a mystery

We went for a walk at work and saw that by a dumpster was a pile of stuff. Some of the stuff looked good, and right away I noticed some postcards. As you know, I collect postcards, so I took them. They are of water crystals, like snowflakes.

In the pile of junk was also dress-up clothes and clothes hangers, bill-like mail, a bunch of Egyption stuff that would suggest that the owner of this trash had recently been to an Egyptian-themed event. Black, white, and brown socks, two pennies, hotel shampoo.

Strangely, I found a key-card for the Luxor hotel, which is Egypt-themed and the only hotel in Las Vegas that I have stayed at.

The more I thought about this pile of stuff, the more it bothered me. This was obviously stuff from someone's car. A crumpled-up Burger King bag, for example. Erik thought someone just cleaned out their car really fast. I was unconvinced and imagined funny business.

Finally I decided that someone stole the car and dumped all the junk out of it in this parkling lot, near a dumpster, to get rid of the evidence. It reminded me of something that happened to me, when my backback got stolen during college. The thief had taken the unwanted contents of the backpack and dumped it in someone's front lawn. That person whose lawn was used as a dumping ground was a good citizen and called me up, which was great because I got some text books, my wallet, and my keys back.

So I was thinking maybe we should look at the mail to figure out what the guy's name was and try to call him because maybe it would comfort him to have at least some of his stuff back. That was my plan, as I scored--to go out at lunch and get his name, look it up in the phone book, and call him.

But then I thought about it more and started worrying maybe this was all shady and it was best to leave well-enough alone. Maybe the owner of the junk was a bad guy and would somehow figure out a way to use my attempt at kindness to his advantage.

We were uncertain at lunch time, but as soon as we had finished our lunch, we walked back over to the dumpster. On the way I said to Erik, "Maybe the dead body is in the dumpster," which scared him. I'm always imagining dead bodies--it's a habit I've had since I was a child and imagined dead bodies in the kelp when I was swimming in the ocean every summer.

But there was no dead body in the dumpster. There was nothing but a tire and a pair of latex gloves. Do you think that's odd? This is really creeping me out--maybe because it's night-time.

We looked at the bills and learned the guy's name: it's unusual. I looked at the clothes and learned that he wore a size 3x tall. I found another postcard.... There was a burned 2-Pac CD. Erik found two plane tickets to the Philipines, pristine in their envelope.

A lot of the mail was old--from December--but some was as recent as May.

There was also some kind of attendence report printout for a 10th grader who had a different last name. And there was a Washington Mutual bill for a woman who shared the same last name.

So, what do you think? I googled the guy's name and got zero hits. I googled just his last name and got zero hits. I googled variations on his last name in case I remembered it wrong and got zero hits--the same with yahoo. So at least there's no news about him going missing.

I think tomorrow when we take a walk, we'll not go over there again.