The Costume Trunk

The notice was taped to my apartment door when I got home from work on Thursday, and it took me about three reads to figure out what it was even saying. A delivery had been made. Not to my apartment, because I hadn't ordered anything, but to the community garden shed on the edge of campus, which had somehow gotten my address attached to it. The driver had left the package outside the shed, wedged up against the door, and the notice was my official notification that it was now my problem.

My name was Jennie Talbot, I was twenty-three, and I was an architect working on the campus renovation project, which meant the college had my contact info on file and somebody in the mailroom had clearly just grabbed the wrong record and moved on with their day. That part I understood. What I did not understand was why the fix had to happen on my Friday evening, because the notice said the package would be collected for return in seventy-two hours and if I wanted it redirected I had to physically verify the item at the delivery point.

So Friday after dinner I changed into my running shoes and jogged out to the garden. It was almost dark by then, that thick upstate dark in October where the streetlights give up halfway down the block. The garden sat past the last dorm, behind a low chain fence, and the shed was a wooden thing with a door whose latch never quite caught and a roof that had seen better decades. Kenneth, my boss, had put me on the garden's drainage plan six months ago, which is how I'd learned the shed existed in the first place. Kenneth was forty-five and mostly cared that the renovation came in on time and under budget, and the garden was the part of the project nobody yelled about, which made it my favorite part.

Sure enough, there was the trunk. A big steamer trunk, the old kind with leather straps, sitting outside the shed door like a very heavy orphan. I put my hands on it and pushed. It did not move. I put my shoulder into it and it scraped about four inches across the gravel, and I decided that if I was going to verify this thing I was at least going to get it out of the weather, so I kept shoving until the trunk was technically inside the little overhang by the eave.

That was when a man spoke up from the shadow of the big oak by the fence, and I nearly went over the trunk sideways.

"Evening. I need you to step away from the shed, please."

He stepped out where I could see him. Tall, dark hair, dark jacket, holding a phone low against his leg with what I assumed was the camera running. He had a laminated card in his other hand and he held it up like a badge, and honestly it was close enough to a badge that I stepped back and put my hands up before my brain caught up with my feet.

"Carlos Torres. I'm a private investigator, licensed in the state. The university hired my firm about three weeks ago. There's been a theft issue on campus and this shed is my current observation point."

I squinted at the card. It did say Carlos Torres. And then my brain did the thing brains do, which is skip the credential and jump straight to the memory. Carlos Torres. Shared elective, senior year of my undergrad, the group project from hell, four people and one functioning slide deck, and Carlos was the only one of the four who actually showed up to the meetings. He'd been twenty-three then, two years older than me, and I had noticed him the way you notice somebody in a class you're failing to care about, quietly and from across the room and then never doing anything about it.

"Jennie Talbot," I said. "We had that urban planning elective. The group project."

He lowered the phone. For a second he looked genuinely thrown, which I didn't expect from a guy doing a stakeout. "The one where the fourth guy plagiarized the whole thing off a blog," he said. "You made the slides."

"You made the model," I said. "Out of foam board. At two in the morning."

"Best foam board model this department ever produced," he said, and we both kind of laughed at the same time, which broke whatever was left of the tension. He pocketed the phone and nodded at the trunk. "So that's yours?"

"That's mine by accident. Wrong address on the label. It's supposed to go to the theater department, it's full of old costumes, and I have to verify it exists so the shipping company will take it back." I patted the trunk lid. "Which raises the question of why a private investigator is spending his evenings in a garden shed."

"Because nobody comes to a garden shed after dark, except apparently you." He checked his watch, then seemed to make a decision. "There's a pattern to the thefts. Equipment, tools, small electronics, all taken from buildings on this side of campus. Somebody's staging things, and this garden is the closest unlit spot to three of the buildings. I sit in the shed with the door cracked and I watch."

"And tonight I showed up and ruined it."

"Tonight you showed up and gave me a heart attack," he said. "A woman wrestling a trunk in the dark did not make my short list of possibilities."

I told him I had to at least confirm the package was there, so I checked the label and the seals, and he said fine, but inside, with the door mostly shut, so his silhouette didn't break up the view of the path. So that's how I ended up in a dark shed with a man I'd half remembered for two years, prying open a trunk with a flathead screwdriver I found hanging on a nail among the rakes.

The trunk was exactly what the notice said. Costumes. A stack of velvet capes in burgundy and black, a hat stand with three hats, a bundle of what felt like sequined dresses wrapped in tissue, and a smell of old cedar and dust. I laid things out on the workbench one at a time and read the tags into my phone. Carlos held the flashlight on his phone steady, which was more useful than my phone's sad little light.

