The Traveling Corpse

by Double Edge Press

  Annie let out a sigh of relief.

  The officers decided not to enter the hall through the front double doors. Rather, they chose to slip in the door on the east side of the building. This one was located near the stage and was the door closest to the Number Ten drawer. The six seniors were told to wait and watch from a distance. Since the temperature was dropping, they didn’t want to wait outside; they preferred to go inside the building to be warm and dry. The rain had stopped by now, but rain drops were still dripping from the dangling Spanish moss.

  Annie and Art, Barb and Brad, and the Vigeauxs circled around the building, passing the double doors on the front entrance of Old Main and entering the building on the opposite side, through the back door to the kitchen. From the pass-through window, they watched the deputies pull out the Number Ten drawer.

  By now, the second half of the Bingo games was in full swing. The lights had been out for less than fifteen minutes, and the Bingo players had waited patiently, knowing from past experience that the electricity would soon be back on. A woman that Annie only knew as Mary was taking her turn at calling the Bingo numbers. She announced, “O – 65.”

  Annie looked around for Karl. She couldn’t see him; she couldn’t help but wonder where he was. However, her main attention was concentrated on the two officers. Everyone else in the large room was, too, keeping one eye on the deputies and the other one on the Bingo screens. The officers didn’t say a word as they sorted through the drawer. Sgt. Menendez took out a few of the boxes and plastic bags that held decorations. The Bingo caller kept on with, “G-47,” then “I-29.” Deputy Juarez took out more boxes, stacking them on the edge of the stage as Annie had done earlier that evening. Then the two officers bent deeper into the drawer. When they finally stood up, Annie saw the young deputy shrug. She watched them replace the boxes, push the drawer shut, and start to leave.

  Annie couldn’t keep still. She whispered to Art, “They’re going. I’ve got to talk to them.”

  He tried to hold her back, but Annie slipped away and crossed the room in front of the stage. She stopped the two officers just as they were leaving. “What?” she whispered.

  “Nothing,” was all the sergeant said as she stepped outside.

  Annie followed them out, and Art was right behind her. He heard her ask, “What do you mean, ‘Nothing?’ Are you sure?”

  “We did not find a body in that drawer, ma’am,” said Sergeant Menendez, politely.

  The deputy, Joe, agreed, “Nothing but decorations in there, ma’am.”

  “But,” sputtered Annie, “I saw a hand, the right hand and part of her arm. I’m sure it was a woman’s hand. It was smaller than a man’s, and there was red polish on the nails. I don’t think the polish was even chipped—and a gold bracelet—and the hand was dead cold.”

  “There is no hand in that drawer, ma’am.” The deputy said it like he needed to explain it to a child.

  “But, there was! There was a dead person, or at least part of one, in that drawer! I was a nurse for a hundred years! For heaven’s sake! I know when something is dead!”

  Patiently, the sergeant replied, “There was nothing dead in that drawer, ma’am. Just boxes and a plastic bag.”

  Annie started to argue, but her husband put his arm around her and said, “Let’s go back inside, Annie. It’s cold out here.”

  Much as she loved and respected her husband, Annie ignored him again. She implored the officers, “No, don’t leave! Please, go look in that drawer again.” When they shook their heads, Annie begged. “Then will you at least look in the other ones? Please look in the other drawers. Maybe it’s in one of those. Please believe me.”

  Surprisingly, Sergeant Menendez took pity on her and said, “Okay, ma’am, we’ll look in the other drawers.”

  “All nine of them?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  While the Bingo caller announced, “B-11,” Menendez and Juarez began pulling out the drawers, one by one. Annie and Art shivered and watched them from outside through the window of the side door. Annie complained to her husband, “They aren’t searching very hard. They’re only pulling each drawer open a little ways and taking a quick peek.”

  Satisfied that none of the drawers held a dead body, the officers left after suggesting to Annie that she call them if and when she found the body again.

