Who Dunnit?

It was a fine day for watching migrating birds, so hubby and I made a trip to our local bird-watching site, Sage Creek promontory. We had bundled up in thick, wooly sweaters and hiking boots for our jaunt. The air was crisp and smelled like burning leaves and the sweet, rotting apples that dotted the ground in the field on the other side of the road.

I usually dislike Fall, mostly because it heralds the coming of the cold, snowy, dark months of upstate New York’s never-ending Winter. I hate Winter. I hate snow. Always have. Always will. Now I live in a Winter wonderland. There are four distinct seasons here: Winter; sloppy, muddy Winter; Summer; and it’s freaking Winter again. Except for those beautiful two weeks, we call Summer, there isn’t much of a respite from the cold and wind up here next to Lake Ontario.

Bill, my long-suffering husband had just turned seventy and was not into long hikes in the woods, besides, there was a football game on the radio. He begged off the romantic hike in exchange for tight ends and men in pin-stripes. I was more relieved than hurt. He liked to chat. I liked the quiet.

I traipsed down the dirt road myself, enjoying the blessed quiet. The cliff-edge was bordered by those pretty little trees with red, fuzzy berries that always reminded me of Christmas lights. The dried grasses at the sides of the road were swaying in the light breeze. A perfect day. Even for Autumn. I stood with my back to where Bill had parked our trusty old Suburban and looked over the waters of the inlet leading to Lake Ontario. The migration of geese was non-stop in the early Autumn and today did not disappoint. Dozens and dozens of Canadian geese flew by me in constant waves. It mesmerized me.

I could even see across Sage Creek to the property where our friends, the Stevens used to live. They said they were downsizing their lives to live more simply, so they built a modest four-bedroom three-bath log cabin with a granite countertop gourmet kitchen and a game room the size of a hockey rink in the basement.

Taking out my new-fangled cellular telephone I tried to capture the waves of geese flying by with a few pictures. I snapped three photos with a perfect view of my double chin and one very clear picture of my thumb. When I finally figured out which way to point the damned thing I got a few good snaps of the bright, blue sky dotted with hundreds of birds.

I heard a soft scrabbling sound behind me and figured the game must be over and Bill had decided to join me. Without turning around I asked, “So, who won?”

No answer. Damn. He took his hearing aids out. I hated that because he had a hard enough time hearing me with them in, but without them, he was practically deaf, and we’d always end up in a quarrel about me not speaking up or me yelling at him with a mean voice. I don’t intend to sound mean, but after he asks me to repeat some inane, ridiculous remark four or five times it does get to me.

Then I heard, “Give me your fucking phone, bitch.”

Yeah, no. Bill didn’t talk like that to anyone, let alone me. He was a sailor but never swore like one. I turned around just in time to see a fist come toward my head, too late to duck, it hit me on the ear and a shot of hot, white pain exploded across my entire head. My eyes immediately started to water, and I was seeing stars.

The grungy fist was connected to a tall, skinny man with stringy, long hair and a scruffy beard, dressed in filthy, loose jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. He was pulling his arm back, ready to take another swing at me and I instinctively fell. Yes, that was planned. Clever, right? Hey, just one of my Marshall arts skills. Actually, my legs just buckled under me, and I landed face-first on the ground. At least I avoided another punch. It had been a long time since I was forced to defend myself against someone bigger than myself. Unable to get back on my feet I scrambled away from him on my hands and knees, expecting a kick in the ribs or head at any time.

A terrifying thought gripped me. ‘Please God, don’t let him kick me in the ass. That would be so humiliating. Anywhere but the ass, Lord.’

I heard a rumbling noise approaching fast. What the heck? The stranger and I both looked up to see Bill hauling ass down the road toward us in our big, old Suburban. He must have caught sight of this fellow hitting me and was coming to my rescue. Thank God he was overly cautious and expecting trouble around every corner. Sometimes this habit drove me mad, but today_ go for it. The SUV barreled down the road and skidded to a stop on the gravel, with the front end swinging around wildly, slamming into the stranger. With a sickening crunch, the man’s body toppled ass over tea-kettle and landed near the edge of the cliff, leaving a smear of blood from our car’s bumper to one of the pretty trees with the little velvety blooms that he was now wrapped around.

