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Finding Prosperity

Page 5

by Cherie Mitchell

Prosperity Spartanburg had been a maid for three weeks when she bumped into the man named Troy for the first time. It was not a strange meeting, except for the fact that he’d been a strange man in a house that was supposed to be empty. Oh, and also the fact that he was naked at the time. Other than that … normal, totally normal.

  It was probably less shocking because she was running on three Monster energy drinks and two donuts with pink icing and sprinkles. Saturday mornings were always tough. Oddly, her classes at the Cape Cod Community College ran late into the evening. Odd because they were classes in Funeral Services during which they were often studying cadavers under the malodorous influence of various embalming fluids.

  Whoever thought it was a good idea to schedule those courses at night was an idiot. She lost track of the times she sprinted across the parking lot to her Volkswagen Bug, fumbled for her keys, and slammed the door on her seat belt trying to escape the imaginary zombies chasing her out of the building. Idiots.

  The longer she spent with the dead, the more she wondered if she’d made a horrible mistake choosing that particular career path. But this was her last year and soon she’d be out … so she could spend the rest of her life around more dead bodies. Who’s the idiot now?

  The maid gig was decent money and she could work pretty much whenever she wanted. A nice feature when exams or labs came up. Twenty bucks an hour paid for her gas and some of her rent. Last month had been slow and she wasn’t able to make the payment, and they kicked her out. No grace period, no warning, no nothing. Boom. Out on the street. With her car stuffed solid to its rag top, she drove around mindlessly, trying to work out where she could crash.

  Her phone had brought her not only a message reminding her of this Airbnb cleaning, but also a plan. There weren’t any guests scheduled to be in the house for over a month. No one would notice if she just spent a couple of days there while she got her current living situation worked out.

  A good weekend at her second job at the Tail Spinner would get her back in the black. It disgusted her that she had to get nearly naked, serve watered-down cocktails, and let a bunch of old white men with cigars and whiskey grab her butt—among other things—for money. But when times were tough, she did what she had to do. That’s what her mama always told her to do.

  Typically, once a month in the skimpy waitress get-up the club provided was all she needed or could stomach. But this month she would have to add a weekend. Just one. Lately she’d been adding more and more second weekends … it made her gag to think about it. Some nights when she watched the genuine strippers counting their huge wads of cash while snorting lines of white powder, she thought about going all the way ... just once. The coked-up dancers pulled in five times what she did on a good night, three times as much on a bad night. It was almost enough to bend her morals until she saw the way those girls looked in the light of day. She shivered at the thought of the strung out, worn down, zombie-fied faces that haunted the Tail Spinner strip club when dawn ran off the last of the vultures. No, that was a bridge too far, for now.

  Her plan to crash at the Airbnb almost came to a screeching halt when she found the naked man showering in the bathroom. The initial shock had been seeing someone else in the buff while she still had her clothes on. She’d become so accustomed to the reverse at the Tail Spinner strip club that this felt strange. But that strange feeling had changed into who the hell is this guy? There isn’t supposed to be anyone here.

  That’s when she saw his eyes. She had become a good judge of character working at the strip club, and somehow she saw immediately that this was a decent man. Worn, weary, and probably hungover, but decent.

  While the man in the shower finished up, she played at dusting the furniture and rearranging the various generic beach house tchotchkes scattered about. She saw what must be his hat on the couch and flipped it over to inspect it. Interesting. You don’t see many of these on Martha’s Vineyard, she thought.

  “You like it?” His voice startled her and she threw it back down on the leather sectional.

  “Hey, hey, hey.” He held up his hands. “You don’t have ta be so rough with her. She’s been through a whole heap of crazy times with me.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She picked it up, dusted off the top of it, and handed it to Troy. “My bad.”

  “No problem, darlin’.”

  He put the hat on his head and smiled. His shirt was linen and wrinkled as if it had never ever seen an iron. He wore khaki shorts and flip-flops, and she wondered if those had ever been washed. This guy was a beach bum in every sense of the word. Prosperity was surprised at the flutters that sent her heart racing and her pulse thrumming in her chest. Thankfully, his smile looked well-cared for and his teeth were all there.

  Good teeth, good man, her mama always used to say.

  He was a little bit Magnum P.I. and a little bit Matthew McConaughey to look at, but his Southern drawl was all McConaughey.

  “Well, little lady, if you’re gonna stare that long, might as well take a photo,” he said and pulled his hat brim down slightly.

  “Oh, uh,” Prosperity stuttered and started dusting the side table furiously. “Just tidying up a bit.”

  Troy nodded. “I’ll just grab my things and—”

  “You don’t have to. Why don’t you stay?”

  She mentally slapped her forehead at how quickly she had blurted that out. High school crushes had been ruined on less desperate sounding appeals. The man named Troy arched his eyebrow and showed her dimples in his cheeks she hadn’t noticed before.

  “What I mean to say is ... like I said before ... um ... the place is empty for a while.” She imagined that she was slowly drowning, every word she spoke dumping more and more water on her. “I’m staying for a few days and I uh…”

  “You don’t want to be alone?” Troy said, and then quickly added, “for safety’s sake. Is that it?”

  He had rescued her from the depths.

  “Yes.” She nodded vigorously as she said it. “That is precisely it. I was hoping you’d stay and keep me safe.”

  Safe from being alone and bored, she thought.

  The man mimicked her by looking at the non-existent watch on his darkly tanned arm.

  “I reckon I could stay a while,” he said. “I suppose I can put off my rendezvous with a Greyhound until next week.”

