Mr. Fenway

He always missed the turn.

This part of town was flat and open, the streets laid out on a simple grid. Numbers ran east and west. Letters ran north and south. The house was only two turns off the freeway; right on 5th, then left on E Street. Yet Peter missed that right turn every time.

After circling the block, he pulled up along the curb and switched off the ignition. As he leaned over to grab the keys from the glove compartment, he paused to peer at the house through the passenger window. He was just here a few weeks ago, but it was uglier than he remembered. Exiting his truck, something caught his eye across the street. It was Mrs. Miller waving from her front window. He returned a quick courtesy wave before turning back toward his property.

What was he thinking when he bought this place? Mike had talked him into it. Mike owned four rentals at the time and lost all of them one by one when the foreclosure crisis happened in 2008.

Peter shook his head. Just because you could buy another house, doesn’t mean that you should. Of course, Mike wasn’t the only one who overextended themselves and the entire country bore the consequences.

Peter was proud he had not contributed to the “Great Recession,” but that wasn’t enough to overcome his absolute disdain for being a landlord. Cleaning up after tenants, sacrificing entire weekends to repairs, dealing with neighbors like Mrs. Miller, he hated all of it. A few years ago, the market picked up enough that he could sell and walk away with some cash. He was in the process of listing the property when his tenant was murdered. Brutally. And just like that, he owned a goddamn murder house.

Had enough time passed? In other parts of the city where bidding wars were the norm, a motivated buyer would not be deterred by an unsolved murder. But here? He wasn’t so sure. He took in the view of chain link fences, faded paint, and driveways peppered with old cars. This neighborhood did not look like it had put its past behind it.

Peter put his key in the door and took a deep breath before turning it. At best, every turnover involved several hours of cleaning, but most required a few days of tedious labor. Last month the house had been broken into and Bruce, his tenant, was unnerved enough to immediately give notice. Now the guy was ghosting him. He had never had a tenant just forfeit their deposit like this and it worried him.

The damage was hard for Peter to process. The light fixtures were either dangling from the ceiling or lying on the floor. The carpet was ripped up at all the corners and sections of baseboard were torn from the wall. The heat registers were pulled out and strewn around the house. In the kitchen, the stove and refrigerator had been pulled out, damaging the floor in the process. And, of course, he had not cleaned, Bruce had not even finished moving out. There were random pieces of furniture and debris in every room.

He heard some noise outside then a knock on the door.

It immediately opened and Mrs. Miller called out in a singsong “Hello? Peter?” followed immediately by, “Oh my!

What happened in here?”

She made small noises of disapproval as she made her way toward him, “Peter! I can’t believe Bruce left it like this.”

Peter shrugged his shoulders. He could believe it, he could believe anything. “Any chance you are in contact with Bruce?”

“No, the last time we spoke was after the robbery, when I told him about Mr. Fenway.”

Tom Fenway, the tenant turned corpse from three years ago.

The police said he was a dealer and that someone killed him for his stash. “Why…why would you do that?”

Mrs. Miller pulled up her shoulders and narrowed her eyes, “The question is why wouldn’t you have told him, Peter? It doesn’t seem right that you rented him this house without telling him.”

“Anyway, a couple of days before the robbery, I saw a man that used to visit Mr. Fenway. I thought it might be related, so I let Bruce know. He is such a nice young man, I didn’t want anything to happen to him.”

“A nice young man? Look at what he did.”

Mrs. Miller shrugged, “I’m sorry Peter. If you need any help, my grandson is looking for odd jobs.”

He shook his head, “I’m good. Say, what did you tell him about what happened.”

“Oh,” she looked around the room, “Just that whoever killed him was looking for the cash he had hidden. People say he had hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden in this house.”

“In THIS house?” Peter shook his head. Who in their right mind would live here if they had that kind of cash? He quickly realized Bruce had been looking for the cash. In the ceiling, under the carpet, behind the stove.

Peter glared at Mrs. Miller, “Do you think it's possible that after hearing that story, Bruce did all of this to find the money?”

Mrs. Miller’s eyes widened. “Do you think he found it?”

Peter shook his head. “No, because there is nothing to find.”

After making an exhaustive list and taking pictures, he climbed back in his truck and reached over to the glove compartment again. He replaced the keys and pulled out a compact black book. Holding it in his hands, he sat back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes for a moment before slipping the elastic off that held the book closed. Then he opened it and logged his mileage and the point of his trip. Over the years he had filled over half of the book, those pages were loose and lightly textured from the pressure of his pen, the other half was still smooth and crisp. Anna had given him this book, she meant it to be a journal. He could clearly remember her disappointment when she discovered he was using it to track expenses. That might have been when she gave up on him.

“1/5/15,” He wrote, “5.6 miles, final tenant walkthrough without tenant.” Well, that doesn’t quite do it justice, he thought and added “FML” in bold lettering.

The next day, he hauled the salvageable stuff to the curb, hoping it would be absorbed by the neighborhood. Then he began filling the back of his truck with trash.

Next was reinstalling the carpet and measuring for the new baseboard. He had forgotten his knee pads and cursed as he crawled around on the floor. By the time he got to the bedroom, his kneecaps were burning and his shoulders ached.

He sat back against the wall and assessed the room. He was still deciding if he needed to paint it. And then the tiniest detail caught his eye in the closet. One of the boards that supported the closet shelf was attached with screws that did not match the other two supports. Mrs. Miller’s fantasy about the money came to mind, but he dismissed it even as he rose from the floor and picked up his impact driver. Scoffing at his foolishness, he made quick work of removing the screws and pulling the board loose. He laughed when he saw it. Behind the board, someone had carved out a crude cubby.

And inside, were six messy stacks of cash, different denominations held together with rubber bands.

He pulled the bundles out of the cubby and sat down on the floor with them. He couldn’t stop laughing. It all seemed so funny. How much he hated this house. That Tom was killed for a few stacks of drug money. That Bruce had ripped the place apart looking for it. In the end, it added up to $20,000 and some change. The money itself wasn’t enough to change his life, but somehow the discovery of it had.