The Cold (An Easy English Story): Part 6
Carlos arrives at 6:55 p.m. He’s always a little early. Mom gives me a face mask after I put on my jacket. “We don’t know the reason for the ice bodies. Just be safe,” she says.
Carlos drives a used Toyota truck. It is old, but he cleans it every day. The inside smells like pine trees. Carlos is wearing a face mask, too. “You ready?” he asks. He looks at my backpack. “Got my journal and recorder,” I explain. “I’ll take videos with my phone, too.”
It takes 15 minutes for us to drive to the mall. The mall closes at 10:00, so I have about three hours to get information about the ice body from here. “Text me when you’re finished,” Carlos says. His apartment is only five minutes from the mall, so he’ll wait there until I text him. He has not been to a store or a restaurant since the first news story about the ice bodies. Instead, he buys all of his things online. “Better to be safe,” says Carlos.
I enter the mall through the clothes store. At 7 p.m., the mall was always crowded. Even on a Tuesday night, high school students usually come to the mall to look at clothes or get coffee. Now, only a small group of high school girls look at the prom dresses, talking quietly. Half of the mall workers wear face masks. Some construction workers are moving tables out of an old cafe. In the window of a spa, a woman gives an elderly man a bathrobe. Two couples wait outside the movie theater, talking loudly. A young perfume seller sadly packs her perfumes in boxes and hangs a CLOSED sign on her cart. A homeless man sleeps on a bench in the corner of the mall. Everyone looks at me when I walk by. There is almost nobody here, so it is easy to notice other people. I pretend to look at some of the things in the store windows while I walk through the mall. Really, I am looking for something strange.
Everything in the mall looks normal, though. How did an ice body come from inside the mall? I decide to look outside the mall. There is one area in the back with large dumpsters filled with trash. That’s where the ice body was found. The cold air hurts my cheeks. I try to breathe warm air into my face mask and pull my hat lower over my ears. Using my cell phone flashlight, I look around the dumpsters. One rusty dumpster is covered in yellow police tape. The ice body was probably here.
I find a box on the ground and stand on it to see inside the dumpster. The police tape says “DO NOT CROSS.” But if I stand next to the dumpster and look inside, I am not crossing the line. The inside of the dumpster is surprisingly boring. There are only a few empty coffee cups, dead leaves, and broken clothes hangers. I look behind the dumpster, and there is still nothing.
I open my phone to check the time. It is 9:30. I haven’t found anything about the ice bodies. Maybe I should just call Carlos.
But where am I right now? I open Google Maps on my phone to send Carlos my location. I look closer on the map. The dumpsters are right behind a cafe. Is that the cafe that closed?
If the cafe is closed, people wouldn’t notice a dead body. The construction workers aren’t in there the whole day.
I decide not to call Carlos yet. I still have 30 minutes, and I am going to look around the old cafe.
Thankfully, the construction workers are gone. No one is shopping now, and the workers are all cleaning up their stores and getting ready to go home. I quietly go inside the cafe. The lights are off, but enough light is coming in through the plastic that covers the doorway. The construction workers took out all of the tables, chairs, and doors. Half of a long counter is on the right side of the cafe. The other half was broken with a hammer and lies on the ground. I look up. The ceiling is painted with green leaves. I remember this cafe now. I went here on a date in my second year of high school. My date wasn’t fun, but I liked the cafe. I feel sad that I never came back. The cafe was called Green Leaves and decorated like a jungle. Tall plants stood by the heavy wooden doors, and there was a small fountain in the middle of the cafe. Now, there is a circle in the floor. The fountain must have been there.
Behind the half counter, there is a rectangle hole in the wall. It leads to the kitchen. I walk softly to the kitchen. When I am behind the wall, I turn on my cell phone flashlight. Wires hang out of the walls like dead tree branches. They used to connect to stoves and ovens. The kitchen still smells like coffee and cake. On the other side of the kitchen are two doors. One has a small window, and I can see the back parking lot from there. This is where they took the ice body out. The other door is thick and metal. It must be a large refrigerator for Green Leaves’ famous milk tea and fruit cake.
My heart beats faster. I turn the fridge handle, and the door is unlocked. The fridge was turned off. Large metal shelves stretch from floor to ceiling on both sides of the fridge. They are empty, too.
Across from me is one more metal door. This one is unlocked, too. I open it to find a freezer.
A freezer.
The freezer is turned off, but inside there are about twenty bags of ice on the ground. And the ice is still cold.
Fun for Fluency! 