Something Missing

by Matthew Dicks

  “G’day mate!” Martin replied, stuffing the burlap into the large black backpack that he had left by the door, heading southwest through the trees toward his car, with a surprising spring in his step.

  Twelve miles southeast, in Middletown, was the home of doctors Max and Emma Reed. The Reeds, a couple not yet in their forties, were among Martin’s best clients for a number of reasons. Financially, they fit his criteria perfectly. Highly successful but rarely home, the Reeds’ kitchen was well stocked with items that often gathered dust, passed their expiration dates, and generally went unused. The Reeds did their grocery shopping through Peapod, a delivery service operated by a local supermarket chain that allowed homeowners to place their grocery orders online and have the products delivered for a minimal charge. As busy as they were, the Reeds had a standard order that they placed each week with little variation. This meant that the same two pounds of tomatoes were delivered to their home every Tuesday, regardless of their current supply. Upon receiving the new order, the Reeds would simply rotate the week-old tomatoes into the trash bin, since it was unlikely that they would find a need for four pounds of tomatoes in any given week. For the Reeds, the money wasted in discarded perishables was offset by the time it would take to inventory their stock and alter their order.

  This worked out beautifully for Martin. Having become familiar with their standard order (after accessing the Reed’s personal computer), and by timing his visits just prior to a Peapod delivery, he was able to acquire items, particularly perishables such as meat and produce, with little concern over the Reeds becoming aware of his acquisitions. In fact, he felt that he was doing the Reeds a favor, since these items would normally be discarded anyway. He was simply reducing their wastefulness.

  The Reeds also spent many weekends at their home in Vermont or their studio in Manhattan, allowing Martin the unusual opportunity of a weekend visit to a client. And determining whether or not the Reeds were home was simple thanks to Emma Reed’s enormous collection of flags, the type that homeowners typically hang vertically off the side of a house or a garage. In all, the Reeds owned more than seventy different flags, each folded in 6” x 6” squares and stored along the north wall of the garage. There were decorative flags, American flags marking different periods in history, flags representing the seasons, holidays, sports, and even a Confederate flag, though Martin had never seen that one displayed. There were eight flags for Hanukkah, each one showing a menorah with an additional candle lit. There were flags for Arbor Day, Election Day (BE AMERICAN! VOTE!), and there were even flags for each of the Reeds’ birthdays. Emma’s flag was a green patchwork emblazoned with the phrase HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMY! and Max’s was a square of red fabric dominated by a birthday cake that was currently adorned with thirty-eight candles. Each year, someone (Emma, likely) squeezed another candle onto the already crowded cake with a needle and thread, adding to the patchwork of fiery reds and yellows.

  But what appealed most to Martin about the flags was that each day, without fail, Emma Reed would change the flag that was displayed off the side of her garage, unless, of course, she was away. So although Martin was often able to identify the weekends that the Reeds were away by keeping track of the calendar hanging in their kitchen, the flags served as a fail-safe way of guaranteeing the couple’s absence. If the same flag that had been displayed on Friday was still up by Saturday afternoon, the house was most certainly empty.

  Thirteen minutes after arriving at the Reeds’ house, Martin was locking the back door, backpack weighed down with a bottle of caffeine-free Diet Coke, a pound of boneless chicken breast, an avocado, half a dozen carrots, a green pepper, several cherry tomatoes, half a head of lettuce, and a book of stamps. In addition to the fresh produce and meat that Martin was often able to acquire, the Reeds unaccountably maintained a large supply of postage stamps on hand, at least five books at a time, so Martin was often able to acquire enough stamps to handle his own postage needs.

  Loading the last of his groceries into the Outback, which was parked in Lot C on the campus of Wesleyan University, Martin turned back onto Route 9, heading north, heading home.

  Some people can point to a specific day in their lives when everything changed. For Martin, that day was a Wednesday in October.

