MOUSETRAPS

Picture a strip mall of four storefronts in a small town somewhere in Wisconsin, with dingy, beige-gray exteriors that became almost invisible against an overcast autumn sky. On the leftmost side was Elite Dry Cleaning, a modestly prosperous family-owned business for three generations now—although at the time, I believe it was still only on the second. Next to it was D.F. Donaldson Insurance, which replaced the drug store that used to occupy this space before the pharmacy in the new chain supermarket drove it out of business. The third storefront was Wise Owl Wine & Spirits—you can probably imagine the sign, featuring a cartoon character in a graduation cap and spectacles—which managed to remain competitive with the supermarket’s extensive liquor department only by becoming much less strict about asking its younger customers to present a valid ID. And lastly, on the far right, was Jakobson’s Hardware. Owned and operated by a man whose name you can probably guess.
       The hardware store’s original location had been right in the heart of downtown, in one of the cream-colored brick buildings that dated back to the earliest part of the twentieth century. But Jakobson, and many other local small business owners like him, had been driven out some years before by a wealthy consortium from Chicago who wanted to redevelop the “historic district.” Grumbling, Jakobson moved to an available position in the newly built strip mall. There had been a period of adjustment, but business had not suffered too badly. He was still on Main Street, after all, albeit now on the very furthest extremity of it; there was nothing past Jakobson’s Hardware but the road out of town.
       When Jakobson told me the story I’m going to pass along to you—a story I did not hear until several years after I played my unwitting role in it, I’m afraid—he said he couldn’t recall the first time he saw the poor young man at the center of it all. Even in the good old days before redevelopment and the population swell, the town was never so small that everybody would have recognized everybody else on sight or by name. Moreover, I can personally attest to how Jakobson made a point of keeping out of his customers’ business unless someone specifically asked for his opinion or expertise. He ran the business of the hardware store as close to a one-man operation as he possibly could, but he did hire a handful of assorted local teenagers part-time for hauling and lifting and other physical tasks, and for much of the cleaning; I was one of these part-timers, and more than once my employer advised me not to nose into my neighbors’ affairs. “You can learn a lot about a person by what they buy at a hardware store,” I remember him saying with a wink. “Maybe too much.”
       But, like any small-town hardware store, even in these modern times, Jakobson’s had cultivated a clientele of old duffers: the retirees whose endless free time allowed them to idly congregate there. They were generally not big spenders, but they were consistent customers; if they misplaced a screwdriver, they were as likely to just pop down to Jakobson’s and buy a new one rather than turn the house upside down searching for it. Even when they didn’t need anything, they might stop in simply to shoot the breeze with whichever other old duffer happened to be lingering in the aisles, and they would often buy a candy bar at least, or a cold can of pop from the cooler on their way out. And it was one of these duffers—Leonard, by name, a heavyset man in tinted bifocals who wore both suspenders and a belt—that first called Jakobson’s attention to the young man.
       “Some tenacious mice, I figure,” Leonard whistled conspiratorially as the bell over the front door tinkled, confirming that the young man had left the store.
       “What’s that?” Jakobson asked.
       “Fella just left,” Leonard said, gesturing broadly towards the door. The old-timer was leaning on the counter, his eyes fixed on the small selection of fishing and woodworking magazines by the register. “Seen him in here a couple times now, buying traps every time.”
       Jakobson had indeed just sold the young man a two-pack of spring-loaded mousetraps—not the modern plastic ones that look like little shark’s heads, but the big old-fashioned kind with a flat wooden base and firm metal wire. He supposed he might vaguely recall having seen this same individual buying mousetraps before, but again, Jakobson always found it intrusive to give his customers’ purchases too much unasked-for thought.
       But Leonard seemed to be prying for his opinion, so he hastily formed one and gave it. “Probably,” Jakobson said, “he lives in one of those old houses on Holland Avenue.” Autumn had just broken cold suddenly, sending mice to seek warmth and shelter wherever they could get in.
