First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  “The police are here,” he answered. That wasn’t anything new, because the police were around here a lot, in the neighborhood and in this building specifically. But the look on his face made me sure that this time, it was very bad news for him. “You have to take it and hide,” Rory told me. He went to the bedroom and I thought about making a run for it, but he was back too quickly. He shoved the handles of a bag into my hand, a heavy duffle that I almost dropped when he let it go.

  “Do you understand?” he asked sharply, and I nodded into the semi-darkness. “Take that and hide,” he repeated. “I’ll come back to get it from you.” He went to the window and looked out again. “I’m not going to wait up here for them. It’s better if I go down and turn myself in, out in the open.”

  Rory put a hand under my elbow and walked us to the door. The screaming had stopped in the stairwell and the building seemed too quiet now, with no one yelling or fighting, no music or even talking. It wasn’t natural.

  He swore again, a lot. “Go,” he whispered. “Go up, not down.” When I didn’t immediately move, he nudged me, and I almost fell because the weight of the duffle threw me off. “Go!” he barked, and I went. I ran as quietly as I could to the stairs with the bag in front of me, trying not to pant too loudly, up a few flights until I came out into another dark hallway. I rushed to the window at the end of it and looked down at the street.

  Rory was walking out of our building, his hands up over his head. I watched as he went down onto his knees in the circle of illumination from the streetlight, and I watched as men with guns drawn surrounded him and I couldn’t see him anymore or what they were doing to him.

  Then they moved, backing away and holstering their weapons, relaxing a little. I saw as the police led him to a car, his hands locked behind his back and his head towering over the men on all sides of him. The straps of the duffle bag bit into my hand and I shivered, despite the new shirt and the warm jacket. What was in it? What was I going to do with it? I watched until the white car that held Rory turned at the end of the block and disappeared. What was going to happen to him?

  The street emptied until all that was left was some trash and the light shining on the pavement. And again, like usual, I was on my own.

  Chapter 1

  Isobel

  The straps bit into my palm and I discretely shifted my grasp. It was heavy, and it seemed like I had been carrying it for much too long.

  “Do you understand?”

  Mrs. Tollman stared hard at me and at the canvas bucket of supplies dangling from my hand, tilting me to the side with its weight. I had started cleaning about five years before when I left high school, and I knew what I was doing, but she shook her head slowly, like maybe I had never seen a vacuum. “You cannot use the products you have there on my stainless-steel appliances,” she said, very slowly and carefully. “The stove alone is worth more than you—it cost a lot of money. Use this.” She tapped her manicured nail on the side of the bottle sitting on her marble countertop, labeled “Stainless-Steel Polish.”

  “Do you understand?” she asked me again, and waited for my reply. I thought she would have raised her eyebrows, but her forehead was strangely frozen.

  I nodded at her. How could I not understand that? Maybe she wasn’t sure if I could read, but yes, I could. If I had stuck with school, maybe I could have graduated, even. I could have... “I do,” I told her. “I do understand about the appliances. I’ll be very careful.”

  She pursed her glossy lips, like she wasn’t sure that was true. It was always a little hard to start off at a new house, to listen to a lecture about their important rules and requirements as I tried not to make a face to show how stupid I thought they were. Everyone had something different, some new thing that I absolutely had to do (or not do) if I wanted to keep working there—like the place I had been right before coming to the Tollman house. That lady always had me take off my shoes at the door to walk in socks over the floors that were grimy with dirt from their six dogs. But she didn’t want me to wear my own socks, no way. Each time I came, she put out a new pair for me to wear over mine, like my socks were polluted and her dirty floor had to be protected from my germs.

  Mrs. Tollman walked me through her house, explaining her specific procedures regarding their prized possessions: the expensive chair in her husband’s home office (“Only lightly dust it with the cloth I left on the seat. Try not to touch the upholstery too much. Absolutely no fluids!”), the special sink in the powder room (“This is the sponge to use, and this is the cleanser. Do you see the sponge?”), and especially her large closet, where I had to be very careful of her clothes, because apparently the last housecleaner had vacuumed a hem or two by mistake.

