15

“You there!”

Walking his bike on a gravel path skirting the side of Vindemia’s main house, Jack looked up. An older woman was calling to him from a balcony. Wisps of her graying hair and her light bathrobe were being blown by the wind.

“Come here!” She pointed to an open, arched doorway beneath her balcony. “Go in there. Come up the steps.”

Overhead the ten huge flags on the roof were snapping imperiously in the wind.

He leaned his bike against a wall, went through the arch and up the stone stairs in the wall of the house.

She was the woman he had seen possibly weeping in the back of the chauffeur-driven stretch Infiniti the day he arrived.

“Do I know you?” she asked him. “I mean, have we done this together before?”

“What?” Jack asked.

“I need someone to take out my rubbish,” she said.

“Oh.”

“People keep forgetting,” she said. “To take out my rubbish.”

“I see.”

“I need this help.”

“Okay.”

“You look like the last boy who used to help me.”

“We’re infinitely replaceable,” Jack said. “I’m glad you realize that. He was my friend.” She stuck a bill into the pocket of his shorts. “Will you be my friend?”

“Sure.”

“It’s just this bag over here.” On the floor of the balcony near the French doors was a green garbage bag. “People keep forgetting it, you see.”

“I see.”

“If you’d just dispose of it for me.”

“Sure.” When he picked the bag up its contents clanked.

“That will be all.” Looking straight ahead, she went through the French doors into the house.

Jack found the latticed yard behind the kitchen of the house where the many covered rubbish barrels were placed in wooden, hatched bins. The area was as scrubbed as a surgery.

Jack lifted the garbage bag into a barrel.

Then he opened the garbage bag.

Within were many vodka bottles, a few sherry bottles, port bottles, brandy bottles, all empty.

There were also many differently shaped pill vials, all empty. The names of the prescription drugs on the typed labels meant little or nothing to Jack. Instructions limited the number of each pill taken daily and usually recommended taking upon rising or at bedtime. They were prescribed by various doctors, MacMasters, Donovan, Harrison and Chiles.

All the prescriptions were for Amalie Radliegh.

Jack would have thought the woman had just cleaned out her medicine chest of years’ accumulations, but all the dates on the prescription labels were within the last three weeks.

He retied the top of the garbage bag and closed the hatch.

Walking back to his bike, he took out the bill Mrs. Radliegh had stuffed into his pocket and looked at it.

It sure was an easy way to make $50.