       “Don’t think so,” Leonard said. He stopped perusing the magazine rack—had he ever really considered buying one that day, or was it just something to occupy fifteen minutes out of the rest of his life?—and walked over to the glass front windows of the shop. “See him walking into that new high-rise?”
       The “new high-rise” directly across the street from the strip mall was only four stories tall and already a year old, but that qualified on both counts in this town. It was called, rather ostentatiously, The Regent. Part of the Chicagoans’ redevelopment strategy involved building some large apartment complexes around the edges of town. These were designed to attract younger commuters who worked in one of the surrounding towns or in the city, but were priced out of living there. Each unit in these buildings was small but modern, each had its own small balcony, and they came with on-site amenities and an outdoor meeting space with picnic tables. A post-collegiate dormitory, in a sense.
       Leonard shook his head disapprovingly. “Fancy new place like that crawling with mice already?”
       Jakobson wondered. Grigg’s Auto Repair used to occupy the lot across the strip mall where The Regent now stood. Jakobson had never heard of the garage ever having a problem with mice, although he supposed it was possible they had somehow been agitated or drawn in by the building’s construction. Or maybe there had been a pest problem all along, and this had sweetened the deal for Grigg to sell the lot to the Chicagoan developers. Of course, as I keep telling you, Jakobson couldn’t say for sure because he kept out of other people’s business, particularly Grigg’s business. The garage’s owner had been a semi-regular customer at Jakobson’s, but Jakobson had not liked him. He’d been polite to Grigg as he would be to any other customer, but he privately felt Grigg overcharged for his services and upsold on repairs every chance he got, and that he wore the oil stains on his overalls and the grime under his fingernails slightly too ostentatiously, like it proved something that his work made him so dirty.
       Grigg had also been, in Jakobson’s opinion, too crass about the cemetery next door. Every time there was a burial, for example, Grigg would make a crack about “a new stiff” moving into the neighborhood and laugh as though he had just come up with this bon mot on the spot.
        Willow Heights Cemetery had been established shortly after the town itself and deliberately placed on a slight hill on the outermost rim of the town limits with the intention of putting some respectful distance between the living and the dead. But over the years, the town had swelled outward and encroached on the cemetery’s edges, and the grounds were unable to expand in the opposite direction owing to wet and marshy runoff land. To serve a growing population, then, newer plots and markers were packed into orderly, increasingly cramped rows surrounding the older and more spread-out graves at the top of the hill. The oldest tombstones tended to be more ostentatious than their modern counterparts, and their weight had made them sink into the soft soil of the hill over the course of the century so that they had the tendency to lean at slight but noticeably crooked angles. A single, massive, and old leaning willow provided shade to these earliest of the town’s deceased.
       The Regent, like Grigg’s Auto Repair before it, had been built right up against Willow Heights, separated only by a short wrought-iron fence, and so tenants on the higher floors facing it must have had a commanding view of the entire grounds. A graveyard for a backyard.

But back to the young man and his mousetraps. I never saw him myself, or if I did, I never registered him as particularly noteworthy. Jakobson described him to me after the fact as rather rodentlike himself: thin and skittish-looking, he wore glasses with thick lenses and wire rims. He only ever paid for his purchases in cash, so there was never a check or credit card to learn his name from even if Jakobson had been curious. In fact, the customer never carried any bill larger or smaller than a twenty, and for some reason they were always crumpeled up into a ball, which Jakobson would diligently smooth out and make change for. The young man never bought gum or a magazine or anything else on these initial trips—only mousetraps.
       Leonard observed him numerous times. “Disgraceful,” he told Jakobson once, after the young man had left. “I’m sure they charge the kids in that building an arm and a leg’s rent, and on top of that they gotta shell out for their own mousetraps?” Jakobson wasn’t so sure: to his knowledge, none of the other residents of The Regent came into his store to buy traps. But that was none of his business and certainly none of Leonard’s.
