“Rich Higgins didn’t put his garbage cans out this morning,” Margaret Bendixen remarked to her husband, Ed, that day as they ate their noon meal of grilled cheese sandwiches accompanied by bowls of tomato soup.
Ed, done with his morning’s worth of Fox News, was peering at the paper-and-ink edition of the Wall Street Journal.
“Maybe they didn’t have very much trash this week and he decided not to bother,” Ed suggested, lowering the paper far enough to look across the table at his wife.
“He always puts the trash out,” Margaret insisted.
Ed wasn’t having any of it. “Maybe they’ve taken a trip and are out of town for a day or two.”
Margaret didn’t reply to that. They had a doggie door in the house, but Chico was so tiny, she didn’t allow him outside without her being there to supervise in case a marauding hawk or eagle tried to snatch him out of the yard. She’d been outside for his first morning walk much earlier that day and had heard Rich banging around in the garage. That wasn’t at all surprising. That’s where he spent most of his time. The problem was, since then, there had been radio silence from next door.
“I haven’t heard a peep out of him since early this morning,” Margaret continued, “and his missing garbage day is really unusual. We’re none of us spring chickens, you know. Maybe Rich has fallen and hurt himself. Or maybe he’s had a stroke and can’t call for help.”
Ed rattled the newspaper in irritation. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Maggie,” he said. “Just because the guy gave you one of his fancy birdhouses once doesn’t make you Rich Higgins’s keeper. Believe me, he’s fine.”
“But what if he’s not?” Margaret persisted. “I think we should call 911 and ask someone to do a welfare check.”
“Don’t be silly. Asking for a welfare check because somebody didn’t put their damned garbage out in the morning?” Ed demanded derisively. “The cops will end up thinking you’re nuttier than a fruitcake. They might even haul you off to the funny farm.”
“But what if—” she began.
“There’s no what if,” Ed said, cutting her off. “If you’re so bound and determined to see whether something is wrong with the man, why don’t you go over there, ring his doorbell, and ask him to his face? But don’t be surprised if he tells you to mind your own damned business. I sure as hell would.”
With that, Ed folded up his paper, pushed himself back from the table, and stalked off into the family room. A moment later Fox News was once again blasting away.
After he left, Margaret cleared up the lunch things and loaded them into the dishwasher before sitting down with her final cup of coffee for the day. In the fifty-five years she and Ed had been married, this wasn’t the first time he’d implied that she was a busybody. Maybe she was, but sometimes that’s what was needed—people who weren’t so caught up in their own little worlds that they actually paid attention to what was going on around them.
Finally, shortly after three, Margaret slipped her cell phone into her jacket pocket and clipped Chico’s leash to his collar. Then she stuck her head into the family room. “Chico and I are going for a walk,” she announced.
“Have fun,” Ed replied with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Chico liked going for walks, but he objected when, instead of heading down the sidewalk on their usual route, they turned in at the very next driveway. With Rich’s car there, Margaret assumed he probably was, too. With the dog tugging on the leash, Margaret stood for a time with her ear plastered to the garage door. Hearing nothing, she finally pounded on it.
“Hey, Rich!” she called out. “Are you in there? Are you all right?”
She listened for a moment. When there was no response, she tried again with the same result. Dragging a reluctant Chico behind her, she headed for the front door. When she pressed the button, the doorbell rang deep inside the house, but no one came to the door. Rich had told her that they had long ago given up having a landline phone, but he hadn’t bothered giving Margaret his cell number, so there was no way for her to call.
She tried the doorknob. It was locked. That was hardly a surprise. Most people tended to keep their front doors locked these days, but what about the ones at the rear of the house? With a six-foot-tall block wall surrounding their backyard, Margaret and Ed often went to bed without bothering to lock the slider on the patio. Maybe Rich and Rachel Higgins didn’t lock theirs either.
Chico was still raising objections to what he regarded as an unwarranted change in itinerary when Margaret went around to the side of the house where a latched gate led into the Higgins’s backyard. Because they had a pool, it was a state-mandated self-closing one that took both hands to operate. Struggling with the leash, Margaret had to stand on tiptoes to make it work, but eventually she managed.
Since her own house was a mirror image of the one next door, Margaret knew just where the slider was. With the reluctant Chico having to be tugged along, she headed for the back patio. On the way she pressed her face to a bedroom window, trying to see inside, but she couldn’t see past the blinds. The slider wasn’t locked. When she opened it, she waited for a moment, expecting an alarm to sound. None did.
