Nearly Departed (Spring Cleaning Mysteries)

by J. B. Lynn

  "And how are you going to explain this?" He raised a hand to trace the bruise forming beneath my eye.

  My breath caught as his fingers hovered over the injured area, but he didn't actually touch me. His focus shifted from the shiner to my eyes as he waited for my answer.

  "If they ask, I'll tell them I banged it working in the bathroom. As long as you don't give them a reason to think otherwise, they'll believe it. My klutziness is legendary."

  He lowered his hand but kept that unnerving gaze locked on my face. "It'll cost you."

  I frowned, wondering what the going rate for my parents' peace of mind would be.

  "I want you to promise me you won't be at the job alone again."

  "That's it?"

  "You were expecting me to ask for something else?"

  I shrugged. "I've never been blackmailed before."

  "Don't think of it as me blackmailing you. Think of it as you developing your self-preservation instincts."

  "It sounded like blackmail."

  "Humor me. Mike would kill me if anything happened to you."

  Before I could ask him just what Mike had said about me, my dad poked his head into the garage. "Your mother says dinner will be ready in ten minutes."

  Smoke pushed himself off the wall and away from me.

  "Jerry, my son, built all these shelves," Dad boasted. "Pretty impressive, isn't it?"

  "Great use of the space," Smoke replied easily. Picking up the heaviest box of supplies, he walked out to the van.

  "Your mother said you should wash your hands and face before you come to the table," Dad whispered before heading back inside.

  I gathered the rest of the materials and stowed them in the van.

  "Do we have a deal?" Smoke asked.

  "Do I have a choice?"

  He tilted his head. "Sure. You can choose to have your parents find out that someone broke in and punched you, or you can knock that giant Miss Independence chip off your shoulder and accept my help."

  I batted my eyelashes and raised the back of my hand to my forehead in my best impersonation of a damsel in distress. "Well, when you put it that way…"

  Smoke's jaw muscle twitched signaling his annoyance. "So we have a deal?" He extended his hand.

  It wasn't like I had a lot of options. "Deal."

  I slid my palm against his, intent on delivering the briefest of handshakes, but he had other ideas. His hand enveloped mine in a firm grip, and he didn't release me when I tried to tug free. "Victoria, I—"

  "The deal did not include you calling me Victoria."

  "Sorry. I'm not trying to stop you from doing what you want."

  So he had heard me earlier.

  "I just want to keep you safe. Those frat boys were murdered…viciously. I just don't want the same thing to happen to you." Having had his say, he released my hand.

  "Dinner's ready!" my father yelled.

  I glanced over and saw that he had the kitchen door open and was standing on the steps. I wondered if he'd seen Smoke holding my hand. I hoped not. I had enough on my plate without having to explain that I wasn't involved in any kind of romantic relationship with my employee. I'd leave that to the Stalker Chick.

  "Coming, Dad!" I motioned for Smoke to follow me.

  The first thing I noticed when we stepped inside the kitchen was that I could see the counters. I groaned.

  "What's wrong, dear?" Mom asked, taking some butter out of the refrigerator.

  "You put everything away."

  "I had time to kill while I waited for the lasagna to heat up."

  "You shouldn't have done that, Mom." She really shouldn't have.

  My mother fixed her gaze over my left shoulder. "You'll have to excuse Vicky, Mr. Smoke. I swear we didn't raise her to live like this."

  "Not a problem, ma'am. If you don't mind, I'd like to wash up before we eat."

  "Of course. Of course. The powder room is upstairs. First door on the left."

  "Thank you." Smoke brushed my arm as he moved past me on his way out of the kitchen.

  "Such a polite young man. How did you meet him?"

  "I told you. He's a friend of Mike."

  "Any friend of Mike is a friend of ours," Dad said, taking the butter from Mom, but not before pressing a quick kiss to her cheek. He winked at me, which I took to mean he'd seen us holding hands and he approved, but he'd keep our "secret."