  She smiled at him, and an awkward silence threatened to creep up between them. Before it could, he reached out and took her feather duster from her hand, tossed it on the couch and pulled her into the kitchen. He opened the stainless steel industrial-sized refrigerator to reveal two Coronas, a partially cut orange, a cardboard pizza box—and nothing else.

  “I drink my beer with an orange slice,” he said pulling the beers out. “How about you?”

  “When in Rome,” Prosperity heard herself say as he opened the bottles and shoved two slices into each one.

  “I had no idea the Romans had Coronas,” he laughed as he handed her one. “But I do know they had beaches all over the world. You in for a quick walk?”

  She raised her beer and took a sip. It was dry and bitter but followed quickly by the sweet and tart tang of the orange. It was damn good.

  “I’m in.”

  At least until midnight, she thought. That’s when things get cranking at the Tail Spinner.

  Prosperity made it home at dawn and found Troy still asleep. She picked a random bathroom, stripped off her smoky clothes, and showered to get the garish makeup off her face. She didn’t want him seeing her like that. She reserved that look for perverts and wannabe gangsters at the club.

  As she scrubbed herself with a guest’s forgotten loofa, she daydreamed about Troy walking in and catching her with a squirrely towel that would insist on revealing a bit too much. But he didn’t, and she thought that was probably for the best.

  Troy had woken up by the time Prosperity exited the bathroom. She hadn’t slept all night, but the shower had rejuvenated her. She was more hungry than sleepy now, so she told
Troy what she was craving, handed him a wad of ones to pay for it all—along with the keys to her bug—and sent him into town. To kill time, she’d started cleaning some of the rooms they weren’t occupying.

  More of the rooms than not looked like they hadn’t been touched since her last cleaning—certainly not the story when the last maid suddenly quit the job. Prosperity had gotten the job by eavesdropping as one of the customers at the Tail Spinner complained about having to get rid of the last cleaning woman and needing someone in a hurry. When she heard the last maid was making fifteen bucks an hour, her ears perked up. They were desperate, as guests were coming the next day and the place was turned over by a bunch of hippie protesters having some kind of clean-up-the-beach party. They had apparently been hiking the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard for a month and had stacked the trash and refuse on the back deck of the rental. One of the men sitting with them commented how those hippy types didn’t shower either and the how the sheets probably reeked of patchouli.

  Though Prosperity wasn’t exactly looking for extra work, she always seemed to need money and she had a phone bill that was three months overdue. She leaned in and said she’d be happy to help, but they’d have to pay well since she’d be missing out on a night of good tips. A bit of haggling and pats on her behind later and she was hired. The next day she found that the place did, indeed, smell like patchouli ... and pot. And the mounds of trash took her four hours to haul away, three at a time, in the tiny trunk of her car.

  Thankfully, today most of the house looked unused. The bathroom and bedroom the man had been using were mostly clean and one other room seemed barely lived in. In the others, she found the beds made and the trash cans empty. She ran her duster over furniture idly as she made her way down the long hallways.

  She took a flight of stairs down toward what the owners called the back of the house. It was a darker area of storage for linens, cleaning supplies, extra dishes, and sundry items that always seemed to end up stowing away in the guests’ luggage.

  She grabbed a few sheets and things to make up the two used bedrooms, and when she leaned over to add pillowcases a strange smell wafted up from below the plastic shelf unit. Her first instinct was mold. This room was probably flooded in a storm at some point, and maybe the water had pooled under the shelf and grown mold.

  She pulled out the shelf, expecting to find grungy green water, but instead found something black and sticky. When the puddle hit the air, the smell intensified and knocked Prosperity back a step. She clutched her hand over her mouth and nearly dropped the clean linens in the muck.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said through her fingers. “What the hell is that?”

  Her eyes watered and she nearly bolted out of the room. But then she realized the ooze was coming out from under a section of the wall behind a shelf that didn’t quite reach the ground. When she examined it closer, she figured out that it was not a wall at all. It was a door.

  She put the stack of linens on the shelf, taking a pillowcase and wrapping it around her face. She pulled the shelf unit away from the concealed door. She had never seen this before and had no idea what to expect, but something made her trace her fingers along the surface until she found the edge. It didn’t have a handle, and though she could get her fingernails into the crack around the door, it wouldn’t budge.

  She leaned down and eased her fingers under the bottom of the door, trying not to get too much of the inky fluid on her hands. That low to the ground the smell was horrific. Definitely not mold, she thought. When her fingers were all the way under the door, she pulled. It moved a little but seemed to catch on something. She pulled harder, bracing her foot against the wall. A loud screech preceded the door flying open, sending her skidding backward to land on her bottom.

  Inside the secret room, a fluorescent bulb flickered on and Prosperity gasped. Only this time, she wasn’t gasping from the smell. She was shocked at what she saw inside the room.

  END OF THE EXCERPT

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  Also by David Berens

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  The Prosperity Spartanburg Files

  With Cherie Mitchell

  #0 Finding Prosperity (available FREE exclusively to the Beachbum Brigade Reader Group)

  #1 Raising Prosperity

  #2 To Be Revealed

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  #1 Capitol Break

  #2 To Be Revealed

  #3 To Be Revealed

  FINDING PROSPERITY

  The Prosperity Spartanburg Files Prequel

  All Rights Reserved © 2019 by David F. Berens

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Tropical Thriller Press 2019

  Printed in The United States of America

  Contact the Author at:

  www.TropicalThrillers.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

 

 


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