36.

Audrey was arrested, but not until the The Caboose was gone—flooring, windows, booths, chairs, tables, toilets, sinks, meat slicer, conventional oven, cash register, walk-in freezer, micro wave oven, orange juice dispenser, gumball machine, newspaper dispenser, walls, ceiling—even the fiberglass sign above the front door. It took thirty-two hours. In your face, Essenalles! She was taken away in handcuffs. She didn’t resist.

The cops had counted on Audrey getting full, exhausted, or dead before she ate the whole thing. Containment was their plan, which, if you think about it, isn’t really a plan (unless you count “not dying” as a plan for living; if so, good luck to you).

Twelve officers had waited. Eagerly at first. Then patiently. Then irritatedly. Then apathetically. And finally, exhaustedly.

All the while, nothing happened. Birds chirped. Traffic rolled past. The wind carried the stink of the peppermint plant from upriver. The cops kept listening to that chewing noise emanating from the building. The unrelenting drone. It lulled them. It hypnotized them. Whenever one of them peeked into a window, they thought they saw a figure, indistinct, squatting on the floor, hunched, hands pressed to mouth, jaw working. Or maybe it was only a pile of boxes. They’d been up all night. The lighting was bad. The cops knew—had been told, anyway—that the woman was unarmed, so they just hung back and made sure she didn’t do anything like cause a fire or flip them the bird.

Most of the curious civilians (whose number peaked at forty-eight near dusk on the first day) only lasted a few hours. A few diehards hung on, camping out in sleeping bags in the parking lot. But with nothing to see, with only a grinding sound and some hearsay and speculation to fuel their curiosity, these folks went home to feed their cats before the second evening fell.

Only two uniformed KPD officers were on hand at 3:30 a.m. when Audrey Mapes finished.

Afterward, the Kalamazoo Gazette and local television news were abuzz with “The Incredible Eating Girl” for about two weeks, while she was detained for her hearing. But other than a handful of eyewitness testimonies, there was no documentation of the event, so people soon chalked it up to a stunt. Theories ranged from an ingenious Caboose promotional strategy to a performance piece for a university art class—a protest of animal slaughter, or perhaps some kind of elaborate statement for workers’ rights. The common denominator among the theories was the firm belief that this girl had not acted alone and that she certainly hadn’t eaten what they said she’d eaten. To quote twenty-year-old J. D. Poke, editorial writer for the Western Herald (Western Michigan University’s newspaper)—this part of the story was “a load of ca-ca.”

“I’m going to shut down the folks who believe the myth. There’s no way a human tooth can penetrate steel,” Poke continues, feeding the reader a logic sandwich with sarcasm spread. “Simple as that. Try it sometime and let me know how it goes!”

How could any Kalamazooan resist such pithy wisdom? The issue was solved. The girl and her fraud were forgotten.