Yard Sale

Bill whistled his favorite happy tune as he hammered the yard sale sign stake into the hard dry ground, shaking it to make sure it would stand for several days. Even though the weatherman called for a chance of rain this weekend and the area needed rain, he hoped it wouldn’t come. Sales never drew much business when it rained. Trying to host a successful yard sale when it was raining was like trying to sell heat lamps in the desert. He glanced at the darkening evening sky and dusted off his pants legs as he strolled back to his plain white, A-frame farmhouse. The thick wooded hills behind the house looked like fancy trim around the impeccable mowed and trimmed yard.

He just sat down to a dinner of grilled cheese and canned chili when the delivery of the evening paper made the customary thunk on the side of the house. He hated the sneering, freckled faced delivery boy, especially when he had ask him to not hit his house with the paper so many times. Much to Bill’s dismay those requests had only resulted in the boy throwing the newspaper with an increased velocity of a major league pitcher, nearly knocking off a hunk of his nearly new siding every night. Bill muttered as he retrieved the paper from under the bush in front of his house about how he really needed to do something about that kid one of these days. But when you live out in a rural area just outside a fair-sized city, it was hard a heck to get kids or anyone make deliveries in his area. Besides this one wasn’t as bad as the last kid and Bill realized that getting a new paper boy might make things worse. That fact didn’t make Bill feel any better so he put it out of his mind until tomorrow.

He stomped back to the dimly lit kitchen, pushing his half filled dinner plate back as he spread the paper to the classified section. His kindly lined face intensely scanned row after row of ads and whistled happily when he saw where his ad had been placed. He preferred his ad to be near the bottom of the middle column so it would draw some people but not droves. Too many people made him nervous. He couldn’t visit with the people like he wanted.

He refolded the paper before tossing it on the end of the table as he finished his dinner. He put his dishes in the sink, deciding to do them tomorrow so he could go down into the basement to make any final adjustments to his tables of goods. He was enormously happy with the house’s spacious basement as a place to host all of his yard sales. It was one of the reasons he’d purchased the place five or six years ago. The vast white walls wore a fresh coat of paint and the floor a fresh coat of gray. He had installed many long florescent lights so people could easily see all his merchandise. He especially liked the double doors that allowed easy access from the driveway and it made it easy to carry out big pieces.

He switched on the lights to the basement by the kitchen door and walked slowly down the wooden stairs and stood on the landing. He scanned the large concrete area and looked with pride at all the items he had on six long tables that he’d placed in a horseshoe arrangement. He descended the stairs much like a monarch at coronation: knick-knacks, kitchen items and general household things that are so popular at yard sales were neatly placed all over the tables and some boxes on the floor. Bill did his best to make the sales room look neat, inviting and clean. Those were the kind of yard sales he liked and where he would spend most of his time and money when he went. His mother had complained often when the two of them would go to a sale that had very little to sell but acted like it was huge. He made sure that he always kept his sales stocked well stocked and truthful in his ads. He literally broke out in a cold sweat when he thought about the idea of ever running out of things to sell, but he quickly laughed at himself for thinking that. He knew he would never let his mother or anyone that attended his yard sales down by running low or not having a lot of good items to sell.

. . .

His alarm loudly sounded the next morning, jolting him awake. The alarm always made him jump because it interrupted his dream that he had every night since he had been seven that was both comforting and painful simultaneously. The loss of a parent, never easy, had been very hard on young Bill.

The dream started out the same every time. His mother laughed as she told him of all the great sounding yard sales they would visit that day. She bubbled and babbled about all the good items the ads listed and how wonderful it would be to own such things, even if they were used. Then Bill would see himself and his mother get into the family car. They laughed together as they pulled out on the road and headed for the first sale. The sale was pitiful and the man holding it was rude and didn’t have a fourth of the items he’d listed in his add. Bill’s mother told the nasty man what she thought of his false add before grabbing her young son’s hand and they got in the car and left.

In his dream, they drove to the next sale and it was all they could ask for. Nice house hold items and lot’s to choose from. His mother stood up and noticed a person she’d known a pushy antiques dealer, posing as just another customer and giving the nice lady a hard time over a price of something. This was the same woman that had cheated his mom out of a blue glass dish she had really admired at a sale earlier in the summer. His mother couldn’t afford to up the dealer’s offer to the seller like the other woman had done. She’d had to let the dish go to the repulsive gloating woman. To add insult to the situation, Bill and his mother had to listen as the offensive lady laughed at her for being poor. Bill had comforted his mother with a hug as they marched to the car arm and arm. Like any good mom, her child’s love and support brought his mother out of her funk and their day returned to happy time. Soon laugher had echoed in their car again; they continued to their next sale.

