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.
Something wasn’t adding up.
I had written down the van’s license plate number. That night, I ran a search online.
Nothing came up. The plate wasn’t connected to any registered business I could find.
On Monday morning, I decided to work from home.
Just before seven, Evelyn came outside again.
This time she wasn’t alone.
An elderly man slowly shuffled behind her.
I had never seen him in the neighborhood before. He looked painfully thin. His gray hair hung messily over his eyes, and he wore flannel pajamas beneath an oversized winter coat, even though it was already almost eighty degrees outside.
Evelyn held him firmly by the elbow.
“Back inside,” she commanded quietly.
The old man looked over toward my house.
For one brief second, our eyes met.
His pale lips moved. I couldn’t hear him.
