The next night, more crunching.
And then the next night after that.
And the next night after that.
"This is ridiculous," I said to Niki at one point, during our neighbor's regular 3 a.m. routine. At least it was keeping a regular schedule.
"Trevor needs to just go up there and grab it with his hands already," she said.
"Yup." It was all I could say.
When a week passed with no sound, and no funk, we called Trevor. He arrived and examined the traps. Whatever Niki thought she heard the other night was something else. The traps had not been tripped.
"It must be getting in from the vents in the crawl space," Trevor said, initiating THEORY No. 2. "There's no other explanation. It can't last a week up there without food, so it has to be coming and going, and the only way in and out is this vent. I'll seal up the vents down here and we'll reset the traps in the attic. Eventually, it's got to go for the food on my trap."
Great, but 'eventually' wasn't the timetable we were going for. While Trevor set the trap, we started grilling him on the question that had been bugging me since our first meeting: How does someone like Trevor purposefully apply for a job like this? How could someone see an ad needing someone to scour attics for rodents and say, I'd like to do this?
The answer, as often happens, is one of relativity. Trevor had been working a night shift at a grocery store when his friend who owned the business asked him to come be a partner. He went from bagging Ritz crackers to bagging raccoons in a heartbeat.
The most disgusting thing he's seen, Niki wanted to know? That would be the skunk that got smashed with a forklift, something he could smell from 2 miles away.
The hardest part of the job, Niki wanted to know? That would be going under houses to retrieve already dead animals. I won't go into the other details.
"I've got some raccoons in the trunk if you want to see them?" he offered.
No thanks.
"Um, let's say we catch the rat in the trap, but we don't hear it," I asked. "How many days till we start smelling some funk?"
Trevor looked me in the eyes: "You've got three days. Three days."
And then, he was off again.
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