Recycling Charlie
Agnes Carruthers looked down at the body of her late husband Charlie, smiling ruefully as she contemplated what to do with it. Charlie had always been a firm believer in recycling and never threw anything away because it might be needed sometime down the road.
"Lord, how many times did I hear you say that," mused Agnes out loud as she thought of her husband’s many excuses for being an inveterate packrat.
Charlie was currently lying rigid on the garage floor, a victim of his latest project gone slightly array. No matter what he did, sooner or later he needed help – and usually from Agnes because there was no one else around.
This time, however, Agnes had been engrossed in one of her own projects in the house, and by the time she’d realized the strange sound she was hearing was Charlie calling her, and finally answered his desperate call for help, he had stopped doing it for good.
"Charlie, Charlie, Charlie," she said over and over, her one hand on her hip and the other rubbing her temple in contemplation, "now you’ve really done it this time."
The garage was, for want of a better word, a junkyard, with everything scattered around in a perpetual state of under construction. Oh, he’d finished a few projects in his time, but the vast majority of them were more in the idea stage than in the well underway to being completed stage. When they’d first bought the house she’d wished it had had an attached garage rather than this poorly put together pile of lumber and old shingles. But now she was glad it hadn’t.
Still, Agnes had had to pick her way through the rubble of bits and pieces to get to Charlie’s body. She could tell where he was by his feet sticking out of a mound of car parts, and that he must be dead because he hadn’t moved a muscle since she’d found him, nor made any sound for that matter. And there was that decidedly red puddle forming around him.
Agnes remembered him saying that he would he would be working on getting the car functioning again, but she had been prepared to believe it when she heard him start it up, followed by the automatic garage door opening up, and then the car rumbling down the driveway. Charlie was supposed to be working on the engine, but for some reason he had obviously decided to put the car up on the jacks to see what was going on underneath. It had obviously slipped off and pinned him to the floor. Agnes remembered how many times Charlie had been warned not to work alone, and especially not when he had put the car up on jacks. But Charlie never had been one to listen to advice.
"Okay, what do I do next?," said Agnes.
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Charlie hadn’t been one to save for a rainy day, or buy life insurance for that matter. He’d somehow got the bright idea that he would live forever, and even if he didn’t, he really didn’t care what was done with his body after he no longer needed it.
Charlie hadn’t been one to donate his body to medical science, or individual pieces of him such as his vital organs for transplanting for that matter. Safe to say, what needed to be done with Charlie’s body was totally up to Agnes now.
She knew there was no way in the world she pull his inert body out from under the jack. She didn’t know the first thing about car jacks anyway. She debated calling for help, though. Charlie was also a cheapskate and abhorred spending money unless it was absolutely necessary. And since he was already dead, she mused, he certainly wouldn’t want her spending any money on him unnecessarily.
"Okay, so what do I do with you?," she said out loud, hoping the answer would come to her when she did. But it didn’t.
Walking around the garage between the piles of clutter, she mused on what it would take to clean up this place. And how she could do it, cheaply, and cleaning up Charlie’s body at the same time. Was there a way?
Agnes was a great fan of detective novels and even more so of true crimes. Even if they didn’t always get away with them, the ways real murderers came up with of disposing of their victims’ bodies was downright fascinating. Now if only Agnes could remember one case that she could use herself.
"It’s a shame this isn’t the basement, Charlie. People always bury bodies in the basement. I’ve never heard of anyone burying a body in the garage – even if this one does have a dirt floor.
"Wait a minute. The house has fire insurance that covers the garage – such as it is. Remember the bank insisted we had to put insurance on the place or they wouldn’t give us the mortgage. It’s a shame you don’t smoke anymore, Charlie, but I’m sure we can work around that. All I have to do is look for something in this mess that is volatile, place it on the floor near the car as if you had actually been using it, and find something else that would provide the spark to ignite it and put it in your hand. Presto – ashes to ashes; recycling at its most basic."
Humming to herself, Agnes rooted around in the garage looking for the required components of her master plan knowing how pleased Charlie would be with her ingenuity and resourcefulness – not to mention her coming out ahead on the deal.
The End