  “It was nearly a litigious situation,” Mrs. Tollman warned me. “I had to call all my friends, her other clients, to let them know about the damage to my Gnôle dress. A Gnôle.” She stared at me, making sure I got the message: I would be fired, maybe sued, and certainly run out of town by a posse of women in expensive clothes made by designers whose names I didn’t recognize.

  “I’ll be very careful,” I promised for the fiftieth time since we began the tour. The entire house looked like something in a display case, like it was a “How the Other Half Lives” exhibit in some fancy museum, with everything in it to be gawked at instead of used. I wasn’t sure what I was going to have to clean, or how she would be able to tell what I’d done, because it was already perfect. Not one piece of furniture or accessory was out of place, and there wasn’t much to show that real people lived here, besides a few small clues.

  One of those clues was a set of keys on a silver fob that Mrs. Tollman picked up now from the kitchen counter. “Oh, and that door, over there…” She lifted her chin at it sharply. “Don’t worry about going into that room. It doesn’t need any cleaning. It’s actually just a closet.” Suddenly, she wasn’t meeting my eyes, and after the twenty minutes of glaring and lip-pursing that she had just done, it made me immediately interested. I managed to be looking at her and not the mysterious door by the time she stopped fussing with the strap of her high heel and returned to staring hard at me. “I’m extremely busy and won’t be able to stay and observe you today,” she announced.

  “I’ll be very careful,” I echoed again, and hefted my bucket of supplies. I looked around the room, nodding a little, like I was deciding on my strategy to tackle the dirt. She watched me for a long moment and then clicked away to the garage without another word.

  I picked up her special stainless-steel appliance polish, a rag, and waited.

  Yeah, just like I thought. A minute later she came back in, very quietly. I was on my knees in front of the stove, wiping it with the cleaner she had shown me, and I looked up like I was surprised to see her.

  “I forgot my phone.” She narrowed her eyes, clearly unhappy that I hadn’t been caught at something, but her frozen forehead couldn’t convey the frown like those glossy, peach lips did. “Goodbye,” Mrs. Tollman announced abruptly, and clicked off again. And this time, I heard the car start and pull away.

  I went immediately to the door, the one to the room that I wasn’t supposed to bother with, and pulled on the handle. Locked, of course. I decided to circle back after I found out what her story was, which meant that I went through the whole house. I looked at all her makeup, neatly put away in trays in drawers, and I examined the labels in all her dresses and silky shirts and practiced saying the names written on them. When I went to the big, white room she used as her office, I found some bills and a few receipts that showed me she spent more on her clothes in a day than I’d spent on mine in a lifetime.

  Inside her desk, in a folder marked “Kitchen Reno,” I read the price quote from an appliance store which did prove that the stove was worth more than I was. Mrs. Tollman had just barely stopped herself from telling me that as she had handed me her spray to polish it. I flipped through a file labeled “Grand Cayman” that was full of official looking papers and real estate listings showing
multi-million-dollar homes and white-sand beaches. I closed that carefully and kept looking to find out more about this family.

  Mr. Tollman was a bit of a mystery. He liked golf and he worked in a boring, conservative office, that was easy enough to see. But like his wife, his personality didn’t come across much in the carefully-decorated house. Well, he did have a girlfriend on the side. I had quickly spotted the evidence at the bottom of his dry-cleaning pile. There were several shirts that had a different cleaner’s marking inside the collars, so he wasn’t taking them to the same place with his work clothes and his wife’s things. These shirts were loud, ugly, and stinky with a perfume which Mrs. Tollman would never have allowed on her perfect body and expensive clothes. I thought he was none too clever to have left the evidence in his closet like that, but probably his wife didn’t ever touch the hamper of dirty stuff.