  It was three-fifteen on an overcast afternoon and Martin was visiting his final clients for the day, Cindy and Alan Clayton of Cromwell. Cindy was a schoolteacher in Wethersfield (second grade, the last time Martin checked) and Alan owned a construction company that bought large tracts of unused woodlands and converted them into mortgage payments. When evaluating them as clients, Martin had been initially concerned about Alan’s line of work, envisioning a man with the freedom to come and go as he pleased, stopping at home for lunch or taking an occasional afternoon off, but after more than a month of surveillance, he was comforted by the discovery that Alan was a workaholic, never arriving home before seven in the evening. The Claytons also kept a meticulous schedule posted on a bulletin board in their kitchen, detailing every job site and meeting where Alan would be each week, presumably so that his wife would know his whereabouts at all times. Of course, this allowed Martin to know where he was as well.

  With four minutes left in his visit, Martin was in the second-floor bathroom, inventorying the contents of their medicine cabinet in preparation for a future acquisition. The Claytons’ shelves were always well stocked with over-the-counter medications, more than two people could ever need. Pain pills, cold and flu treatments, skin ointments, and allergy remedies littered the shelves, and acquiring these medications had always been a fairly simple procedure. Though he would never think to acquire an entire bottle of Advil, for example, Martin considered it safe to remove a small number of pills from the bottle without anyone ever noticing. Sometime next week, after he had compared the Claytons’ inventory to his own, Martin would visit again, this time equipped with a supply of plastic containers that once held rolls of camera film, each marked with the name of a medication that he planned on acquiring that day. In addition to sorting pills by type, Martin would also mark each container with an expiration date since he wouldn’t have access to the original bottle at home.

  Completing his inventory, Martin reached out to shut the medicine cabinet, simultaneously glancing at his watch (3 minutes, 27 seconds remaining), when the sleeve on his left arm brushed up against Cindy Clayton’s electric toothbrush, standing upright at the edge of the sink, nesting in its charger. Cindy Clayton’s to be sure, for the ancient plastic toothbrush, nearly devoid of bristles, that was kept in a drawer below the sink was surely her husband’s. The toothbrush tottered for a moment, clinging to its perch, and then succumbed to gravity and toppled over, falling toward the open toilet bowl beside the sink.

  Martin saw all this happen, as if the events were occurring in slow motion, but did nothing, his left arm frozen over the empty charger and his right affixed by his side like a slab of beef. He watched in a mixture of awe and terror as the toothbrush completed two and a half turns before slicing through the water in the bowl as smoothly as an Olympic diver. A baritone plop, followed the toothbrush’s contact with the water, caused him to start out of his trance. Had he been more alert, there was a good chance that Martin could have caught the toothbrush on its way down, or perhaps stopped it from leaving the charger entirely, but the incident was beyond his initial comprehension.

  It was something for which he was completely unprepared.

  Contingency plans were Martin’s bread and butter, the secret to his success, the reason he was able to work with very little anxiety or fear. He had designed plans for every conceivable emergency and genuinely loved preparing and rehearsing them. He had fire-escape plans drawn up for each of his clients’ homes and rehearsed these plans yearly, as children are instructed to do when firefighters visit their schools in September with coloring books and blankets used to simulate smoke. He knew what to do in case of an earthquake and had identified the best place to stand in each of his clients�
� homes, even though the last earthquake of any magnitude to strike Connecticut took place on May 16, 1791 (a date Martin had committed to memory). He even had a plan of action in the event that he encountered a genuine burglar while visiting a client’s home (drop to the ground, cry and beg for mercy while pretending to be a visiting cousin from Pennsylvania with little familiarity of the home). Even this he rehearsed yearly in each home (practicing the actual crying and begging from the confines of his own home), because one can never be too prepared.

  But this situation was anything but conceivable. “The toilet lid should’ve been down to begin with!” he thought as he watched the toothbrush bob up and down in the bowl. “Why can’t people put the lid down? Why can’t people put the lid down?”