       Thanks to Leonard pointing him out, however, it became impossible for Jakobson not to take special notice of the young man and his consistent buying habits, whether Leonard was there or not. Which is why Jakobson was so surprised one afternoon in early December when the bell rang and the young man entered, but he did not head directly for the small pest control section in the third aisle as he usually did. Instead, he grabbed one of the small metal shopping carts Jakobson kept out front and began to browse elsewhere in the store with a nervous, uncertain look on his face.
       The young man had bought nothing but mousetraps for weeks; what could he need a cart for all of a sudden? Despite Jakobson’s distaste for nosiness, he couldn’t help but passively eavesdrop for a few minutes as the old wheels squeaked up and down the aisles in the back, the metal of the basket clattering as some new item was dropped into it. Just then, another customer came to the counter with two buckets of paint and in need of some assistance, and Jakobson completely put the young man out of his thoughts. Jakobson was only too happy to answer this new customer’s questions about primer and curing time, since he had been explicitly asked. And just when this customer had paid for her paint and left, the young man wheeled up to the counter behind her, pushing a full-to-the-brim cart.
       Its contents included a large saw, a heavy hammer and a lighter one, a starter set of screwdrivers, a power drill, some small boxes of nails and screws of many different sizes, a tape measure, some duct tape, and various other odds and ends, seemingly selected without much consideration. It was as if, Jakobson told me, a person who had never touched a toolbox in his life had suddenly been possessed to establish an entire carpenter’s workshop from scratch, and without having made a list ahead of time. All of it was paid for with handfuls of wadded-up twenty-dollar bills, more cash than Jakobson had seen at one time in a good long while.
       As it turned out, this young man would spend much more money in Jakobson’s in the days and weeks to come. Sometimes he bought tools—more specific tools for some unknown, more specific job. Once he bought a pair of sawhorses. He seemed to have discovered he needed a level and first bought a simple spirit level, then returned for a more precise carpenter’s device several hours later. Always more nails, more screws, although he had evidently discovered or decided he needed only a single type of each instead of the assortment he’d bought initially. His purchases were becoming more targeted and precise over time. Cost was, however, evidently no object—there seemed to be a limitless supply of crumpled twenties in his pockets.
       “I’ve got it,” Leonard said, slapping the counter after watching the young man walk out the door again one afternoon. “He’s the handyman for the building. Must take care of the pest control as well; that explains the mousetraps.” In the interests of ending the conversation, Jakobson conceded it was possible, but privately he noted a hole in Leonard’s theory, one you might have noticed as well: if the young man were working for The Regent in any official capacity, he would probably have had a credit card or checking account linked to the building’s owners; or if he was paying cash out of pocket, he would want receipts for reimbursement. And though Jakobson disliked making assumptions about his customers, this frail and nervous young man did not exactly resemble what you or he or anyone else might expect a craftsman who worked with his hands to look like.
       Jakobson also didn’t think routine maintenance and repairs would require quite so much wood. The young man bought it in different sizes, different shapes. Jakobson’s was no full-service lumberyard, but it maintained a back wall with a variety of basic options suitable for most ordinary household jobs or projects. The young man bought up wood as indiscriminately as he bought tools, as though he wasn’t sure what he’d need until he actually set about building whatever it was he was working on. He seemed to favor larger, broader planks of various thicknesses at first, but eventually seemed to shift to varieties of two-by-fours. Because the customer never asked any questions or signaled that he needed any assistance, Jakobson’s sole point of interference was to occasionally ask the young man if he’d like any help carrying these heavy loads across the street to The Regent; that’s one of the reasons why, after all, he employed me and the other high school students. But the young man always flatly insisted he could handle it himself, even if it required several trips. He always returned to The Regent alone.
       But as he would open the door to the building, he’d invariably look toward the cemetery before entering. Often it was just a brief, furtive glance, but now and again he would pause and spend some agitated time in seeming contemplation of the older, taller, slanting gravestones dating back to the dawn of the town. Now, Jakobson, of course, could only have made this observation to share with me later if he’d been in the regular habit of watching the young man after leaving his store. He would have been able to do so quite discreetly; the front door and windows of the hardware store faced the front door of The Regent across the street to the right, and the cemetery to the left. I have never pointed this out to Jakobson, however; he would probably think I was accusing him of spying and become embarrassed or defensive. But it’s notable to me only because my former employer was normally so scrupulous about keeping his professional distance from the clientele. So when I speak of Jakobson wrestling with his own curiosity, it is an inference based on knowing the man rather than any confession he made.