Then the dream turned ugly. A car crossing the centerline crashed into their car as Bill helplessly watched. Their yard sale goodies had spilled out of the car and all over the road as their car flew off the road because of the impact of the crash. Ruined. Bill saw his blood-covered mother not moving when the woman from the other car that had hit them staggered out of her smoking car and teetered around to his mother’s door. Bill screamed when it was the woman antique dealer who had been so mean to his mother just minutes earlier; now she’d killed his mother. The dream blackened. It always ended there with the raw sensation of death and loss. When his tear filled eyes popped open he found himself back in the present, awake, cold and utterly terrified.

Bill shook off the dream, said a quick prayer for his mother and jumped out of bed. He showered, dressed and grabbed a cereal bar as he looked out his living room window and cursed as he noticed a slight drizzle and then at the driveway: no one yet, which was good because he wanted to go down and prop the outside doors open for the people.

The tables popped to life with myriad shapes and colors when he flicked on the lights, rushing to get the both doors blocked open. Back in the basement, he saw he had left the white curtain open to the back room. He scurried over, closing it. No one needed to go in there, and he was sure that some nosy person might try if he left it open.

The sound of gravel crunching on the driveway gave him goose bumps of delight--he had customers; his sale had started! He hustled briskly to the door and went out to greet them. A young woman with a preschool aged girl stood next to their car as the young mother looked around for another sign telling them where the sale was. She was thin with straight hair that was clean as where her navy skirt and white blouse. The little girl she was helping out of her carseat was dressed in purple overall with a bright pink striped shirt. Her thin hair was pulled up into two swinging pigtails that bobbed up and down as the child moved and move the little munchkin did. Bill laughed as the woman tried to pull the hopping little girl to her.

“Hi, folks. The sale is around back here in the basement.” Bill had an easy big smile that usually instantly put people at ease. He was surprised when the woman didn’t return his smile and didn’t walk toward him like most people did; he was even more surprised that she looked at him as if she felt uneasy. Oh no, was she the kind of gal that thinks every man she meets is in love with her he reasoned to himself. Then he laughed at the idea of any young woman thinking that of him.

“In the basement?” She bit her thin lower lip as she looked down at her young daughter that she had by the shoulders. She come across as if she were debating on whether to get back in the car or come around to the back of the house. Before she could make up her mind, her daughter bolted toward Bill, her pigtails flying. It startled the young woman into instantly following her child as in a manner suggesting more of a protector, not as a parent, yelling, “Rachel!”

“Hey, I bet you like dolls, don’t ya?” The little girl stopped in front of Bill and smiled up at him as she played with the tiny gold necklace she wore. Bill, who loved kids, wished he had some of his own, but that wasn’t going to happen, not in this life anyway. He’d lived alone for most of his life and never dated. He didn’t see that changing at this stage in his life without a miracle, and he didn‘t believe in miracles much. He stared back at her tiny, innocent smiling face. He raised a graying eyebrow, smiled at her as he waited for her answer about liking dolls. Her mother to caught up to them before her daughter answered him and tried to smile at Bill but shot daggers at her little daughter for running off.

“Nope, but I like dinosaurs. Do you got any of those?” Rachel smiled broadly again. He could see that she missed some lower teeth. This gap made Bill melt like an ice cube in a frying pan as he tried to remember if he had any dinosaurs or not.

“Come on, Mama!” Just as her mother nervously tugging at her in-style frayed jeans jacket, Rachel ran around the corner of the house to stand in front of the open door.

“I‘m not sure if I do or not. little lady. Come on in both of you and look around while I see if I can find one just for you.” He turned, showed the door, and waited for the woman to enter. He waited a for a few seconds before following the mother inside in hopes it would help her feel more at ease. He began to wonder if this woman was wanted by the law or something the way she was acting.

The lady, her blue eyes darting to take in the whole room, captured the little girl’s hand in hers and quietly told her to not run off again. The little girl nodded, smiling. The mother smiled back at her, now looking around the room still uneasy. The surprise on her face told Bill she was blown away by the sheer volume of stuff he had for sale. Experience told him she would also love the low prices stuck on every item. The array of different kinds and colors of price stickers were amazing; in fact, very few of them matched. He also knew that the basement looked so much larger from the inside than the outside and how clean the white painted walls made the room look. As the stiffness of fear left her body, he was happy to see that her nerves where settling down. She browsed and picked up a few things to buy as the little girl played with a few toys out of the boxes on the floor.

Meanwhile, Bill cruised into the curtained-off room, looking in several boxes of all kinds of things for a dinosaur. When his hand hit something hard, he pulled out a large, plastic, painted T-Rex that had been played with quite a bit but still had a bit of life in it. Bill, smiling, dusted off the toy and pulled back the curtain. The mom and little girl were still there; but the mom jumped when he pulled back the curtain and made an involuntary ‘oh’ sound as she spun around. Bill couldn’t fathom why this woman was so skittish, yet she seemed nice enough to the child. His eyes fell on the little girl who had crawled under one of the tables.

