Brown Paper Packages

Chuck Babcock was not a popular guy. In high school he had been bullied and avoided by practically everyone. He had one friend, Louis Green, but Louis’s family had moved away when they were sophomores. Chuck had some skills though. He was a member of a group of young men who had come to occupy a kind of clichéd niche in modern America. He was now twenty-one and still lived with his mom. His domain was the garage and the basement. The garage was full of tools of all types and the basement was filled with computers and gaming equipment. Chuck’s dad died when he was ten. His mom, Ginny, had given up on Chuck and let him exist in his own domains. For a while she had tried to stay connected with him emotionally by being a ‘nice’ mom, cooking the things he liked to eat, and making sure he had the tools and computer gear he craved, a kind of retail bribery. But Chuck became more and more truculent and sometimes Ginny was scared he would hurt her physically.

Young teens were attracted by Chuck, who was older. They did not see that he was socially stunted. Chuck seemed to have turned some of the young neighborhood boys into a kind of gang, led by him. Cruelty to animals ticked up in the neighborhood, an upscale suburban one, with town houses filled with people who commuted to work and back each day. The police had their eyes on Chuck’s nascent criminal group but had never caught them committing any atrocities yet.

There was a young lady living next door to Chuck and his mother. She was single and worked in a downtown office, so she dressed up for work. Olivia found her neighbor creepy and tried to always park in the garage so she could enter her townhouse through the garage entrance. Chuck was always lurking although he never spoke to her if she did happen to park in the driveway. Olivia spent as little time outside of her townhouse as possible. She did have a cat, a sweet tiger-striped male, now getting old, who liked to spend time in the woods behind the town house. Olivia did not know about the dead pets the neighbors complained about, so she let him roam. One day two children came to the door and said that they had found her cat hung from a tree in the woods with his throat cut. Olivia asked the children to take her to see her cat, but they did not want her to have to see him like that. They brought her cat, Whiskey, to Olivia and helped her bury him. She reported the killing to the police, who explained that they were having trouble finding out who was doing these cruel acts, although they had a suspect in mind.

Olivia wanted to move. Her lease was not up for several months, and the penalties would be too great. She had to stay and stick it out. But she was sad and scared and did not feel safe. She advertised for a roommate and Geraldine moved in with her. Without a two car garage the last one home had to park in the driveway. Geraldine did not get a weird vibe from Chuck, but she usually got to the garage first and so did not run into him. Olivia felt safer with a roommate, although now she usually ended up parking in the driveway and had to deal with Chuck’s poorly disguised ogling.

Olivia began dating a handsome guy with a terrible gambling habit. Since they did not have any shared finances, she decided to just enjoy his company for a while. He was a professional gambler who studied books on the subject, but he had been on a losing streak and was trying to stay away from gambling. He seemed to be looking for a wife, but Olivia thought him a risk as a partner. She was keeping things casual. He did make her feel safer and she basically forgot about Chuck Babcock.

Chuck Babcock did not forget about her though. He did not like her Desperado boyfriend in the least. He got angrier and angrier. He escalated his criminal activities, and he turned his little gang into accomplices. They stole bikes and he used his garage with all those tools as a chop shop, selling the bike parts to a guy he had met at the motor vehicle department who had connections to sell the parts to a bike shop and on the internet. With the police watching Chuck so closely he couldn’t start his own online parts business without getting busted.

Olivia started to find small brown paper packages on her doorstep with little treasures inside. One was a small giraffe carved from a dark wood. One was a bracelet of semiprecious stones on an elastic band, one size fits all, with a note about the significance of the stone. These stones were pink and meant ‘luck’ in the coded language of semiprecious gems. Olivia thought they were from Derek, her gambler. She started to look forward to what she would find next. She sang to herself, “brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things” from The Sound of Music. She showed Derek her trinkets and mentioned how much she loved them. When he didn’t react the way she expected, she began to doubt that they were from him.

Geraldine was a good old girl who liked everybody and accepted whatever went on around her as normal. She had a slow way about her and spent most of the time she was home in her room. Her boyfriend was a pilot, but he was also bipolar. She shared the rent, but she wasn’t someone Olivia could have long chats with. She planned to get married soon and was saving up. So, Olivia didn’t share her pleasure at receiving her treasures. After a while they stopped arriving. Derek eventually said he did not know anything about the small packages.

When Derek had to leave town for a while for reasons he did not share, Olivia once again noticed that Chuck seemed to always be in his driveway when she came home. He never greeted Olivia, in fact he didn’t even look at her, which made his presence even more creepy. Olivia mentioned her neighbor to Geraldine, but he was not out in his drive when she got home from work.

Geraldine was going away for the weekend at the end of the work week to meet her boyfriend’s mom she told Olivia. Olivia had lost both of her protectors and she thought about finding somewhere to stay until Geraldine came back, but she said to herself that she was darned if she would let some punk drive her out of her home. It was a winter weekend and Olivia had no plans to go out. She wanted to snuggle under a warm blanket and watch movies. As she entered the house with the mail, she noticed another small brown package mixed with the bills and ads. Now that she knew these packages were not from Derek, she did not trust them and threw the package away in the garbage. The phone rang. It was Derek, so she got sidetracked and did not give the little package another thought. Derek was home and he would see her tomorrow. She was flooded with anticipation and relief.

When Derek turned onto Olivia’s street on the way to her town house, there were police cars all over. A firetruck and an ambulance were also there. Apparently there was a fire in Olivia’s town house, and it must have been almost out because the ambulance crew was entering with a gurney. Derek pulled up next to a police car that was occupied and said that he was a friend of the girl who rented that town house. He asked what happened.

The policeman told Derek there had been an explosion and that had started a fire. A neighbor called it in. The fire crew chief said that the explosion happened in the wastepaper bin in the kitchen and the fire grew from the explosion. But what about his girlfriend, Olivia, Derek asked. We are so sorry, the police chief said sadly. She did not make it. They tried to give her oxygen, but she was already dead when the EMT’s arrived. Derek mentioned how scared she had been of the creepy kid next door and the policeman took a note about that. He said that there had been many complaints about Chuck Babcock.

Derek saw Chuck in the back of a crowd of observers. He had a strange smile on his face. He gave the police information about how to contact him and he left with his sorrow and suspicions to keep him company. He vowed to try to help the police nail this guy. That’s how Derek Adams finally put gambling behind him and found his new career as a private detective.