“Rich?” Margaret called through the narrow opening. “Is anybody here? Anyone home?”
From somewhere inside she heard a rumble of voices, but no one responded to her summons. After securing Chico to the arm of a wooden deck chair, Margaret eased the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. She was immediately surprised by how cold the interior of the house was. Someone must have mistakenly turned on the A/C as opposed to the furnace.
Why would someone turn on the A/C at this time of year? Margaret wondered.
Remembering Ed’s admonition about minding her own business, she sidled through the house. If the cops happened to show up, the worst they could charge her with was trespassing. She certainly wasn’t guilty of breaking and entering.
The interior of the house was neat as a pin. There was nothing out of place and no sign of a struggle. Still calling out for Rich, Margaret made her way down the hall, where she realized that the voices were coming from a television in the second bedroom. Since the door was closed, she knocked, but again there was no response.
When she pushed it open, other than the light from the flickering television screen, the room was bathed in darkness. As soon as she switched on an overhead fixture, she was appalled by the mess. Piles of clothes were scattered everywhere—on the floor, on the chairs. At first glance it reminded Margaret of the way her son’s room used to look back when Jed was in high school and before he’d morphed into the world’s most persnickety neatnik.
Turning away from the mess on the floor, Margaret allowed herself to take in the rest of the room, and that’s when she saw someone lying on the bed—a motionless figure completely covered by a flowered bedspread over the length of the body and with a pillow perched on top, over the face.
“Rich,” Margaret called nervously as she edged her way into the room. “Is that you? Are you all right?”
Gingerly, Margaret picked a path through the debris on the floor. Once at the bed, she reached out and tried to shake the person awake, but the still figure was stiff to the touch. With a growing sense of dread, she pulled back the covers. Rich was there, all right. His eyes were wide open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and in the middle of his forehead was a star-shaped hole.
Horrified, Margaret stumbled backward and dropped heavily into a nearby easy chair. Had it been one step farther away, she would have plummeted clear to the floor. Barely able to breathe and unsure if her legs would hold her, Margaret stayed in the chair long enough to wrestle her cell phone out of her pocket. Once she did, it took three tries for her to dial the simple three-digit number.
“Nine-one-one,” a calm voice said. “What is your emergency?”
“Come quick,” Margaret gasped. “My neighbor’s been murdered. He’s dead.”
“Is he breathing?”
The fact that the operator wasn’t really listening got Margaret’s back up. “No, he’s not breathing!” she shouted into the phone. “I already told you, he’s dead—cold, stiff, and dead.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Margaret Bendixen.”
“All right, Margaret. Units are on their way. Please stay on the line.”
But Margaret didn’t heed that last instruction. Instead she hung up and dialed Ed.
“You’ve gotta come quick,” she wailed into the phone once her husband answered.
“Where? What’s wrong, hon? Are you all right?”
“I’m not all right,” she sobbed. “I’m next door—in Rich’s bedroom. He’s dead, Ed, and Chico’s tied to a chair out back on the patio. I’ve called 911. The cops are on their way. You’ve gotta come fetch Chico before they get here.”
“Rich is dead? Are you sure? How?”
“There’s what looks like a bullet hole in his head. Maybe he committed suicide. Rachel isn’t here. Somebody needs to call her and let her know so she doesn’t come home and find him like this.”
“Hang on, Maggie,” Ed said. “I’ll be right there.”
By the time Ed showed up, clutching Chico to his chest, Margaret had her wits about her. She had known for years that Rich Higgins was left-handed. There were pillows on the floor on the left-hand side of the bed—pillows but no weapon. This wasn’t a suicide.
“Come on,” Ed urged, reaching for his wife’s hand. “We need to get out of here right now.”
“I think Rachel shot him,” Margaret managed, “and that’s what woke us up in the middle of the night. What we heard wasn’t a backfire, it was a gunshot. It was Rachel shooting Rich in the head!”
“We still shouldn’t be here. How did you get inside?”
“The slider was unlocked. I let myself into the house because I was worried,” Margaret told him, wiping away tears. “It turns out I was right to be worried.”
“Because he didn’t take out the trash.”
“Exactly.”
The wail of an arriving squad car blasted into the room. “Come on,” Ed said again, helping Margaret to her feet. “We’d better go outside to talk to them. They’re not going to be happy we were here first. They’ll probably think we’re the ones who did it.”