  Annie was far from satisfied, but she didn’t know what else to do tonight except to go back to the kitchen and say goodnight to her friends. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she began speaking to Barb, Brad, Verna and Von, and Art, too. “I don’t know if you believe me or not, but there was—or at least I saw and felt part of a dead body in that tenth drawer. Since the corpse has disappeared, I really think it would be best if you, we, don’t talk about this with anyone else outside of our gang. I’ll tell the Davis’s tomorrow. Promise me you’ll keep it mum, at least until I can find out what happened, where the corpse has traveled to.”

  They looked at her solemnly, mute. At least they didn’t look as though they disbelieved her.

  “Whether we like it or not, this is a real mystery, a crime has been committed, and I’m smack dab in the middle of it,” Annie drew in her breath and continued, “And, as my friends, I hope you’ll help me solve it. It doesn’t look like we’ll get much help from the law. Those deputies were polite enough, but they are probably laughing about all this and saying something like, ‘That little-ole senior woman’s got a screw loose!’

  “I may sound crazy to you, but I am the same person I was this afternoon at the bridge table when I bid and made that grand slam! I hadn’t lost my mind then. And I don’t have Alzheimer’s—at least, not yet! So, please, just love me, and trust me, and don’t talk about it outside of our gang.”

  * * *

  ‘The Gang’ was a tight group of four couples, all retired and all living in BradLee Park. Their friendship had begun a few years earlier. It began one Wednesday morning when the Andersens went to Old Main, as usual, for nine o’clock Coffee Hour. The Snowbirds, those who only stayed in Florida seasonally, were all back for the winter so the hall was crowded. Art and Annie managed to find two seats together beside the Bentons, an older couple that they knew from the water aerobics class. They introduced their daughter, Barb, who was recently widowed. She had flown down from New York State to visit her parents. Annie liked Barb right away, and the feeling was mutual even though Barb was some eight years younger. Before Coffee Hour was over, the Bentons invited Art and Annie to ride with them on Saturday evening to go to a spaghetti dinner. The youth of their church were putting on the meal to raise funds for a charity project. “We’re Presbyterians,” Art said, “but we’ll be happy to join you and eat Methodist spaghetti.”

  The round tables in the church fellowship hall sat eight. Three people were already seated at one of the tables, an older couple in their nineties and a middle-aged man. Art and Annie knew who they were although they had never been introduced. The older man smiled and motioned for the five of them to sit down, saying, “Please join us if you don’t mind sitting with Roman Catholics in a Methodist church. We’re the Bradkowski’s.”

  “The Bentons here are Methodists,” Art motioned toward them, then added, “Annie and I are Presbyterians; so this will be an ecumenical table.” Art shook Mr. B’s hand, “We’ve never had the pleasure to meet you before, Mr. Bradkowski, but we do recognize you and your wife, as we live in BradLee. Thank you for having the foresight to found such an outstanding retirement park.”

  Mr. B thanked Art, then introduced his son. Like his father, he was also nicknamed, Brad. Although he was at retirement age, he still enjoyed working as an electrical engineer at the Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Annie chuckled to herself, noting that before they sat down the tall athletic-looking Brad had easily moved so he was seated beside Barb. He was recently divorced; she was a broken-hearted widow then in her early 60’s. At the end of the dinner, Brad offered to take Barb to the airport on Monday, saying, “I’ll be driv
ing to the Orlando area anyway. I’d be more than happy to leave an hour earlier so you can make your flight.” That was the beginning of Annie and Barb’s friendship as well as the romance of Brad and Barb. Six months later, it was Annie and Art who helped them elope.

  The next fall, at a Woman’s Golf League Scramble, Annie and Barb happened to be assigned to the same team. The two other women making up their foursome were strangers. Verna was a snowbird from Maine. The younger woman was Edith Diane Davis, who, since childhood, had been known as DeeDee. She came to Florida from Ohio but was born and raised in East Tennessee. Verna and DeeDee were newcomers to BradLee, spending their first winter in Florida. The four women had an especially good time together; they thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. Barb suggested that they meet a few mornings later to play another round of golf. During that second game, they learned that they all played bridge.