  But now what?

  With time running out (2 minutes, 40 seconds and counting), Martin had to make a decision. His choice seemed simple and yet impossibly difficult. He could remove the toothbrush from the bowl (thankfully he was wearing gloves, though the thought of reaching into the bowl still made him cringe), run it under hot water, dry it off and return it to the charger. No harm, no foul.

  Only there would be a foul, the foulest of fouls, because this would mean that despite any amount of washing, Cindy Clayton would be brushing her teeth this evening with bristles that had been bobbing in her toilet like a buoy. And though Martin had never come face-to-face with Cindy Clayton, he felt as if he knew her intimately, and in many ways he did. Short, blond, and freckled, her photographs bespoke a woman with an easy smile and a casual style. Little makeup, even less jewelry and a willingness to wear a wrinkled T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a baseball cap to many a family gathering.

  Martin couldn’t help but like her.

  In addition to knowing her eating habits, her musical preferences, and the ways in which she spent her money, he also knew the color of her panties (almost exclusively black, with a couple of jungle prints and a lacy little thong probably bought by her husband in order to spice things up), her bra size (34B), and the time of the month she menstruated (thirteen days ago). He knew that she was on the pill, kept a journal that was probably a secret from her husband, and had a vibrator in the bedside table that he suspected was not. With this knowledge, he felt as if Cindy Clayton was not only his client but was also his friend, and as such, he also felt that he had an obligation to her. He simply couldn’t allow her to use a toothbrush that was, in all likelihood, permanently contaminated with fecal matter.

  So his options were limited. He could remove the toothbrush from the home, but this would mean violating Rule #1:

  If the missing item will be noticed, don’t acquire it.

  Surely Cindy Clayton would notice that her toothbrush had disappeared, and though this might prevent her from brushing her teeth with the contaminated device, it all but assured that Martin would also be forced to discontinue the Claytons as clients.

  Discontinuing a client was nothing new to Martin. He had done it many times, but never as a result of a mistake on his part. Most often, a client would become pregnant, and with the prospect of children on the way and a less predictable schedule, Martin would be forced to end the relationship. This was never easy, for he typically invested an enormous amount of time getting to know his clients, so the loss was a great one. Not only did he feel as if he was losing a business partner, but he often felt as if he were losing a friend. It was never a happy time for him, despite the couple’s likely joy over the news. Typically, Martin found out about the pregnancy shortly after the client, and oftentimes on the same day. Early on in his career, he had made a point of searching the bathroom waste cans for evidence of a used home pregnancy test, and six times had found the remnants of such tests. Each time he could clearly see that the client was pregnant. Discontinuation would follow shortly thereafter.

  But to discontinue the Claytons at this juncture was not something that Martin wanted to do. He liked the Claytons immensely. He found them to be a neat, orderly, and extremely reliable couple that could always be counted on in terms of schedule and acquisition potential. The Claytons did not like change. They stocked their refrigerator and cupboards with the same items each week and always placed them in the same spot. They rarely switched brands, vacationed at the same Caribbean resorts each winter, and showed no signs of planning for a new family member. Losing the Claytons would mean losing one of his most reliable clients.

  It would mean losing a friend.

  This left Martin with only one option: replace the toothbrush. He would have to switch Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush for a new one. This meant that he would need to exit the house, acquire an identical toothbrush, and return before Cindy arrived home from work around 4:30. He knew from the calendar hanging in the kitchen that Alan was expected home at 5:00 that day for a dinner date with his wife at Chowder Pot, a Hartford-area restaurant, so as long as he was out of the house before 4:30, he would be safe. He quickly glanced at his watch again: 1 minute, 27 seconds remaining in his visit, and in the top right hand corner of the display, the actual time: 3:19. He was surprised to see that only a minute had passed since the toothbrush had taken its fateful dive. It felt like hours had passed as he had stood there, staring into the bowl. He would have just over an hour to acquire a new toothbrush.

