The first thing I saw wasn’t blood.
It was bread.
Perfectly good bread.
Still sealed inside the bakery bag.
Next to it sat unopened cartons of milk, fresh vegetables, expensive steaks wrapped in butcher paper, family-sized boxes of cereal, frozen meals, yogurt cups that hadn’t even reached their expiration date, and enough fruit to fill an entire grocery store display.
I blinked several times, convinced I was missing something.
The contractor bag wasn’t full of garbage.
It was full of groceries.
Thousands of dollars’ worth of groceries.
Nothing smelled rotten.
Nothing had spoiled.
Everything looked fresh.
“What on earth…” I whispered.
A car door slammed somewhere down the street.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Thinking Barbara had come back, I hurriedly tied the bag closed exactly as I’d found it and crossed the street as casually as I could. By the time I reached my driveway, my heart was pounding harder than if I’d been caught stealing.
When I told my wife, Megan, what I’d found, she stared at me in disbelief.
“You’re telling me she’s throwing away perfectly good food every single day?”
“I know how crazy it sounds.”
She folded her arms.
“Maybe someone dumped it there.”
“In five different bags?”
Neither of us had an answer.
That evening, while grilling dinner, I watched Barbara pull into her driveway.
She smiled at me exactly like she always did.
“Beautiful evening,” she called.
“It sure is.”
She looked completely normal.
No nervousness.
No guilt.
No sign that she’d spent the morning tossing away enough food to feed several families.
For the next few days, I tried to forget about it.
I couldn’t.
Every morning, more enormous bags appeared.
Every afternoon, the garbage truck hauled them away.
Finally, on Friday, curiosity got the better of me again.
This time I waited until she’d driven off before checking another bag.
More groceries.
But underneath the food, buried near the bottom, I found something else.
Prescription bottles.
Dozens of them.
Every label had been peeled off.
The names were gone.
The instructions were gone.
Only the pharmacy logos remained.
Some bottles were empty.
Others still contained pills.
I counted nearly forty before I stopped.
Megan looked over my shoulder.
