Torin often found himself playing with Blake, who lived the closest to him. Unlike the other boys, Blake never pestered him with questions about his parents' wealth. Torin remembered how the others cornered him, their eyes wide with curiosity, asking, "Are your parents rich, Torin?" It didn’t feel right saying, yes so, he scuffed his toes on the ground and awkwardly scratched the back of his head, avoided their gazes and said, “I guess.” That felt like a lie. With new boys always coming around, it was a relief to have Blake. With Blake, he didn’t have to lie. It was Blake’s eyes he met when he’d look up, and Blake who looked on with bored disinterest, and often Blake who suggested they check out the garden which was the real reason Torin’s house was the best of all, in a neighborhood littered with great big houses none were as big as Torin’s, or on eighteen acres of woods and grass. Torin’s was the only backyard with an inground pool and a pile of rubbish as wide as the barn, so when Blake asked if they could hang out “Just us this time, so we can go through the heap,” Torin didn’t hesitate and immediately went looking for two long sticks they could poke through the heap with.  

In the rubbish pile, they found all sorts of odd things beyond the old furniture, stacked up as it was on and around and in a heap, and so they called it the heap. Even his parents and their friends called it a heap, a name the boys had coined, and which stuck because it suited it best.  

“Like guards in front of a fortress,” Torin said about the fancy chairs. Blake raised his stick and with a battle cry, he charged toward an Aeron Chair teetering on a matted pink couch. He threw it aside and climbed onto the couch, his knees rested against the back of it, and he began to pull what he could from a pile of wet books. Some of them had disintegrated and turned to sludge. His hands turned brown under hunks of soggy paper waste, all wet and unremarkable. Blake dug into the heap with his bare hands even though the boys had found plenty of knives and wires in the past.  

“C’mon Torin,” Blake shouted. 

Torin hesitated because his parents had warned him rather sternly to stay away from the heap, but he pushed away those thoughts and raced to his best friend’s side.  

He avoided the soggy muddy parts and focused his attention on a pile of household items, rusty kitchen utensils and plastic bags and bottles. He wanted to be the first one to say, “I got something” because Blake always got something first and that’s what he shouted. It was Blake who found the first wallet. It had been a while since they found a wallet.  

“It’s no use,” Blake shouted. “Everything’s wet. Let’s go around to the other side.”  

Torin dangled a set of keys in front of Blake. “You better give those to your dad,” Blake warned. Torin shrugged and tossed the keys as hard as he could and they landed somewhere near the top, disappearing back into the clutter. Blake's laughter erupted, so loud and hearty that it sent a flock of birds fluttering from the nearby tree. 

“Your bad,” he said.  

Torin jumped from the couch, two feet to the soft earth and they traipsed around to the other side where there were tarps and old barrels, crates, and bins overflowing with miscellaneous items. Those boxes were red herrings. The wallets were always deep inside the heap, always pushed way in and always near where Mr. and Mrs. Schröder would put the new stuff, along the edges and on the outermost ridges of the heap.  

“I think the wallets must be from whatever dump your parents get this shit from,” Blake said. 

“Not parents. Mostly just my dad, but yeah.” Torin agreed. “Say,” he said. “How many wallets are we up to now?”  

Blake kept the wallets at his house, in a shoebox under a floorboard in the partially finished attic where his mom let him play video games. There were no unfinished parts of Torin’s house, no loose floorboards either, so they stayed with Blake.  

“There’s six in there, the last I counted.” 

“Well,” said Torin. “Now we can make it seven!” He pulled a fresh wallet from a stack of magazines squeezed to fit into a broken garden pot and somewhat obscured by an old umbrella.  

“Hawkeye,” Blake squealed. “How’d you spot that?” 

Torin shrugged.  

The boys moved to the asphalt and sat huddled together for the great reveal. It was always a suspenseful moment opening the wallet to get a look at the picture, to get the man’s name, and to see if there was any money inside. The first two wallets didn’t have cash, but the last four totaled more than a hundred dollars.  

“No I.D.” Torin said with a useless shrug.  

