You enter this thread on The Avocado to find a well-appointed and firelit study. Your host is sitting, quite patiently, in a high-backed chair in the center of the room. There is a bar with a selection of wines and liqueurs and sparkling waters in the back, and you take your host’s friendly nod as an indication that you may help yourself to whatever refreshment you prefer. With glass in hand, you take a seat and make yourself quite comfortable. The fire is warm. It is time for a story. “I must warn you,” your host says, “that this is a horror story and may contain gruesome and disturbing imagery and subject matter. A complete list of content warnings would spoil the surprise, I’m afraid, so I will be quite understanding if you would not wish to risk it and would prefer not to hear what I have to tell.” Assuming that you remain, your host sits back in his chair, inhales deeply through the nose, and begins…

Picture a strip mall of four storefronts in a small town somewhere in Wisconsin, with beige-gray exteriors that become 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.T. Donaldson Insurance, which replaced the drug store that used to occupy this space four years ago before the new chain grocery store 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. It was well known in town that Wise Owl remained competitive with the grocery store’s extensive liquor department by becoming considerably less strict about requiring its younger customers to present a valid ID. 

And on the far right, on the opposite end from Elite Dry Cleaning, was Jakobson’s Hardware. Owned and operated by my friend, 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 shortly after the town’s founding. Jakobson, however, and many other local small business owners like him, had been driven out some years back by a group from Chicago who wanted to redevelop the “historic district.” Grumbling, he’d moved to the 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, but now on the very furthest extremity of it; there was nothing past his store—on this side of Main anyway—but the road out of town.

Jakobson tells me he doesn’t remember the first time he saw the young man this story concerns. Even in the good old days before redevelopment and the population swell, the town was never so small that everybody actually knew everybody else’s name. But more importantly, Jakobson always made it a point to keep his nose out of his customers’ business unless someone specifically asked for his opinion or expertise. 

But like any small-town hardware store, even in these modern times, Jakobson’s had cultivated a clientele of old duffers: the retirees whose free time allowed them to 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 to buy a new one rather than conduct a search of the house. Even when they didn’t need anything, they might stop in simply to shoot the breeze with another old duffer who might happen to be lingering in the aisles, and they would often at least buy a candy bar or cold can of pop from the cooler on their way out. It was one of these duffers—Wiley, by name, a heavyset man who wore tinted bifocals and preferred suspenders to a belt—who first called Jakobson’s attention to the young man.

“Some tenacious mice, I figure,” Wiley whistled conspiratorially to my friend 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,” Wiley 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 looked like little shark’s heads, but the big old-fashioned kind with a flat wooden base and severe metal wire. He supposed he might vaguely recall having seen this same individual buying mousetraps before, but again, Jakobson found it intrusive to give his customers’ purchases too much unasked-for thought.

But Wiley seemed to be prying for my friend’s opinion, so he formed one and gave it. “Probably,” Jakobson said, “he lives in one of those old houses on Oneida.” Autumn had just broken cold suddenly, sending mice to seek new warmer resting places.

“Don’t think so,” Wiley said. He stopped perusing the magazine rack—had he really ever considered buying one that day, or was it just something to do?—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. The building was called, rather ostentatiously, The Regent. Part of the Chicagoans’ redevelopment strategy involved building these sorts of large apartment complexes around the edges of town. These were not designed with locals in mind, but to attract younger commuters who worked in one of the surrounding towns or in the city but were priced out of living there. These apartments were small but modern, each one had a small balcony, and they came with on-site amenities and an outdoor meeting space with picnic tables. A post-collegiate dormitory, in a sense.

“Fancy new place like that is crawling with mice already?” Wiley shook his head disapprovingly. 

Jakobson wondered. Grigg’s Auto Repair had 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; it’s possible they had somehow been agitated or drawn 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 have been to any other customer, but he privately felt Grigg overcharged 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 graveyard next door; every time there was a funeral, 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. 