The velvet cape was the problem. It had been folded by somebody who hated capes, apparently, wadded into a ball at the bottom, and it took both of us to shake it out and get the creases to lie flat. We folded it together, my hands on one edge and his on the other, and on the third fold his knuckles brushed the inside of my wrist and stayed there a half second longer than a knuckle has any business staying.

I didn't pull away. I could say that was a decision, but it was more like the decision made itself somewhere below my thinking level, and my hand just stayed where it was while he finished the fold around it. He didn't move his hand either. The shed was very quiet and I could hear both of us breathing and the cape settling.

"Anyway," I said, way too loud in the little space, "the cape's accounted for. That's most of the verification done."

"Right," he said, and turned the flashlight off, which was probably the right move for his stakeout and a terrible move for my concentration.

I got the trunk back under the eave, told him I'd come back tomorrow to formally claim it for the theater department and get the redirect paperwork moving, and jogged home in the dark. I thought about his knuckle on my wrist the whole way.

Saturday evening I came back, officially, with a folder containing the delivery notice and a printed email thread proving the trunk belonged to the theater department. That was the story I told myself, anyway. Unofficially I had spent an embarrassing amount of the day deciding what to wear for a trip to a garden shed, which should tell you everything about where my head was.

He was already there. Not in the shadows this time, just standing by the shed door with two coffees from the gas station, and when he saw me coming up the path he held one out like it was the most normal thing in the world.

"You look like you're here on official business," he said, nodding at the folder.

"I am here on official business." I took the coffee. It was terrible and hot and I drank it anyway.

"Case is quiet tonight," he said. "Thief doesn't work Saturdays, far as I can tell. So it's just me, the moths, and whatever you brought in the folder."

I stepped past him into the shed and set the folder on the workbench, and I don't know which of us moved first, or if it was one of those things where you can't tell afterward. What I remember is that I turned around and he was close, and I said something like, "Okay, so, are we doing this," which is not my best line ever, and he said, "Yeah, I think we are," and then his mouth met mine and my back was against the wall of the shed.

The wood was rough through my shirt. That's the detail that stuck, the old planks pressing into my shoulder blades while he kissed me like he'd been waiting on it, and maybe I had been too, since a foam board model at two in the morning two years ago. My coffee hand was still full. I set it down on the workbench by feel without breaking the kiss, which I remain proud of.

By the next week we had a system. That was the part that surprised me, how fast it became a system. Systems are my whole job, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. You take an irregular thing and you routinize it until it looks like a detail on a drawing.

The routine was this. I worked late on the renovation drawings, because Kenneth wanted the drainage package updated and the phase two plans redlined, and by the time I finished it was usually close to eleven. I'd walk past the last dorm, past the low chain fence, and there he'd be, either in the shadow of the big oak or already inside the shed with the door cracked. He'd gotten a little battery lantern somewhere, the kind campers use, and he hung it from a roof beam that seemed solid even if the rest of the roof had its own ideas.

He also brought a tarp. A green plastic gardening tarp, folded into a neat square, which he spread over the dirt floor near the workbench. He kept it rolled up behind a stack of empty pots during the day. I asked him once if he'd done this before, set up a little camp in some forgotten building, and he said stakeouts were mostly furniture, meaning you learn to make furniture out of whatever's there. I liked that. There's something in every profession that translates.

We dragged the trunk inside against the wall and it became our table. The lid was flat and wide and it had a brass lock plate that clinked when you set a coffee on it, and we ate takeout off it three or four nights that week. Thai once, diner food twice, and one night he brought sandwiches from the gas station again and I gave him a genuinely hard time about it. He defended the gas station with a straight face. He said their egg salad had never once betrayed him. I told him that was a low bar for a relationship with a sandwich and he said most good things were.

I should say here, plainly, that I was twenty-three and he was twenty-five and we were both fully aware of what we were doing. Nobody was drunk on anything but bad coffee. We talked everything through before we did it, in the plain boring way that turns out to be the hottest way, and if either of us had said wait the other one would have waited. Kenneth's promotion and Carlos's case had nothing to do with each other or with us, and neither of us owed anybody anything for this. I want that understood because the rest of this reads like a fever dream and it wasn't. It was two adults choosing a thing, carefully, in a shed.

The first night of the routine, the Monday, we ate off the trunk lid and talked about nothing for an hour and then he reached over and turned the lantern down to its