“Well, that fucking sucks,” Blake said.  

“Twenty bucks though,” Torin said with a grin, and they cheered up at the prospect of adding another twenty to their stockpile of cash.  

“We should get a PlayStation.” Blake said.  

“For sure,” said Torin. “I heard next year and that it would cost three hundred dollars.” 

“No way can they charge that much.”  

“It won’t matter if we keep finding wallets.”  

Torin continued to lay out the contents of the wallet, which could have belonged to his father and maybe did because it was overflowing with receipts, business cards, loyalty cards, and coupons; although his father would never use a coupon, so he knew it was another man’s wallet.  

“Look at this,” he said, holding up an insurance ID card. “His name is Josie Martin-ez.”  

Blake took the card from his friend’s hand. “Jose Martinez,” he corrected.  

“I wonder how old he is,” Torin said. Blake shrugged and looked on absentmindedly as Torin spread open every receipt and laid it flat on the asphalt, as was their ritual. He pulled out a piece of paper, folded neatly into one of the card compartments.  

“What’s on it?” Blake demanded to know.  

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“Hold on,” Torin said, flicking his eyes to his friend’s. “It’s a printed poem, and it’s long and boring.” 

“Let me see,” said Blake, and he took the poem from Torin's hands with ease. “This will give me something to look at while you finish going through all that crap.” 

“Oh, a quarter,” Torin exclaimed. Blake was reading the poem, but Torin was done going through the wallet before he finished the first stanza.  

“You really going to read that whole thing?”  

“I’m skimming it,” said Blake. “Like in English class. There may be something weird in here, you never know.” 

“Yeah, like that one photo we found.”  

They both knew exactly what photo Torin meant despite finding lots of photos in the wallets, moms, dads, sisters, and brothers mostly, a few nieces and nephews. But the photo that stood out the most to them, the one they put at the bottom, was of two men lying in bed together, cuddling, being spoons together and on the back was a scrawled red heart and the words, “Kyle and Marty forever.” All Blake could say was, “Well there’s some guys like that, I guess.” Torin was speechless. They put it with the rest, but on the bottom of the pile. For safe keeping, but also because it felt like trouble. It was all trouble, but only the picture felt like something they shouldn’t have but it was too sentimental to just toss back, so they kept it. 

“Listen to this... his form had fix’d her fickle breast.”  

Now, it was Torin who erupted into laughter. He teetered back and forth laughing. “What’s that mean?” 

Confounded silence washed over them.  

“His form had fix’d her fickle breast,” Blake repeated slower. When neither boy could land at a meaning, they resumed their fitful laughter.  

“Fickle breasts.” Blake shouted with a hoot and a holler. He threw himself backward, forgetting there was a bush behind him. He laughed even with prickers and branches tearing away at him. He brought his hand down in the bush, not finding ground, but not finding a branch or a root either. Instead, his hand happened upon something firm and rounded. He could not pick it up with one hand, so he stood up and reached into the blind of the bushes with both hands and pulled out a human skull.  

“I got something,” Blake shouted, and Torin forgot the poem and jumped to his feet. What could Blake have found this far from the heap, he wondered; although, they really weren’t that far from the heap. The wind was known to blow trash all around the property, and his father had also begun to start smaller heaps in other places, deep in the woods even. Torin figured it was his dad’s attempts to hide his hoarding from his mother, who didn’t approve of the heap but had stopped complaining about it years before.  

Torin took a step back.  

“That’s a human skull, Blake.” 

“No, it isn’t.” Blake said. “It’s one of those ones made for biology class or whatever.” 

“It doesn’t look plastic.” 

Blake brushed some dirt away and held it aloft like a trophy.  

“It doesn’t feel plastic either. It’s probably made from something real lifelike. Probably it was in a science lab or something.” 

A delighted smile crept across Torin’s face. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s scare Janice.” 

Janice Schröder lounged on the sofa; her eyes glued to Nickelodeon's Aaahh!! Real Monsters. Suddenly, her brothers burst through the door, laughing and shouting, a skull impaled on a stick clutched triumphantly in their hands. 