  I wondered what the mistress looked like, and if his affair was why Mrs. Tollman acted so mean, because she was so unhappy. Was this who her husband was, secretly? Did he want to be a single guy who wore silk shirts with gold and purple swirls and medallions, or was he actually the married man with the long rack of silver and grey ties? I wondered if he would ever have to choose.

  But it was very hard to get a handle on this family—even the kids’ rooms were strangely vanilla, with no retainers and phone chargers on their nightstands and no piles of clothes or toys on the floors like in my other houses. I did find the daughter’s pot stash. Leighton had hidden the baggie in her closet, inside a teddy bear with its head ripped off and some of the stuffing removed. Her rolling papers were in the Bible on her shelf, one of the only books there.

  Under her brother’s bed, hidden in a deflated ball, I discovered a thick roll of tens, twenties, and even some fifties. “What have you been up to, Wilder?” I asked the framed picture he had on his desk of himself with his parents and sister, all of them wearing toothy smiles as they posed on skis on a snowy hill. Probably his mother had put that photo there. She seemed like the type to direct what the two kids could have on every surface, and he didn’t keep anything else on his desk besides an empty binder.

  After I cleaned for a while—I did clean and do a good job, because I did want to be paid—I returned to the locked door that had made Mrs. Tollman so nervous before she left (she had gone to a meeting for Wilder’s soccer team, I had discovered; she was president of the parent board). It was easy enough to get the door open, and by now, I knew that there were no hidden cameras in the house. I figured she had a very high opinion of her steely control of the environment and didn’t feel like she needed them.

  I quietly twisted the knob, keeping one ear primed for the sound of the car coming into the garage. It was getting close to the time that she had said she would be home, and I didn’t put it past her to get here “early” to do another surprise check on me. I glanced over my shoulder toward the garage, thinking I might have heard something.

  And then I turned to see what was inside the secret room. I just stared, my mouth hanging open so far that my chin practically rested on my t-shirt. I had found some crazy stuff in my other houses, like evidence of highly unusual religious practices using snakes, hard drugs that even I didn’t recognize, and porn involving…well, it was not regular porn. But this was something I couldn’t have guessed at.

  Mrs. Tollman was a hoarder! This room, which was close to the size of my studio apartment, was full of absolute crap, almost from floor to ceiling, so that it was difficult to walk very far inside without tripping. None of the stuff in here was actual trash, though, because every item that I could see still had a tag on it demonstrating that it was new, new and unused. I picked up a $50 sequined pillow with pink and turquoise leopard spots, and stepped carefully around a large, wooden lighthouse with a heart at the top, painted with the words “Love is a BEACON” and marked at $29.95. None of it looked like it belonged in Mrs. Tollman’s neutral, uncluttered house, which was why she was hiding it here.

  I took another small step and kicked a glass bottle by mistake, which clanked loudly as it tipped and rolled briefly before getting stuck on a birdcage with a toy parrot inside ($38.50). So, she drank in here, too. There were a lot of empty bottles stuffed in various places among the merchandise—she drank in here a lot.

  Then I did hear the garage, so I replaced the bottle in its spot on the floor and put down the sequined pillow and hurried out, over to the refrigerator where I rubbed away the last of the fingermarks just as Mrs. Tollman came in. She didn’t say hello, and she walked in her shoes across the floor that I had just washed, leaving a mark with her pointy heel.

  And she did just what I expected: she ran her index finger over the top of the refrigerator to check for dust. Almost all these ladies were the same. When she didn’t find any, she turned to me, mildly satisfied, and picked up her phone. “I’ll send you your fee now. You said your name was…”

  “Izzie. Um, I would prefer cash, if you have it.” I bet that she had it. Her son sure did, if she was short, but I wouldn’t be mentioning the giant money roll under his bed.

  Mrs. Tollman did her mouth-only frown again, but pulled out her designer wallet from her designer purse, and it was stuffed with crisp bills. She counted some out onto the marble counter and as she did, I saw her eyes dart to her hoarder room.