It all happened so fast my mind couldn’t connect the dots. I flopped onto the ground, shaking and hyperventilating, trying not to look at the horror that had settled around the base of that pretty, little tree. I had been peacefully watching birds and minding my own business, enjoying a beautiful day. Now, suddenly, our lives had been turned upside down by a stranger whose motivations were a mystery to me. I wasn’t threatening him. I was just taking pictures of birds. I couldn’t catch my breath or stop shaking. Bill took off his sweater and wrapped it around me to keep me from going into shock. He knelt next to me, trying to calm me down as he studied the man he had struck. If he was just injured, that was a problem. If he was dead- that was a bigger problem.

Bill went back to the car to retrieve the metal baton he kept under the front seat for when he was driving in sketchy neighborhoods for his job. The baton was made of steel and was a good two inches around and six feet long when fully extended. He cautiously approached the man and turned his dented, bloody face toward us with the baton to see if he was still alive. There was no way he could have survived that hit from our Chevy Suburban. Not at that speed. Bill just shook his head.

When he came back to my side, he said what I had been thinking, “We’re in big trouble. He’s definitely dead. I don’t know what to do from here.”

I tried to take out my phone to call 911, but Bill gently took it out of my trembling hands and said, very calmly, “Let’s think this through before we do something stupid, okay? We have no witnesses. No one saw him attack you. All the police are going to see is my bumper stuck up his ass.”

In confusion, I looked over at the dead guy and Bill said,

“I don’t mean literally, Georgia. I mean, I just committed vehicular manslaughter, or maybe something worse because I fully intended to kill him when I saw him hit you. I don’t know what his deal was or where he came from. He didn’t walk past the car, so he must have been here all the time we were here. Maybe he was squatting in the cabin.”

“No. No. That’s the cabin for the Audubon Society bird counter. I’m pretty sure there’s a regular bathroom in there with a toilet,” I insisted.

Bill just rolled his eyes and helped me up off the ground. “Here, Sweetie, let me get you to the car. I think you have a concussion. I meant he was staying there illegally. Look, we don’t even know who this guy is. I’m going to dig through his pockets and see what I can find before we call 911.”

Bill sat me down on the passenger side and took his baton over to the corpse. Oh, God, we made a corpse. This was such a nice day before we made a corpse. Oh, God. We’re in so much trouble. Those sour, sick-feeling shock waves were traveling from my throat down to my stomach. I leaned out of the car door and spewed my lunch out onto the road. Great. Now I had left DNA at the scene of the crime.

“You gonna be okay?” Bill called out.

I gave him a thumbs up and wiped my mouth with some of our fast-food napkin collection.

Bill poked the corpse several times to make sure he wasn’t just pretending to be a corpse to fool us. Then he reached into the flannel shirt pocket first, pulling out a few joints and some rolling papers. He held them up for me to see. Good to know that our corpse might have been high when he was run over. Maybe he didn’t feel anything? Then he reached into the front pants pocket closest to him and pulled out what looked like a tiny dop kit. He zipped it open to reveal several syringes and needles with a little packet of white stuff, which he also showed to me. Well- looks like our corpse may have been completely numb when Bill rammed him. Thank God. Maybe he was already almost a dead person when we met him.

“Whoops, hey, what is this?” Bill found a bulge in the waistband of the dead guy’s pants and pulled up the shirt. “Well, what have we here? If I hadn’t run him over, I can’t even bear to think how this day would have ended. No one carries around a gun if they don’t intend to use it. I think you were lucky he just punched you.”

“No kidding. I was scared he was going to kick me in the ass. That would have been so embarrassing.”

Bill just stared at me and then continued the dead man search. He pulled a battered, crinkled wallet out of the other pants pocket. Opening it he found a driver’s license, a Social Security card, several credit cards, a couple of twenties, and a lock pick tool hidden in one of the compartments. He held the license near the man’s battered, smushed face and announced, loudly enough for me to hear, but not in a ‘mean voice’, “This is not ‘Felix Benson’. It looks like this guy is a thief and maybe he was holing up here. Better than being on the run or homeless in the bad weather, I suppose. If he was homeless, he’d have a backpack or something with him. I’m going to look in the cabin. You stay here.”