“Oh Janice,” Torin called. His sister screamed for their mother, who came rushing from a nearby room to find her son and a neighborhood boy tormenting Janice, who was a shade younger and hated dirt and gross things. They cornered her on the sofa leaving her no choice but to bury her screams in the cushions or meet the gaze of the toothy skull on a stick.  

“Where did you get that, Torin?” Mrs. Schröder asked. His mother’s voice startled both boys, who were not such troublemakers that they would continue to wave it around in front of her. Torin slowly and carefully turned the stick to hang the skull in front of his mother, whose eyes he didn’t dare meet. He looked over to see Blake was studying the toes of his Dr. Marten’s.  

“We found it near the woods.” Torin said.  

“Well, don’t wave it at me.” Cindy cried. Torin pulled the stick closer to his body.  

“Show me where you found that thing,” she demanded. The boys led her back to their spot on the asphalt closest to the clearing, upwind from the heap.  

“We’re in for it,” Blake whispered gravely.  

“What do you mean?” Torin asked, hardly believing his mother would overreact to the teasing. And then he remembered the wallet and terror drained the color from his skin. Along the side of the asphalt, the contents of Jose’s wallet were carefully catalogued and waiting to go into Blake’s shoebox which was hidden in an old vanity at the edge of the heap.  

“Oh shit.” He whispered.  

But Cindy didn’t notice the wallet at all. What she did notice was a pile of brown sticks thrown together, with shades of sinewy white beneath the soot and dirt. Brown sticks that looked curiously like bones.  

“Go on,” she said, pointing at the bush. “Put it back where you found it.” 

The boys did as they were told. “Come on back to the house now,” she said. “I’ve got some doughnuts.”  

That night, Torin telephoned Blake after dinner.  

“Did you get it?” He asked about the contents of the wallet.  

“Yeah. I went out the back door and your mom didn’t even notice. The money’s gone though... must have blown away.” 

“Shut up. I saw you put it in your pocket.” 

The boy on the other end of the line laughed for what felt like days until Torin shushed him. He had something to tell him.  

“My mom talked about it at dinner, and I didn’t even get scolded. It was so weird. Like Eerie Indiana type weird, like that one episode of Pete and Pete.” 

“Why? Do they think it’s real, like a real human skull?” 

“Well, no. Well, yes. My dad, he just kind of went silent for a moment and then he said, it belonged to his dad. That it was just crap that my grandpa had from medical school. He said raccoons must have dragged it out of the garage.” 

“Raccoons?” Blake asked in disbelief.  

“Yeah. It was weird, but I guess that makes sense that it’s a medical type one, like you said... You know... that it’s a fancy one doctors use, only my mom said she didn’t remember my grandpa having a skeleton in his surgery and my dad got kind of mad about that.” 

“What did he say?” 

“Not much really. He just got really quiet and kind of stared her down, and she looked really confused like she was going to ask some more questions, but he got loud and told her she never lets anything go about the heap, and that she needs to just lay off about the heap.” 

“I thought you said your mom didn’t care about the heap anymore.” 

“She doesn’t. She never complains about it, really. Who do you think threw all those old shoes on it last week?”  

The next morning, Cindy Schröder bundled herself into her coat and left out the backdoor of her large mansion surrounded by growing piles of her husband’s garbage. She walked upwind of the heap and stood in front of the bush that was in front of the clearing that was no longer home to a pile of medical school bones.  

“Am I in the right place?” she wondered aloud and scanned the clearing. She was certain it was the right place. She dug around a bit in the bushes, but there was no skull where her son had dropped it. She was certain this was the place, but there were no bones.  

Must be the woodland animals must have taken them away, she thought.  

“Damn raccoons.” 

A year later, Cindy sat in her office surrounded by paperwork and her mind wandered back to the skull her son had discovered in their garden. She didn’t know it, but this seemingly innocuous find would peel back the first layer of her bisexual husband’s hidden life – a labyrinthine web of crime and secrets, which revealed a side of him she never knew existed and that would uncover 10,000 human remains.