       I imagine it was the increasingly tortured look Jakobson described on his customer’s face that stoked his curiosity. When the young man had still been buying mousetraps, he looked only flustered and irritable. But in his new course of buying endless tools and supplies and lumber, his face turned grayer, his hair thinner, eyes increasingly more watery and bloodshot. And when he handed over his wadded twenty-dollar bills, Jakobson could see the young man’s hands were white and dry and cracked, exposing glistening dried blood between the dead skin like magma oozing from tectonic plates. A grimace of one sort or another was always frozen on his face. He seemed sick—not that he coughed or sniffled, but he seemed to be steadily degenerating every time he came into the store. Putrefying by gradual degrees. Still, Jakobson couldn’t bring himself to pry...
       ...although others might. Jakobson related an incident where the young man walked in and interrupted a long conversation Jakobson and Leonard had been having about the town’s high school football team and their chances of going to state this year. While I have no doubt this is a subject old Leonard was prepared to expound on at great length with minimal prompting, I’ve never known Jakobson to care about student athletics at all. I wonder if he had felt, perhaps, some premonition that the young man from The Regent would be in that day and sought to keep Leonard close by, hoping that he would engage the young man and finally ask about whatever strange project was keeping him so busy at The Regent, to settle the hardware store proprietor’s secret curiosity. Rather like setting a trap.
       And in the middle of Leonard’s exasperated critique of the school’s bewildering reliance on the passing game when they had a potential all-state running back on the roster, the young man approached the register. Jakobson had not even noticed that he had entered the store, even though he must have set off the bell over the door. His customer bought just a single box of nails this time; he owed only a few dollars for them but, as always, he placed a balled-up twenty on the counter. And as Jakobson took the bill, smoothed it out, and set about making change, he saw Leonard turn to the young man and start to say something.
       Jakobson looked up. The young man had a full foot on Leonard, and he was peering down at the older man through gluey eyes under dark and heavy lids. His lip was curled up, exposing dangerously receding red gums; Jakobson thought he could feel them throbbing painfully, the vibrations traveling through the air.
       The closeness of this figure of anguish and decay shocked Jakobson, but Leonard kept his casual composure while staying silent. Jakobson gave the young man his change, and he left, holding the box of nails tightly to his chest. The bell rang dully when the door opened and when it closed, and the two older men were alone again.
       Leonard slowly turned to Jakobson and then leaned in over the counter. “I didn’t like to ask,” Leonard said simply, then walked out of the hardware store himself, not caring to finish the conversation they’d been having, either.

Some more time passed. Despite Jakobson’s nagging interest—deeper, I might suggest, than he ever let on, even to me—his strange customer was ultimately only one of many things on the mind of a busy small business owner in a somewhat bustling town. He certainly wasn’t expecting to see the young man on that final night, because he never saw the young man on any night; the odd supply runs happened only in daylight, morning or afternoon.
       But one night in December, after dark—it was the shortest day of the year, in fact, and so it had been dark for some time—Jakobson was closing up for the evening. He had already turned off most of the main fluorescents overhead, leaving just enough light to allow him to lock up out front and then make his way back to the office in the rear. Jakobson’s forehead was almost touching the front door as he fumbled with the locks when suddenly, a hand appeared with a loud slap on the other side of the glass, inches from Jakobson’s eyes. He looked up, quite surprised, and saw the haunted face of the pale young man you’ve heard so much about to this point.
       Jakobson opened the door and tried to compose himself. “I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered, “I was just closing up for the night.”
       “I just need one thing,” the man in the doorway croaked, and not politely. “And I know where it is already.”
