One for the Team

26 | after

The Moskowitz's residence is just another trailer in the middle of all the others in the clearing of Northwoods Forest. Except usually, when a police officer knocks on their door, they open.

Detective Solomon knocks again. The cigarette between his fingers drops to the floor and his eyes follow it. The grass is yellow around the Moskowitz's home and the patch in front of the steps that lead to the door is just dirt. Dirt and a cigarette butt.

Solomon bends down to grab it and throws it into the nearest trash can instead. He knocks again. Nothing changes. The detective looks at the window to his left. He waits a few more seconds before stepping aside and looking through it.

Inside, a fat white cat licks the leftovers on the plates piling up on the kitchen table. He probably licked the ones accumulating in the kitchen sink already. There is a paw print on one of the plates. More on the windowsill above it, where dead plants line up miserably.

There's a trash bin next to the fridge and it needs to be taken out, but the detective is looking for something else. Drawings. In every house he's visited, he's seen children's drawings proudly hung on the fridge by colorful magnets. In every house, except this one. There are none here.

He looks away. One of the chairs by the kitchen table has a tower of dirty laundry on top of it and none of it looks like that of an eighteen-year-old boy. The detective walks around the trailer and looks through another window.

"That can't be polite, can it?"

Solomon turns around. A woman sits on the trailer next door. She drops a peeled potato on the big bowl on her lap and starts peeling another one with a sharp knife.

The detective takes out his badge and shows it to her, "I'm Detective Solomon from the Northwoods Police Department. I'm looking for Mrs. Moskowitz."

The woman's face seems to age. She shakes her head. "What has the boy done this time?"

The detective slowly puts his badge back in the pocket of his blazer, "Does he get in trouble a lot?"

"That poor boy got in trouble the second he was born," the woman says, scratching her grey head with the back of her knife. "Every day that he doesn't show up dead somewhere is a miracle."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm afraid I'm not following."

"Damn right, you're not. The police should have knocked on this door years and years ago."

The detective is ready to sit down and listen if only there was some place to sit. He takes out his notepad and waits for the woman to open her mouth again. He knows she will.

"I remember the day they moved in like it was yesterday. It was just Kelly then, nineteen, pregnant and alone. She walked into that trailer with a couple of big suitcases and closed the door behind her. That's when the crying started. She cried every day during her pregnancy. Woke up screaming during the night too. Something horrible happened to her."

"You never tried talking to her?"

"Oh, I tried, alright. That very first day, I went and knocked on her door. I had made her an apple pie. I left it on the front steps of her trailer. When I went to check the next morning, it was still there, butchered by stray dogs. I tried again later. Tried for years. I've never baked as many pies as I did for that girl, and if there are more dogs in Northwoods than in any other town, it's because she never took any of them."

"She didn't leave the trailer?" The detective writes agoraphobia on his notepad.

"Only when the baby was born. That night, a taxi stopped down there by the laundromat. I watched her walk towards it through my window. She was a beautiful girl then. The kind you see in magazines. The kind that has men doing crazy things."