Death Next Door

© shaunl, via istock

One morning in late May, an unmistakable odor filled my backyard. Alarmed, I turned off the garden hose and looked beneath shrubs and trees, expecting to find a dead raccoon or squirrel, but there was nothing. I went inside and told my husband, John, that a critter must have demised. John said he had noticed the smell too. Later, when we were doing the lunch dishes, voices clamored close by. I peered out the window. Men in blue uniforms were swarming a tiny rental house next door.

“The police are over there,” I told John. With them were the property owner and her son, but there was no sign of their tenant, Doug, an EMT in his late fifties.

John looked over my shoulder. Lightning fast, he made a connection. “Have you seen Doug lately?”

“No,” I said and felt a dreadful certainty take hold.

The little house sits diagonally behind our brick two-story. Built as the garage for a single-family home—which itself had since been made into a duplex—the dwelling had been converted into living space suitable for one person.

John and I went outside. To circumvent the chain-link fence that separated the two lots, we pushed past the crape myrtle on our front lawn and stepped into the driveway of the rental property. We asked what was happening. At first, the officer said, “It’s a personal issue,” but when we asked bluntly if Doug was all right, he said, “He’s deceased.”

Amid the intensifying odor, we learned that Doug’s landlady had sent her son to see why a tenant who had paid his rent like clockwork for eight years was so late. The son had found Doug lifeless in bed.

While we stood there talking and squinting in the sunlight, men in hazmat suits and gas masks arrived. They opened the door of Doug’s house, and the stench poured out and knocked me back to the street.

“Do you know if he has any relatives?” an officer asked.

I didn’t. As for the last time I’d seen Doug, it had been weeks since he’d waved at me while he navigated the short driveway and parked his white Ford truck beside his house. The arithmetic horrified me.

“He’s been dead about a month,” the police officer said. In the house, he had found a receipt dated April 24. “Probably natural causes,” he said, but the M. E. would have to make a determination.

Yes, at least a month had passed since I had last greeted Doug across the chain-link fence: “How are you?” Barefoot, clad only in shorts, clapping the lid on his trash barrel, he’d looked woozy. “Not so good,” he said, and I shied away from his vulnerability and near-undress. The truth was, I was a little afraid of him. He’d had a brush with the law, and while I tried to be cordial, I kept a distance. So did he. He wasn’t quite a hermit, but solitary.

I said to the policeman, “I feel so bad about this. Not noticing.”

He was handsome. Sweat slid down his sharp cheekbones, but his uniform stayed crisp. “It happens,” he said, and that shocked me too.

“Did you find his cat?” I asked. “He loves her. He never lets her out.”

“We didn’t see any evidence of a cat,” he said.

I thought of the sweet-faced gray and white animal, Maisie, and felt despair.

Another policeman opened Doug’s mailbox and pulled out so many envelopes, flyers, and newspapers that his fellow officers’ shoulders finally shook. I realized they were laughing, as if to say, What’s next, a rabbit? I wondered why the mail carrier had not realized something was wrong.

The terrible show continued. The men in gas masks hauled out a sagging body bag, laid it on a gurney, and wheeled it into an unmarked van. Then the police closed up the house and departed.

Quaking, the landlady’s son stood beneath my crape myrtle and described...