Willow Pond

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Chapter Forty-Eight

About fifteen minutes after receiving an anonymous phone call, two policemen arrived at 31 Jones Street in San Francisco. The caller said it was in regard to a terrible stench emanating from that house. During the time between the phone call and the arrival of the first police car, the entire neighborhood congregated outside the house. They separated so the police car could park, then gathered around again. As he got out of the car, the first cop searched the crowd, asking which one of them had made the call.

They told the cop the house had been deserted for at least eight months. The owner, George Strauss, had an odd, but harmless reputation with his neighbors. The grass was waist high and the shrubbery so overgrown the first cop had to shove it out of the way with his nightstick as he and his partner made their way to the front door. They knocked, just in case, but no one answered. When they tried the door knob they weren’t surprised find it was locked. They gave it a few good kicks, then heard a loud crack as the door gave way. They stepped over the splintered door and found themselves standing in the middle of a dusty living room, its walls laced with filthy cobwebs.

The second they stepped inside they were hit by the putrid stench. The first cop gagged and clamped his hand over his nose and mouth in an attempt to dilute the stink. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen, but when he walked into the room, he realized it was coming from the basement. Fighting natural instincts, he followed the smell down the stairs and discovered the decomposed body of what appeared to be an adult male. It lay on the floor, the head a pulpy mess and the skin black with rot.

The cop took the stairs back up two at a time. In the kitchen he found his young partner vomiting into the dirty sink.

“Is there a dead body down there?” asked the second cop, wiping a sleeve over his mouth.

“How did you guess?” the first cop snarled. He pushed his partner toward the outside, needing to escape the smell. They stepped back over the wrecked door and into the sunlight, not meeting the curious eyes of the neighborhood. He turned his back to the crowd and spoke quietly to the younger cop. “Go back to the station house and tell them we need the medical examiner. Could be a homicide.”

The crowd stepped aside for the younger cop as he backed his car out of the space and drove away. The first cop faced the onlookers.

“No one goes in, you get it? This is now an official police crime site.”

The people immediately buzzed with words like “murder” and “dead body”, though none of them had seen anything yet. The reek spoke for itself. It was so thick, even outside in the fresh air, the cop felt like he’d never be able to wash the stink off. He walked to the corner of the building, looking for any kind of clues and breathing in relatively clean air.

On his way back he heard a commotion coming from the west side of the house and headed toward it. Could it be vandals? At first the only thing he saw was a birds’ nest on the ground, holding three dead baby birds. The mother bird was nowhere in sight. She’d obviously abandoned her babies a while back.

Then he heard a scream from inside the house. He ran inside, braving the smell again. Downstairs he discovered two teenage boys standing over the body. One of them looked as if he’d been about to search the corpse’s pockets, but had stopped short when some sort of liquid oozed out of the blackened mouth.

“One move and you’re both under arrest.”

The boys ran for the stairs, but the cop was too fast for them. He tripped the first boy, who fell flat on his face, and grabbed the other one around the waist, then handcuffed them together and pushed them to the floor. They were still there half an hour later, looking slightly green, when the medical examiner arrived.