  When they were walking back to the clubhouse, DeeDee said in her East Tennessee accent which she had never lost even though she had lived in Ohio ever since she married over 40 years ago, “I’ve had sech a good time with ya girls this mornin’. Would y’all like ta come ta my place tomorrow afternoon ta play cards? We’ve only got an old single wide trailer; it’s not very big, but we can play at my kitchen table. Will ya come? Say one o’clock?” Surprisingly, none of them had a doctor’s appointment scheduled. They quickly promised to be there.

  So, besides becoming ‘The Golfing Gals,’ they were also known to their husbands as ‘The Bridge Buddies.’ A few weeks later, they invited their husbands to go out to dinner with them. The women were delighted when their husbands enjoyed talking with each other. It was a most congenial group; so an easy and lasting friendship formed among the four couples. Art jokingly called themselves the ‘A, B, D, & V’s’—Andersen, Bradkowski, Davis, and Vigeaux. But mostly, they all just called themselves ‘Our Gang.’

  Chapter 2

  Wednesday, 5 A.M.

  That Tuesday night, Annie lay awake beside her sleeping husband in their queen-sized bed. She closed her eyes and said her prayers, asking God to lead her, to guide her, to show her how to prove that a crime had been committed. Her body was exhausted, but she couldn’t fall asleep. Her mind would not stop running the events of last evening over and over and over. Also, she wasn’t quite sure if Art and her friends believed her since she couldn’t produce a corpse. And, she was very sure those two deputies didn’t believe her. She kept asking herself, “Where has that corpse disappeared to? Who moved it? Where did they move it? Why did they move it? How did they move it?” The answers as well as sleep eluded her.

  Finally, after several hours of rehashing all the facts, she fell into a troubled sleep only to wake up suddenly before five o’clock with an idea that gripped her. She knew she had to act on it; so she poked her husband. “Wake up, Art!” Her husband of almost 50 years groaned and rolled over. She pulled the covers off of him and said, “Please, Art, get up. I need you to go with me.”

  There was Annie’s magic word: ‘Need.’ Art would always help her when she said she needed him. “Where?” he asked as he tried to pull the covers back over him.

  Annie pulled them off of him again, and said, “To Old Main. We’ve got to look in all those other drawers. We need to check them ourselves. Please hurry; I want to get over there before anyone else goes nosing around. You know, ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

  Art groaned at another of her old sayings. Slowly, he sat up on the side of the bed, stretched and yawned. When he had gotten his ying and yang together, he realized Annie was serious; she meant to find that body. He knew she was convinced that she’d seen something that was dead; although it was hard for him to believe it when she couldn’t produce a body. He ran his fingers through his wispy, sandy hair and tried to persuade her, “But, Annie, the deputies looked in the drawers—all the drawers, just like you asked them too.”

  “But they didn’t do a thorough enough job. Please help me. Hurry and dress.”

  Art shook his head and headed for the bathroom. When his wife set her Hungarian/German stubborn temperament to something, he knew she would not give up.

  “You’ll want to wear a sweater and a jacket. It’s cold out,” Annie suggested, bringing him a glass of orange juice. “The temperature really dropped last night after the storm. There’s frost on the ground this morning. Glad I covered my geraniums yesterday afternoon. They’d all be dead if I hadn’t protected them from that freezing air.”

  While Annie waited for Art to dress, she went out to their shed and backed out their cream-colored golf cart. Because the weather was so chilly, she pulled at the Velcro tabs to release the side curtains. She was snapping them down when Art came out. He did up the snaps on his side and slid into the passenger seat beside his determined wife. He pulled the long zipper down on his side as Annie did on hers. She handed him a mug of steaming hot coffee. “Brr,” he shivered, “This isn’t the Florida weather I like. The mug feels mighty good; it’s warming my hands.”

  In the early morning January darkness, they drove down their street of manufactured homes and then took the path that wound through the park. The huge old Live Oak trees with their dangling gray Spanish moss were quiet and still now, as though worn out from all the frantic dancing in last night’s wild storm.