Oak Heights Cemetery had been established at the time of the town’s founding, and it had been 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 grown outward and encroached on the cemetery’s territory, 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 around the older and more spread-out graves at the top of the hill. The oldest tombstones on the hill tended to be quite a bit 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 emerged from the ground at slight but noticeably crooked angles. A single, massive old oak provided shade to these earliest of the town’s deceased, although only a few leaves still lingered on the tree this deep into the autumn. Jakobson could see all this across the street from the front windows of his hardware store.

The Regent, like Grigg’s Auto Repair before it, had been built right up against Oak Heights, separated only by a short wrought-iron fence. Tenants on the higher floors facing it, I suppose, must have had quite a view of the entire grounds. A graveyard for a backyard.

* * *

But back to the young man and his mousetraps. Jakobson described him to me 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. In fact, he never carried any bill larger or smaller than a twenty, and for some reason they were always wadded up into a crinkled 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 trips—only mousetraps.

Wiley had observed him several times and never said anything to the young man himself but would frequently comment about it after the fact. “Disgraceful,” he said once. “I’m sure they charge those kids in the building an arm and a leg’s rent, and on top of that they gotta shell out for their own mousetraps?” But 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 Wiley’s.

Thanks to Wiley pointing him out, however, it had become impossible for my friend not to take special notice of the young man and his consistent buying habits, whether Wiley was there or not. Which is why he 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 at the front of the store 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 squeaky wheels wound their ways up and down the aisles in the back, the metal of the basket clattering as each 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 with a full 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.

As it turned out, this young man would spend much more money in Jakobson’s in the days 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. 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,” Wiley said, slapping the counter after watching the young man walk out the door 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 Wiley’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 it definitely wasn’t Jakobson’s place to make assumptions about his customers, this frail and nervous young man did not exactly look like what you or he or anyone might expect a handyman to look like.

He also didn’t think the kinds of repairs and routine maintenance likely for an apartment complex like this would require buying quite so much wood. The young man bought it in different sizes, different shapes. Jakobson’s was no 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; Jakobson’s employed a few teenagers part time, mostly for stocking and hauling. 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 before entering the building, the young man would always look toward the graveyard as he opened the door. 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, my friend, of course, could only have made this observation to share with me later if he’d been making a regular habit of watching the young man after leaving his store. Jakobson would have been able to do so quite unobtrusively; 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 him, however; he would probably think I was accusing him of spying and become embarrassed. But it’s notable to me only because Jakobson is 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 my friend 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 the course of buying tools and supplies and lumber, his face turned grayer, his hair thinner, eyes increasingly watery and bloodshot. And when he placed down 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 Wiley 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 Wiley 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 my friend had felt, perhaps, some premonition that the young man from The Regent would be in that day and sought to keep Wiley close by, hoping that he would engage the young man and ask about whatever strange project was keeping him so busy at The Regent, to finally settle my friend’s secret curiosity. Rather like setting a trap.

And in the middle of Wiley’s very detailed critique of the school’s bewildering reliance on the passing game when they had a potential all-state running back on the roster, and the sad state of coaching today in general, the young man approached the register. Jakobson had not even been aware 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, placed a balled-up twenty on the counter. And as Jakobson took the bill, smoothed it out, and set about making change, he saw Wiley turn to the young man and start to say something.

Jakobson looked up. The young man was a few inches taller than my friend and had a full foot on Wiley, and he was peering down at the older man through his thick glasses with gluey eyes under dark and heavy lids. His lip was curled up, exposing dangerously receding red gums; Jakobson admitted it was only his imagination, but he said he could almost hear them throbbing, and it hurt just to look at them. The closeness of this figure of anguish and decay shocked Jakobson, and he was glad the young man was not looking at him.

Wiley, however, kept his composure much better than my friend did. He merely pursed his lips into a strained but polite smile. “Cold day today,” he said.