       Jakobson would have been well within his rights not to let the young man in. The sign on the door—I know from having seen it so many times myself—says the hardware store closes at seven p.m., and Jakobson is quite adamant that it was at least one minute past that now. But the young man so rarely spoke in Jakobson’s presence that when he did, it inspired a terrible dread and urgency that made it impossible to refuse. He allowed the customer in and sheepishly resumed his post behind the checkout. If Jakobson had already cleared the register out and shut it down for the night, it might have given him a firmer excuse not to let the young man in. How might things have gone differently, if that had been the case? I certainly could not say.
       The night was a wet one. An unexpected warm snap had melted most of the thin December snowcover. In the strip mall’s parking lot out front, only a few dirt-speckled clumps of snow remained at the corners, and several puddles of cold, dirty water had spawned on the uneven concrete surface. The customer had apparently walked through one of these puddles immediately before entering the store because his shoes squelched as he walked, and Jakobson frowned at the wet grey treadmarks they left on his floor. Jakobson decided he would have to mop up before leaving for the night, or he’d be annoyed and thinking about it until the next morning.
       It took only a moment for the customer to return with his intended purchase: a shovel with a heavy wooden handle and a heavier metal head that clattered fearsomely as he dropped it onto the counter. Next to it, the young man placed the customary wadded twenty.
       Jakobson looked down at the shovel, then at the crumpled money, then up at his customer. The young man’s eyes, magnified by his glasses, were particularly rheumy and vacant that evening; the mouth fixed in a rictus, his skin grayer than ever before. Ordinarily, the transaction would be conducted in silence; Jakobson would take the bill, smooth it out, make the change and hand it over, and the young man would scoop it into his pocket with a gnarled-looking hand and leave. But because of the unusualness of the hour, because the customer had spoken first—perhaps even because Christmas was just a few days away—Jakobson felt impelled (or permitted, at least) to ask: “Do you have everything you need?”
       It was as if, Jakobson told me later, a cloud suddenly lifted from the young man’s face. He didn’t look any healthier, but he at least seemed animated; there was light behind the eyes where there hadn’t been before. Some of the squirrely agitation he’d exhibited when buying mousetraps returned, though sluggishly, as though his muscles had atrophied. His dry lips loosened, closed, and then parted again as he looked down at the shovel.
       The young man’s eyes widened as if seeing it for the first time. “I changed my mind,” he said, in an urgent, hoarse tone. “I don’t need this. Should have just let you close up for the night. Here.” He rummaged through the packages of gum by the register and indiscriminately spilled a small pile on the counter. “Let me buy something for the trouble.”
       Jakobson, baffled, was about to tell him not to bother when the lights went out. They both let out a thin, sharp cry of surprise. Then Jakobson laughed at himself. The customer did not.
       “Is that ever weird,” Jakobson said. The store was completely black, except for a hazy, orange-purple light from the lamps in the parking lot, bleeding in through the front windows and door. “Must be a fuse. Wonder if it’s the whole mall or just me. Would you excuse me a moment?” The practical necessity of restoring the lights had shaken off the blanket of dread he had been under just moments before. He pushed his way out from behind the counter and started to shuffle towards the back office, where he could check the breakers and switches, navigating his way by memory and by touch in the pitch darkness.
       And then he heard, behind him, a wet, pulpy rustling, like a mass of soggy leaves shifting in a sack.
       Jakobson spun around. In silhouette against the rectangles of color from the front windows were at least four figures, possibly five, clustered together in some sort of a struggle. There was a sharp croak that was suddenly choked off, and a strange hollow clacking, like thin hard pieces of wood hitting each other. But those sounds were buried under the obscene wet twisting sounds. Something glistened on the forehead of one of the figures, and though it was hard to make out the precise shape of the thing, Jakobson had a feeling whatever it was had just noticed him.
       “Hold on!” he cried, but he did not run back out front to the counter. Instead, he continued his course to the back of the store and into his office. He opened the fuse box there and felt that everything was in its expected place, so next he fumbled for the light switches. Strangely, the one he had very deliberately left on to light his way while locking the doors had somehow gotten flipped into the off position. Jakobson turned all the lights on with a frantic swipe of his hand and ran out to the front. His heart pounded and he felt he had to hurry—but he had no idea, he tells me, what he expected to find there.
