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The Tarp beside My House


As I briefly mentioned in yesterday’s blog, my wife and I moved to Little Rock recently so that she could attend medical school at UAMS. When we were looking for a place to live, the most important thing we considered was location. The area we were going to live in had to meet three requirements: be close to UAMS (for my wife’s sanity), be in a safe neighborhood, and be mostly residential. Luckily we found a place at the end of a quiet street. To this point, our experience living in Little Rock has been even better than either of us imagined.

However—there’s always a however with me, as you’ll learn—as with any house, this place has some shady history. Some based in truth, some purely speculative (if you read the link I posted in yesterday’s blog, you know I like to speculate). Tom Haynes, who is my cousin and a fellow Little Rockian (?), being the inquisitive person that he is as a lawyer, found a story about a former resident of our house. It seems Mr. Former Resident (no way I’m using his real name) had a real talent for thievery and drugs. If you are familiar with Forbidden Hillcrest (www.forbiddenhillcrest.com), Former Resident is the type of guy you’ll find written about there.

So when I was walking around the west side of my house one afternoon, which is a steep hill that runs into a little patch of woods, and I saw something sticking out of the ground, I was a little nervous. Nevertheless, curiosity took over. I pulled on the object. Which turned out to be the corner of a brown plastic tarp. I started inspecting the hill and noticed that area around the tarp was covered with what appeared to be mulch and some thorny bushes. At this point, I was more than a little paranoid and decided to leave the tarp alone.

(Note: This photo was taken recently, which will make sense when you keep reading. Anyway, it's hard to get a good picture because this spot is always shaded.)

Yet, when you don’t have a job, buried tarps are hard to ignore. A few days later I couldn’t resist. I decided to look under the tarp. I’ll admit that I was expecting to find a dead body. Quickly I realized that pulling the tarp up would be difficult work because beneath the mulch were concrete stones stacked on top of the tarp. After a few minutes, I finally got a corner dug out of the ground…and I may have something more ominous than a dead body: the largest pair of bolt cutters I have ever seen.

(Note: Hopefully that provides some prospective. For the record, those Twilight books are my wife's.)

Being the idiot that I am, I grabbed the mud-covered bolt cutters. What was I going to do? Put it back and cover the tarp back up? Realizing my fingerprints were already on a murder weapon, I decided to take the tool inside. Yes, yes, I know: I’ve probably destroyed DNA and evidence and implicated myself in an unsolved crime. It’s too late now, though.

After finding the bolt cutters, I tried in vain to uncover the rest of the tarp—mostly because I don’t really want to know what else I might find. The possibilities seem endless. And, as a person with a very active imagination, none of these possibilities end well for me.
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