She looked completely normal. No nervousness. No guilt. Absolutely no sign that she’d spent the morning tossing away enough food to feed several families.
For the next few days, I tried my best to forget about it.
I couldn’t.
Every single morning, more enormous bags appeared on the curb.
Every afternoon, the city garbage truck hauled them away.
Finally, on Friday, my curiosity got the better of me again.
This time I waited until she’d driven off to work before checking another bag.
More groceries.
But underneath the food, buried near the very bottom, I found something else.
Prescription pill bottles.
Dozens of them.
Every single label had been carefully peeled off. The patient names were gone. The dosage instructions were gone. Only the generic pharmacy logos remained.
Some bottles were completely empty. Others still contained pills.
I counted nearly forty of them before I finally stopped.
Sarah looked over my shoulder when I told her.
“That’s not normal.”
“No.”
“Call the police.”
“And tell them my neighbor throws away groceries?”
“The pills.”
I hesitated.
There wasn’t actually any concrete evidence of a crime. Just something incredibly strange. Instead, I decided to pay much closer attention to the house next door.
The next morning was Saturday. Evelyn usually slept in on weekends.
Around nine o’clock, a nondescript white delivery van pulled into her driveway.
It wasn’t an Amazon truck. It wasn’t FedEx or UPS. There were absolutely no company logos on the side.
Two men climbed out wearing plain navy blue work shirts. Neither of them looked like standard delivery drivers.
They quickly unloaded six enormous cardboard boxes and wheeled them on a dolly straight into Evelyn’s garage.
Thirty minutes later, they left completely empty-handed.
That afternoon, Evelyn made three separate trips carrying more heavy contractor bags out to the curb.
Six boxes in.
Three bags out.