       As it turns out, there was nothing. The store was empty, and the shovel was gone. The customary twenty-dollar bill had been left on the counter, but the customer had not waited for his change. Jakobson ran to the front windows and pressed his face to the glass, looking toward The Regent. The young man couldn’t have gotten all the way across the street and into the building so quickly, but wherever he was, he was out of Jakobson’s sight—as were the figures that had descended on him in the darkness.
       Jakobson walked over the counter to pick up the money and noticed the floor. The trail of grey meltwater I’ve described, tracing the young man’s path from the front door to the counter, had been completely obliterated by far heavier and muddier tracks along the same path. Jakobson couldn’t discern how many feet had made them because they were not so much a collection of steps as a gruesome smear of slimy earth. As if, Jakobson thought, something had been dragged in and out. He threw open the door to see where the trail led after leaving the store, but if there were any tracks outside to follow, they had been made indistinct by the sloppy grey wetness outside.
       It occurred to him, only then, that the young man had set off the bell over the door when he entered, but whoever and whatever had followed him in and sprang on him in the dark had not.
       Jakobson quickly locked the door, and although his floor was even filthier than before, he decided not to stay behind that night to mop it clean after all.

It’s difficult to describe the events of the following morning in chronological order, because they have to be pieced together from various accounts of multiple discoveries, and Jakobson—from whom I learned the secret details I’ve shared here, and who until now has been a convenient and consistent focus for my narrative—was not involved in any of them.
       It is as good a starting point as any to begin with the tenant on the first floor of The Regent, who noticed a strange, smeary track on the green carpeted hallway when he opened his door early that morning. It’s possible that he was not the first person to notice this mess, but he was the first that I know of to follow it. It led him up three flights of stairs to the top floor of the building, and the fact that he was able to follow it this far struck him as strange only after he’d made his initial statement to the police. If you had deliberately sunk your feet into a deep sinkhole of mud and then walked through a hallway, after all, you would expect the track you’d leave to be heavier and thicker where you began and gradually thin out the further you walked, like dragging a paintbrush from one end of a canvas to another until the paint runs out. But this was a consistent and steady trail of dark brown mud and oily debris, as though spilled from a continuous leak.
       This trail led into and under the door of a fourth-floor apartment. The first-floor tenant later said that it’s not in his nature to pry into other people’s business (which, as you’ll assume, put me in mind of someone we should all be familiar with at this point). But somebody, he thought, had made a terrible mess that everyone in the building would have to live with, and it seemed to be responsible for the unhealthy, rotten pulp odor that seemed to be polluting the hallway. So, having traced it to the apparent source, he knocked very sharply on the door.
       At the touch, it unexpectedly opened a good three inches.
       The first-floor tenant was startled and apologized quickly—he hadn’t noticed the door was open already and didn’t mean to barge in uninvited. When, after the span of a few seconds, he still had not received a response, he knocked again, more gently this time. Still no response. Now, I don’t know what the correct thing to do in this situation is, but I can only tell you what this person did: he pushed open the door the rest of the way and looked inside.
       Each unit of The Regent opened onto a main living room area with a sliding glass balcony door at the back. The door in this unit was open, letting in the early morning December air as dark curtains fluttered. And in the center of the living room stood a crude gallows.
       I don’t mean to suggest it had been made hastily or carelessly, because a great deal of time and effort had clearly been spent on it. But it was as though it had been built without any plan whatsoever, through sheer trial and error, rather than at the hands of an experienced carpenter. The floor was littered with scrap wood, many pieces of which looked like they had been cut and hammered or drilled into place and then violently removed because something had been wrong: too short or too narrow, or the join had not been quite tight enough. You’ve probably heard the joke about the sculptor who carves a statue of an elephant by taking a block of marble and simply removing everything that doesn’t look like an elephant; this appeared to have been built by inexpertly attaching pieces of wood to other pieces of wood until, eventually, something that looks like a gallows emerged. But the finished product, although it was covered in bent nails and holes and rough, splintered edges, was quite sturdy. It would easily support the weight of a man.