  He thought it could be done.

  One more decision would need to be made before he could begin. Should he remove the toothbrush from the house in order to find its match, or should he instead commit to memory the type and model number, and perhaps take a photograph of it? Though memorizing the brand and model number initially seemed to be less dangerous than removing the entire toothbrush, Martin was worried that if he failed to return in time, Cindy Clayton would unknowingly use the contaminated toothbrush this evening, and there would be nothing that Martin could do to stop her.

  On the other hand, if he removed the toothbrush and did not make it back in time, he would have no choice but to discontinue the Claytons as clients. A missing toothbrush would likely be more obvious to a client than a missing china plate or pearl necklace. Therefore, the decision was clear. He would take the toothbrush with him. As much as he valued the Claytons as clients, he could not take a chance on Cindy Clayton placing this contaminated device in her mouth.

  With less than fifty seconds remaining, Martin went into action.

  Moving quickly, he scooped the toothbrush from the bowl, shaking it over the sink briefly in order to prevent dripping, and then slid it into his pants pocket.

  As he exited the bathroom, he made a mental note to burn these pants later that day.

  He then turned and headed for the rear door adjacent to the Clayton’s kitchen, scooping up his backpack along the way, removing his rubber moccasins, and relocking the door with the key that he had made seven years ago after locating the spare set in the Claytons’ empty sugar bowl. He was crossing the patio and squeezing between a space in the high hedgerow that bordered the rear of the Claytons’ property when the alarm on his watch began vibrating, indicating his time in the Clayton home was up.

  The Claytons lived in a relatively new housing development off Route 3 in Cromwell. A total of eight large homes lined the short street that ended in a cul-de-sac, and these were spaced sufficiently apart to allow Martin to exit the property without being seen. The Claytons’ backyard, which included a swimming pool and bocce court, was also enclosed by a high row of hedges, allowing Martin complete concealment when gaining entry through the back door. Best of all, the Clayton home, on the eastern side of the cul-de-sac, backed onto six acres of state-owned wetlands, complete with several walking trails. In less than ten minutes, Martin could safely cross through this forested area and make his way into a retirement village with plenty of visitor parking.

  As Martin crossed through the forest, picking up a trail that headed directly east toward his car, he began unconsciously thumbing the ten-sided die in his coat pocket. There were four other trails that he could have chosen, and on a typical day he would have rolled the
die before leaving in order to determine his route, but time was suddenly of the essence, and so he chose the shortest and most direct means of returning to his car, even though he recognized that this was breaking another of his important rules.

  He wondered how many more rules he would need to break in order to correct his mistake, and, more important, what consequences it might bring.

  With this thought in mind, he broke into a run.

  As he climbed the short hill leading out of the forest and into the parking lot, Martin began plotting his next move. He would need to locate a match for Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush as quickly as possible, and he had several alternatives. About two miles down the road, at the junction of Route 3 and Route 9, was a Stop & Shop, a CVS pharmacy, and a little farther down the road, a Walgreens, any of which could potentially carry the toothbrush that he needed. With about an hour before Cindy Clayton arrived home, it was imperative that Martin choose the correct store.

  After slamming his car door, tossing the incomplete sack of acquisitions into the backseat (another serious violation of routine), and starting the engine, Martin removed the toothbrush from his pants pocket (while keeping his latex gloves firmly affixed to his hand) and examined it more closely. About six inches in length, the toothbrush was primarily white, with green stripes stretching down opposite sides and a green on/off button in its center. The brand was Braun. Alongside one of the stripes were the words “Plak control ultra.” The upper portion of the toothbrush, containing the bristle attachment, was also white and marked by the phrase “Oral-B.” Other than these few distinguishing features, there were no other marks on the brush. No model or serial numbers. Martin was pleased with his decision to take the brush with him. Finding a match with this limited information would have proven difficult.