Chasing Enlightenment

 

            Alright. I am a logical woman of thirty years. No wee ingenue. I determined to make sense of this mad data set.
            There are two doorways into this big old house. Both were locked while I was in the tub. Fred didn’t let anyone in. He’s too short, even if he decided to go rogue on me.
            There were six white roses and eight pale pink roses, cool and damp to the touch, tossed over my futon.
            There were no florist’s shops in Chase. It barely had a Dollar General and Sinclair Station. There wasn’t even a realtor. Buying this place was tricky, by the way.
            One possible, but very unlikely, way to get these cold roses to Chase was in a refrigerator truck, like a florist’s van. That was what I call a mathematically possibility.
            How did whoever get in the house? The doors were both still locked. I checked. Unknown. Did he have a key? Was he a previous resident? Seemed unlikely, as the house had been vacant for twenty years. Who waits for twenty years to make this kind of a subversive delivery.
            This left me stranded with the uncanny. I would so much rather it was a breaking and entering crime, of a rather comical nature.
            Going on the hopeful assumption that it was a breaking and entering incident, I decided that Fred and I would go locate the law around here. I knew there was a two man police dept. I had checked on that, and I had seen the office. It was in one of those industrial metal buildings at the other end of Chase.
            Then I thought of something. “Fred,” I said, “did you notice anything while I was in the tub? Like somebody coming in here somehow?”
            “Oh, you mean the flowers? No. Nobody came in here,” said Fred. I sure didn’t think he knew anything. He had been out cold, zonked.
            Why didn’t I just call the police, to make a report and get an officer to come and look at the evidence? Well, no cell service. I hadn’t called T-Mobile and gotten on their Starlink service yet. You can see the difficulty. You need some kind of access to reach them!
            So, Fred and I locked up the house, front and back, and headed out to the street to climb into my old Ford pickup, 1990, geriatric truck. Red and white. I hadn’t locked it. Maybe I would from now on. Inside the cab, on the passenger’s side of the seat, I kept a nice wooden box lined with towels for Fred to ride in. The seat belt went around the box. Fred has been around for a few years, and he needs his comforts. He doesn’t ride the dash under the window these days.
            We rolled over to Main Street and up to the other end of town. I parked in front of that very plain police office building. It was a weekday morning. They had to be open. I saw that the police car was parked around the corner beside the building. I assumed that meant someone was there to answer my pleas.
            The sign on the desk said Officer Mike Harald. I wondered idly if he had a last name too. I’m very funny. After a couple of minutes he came into the room from the back somewhere.
            He looked about 18 to me. The youthful arm of the law.
            In my opinion, Fred looked amused. But he kept his trap shut, thankfully.
            “Hello, ma’am,” said Officer Mike. “I saw your truck parked over in front of the old Lindel place. You buy that pile?”
            “Yes, I did, Officer, and there has been a bit of bother, as they say,” I said.
            “You could have called,” he said.
            “My phone doesn’t work here, yet,” I said. He smiled. He had heard this before.
            “What happened? Did somebody break in, or egg the house or something?”
            “I’m not sure. It’s a little too much for me to figure out on my own,” I said. “I was in the bathroom for a while, and when I came out and went into the bedroom, I found a bunch of roses thrown all over the bed.” I clammed up then and looked at him to see how he would take this. “And they were cool, and fresh too. Like they just came out of a refrigerator.”
            He didn’t look happy. “Ma’am, is this a joke? Are you here to make some kind of trouble?” he asked.
            “Officer, I don’t like it any better than you do. In fact, I will admit to being pretty freaked out by it. I don’t see any reasonable way for it to have happened.”
            We kind of stared at each other for a minute. Finally, he said, “well, let’s go over there and I will investigate, and make a report.”
            On the way back to No. 7, my house on 2^nd Ave, I drove by a woman walking down Main in a floor length gown and a big sun hat decorated with flowers. She glanced briefly at my truck and then looked down.
            What a strange town Chase was turning out to be. My stomach wasn’t sure what to think. I was feeling a little fluttery.
            I parked. Mike parked behind me. We all got out. We walked between my cacti on the cracked walk up to the porch silently. I felt like I was in a sort of defensive position with this officer, like I was  having to prove something to him.
            Well, I hadn’t been egged. I guess it was soap. On the small window, high up in that heavy old door was written in an old fashioned hand, “Find Me!”
            I burst out in tears.
            “I loved this house! Is this town crazy?” I sort of yelled.
            “Ma’am, hang on. Let’s go in and check it out,” said Officer Mike Harald.
            “Sir, my name is Terry Reilly. You may as well start using it,” I said, damply.
            “OK, Ms. Reilly. Let’s go in and look it over,” he said.
            I unlocked the door, and we went in. The living room looked just like I had left it.
            There were no roses in the bedroom. Not one!
            He looked through all the rooms. He wrote on a clipboard. He looked at me with a strange expression.
            Then, he left me and Fred there.