The young man nodded absently but said nothing. Jakobson gave him his change, and he left, holding his nails tightly to his chest. The bell rang dully when the door opened and when it closed again, and the two older men were alone.

Wiley slowly turned to Jakobson and then leaned in over the counter. “I didn’t like to ask,” Wiley said, simply, then walked out of the hardware store himself, not caring to finish the conversation they’d been having.

* * *

Some more time passed. Despite Jakobson’s nagging interest—deeper, I suggest, than he lets 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 him 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—on, in fact, the shortest day of the year, 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 to the office in the back. Jakobson’s forehead was almost touching the front door as he fumbled with the key when suddenly, a hand appeared suddenly with a loud slap on 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.

My friend 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 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 filled my friend with 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 clearer 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, large and small, 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 faint grey treadmarks they left on his floor. Jakobson 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 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 this evening; the mouth particularly 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 nearly skeletal hand and leave. But because of the unusualness of the hour, because the customer had spoken first—perhaps even because Christmas was just four 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.

And 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, choked cry of surprise. Then Jakobson laughed at himself. The customer did not.

“That’s a weird thing,” 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?” 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 soggy leaves shifting in a sack.

Jakobson spun around. In silhouette against the rectangles of color from 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!” my friend 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.

He 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. 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 invisible in the sloppy gray wetness outside.

It occurred to him then, that although the young man had set off the bell over the door when he entered, 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 and 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 my friend Jakobson—who has until now 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 where you began and gradually thin out the further you walked, like dragging a paintbrush from one end of a canvas to another. 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 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 hadn’t meant 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.

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 the 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 a seasoned 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 removing everything that doesn’t look like an elephant; this thing appeared to have been built by inexpertly attaching pieces of wood to other pieces of wood until, eventually, 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 presumably it had, because hanging from the end of it was a noose. The rope looked quite brand new.

It’s unclear whether the gallows was discovered before or after the fresh mound of upturned dirt in the graveyard, 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 it. The top floor facing Oak Heights Cemetery, as I have suggested, had a commanding view of the grounds. This suggestive rectangle of disturbed earth stood out from the remaining white snowcover and pale winter grass. It was positioned almost directly under the room’s balcony, but on the other side of the wrought iron fence separating The Regent from the burial place. 

The police eventually dug it up, and you can probably assume what and who they found at the bottom of it.

In a thorough search of the cemetery, no other grave was found to be disturbed or tampered with, including the ones at the top of the hill dating back to the town founding. But a rumor persists 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. However, 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 at the time.

A great many rumors circulated in the coming days—some true, a great many false. Because of what Jakobson has told me about only ever paying with twenty-dollar bills, I tend to believe the rumors that floor was littered with scattered coins and small bills, although I can’t figure out what it might mean. As more details surfaced, they only added to the awful mysteries rather than solving them. 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. I’d have thought someone would have complained.”

“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 great many people who were then renting at The Regent decided not to renew their leases after that, and few new tenants were 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 Oak Heights up for sale. The town government made an immediate offer on it; the purchase would finally allow the cramped-to-capacity cemetery to expand.

* * *

Despite a heavy amount of news coverage and a thorough investigation by various authorities, this murder, or suicide—or whatever it is that had happened—remains officially unsolved and unexplained. 

It was reported that the police found a shovel sunk into the mound the young man’s body was found in. (The specific red and raw patches on his hands and the dirt under his nails suggested that he dug this grave himself. This of course only begs the next question: who filled that grave back in?) But it was less well known that this shovel still had its price tag affixed. This brought the police, soon enough, to Jakobson’s Hardware directly across the street, and to question Jakobson himself. 

My friend told the police that it was true: he had sold that shovel 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 had, of course, no idea what the young man had been building, and he unfortunately 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, my friend had not made a point of getting to the store early that morning and giving the floors a thorough mopping, it is likely the police would have drawn some connection with the muddy trail in the hallways of The Regent  and asked some more questions, and it is very unlikely they would have accepted the answers.