“No. No. I’m not staying with Mr. Corpsy. Uh- uh. I’m coming with you.”

“Just don’t touch anything until we figure out what to do,” he admonished.

“Duh, Crime Stoppers show 101. I know that.”

We peeked into the window on the porch and saw a little room with an unmade bed, a desk, and a chair with a compact kitchenette on the other side of the cabin. Bill was right. I couldn’t see a bathroom from here, so maybe the guy was squatting in there. Huh. We stepped off the porch and I found a tree branch with a bunch of leaves on it to brush off our footprints. I brushed our prints back to the car. Now we had to decide what to do.

“I think this guy thought I’d taken a picture of him with my phone. That’s what he asked for when he hit me. He was probably already in trouble with the law and didn’t want anyone to see him here. I say we just call the police and let them sort this out.”

“Do you really want to sit in a jail cell with real criminals while the police try to figure out who this guy is and if I’m a murderer or not? Georgia, it could be days or weeks. You don’t know how long we’ll end up in jail waiting. You know and I know we didn’t do anything wrong, and it was clearly self-defense, but there isn’t any proof. I wouldn’t blame the police for thinking maybe we were meeting up with this guy to buy drugs or something and killed him.”

“Pfft. Can you hear yourself? You’re 70 and can barely walk, and I’m a little old lady. We’re senior citizens. The only drugs we’d be buying would be Viagra and water pills and it didn’t look like those were his drugs of choice. Come on, Bill. I’m not feeling very good. I just want to go home. Let’s call 911 and get this over with.”

“I’m telling you, the one place you won’t be going tonight is home if we do this. They will have our car towed away and we’ll have to go to the police station. Probably the State Police barracks where they’ll take our fingerprints and statements. What if you say something different than I do? What if I mess up the timeline and can’t remember when something happened, and they think I’m lying? What if they think you’re lying? This is serious. A man is dead, and we are the last ones to see him alive. I hit him with our car. His blood is on our car. Our car is on the dead man.”

It was beginning to make sense to me. Bill was right. We had no one to corroborate our story, so to the police, it would be just that; a story. I didn’t want to sit in a jail cell with real criminals. I didn’t want to accidentally say something that would incriminate Bill or myself. What if Bill had to stay in jail? What if they put him on trial for vehicular manslaughter?

Whatever we did, one thing was for sure. This man had a gun and a stolen wallet. He wasn’t a boy scout. He was off the streets now and couldn’t hurt anyone else. God, my head hurt, and I was feeling sick to my stomach again. All I wanted was a hot shower an aspirin and my bed. I was ready to agree to anything, just to go home.

“I think I understand what you’re saying. It looks like this guy already destroyed his life before we came on the scene. We should take advantage of where he landed and help him go down the bank. I’ll check the other side of the creek with the binoculars to see if anyone is watching.”

I got the binoculars and glassed the area across the creek. (Glassed the area is a term I got from reading thriller novels about assassins. 'He glassed the target before setting up his high-powered rifle.') The leaves were still on most of the trees, shielding the properties from seeing our side of the creek. I scanned up and down several more times and helped Bill edge the corpse toward the drop-off. It was not as easy as it should have been. The dead guy was skinny and limp, but we were old and terrifically out of shape. I was on my hands and knees, untangling the body from the tree, while Bill kept a lookout for movement on the opposite bank. Then, together we shoved and pushed the body until it was right near the edge of the cliff.

Bill lost his footing on the loose dirt and nearly ended up at the bottom of the cliff himself and if I’d tried to stop him, I would have tumbled along right after him, Jack and Jill style. Bill finally decided to use the baton to send him to his final resting place.

“I’ll look again, and when I tell you to, shove him off the edge. Just stay behind those little trees, in case someone is watching from a point I can’t see.”