“For you, little lady.” He moved toward them slowly, holding out the dinosaur so the little girl could see it. Her eyes brightened. She squealed as she jetted out from under the table and dashed toward him with her arms stretched out to grab the toy. He laughed as she cradled the ugly beast in her little chubby arms and kissed the toy.

“Oh, Rachel! Don’t kiss that until I can wash it and thank the nice man for finding it for you.” She patted her daughter on the head and smiled uncomfortably up at Bill.

“Thank you,” Rachel said before dropping to the floor and making growling sounds for the toy.

“How much do I owe you for the toy and all this stuff?” She swiftly laid the items she wanted on the empty table next to Bill and the curtained off room. He gazed down at the stuff and opened his small green metal cash box as she pulled her small black leather purse in front of her.

“Oh, the toy is free and let me see. How about $7.50 for the rest?” He smiled at her and then looked back at the girl playing on the floor behind her mother.

“$7.50? Are you sure?” Her slack mouth told him she was stunned that he charged her so little for such a large pile of things. Something wild out of her eyes told him that she wanted to run like hell but fought it back.

When he nodded, she quickly paid him, grabbed her stuff in one hand and her daughter‘s hand in the other.

“Don’t you need a bag?” He had turned to get one when she answered him from a the other side of the room. He was surprised at how close to the door she had gotten in such a short time and that she had her daughter with her.

“No, thanks. We’re late and need to run. Thanks again,” she said as she hustled out the door and had passed the basement window before he could answer. Bill shook his head and went back to the tables and straightened everything. He pulled a box out from under the table and added new items to fill the holes on the tables. He wondered as he worked just what was wrong with that gal and why she’d acted so freaky towards him but couldn’t come up with anything that made sense to him.

A half an hour passed until Bill heard the gravel crunching again; he clearly heard a car engine shutting off. Bill got up out of his lawn chair by the cash box and looked out the basement window. He saw an older, heavyset woman getting out of a car; he watched her heft a huge purse onto her arm.

She tugged harshly at a jacket she was poured into and attempted to smooth her dyed red, frizzy hairdo. Bill marveled at why any woman would pay good money to come out of a beauty saloon looking like an over cooked poodle. But they do and it doesn’t good sense to him. She didn’t hesitate on where to go as she headed to the back of his house like a dog on a scent.

“Good morning, is there anything you’re looking for today?” Bill smiled as he spoke. The lady looked at him but didn’t smile back. She did grunt as a way of answering him.

“If you have any questions, let me know.” Bill edged back and stood next to his cash table, watching the odious woman. He could tell that she was rough, uneducated and probably a bit of a chiseler since her piggy eyes gleamed with delight as she carelessly grabbed, poked and shoved the items she looked at. His thoughts were confirmed with her first question.

“Does this can opener work? I’ll bring it back, and I’ll want my money back if it doesn’t, you know.” Now she smiled at him with eyes narrowed as she let him know who was boss and who wasn’t. Her contemptuous round red face told him she had looked Bill over and decided that he was a wimp, a push-over. She probably hoped to push him into some pretty sweet deals just to get rid of her if she had enough time before the next customer.

“Yes, it works.” He leaned back against the wall casually and smiled.

“Do you have any Harvest China around here? I like that kind of china unless it’s chipped.” She smile broadly with sharp teeth that seemed more fang like than human as she carelessly tossed a stack of stuff on Bill’s cash table with a thud and waited for his reply.

“I might have some in my back room. Do you want me to check and see?” Bill leaned up from the wall and stood by the curtained doorway.

“If you can hurry it up. I don’t have all day. Another fellow in the paper has some of it too, and he‘s closer to the city. But I’ll give you top dollar for what you have because no one else will. It’s hard to get rid of, you know.”

Bill nodded, ignoring the obvious lie, and strode through the curtained area and quickly crossed the room so he could look out the window. He could see the nasty woman putting jewelry from one of the tables in her pocket and it really made him mad. He quickly rummaged though a few of the hundreds of boxes that littered every square foot of this room and produced a nice china plate just like she had asked for. He smiled and started back for the curtain when it flew back and the odious woman rushed in.

“Oh, here now? What do we have in here?” She licked her bloated lips as she glanced all around the room. Hundreds of every sized boxes, sacks and containers were stacked all around the room and neatly covering most of the floor but with neat paths through out the room. The open boxes had all kinds of things hanging out where she could see them.

“Oh, this is my staging room. You know, where I get all my new items ready to sell. Would you like to look around in here? You can see that some items already have price stickers on them and some don’t. I have the china you asked for, and there’s more in that box on the far side of the room if your interested.”