  I didn’t smile, even though I wanted to. She was wondering if I knew what she was hiding on the other side of that door. It was hard to have secrets when you let a stranger into your home to clean up after you. Maybe I had just scrubbed her toilets and she was looking at me like that was all I was good for, but I still knew what she was concealing from the rest of the world behind her perfect hair, her white walls and neutral artwork and careful pillows, and her gold bracelets and her pretty shoes. Inside that room, there was a big, ugly mess.

  “Thank you,” I told Mrs. Tollman as I picked up the cash, but she didn’t say it back to me for the work I’d done—and I really had done it, making everything shined and polished even more than before. You could have eaten off the floor in those cold, unwelcoming rooms.

  But as much as I thought the Tollman house was personality-free (except for the one room, obviously), I still admired it a lot. It was totally beautiful in its hard, hollow way. All the other houses on their street in Grosse Pointe were beautiful, too. I drove very slowly so I could look at them with their green lawns waking up after the winter and the big trees just starting to get their leaves. These people would have second homes, also, or maybe even three or four.

  I wondered what they hid in them.

  A car behind me honked and I sped up, finding my way to I-94 to head west toward Detroit to my apartment building. I stopped at a supermarket along the way and carefully considered every purchase before I laid out some of the cash that Mrs. Tollman had given me, sorry to part with it so soon. Money always left my hands way too quickly.

  “Rella?” I called as I gently tapped with my tennis shoe on the door of her first-floor apartment in our building. Her barred window faced the street and she usually watched what was happening outside, so she should have seen me coming up the steps. I shifted the groceries and my cleaning supplies, trying not to have to put anything down onto the dirty hallway floor to hunt for my key. “Rella?” I thumped harder with my toe, then when I listened closely, I heard her shuffling steps.

  She smiled at me as she opened the door. “Izzie? I didn’t know you were stopping by.”

  I swung the groceries forward. “Remember that I was bringing you a delivery?”

  That was a poor choice of words. Her forehead crinkled, her skin folding into old creases of worry and smiles. “No, I didn’t remember that, honey.”

  “That’s ok,” I said quickly. It was late in the day and she was just tired. When she was tired, she was forgetful. “Can I come in to put it away?”

  “Yes, yes! Come on in. I was just thinking about baking something. You’ve always liked my lemon bars.”

  I felt better, hearing that she still
knew that about me. “That’s right, I love your lemon bars,” I answered, smiling in relief.

  We unpacked the groceries and I told her a little about my day and the new client I had, not mentioning the hoarder room or the drugs or the money I’d found, or even that Mr. Tollman had a girlfriend. Rella didn’t like it when I pried, but she was always interested in how the houses looked, and especially if they had pools like the Tollmans did. She considered a pool to be the height of luxury. “My cousin lived in a house with a pool in Southfield. She hated it, all the upkeep, but did we have fun in the summertime,” she told me again now. That had been back in the fifties, Rella’s heyday.

  “Tell me what you wore. Tell me about your bikini,” I urged her as I put away the food.

  She chuckled. “Well, it was cherry red, my favorite color. It had a little skirt that went down to here,” she placed her hands with the gnarled knuckles on her thighs, “and I thought I was so daring. My mother would have shot me if she’d seen me in it, so I had to change before I went home and wrap it in a scarf in my handbag.” She told me more about the parties they’d had, about how she’d seen the man she’d marry there, standing on the other side of that pool. “I looked across the water and I knew.” Rella smiled, her dark eyes now looking at something far into the distance. “Barry wasn’t so sure at first, but he came around pretty fast.” She chuckled again.

  I had heard this story many times before and the words were just about the same now, which lifted a weight off me. She was ok, if she was still talking like this, remembering about meeting Barry and about her red bikini. “He was a smart man,” I told her. Her husband had died before I’d met her, but she talked so much about him that I felt like I knew him.

  “He’s a wonderful man.” Her gaze looked even farther. “When will he be home?”

  I kept my face impassive even as my heart sank. “What do you mean, Rella?”