"This is the last one, Miss Conte, sign me here and I can go."
"Roberto, what did I tell you, call me Amelia, please!" In her tone of voice could be felt the laughter that came out after that request in the form of a chuckle. "Well, here's a nice tip to make up for it." She handed him back the folder with the sheets she had signed, now with a fifty dollar bill on top. "I could also offer you a cup of freshly brewed coffee."
"I'd love to, I really would, but I have one more delivery to make before I go home and I can't delay."
"I don't know what it could be... my mother was the one who was in charge of packing the things."
"Then I wish you luck, it sure will be fun to open them." He joked before leaving.
She had been notified that she had to vacate her old apartment because it would be sold, even though the owners gave her three months to find somewhere to go, she was visiting some childhood friends in Italy, so she asked her mother for help with the move so she wouldn't have to return early since her job had already given her vacation.
The sound of the coffee pot gave her a sense of comfort, because although it would be a huge job to unpack so many boxes, she would have a good cup of black coffee, just the way she liked it, and that made her feel better. But thinking precisely about the amount of boxes while she poured the coffee in her cup made her ask herself how had she accumulated so many things if she followed a minimalist lifestyle?
It was there that she began to contemplate the boxes while taking sip after sip of coffee, stopping at a small white box that said 'fragile' in red letters. She left her cup on the kitchen counter and approached it with some apprehension but great curiosity as it was the first one she would open, not at all surprised by its somewhat battered state, as it was known that during moves boxes could suffer a lot of damage along with what was inside it. What did surprise her, and very much so, was when after opening the box she found a gun, so much so that she immediately dropped the box to retrace her steps back to the kitchen in search of her phone not caring that the box had fallen on the floor, all she could think of was to call her mother, dialing her number as fast as her fingers could.
"Can you explain to me what a gun is doing in my things?" She shouted.
"Amelia, are you okay, what gun are you talking to me about?" The confused voice her mother answered in was enough for her to understand that she had nothing to do with what was going on.
"Mom, I'm unpacking boxes and I found a gun. If you didn't send it, whose is it? Ask Dad, lest he bought it on the sly."
"Call the police this instant, Amelia, I know your father wouldn't do anything like that, I don't want to imagine what boxes it was that came to you but they are not yours, call the police, let them check what's in there, don't keep opening anything." She ordered her.
Following her mother's directions, Amelia called emergency explaining everything that was happening and an hour later two officers knocked on her door asking for details of the incident to write them down in their notebooks. She repeated what she had told the emergency operator, but told them the moving service she had used, the name of the person who had brought the boxes and that the only box she had touched was the one still on the floor with the gun inside. One of them put on gloves, while his partner stood next to her.
"I think you're going to have to escort them to the station, Miss Conte."
"So I'm under arrest? Oh my God." Faced with the loss of strength in her legs, the officer next to her had to hold her up so she wouldn't fall.
"No, we're not going to arrest you, there's no need to be alarmed. What we want is to be sure."
The officer's speech did not leave her calm but there was nothing to do, she knew they were going to keep her waiting in a room for hours, in the best case scenario letting her go without having to call her mother to rescue her from such a tangle she had gotten herself into by chance. To her good fortune, she didn't have to wait much longer before a woman who introduced herself as Detective Rodriguez appeared, sat down across from her placing a folder on the table and smiled at her.
"Please tell me they know I had nothing to do with those boxes." She asked with tears about to spill out of her eyes.
"Oh yes, don't worry, the gun is stolen, until now we had had no indication as to the whereabouts of both the gun and who used it, but we have several prints on the gun and they are already being processed. The moving services company told us there was an error in the delivery, those boxes were supposed to go to an apartment with the same number but in a different building, maybe that's why the person who dropped off the boxes to you got confused."
Amelia couldn't believe her luck.
"So I'm free?"
"Yes, you are free." She rose from the chair, offering her a card. "I'll keep in touch with you if I have any news about your belongings to deliver to you. For now, all I can do is buy you a cup of coffee."
Yes... now she needed a strong cup of coffee.