  As she drove her golf cart for the half mile to Old Main through the lovely parklands of BradLee, Annie briefly forgot the tension of the preceding night, and she let her mind relax and think about this lovely place that she now called home. Not many manufactured home parks had spacious common areas like here.

  This reminiscing flashed through Annie’s mind as she and Art rode through the foggy darkness. Art sipped his coffee as Annie drove. He couldn’t help protesting once again, “Annie, why are you dragging me out before daylight? The clubhouse won’t be open yet, and we don’t have a key.”

  “But maybe it is! Maybe we can get inside. Anyway, I have to try. I can’t sleep anymore. We need to get in there before the Coffee Hour volunteers come to do their thing. Something’s wrong; I just know it. Please, Art, I need your help.”

  “You got it.”

  “Thanks, Honey. I know I can always count on you.”

  She parked the golf cart in the courtyard. They tried the door that led to the bathrooms; they were open, but the entrance from that hallway into the clubhouse was locked.

  “I’m not surprised,” Art said. “Security never locks up the restrooms, but they make sure the other doors are.”

  “Let’s go try the front doors.”

  As Art predicted, they were locked too. They tried all the doors on the east side: the door near the stage, the one into the Annex, the one into the Communications Office—all locked on that side of the building. Discouraged, they walked around the back to try the doors on the west side. Locked, but the screen door to the new patio off the rear of the kitchen was unlatched.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Art warned. “The screen door doesn’t have to be locked if the back door is.” However, to their surprise, the handle turned when Art twisted it. How good it felt to go inside out of the cold. Before Art could find the light switch, they heard footsteps. They held their breaths, and their bodies went taut. A scary thought flashed through Annie’s mind. She realized that as soon as the two officers started searching the drawers under the stage last night, then the person who killed that woman and stuffed her in the big drawer was tipped off for certain that Annie had seen the body. A cold chill enveloped her; she didn’t feel safe anymore.

  But, when the door opened, they both gasped with relief. From the faint glow of the security light, they saw their friend, Doc Davis, struggling to get through the door carrying a big electric roaster. He was as shocked to see them as they were to see him there at five a.m. on this cold January morning.

  Art stepped over and took the roaster from his friend. Doc flipped on a light switch and turned up the heat and then explained why he was there so early. “I’ve got to get the meat for
the monthly dinner out of the freezer and into a refrigerator to start defrosting. The dinner’s tomorrow night, you know.”

  “We’ll be there; we don’t miss one of those dinners,” Art said. “We bought our tickets last week at Coffee Hour.”

  Annie added, “You fellows cook up some very special suppers.”

  “That’s the purpose,” Doc said, “good fellowship, good food, and make some money for the park.”

  “Can’t beat that,” Art agreed.

  “And to make it even better,” Annie interjected, “we women don’t have to cook that night. What kind of meat are we having?”

  “Pork tenderloins. I was going to come over last night and get the meat out of the freezer, but then that storm came through and I didn’t feel like going out in it. What are you two doing here at this time of morning? If you’re working Coffee Hour you’re awful early.”

  “No, Annie’s got to check on something,” Art said, rolling his eyes.

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell him what happened last night?” she demanded, but there was warmth in her eyes and a softness in her voice.

  “You tell him, Annie,” said her husband. “It’s your story—all the way!”

  “I will,” she said, “but, oh, Doc, I need to apologize to you. We didn’t mean to leave you and DeeDee out of all the excitement. But, as you said, it was such a nasty evening, and well, it all happened so fast.”

  Doc interrupted her, “What are you talking about?”

  Art answered, “Just listen, Doc. You won’t believe what Annie found and lost last night.”

  So, Annie began her story of the corpse that moved. She related her whole mystery, stressing the fact that they not talk about it to anybody who wasn’t in their gang. She ended by quoting Shakespeare, “Something’s rotten in Denmark,” and threw a teasing look at her husband whose parents were born in Denmark. Seriously, she added, “and something’s rotten right here in BradLee! Whoever put that body in the drawer knows that I saw it; so I’m a little frightened.”