She grunted her answer again, darting past all the other boxes to dig in the one he’d pointed to. Bill smiled and watched her as he noiselessly pulled something out from behind a box nearest him. He sneaked behind the recklessly digging woman and struck her very hard on the back of the head with an long iron pipe. She groaned, crumpling into a heap on the floor as Bill stood over her. He rolled her over so he could see her face to see if she were alive. She was dead.

Bill stood, moved some boxes off the wall and pushed the wall aside. Reaching around, he turned on a dim light, grabbed a digital camera and took several pictures of the dead woman to add to his collection. Then he put the camera back in the dimly lit room and stopped for a few seconds to look at all the photos of dead women and some men that he had carefully framed and mounted on the walls of the hidden room. His eyes looked longingly at the huge, elaborately framed photo of his beloved dead mother. He had a massive shrine built around her photo where he had placed many silk flowering vines and small statues of women or girls dancing like his mother had loved to do a young woman and secretly for him. His mother would be proud of him for ridding the world of the kind of nasty, greedy people like the one who’d been so mean to her in life and for the one tha took her life and his too.

He blew a kiss to her photo, turned off the light and slid the false wall back in place. He quickly stacked the mismatched boxes back, grabbing the odds and ends that had fallen out in his arms. Usually he was very meticulous about sorting things but this stupid woman rushed him or this would‘ve been a much neater kill. His eyes flitted over a stack of open boxes that were closest to him and stashed the fallen items in the boxes with out any real care. He tossed some of the fallen sacks the cow had knocked over as she hit the floor on the top of the stack. He glanced back at his latest link in what he hoped was his newest supply of yard sale items. He smiled at the dead woman until he saw a small river of blood dripping into a puddle on the nice clean floor. He sighed and rolled his eyes as he searched for something to contain the gore for a faster clean up. His searching eyes fell on a plastic bag on a Christmas yard ornament and grabbed it off of the smiling five foot angle. He roughly wrapped her damp head so she wouldn‘t make such a mess as he took her out. Joylessly, he grabbed her puffy lotion slathered ankles, he pulled her toward a door at the far end of the room. He left her in an ugly, crumpled heap by the unused doors and shuffled back along the drag trail, straightening all the boxes he had bumped into or knocked over. He set a few sealed boxes in front of the bloody mess on his floor and he grumbled at having to clean his ceiling too from the gushing old cow’s blood splatter.

Bill hurried out to his cash table, snatching up her set of car keys and purse and set them behind the blocked open door before walking outside to the woman’s car. His eyes almost bulged out of his head when he looked into the backseat of the woman’s car: sacks and boxes of yard sale finds stacked everywhere! Bill let our a whoop of pleasure as he slapped his thighs and did a fast jig. This was the best surprise he had ever had in years! This haul meant that he didn’t have to kill anyone else for a good long while unless they were too piggish to live like this woman.

He revved the woman’s car and drove it around to the basement doors where he unloaded all the boxes and sacks over her dead body and into his staging room though the same doors he planned on taking her out of. He opened the second door of the basement so he could load her gelatinous body in the back seat. He grunted and groaned as the bulk of this woman was taking a toll on his older frame. As he leaned on the car to catch his breath from all the straining he had just done, he realized that he’d left her purse behind the blocked open door where anyone could find it. He grabbed the sloppy, old brown purse and drove her body-laden car to the abandoned rock quarry up the hill behind his house.

Stopping the car inches away from the lip of the water-filled quarry, he looked around the slick sides of the rock walls that had been quarried out years ago. The deed to the farm said it’d been abandoned since the 1930s. It had filled with water over the years. Since there wasn’t a fresh source of water to feed the 200 foot quarry, the water turned a sickening green year around: a perfect for hiding bodies and cars, as Bill well knew.

After looking down at the murky water, he put a rock in under the front tire and then got back in the car. He took it out of gear and waited to see if the rock would hold the car. Once he was sure the rock would hold, he gently slid out, closing the door after cracking the window just a bit. He knelt down next to the running car and pulled the rock out from under the tire. The car slowly rolled forward and ran off the edge of land and splashed into the water filled tomb. The green, filthy water soon covered the car, which sank to the bottom of the quarry as he stood and watched, smiling as the last bubbles of air slowed to a stop.

Bill, satisfied that his work here was done, reasoned, rightfully so, that no one would ever find that car or all the others, no matter how hard they looked. But someday the quarry would fill. Then he’d have to find another place to dump cars and bodies. But that was for another day, not now.

Delighted that he had all the items he would need to restock his yard sale for months after today, he was ready to talk to about yard sales to any and all customers he would have today. Bill whistled a happy tune as he made it back to his house and saw a woman and a man standing by the basement doors