets. Did you check them?”
    “Did I check them? No-o-o-o. Why would I do that? I am in the habit of putting my glasses only into my shirt pocket, Brenda. Invariably. No—other—pocket. But here, right before your very eyes, I will check my other pockets—just to see whether you’re correct—or not.”
    He elaborately patted his trouser pockets and then reached inside all of them, even removing his billfold from his left hip pocket to check inside that.
    “Wouldn’t your jacket be a more likely place to start?” asked his wife as Harold put away his billfold.
    “More likely? I don’t see why. Oh—oh—this suspense is almost unendurable, Brenda. Will I or won’t I find my glasses inside my jacket pock—inside one of my jacket pockets?” He lowered his voice to a soft nasal monotone. “Well, sports fans, as Professor Wilcox approaches the fifth pocket, the crowd all crane their collective necks to ascertain the outcome of his endeavors. No! Nothing in the fifth pocket! The bald professor pauses to consider his next move. Will he try the sixth pocket? Yes! His left hand is moving in that direction and—and—no! Nothing there either! Just two more pockets, sports fans—the outside left breast pocket and the inside right breast pocket. Gosh, fans, we hope the F.C.C. won’t fine us for saying ‘breast’ on television. Wilcox’s hand is slowly approaching—”
    “Harold—is this amusing to you?”
    “Brenda—you mean it’s not amusing to you?”
    “I get the impression that you’re somehow mocking me with this performance of yours.”
    “Perhaps you’re just a little paranoid, Brenda. I’m just—I’m merely venting some of my justifiable frustration at losing a $50 pair of good glasses—and losing the time it will take me to get them replaced. Do you know what that represents?”
    “About two hours? One for your salary and one to make the phone call and then make a little stop-off after work?”
    “Well—yes. But I hate throwing good money away like that. It’s one thing to hand out fifty bucks to little kids—or five hundred to the—the charity—for research. I guess Oscar was right—‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ Just thrown away, plain and simple. Ol’ plain and simple, that’s me!”
    “Maybe one of the mothers will bring your glasses back tomorrow when they’re found inside one of the candy bags.”
    “Maybe—? Yes, I suppose there is that optimistic view to take. About one chance in fifty, I’d say. Even if they find the glasses, how many people would be conscientious enough to track down their owner? Not blooming likely, I’d say.”
    “Maybe you’re right, Harold. Time will tell, I guess.”
    “Let me get a pen and write that down. Hmm. ‘Time—will—tell.’ Hmm. I really like that expression. I surely do not want to forget that one.”

1


    “Brenda—I’m home,” called Harold dully from the side door as he entered their house four days later.
    “In here, Hon,” said Brenda Wilcox from the bathroom.
    Harold glanced at the half-open bathroom door and thought, I could almost have guessed that.
    “I ran into two of your ol’ pals, Doug Gould and Nick Keating, in the parking lot at school, Brenda. They both asked me how you’re doing these days—and then asked me to be sure and say hi to you for them.”
    “Thanks, Hon. That was nice of ‘em. What did you tell them?”
    Harold paused, recalling that he had said things were getting worse and that Brenda was “one of the roughly ten percent that get, you know, really—difficult—emotionally—in fact—a bit paranoid much of the time—and now she thinks I’m, well, having affairs with other women—like three or four of the young mothers that brought kids by our house on Hallowe’en—and Lanie Golden here at the library—and even that Korean, uh, woman—Lee—that works at the News Depot—where I buy us out Sunday New York Times.” And then Brenda’s former colleagues, professors in the Engineering Department, had both expressed brief words of ambiguous sympathy.
    “Oh—I just told them you’re bearing up bravely, of course. Why do you ask?”
    “Just making conversation from the can, Hon. I’m almost done.”
    “I picked up my new glasses on the way home. I’m trying out a new kind of lens that’ll act like sunglasses when I go outdoors. Maybe it’ll save my old peepers so I can grade another fifty-thousand essay exams before I retire—if I live that long.”
    “Be with you in a minute,” she said. “I’ve got some good news for you, Harold.”
    Like you want us to have sex again in December—to celebrate the coming of the winter he thought.
    “What is it, Honey Pet? Did my publisher phone and say they want me to do a third edition of my Intro to Physics text? That would give us a few much needed jingles for our jeans, what with all the Christmas charity drives coming up and all.”
    “Almost that good, Harold—I found your glasses.”
    “Found them? You mean somebody returned them? Do tell. Just in time, too. Now they can serve as my back-up pair for when I lose or break these new ones.”
    “No, nobody returned them, Harold. They were here all the time. We just didn’t see them.”
    “Really.”
    “Yes. The mailman was knocking on the side door around one o’clock today, wanting me to sign for something, and when I was there by the door doing that, I happened to look up—and there they were.”
    “You looked ‘up’ and saw them?”
    “Yes. Through the glass shelf of the étagere—right beside our big Rosenthal rabbit. I asked the mailman to hand them down to me, and he did. You must have put them there when you were answering the door for the last trick-or-treaters—when you were going to put on your gorilla mask for them. Isn’t that great? It’s like found money, isn’t it?”
    “I always put my glasses into my shirt pocket when I take them off, Brenda. I’ve told you that. It’s almost a reflexive action. It’s invariable.”
    “Well, maybe it’s invariable most of the time, but this time was an exception.”
    “Really—wasn’t it one of those snotty, overly pampered, manicured, pedicured, botoxed, and silicone-implanted wealthy young mothers that came by in a fit of—a fit of unaccustomed honesty—and unaccustomed charity—after nearly a week?”
    “Do you want me to lie to you, Harold? If that’s what you want me to do, just give me a minute, and I’ll make up a really good one for you.”
    “No, no, no, pet. No, I don’t know what got into me just now. Some days I get to feeling a teensy bit cranky—in my old age.”
    “Oh, Harold—you’re only forty-two. That’s not old.”
    And you’re only thirty-eight, he thought, and we live like a couple of elderly non-****in’ celibates year in, year out—PET. And I KNOW I put those glasses in my shirt pocket—but what I don’t know is why the hell you’d LIE to me about something as simple an’ insignificant as how they REALLY got back home.



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