Bill leaned up against a little tree, puffing little clouds of steam into the air. His face was as white as the corpse, and he was sweating profusely. We had to get home quickly so he could take his heart medication. In a split second, everything in our boring existence snapped and now we were tied to an event with lasting consequences that would haunt our every waking hour and probably every sleeping hour for the rest of our lives. Murder. It never ends well for either party.

When Bill gained his composure, I took one last look across Sage Creek and gave him the nod. He nudged the body closer and closer to the cliff’s edge until it hit the air, then crunched and slapped its way down the brush toward the water, landing with a thud instead of a splash.

“Shit. That’s not good. He was supposed to go in the water- not stay on the bank. We can’t climb down there and push him in,” Bill complained.

“I know. I know. Let me think.”

Bill needed to get home to his medicine, and I was still shaky myself. Suddenly an idea popped into my head.

“Hey! Steven’s cabin had a 'For Sale”' sign on it when we drove by it last. Let’s go and pretend we’re looking at the property. We can probably see this spot from their backyard and find out where he landed. Maybe he’s hidden and no one will see him until Spring.”

We grabbed some McDonald’s napkins and an old, half-filled drink cup out of the car’s cup holders and did our best to scrub hair, bone, and blood from the Suburban’s hood. I scooped up my former lunch with the cup and stuck it into a Burger King bag Bill had cleverly left on the floor behind the driver’s seat. After tucking the evidentiary napkins into the bag, we took off toward the main highway, crossing over the Sage Creek bridge. Bill swung a right onto the road where our friends used to live. Sure enough, their log cabin was still for sale. We drove carefully down the rutted driveway and parked where no one could see the vehicle from the road.

We crept to the bank of Sage Creek, where their old dock still stood, and I handed the binoculars to Bill, so he could ‘glass’ the body on the bank to see if it was in plain sight or not. He couldn’t find it, which was a good sign.

I was standing over him, squinting for a better look across the creek. “Bill, quick, pass me the binoculars. I think there’s more than one body across the creek.”

"Are you sure it’s not a log? Or a rock?”

I got my bearings with the glasses and found the dark spot again. “Nope. Not a log or a rock- it’s a person. I swear. Looks like it’s been there a while.”

I handed the glasses back to Bill for a second opinion. “Looks like we found Felix Benson. What do you think?”

“It’s not the same corpse we pushed down there. The clothes are all wrong. It must be the guy that got robbed. If no one has discovered his body, then they sure won’t find the robber. We know he’s down there and can’t find him. Maybe the snow will come early this year and cover them both up with ten feet of the white stuff. We can only hope.”

“Did you just say you hoped for snow?” He asked, incredulously.

“Yes, indeed. I can’t wait for the first beautiful snowfall. I hope we get the biggest snow total of the century this year- in October,” I announced with glee.

After we got back home, with medicines ingested and hot showers behind us I googled Felix Benson. He turned out to be the bird enumerator for the Audubon Society. Felix traveled to different locations for his work and hadn’t been reported missing yet. This landed us another blow. Felix had hurt no one. He probably had a family and was one of the good guys, keeping track of wildlife for a conservationist organization. How do we report finding him without confessing to our crime? Or crimes. As it turns out, moving a corpse after killing it is also a crime.

After many nights of tossing and turning and days of indecision, we concluded that both bodies would be found eventually. Since we couldn’t bring anyone back to life, the best thing to do was to let fate work itself out. We, unknowingly, brought a bad guy to task for his crime. When they found both corpses in the Springtime Felix’s family would find out who killed him and know that justice had been served without them having to be involved in the pain of a lengthy trial.

Bill and I also went through a total relationship revision. We found that, after the incident, we were more patient with each other, kinder, gentler, and more careful about how we treated one another. I tried to not use my mean voice when he couldn’t hear me and he, well, he didn’t really have to change too much. He was much nicer than I was. Well, except for running over a stranger and shoving bodies off a cliff.

This change did not come from realizing how quickly life could be lost. No. Not at all. It was because of that old saying, ‘Two can keep a secret only if one is dead.’, and now we both know the perfect spot to hide a corpse.