       And indeed it did, hanging from the end of it on a noose. The young man’s round glasses lay at his gently swaying feet.
       It’s unclear which was discovered first: the body, or the freshly dug rectangle in the cemetery next to a mound of hastily upturned earth. But if the tenant from the first floor had entered the apartment instead of running away, and if he had stepped out of the open sliding door onto the balcony, he would have been able to see the hole, positioned almost directly underneath, but on the other side of the wrought-iron fence separating The Regent from the burial place.

A great many rumors circulated in the coming days—some true, most of them probably false. It was demonstrably not the case, for example, that several existing graves had been dug up in addition to the fresh one; in a thorough search of the cemetery, no other plot was found to be disturbed or tampered with in any way. It has also been claimed that the oily trail that led to the gallows could also be traced in the opposite direction, leading out of the building and back to the top of the hill, where bodies dating back to the town’s founding lay; but there had been so many police and reporters and investigators in the cemetery that day, and they had all made so many footprints, it would have been hard to be certain about this even in the moment. On the other hand, because of what Jakobson has told me about the young man only ever paying with twenty-dollar bills, I tend to believe the claims that the floor was littered with scattered coins and small bills—his discarded change from the hardware store, clearly—although I can’t figure out what meaning or significance it might have.
       There was no note or anything else of the sort left behind, but Occam’s razor suggested a suicide regardless, and the investigation failed to find any real reason to suspect foul play. A few more details surfaced and were revealed to the public, but they explained very little about what people actually wanted to know about the case. I found myself hung up on one fairly dull and almost inappropriately practical matter that confused me until weeks later, by complete chance, I happened to meet someone who had lived in The Regent directly under the poor young man.
       “The thing I don’t understand is,” I said, “all that hammering and drilling and sawing must have made a lot of noise. Why didn’t anyone ever complain?”
       “I did, actually, several times,” came the reply. “But it doesn’t do much good complaining to building management about the owner’s son, does it?”
       As you can imagine, a lot of people who were renting at The Regent decided not to renew their leases after that, and few new tenants proved interested in replacing them. Within a year and a half, the developers from Chicago decided the best option was to bulldoze the building and put the now-vacant plot of land next to Willow Heights up for sale, and for much less than they’d paid for it in the first place. The town government made an immediate offer at the reduced price; the purchase would allow the cramped-to-capacity cemetery to finally expand.

In subsequent years, a legend would spring up that the young man was buried in the spot he had dug for himself, at his request, and that no marker or headstone was ever placed. But in actuality, he was of course given a proper and more conventional burial elsewhere, and the hole was filled in. There was one element of truth surrounding this claim, however: the dirt under his fingernails suggested that whatever the purpose of that sinister hole in the earth had been—grave or otherwise—he had in fact been the one to dig it out.
       There is one more detail from that day I think is important to mention, although it was reported as seemingly insignificant at the time: the police found a shovel still sunk into the mound of excavated earth. It is less well known that this shovel still had its price sticker affixed. This brought the police, soon enough, to Jakobson’s Hardware directly across the street, and to question Jakobson himself.
       He told the police that it was true: he had sold that shovel to that young man the previous night. He also confirmed that much of the lumber and many of the tools had been procured from his hardware store over the past several weeks—although Jakobson has always insisted, both to the authorities and to me, that he never sold him any rope. He said he had no idea or suspicion what the young man had been building, which I believe to be completely true. And unfortunately, he could not offer the police anything more useful than these basic facts and records of purchases because, as he explained to them, he liked to keep his nose out of his customers’ business.
       If, however, Jakobson had not called me into the store early that morning and told me to give the floors a thorough mopping—which, not knowing the significance of those strange dark stains, I cleaned off as ordered—it is likely the police would have drawn some connection with the muddy trail in the hallways of The Regent and asked my employer some more questions, and it seems very unlikely that they would have accepted the answers.