  I smiled weakly before turning to scrub my hands in the kitchen sink.

  "There's no rush on dinner. You have time to freshen up. You don't have to wash up in the kitchen." My mother's hint was less than subtle.

  "I'm hungry."

  "But…when's the last time you had dinner with a man other than your father or Mike?"

  "I'm not 'having dinner' with Smoke. You issued the invitation, you're the one having dinner with him. It's just happens to be in my home."

  My mother clucked her disappointment, grabbed the lasagna out of the oven, and marched into the dining room.

  I dried my hands on a paper towel and considered the kitchen cabinets. They were full of canned goods, which was not a good idea.

  Hearing Smoke's footsteps clatter down the stairs, I tossed the towel and strolled into the dining room. Mom and Dad were already seated. There were three empty chairs at the table.

  "Where would you like me to sit?" Smoke asked.

  "Anywhere except at the head of the table," my mother said as though it was her house.

  Smoke looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded.

  "Salad, Mr. Smoke?"

  "Please."

  "Vicky has an aversion to china and porcelain, so I'm afraid dinner will be served on paper, plastic and Styrofoam," Mom said, dishing a huge serving of salad onto a plate.

  "Fine by me." Smoke looked at me from across the table.

  I busied myself with tearing a piece of French bread off the loaf and passing it to my father.

  "We have two kinds of lasagna, Mr. Smoke. Would you prefer yours with or without meat?'

  "He's being polite and not correcting you, but his last name is not Smoke," I muttered. "It's Barclay. He's Mr. Barclay. Smoke is his first name."

  "Legally?" my father asked.

  Smoke nodded.

  "I bet there's a fascinating story behind that, Mr. Barclay."

  "Call me Smoke. Everyone does. And I'd like to try both lasagnas if that's okay."

  My mother beamed. "I do like a man with a healthy appetite."

  Reaching across the table, I picked up the salad and examined it. "Is this the salad from the birthday party?"

  "Of course," Mom said.

  I wrinkled my nose at the limp greens and passed it to my father without taking any.

  "So tell us how you came by your name, Smoke." Dad served himself a healthy serving of close-to-rotten lettuce.

  Smoke's lasagna-laden fork hesitated halfway to his mouth.

  "You don't have to," I told him hurriedly.

  "Forgive our daughter, Smoke." Mom reached out and lovingly brushed my hair off my face. "She doesn't like to talk about herself, and so she assumes it makes everyone else uncomfortable too."

  "I've noticed." He watched Mom's actions intently. A flicker of surprise flashed in his eyes when I caught her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  "I shouldn't have interrupted," I murmured. Mom was right. I did have a habit of projecting my own hang-ups on others.

  "I hated my birth name, so I legally changed it when I turned eighteen," Smoke explained.

  Thankfully both my parents had the grace not to ask what his hated name had been. They must have been curious. I knew I was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I'm not sure if it was the bonk on the head, getting slimed by the ghost, or that my stress level was hovering just below Code Red, but that night I dreamt about the event that had resulted in my being able to communicate with the nearly departed.

  My life was fairly normal, boring even, until the meth lab "incident."

  I've ne
ver understood why Jerry wanted to open a Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination (or as I like to call it, CTSD) biz, but I was happy that he'd found his calling. Just around the time Spring Cleaning had gotten started, I'd had to leave my fiancée and my job at the law firm of Kerr, Macht, and Adams.

  That's when Jerry had asked for my help. It was a win-win situation. I'd get a chance to get back on my feet, and Jerry would have someone he trusted helping him build his dream. He sweetened the arrangement by letting me live in his place rent-free since my housing arrangement expired at the same time.

  Our deal was that I'd give him a year.

  The money may have been good, but the work was back-breaking, the hours were murder, and it was emotionally draining. Because of that, the average CTSD employee could only hack it for about eight or nine months. It was my eighth month working for Spring Cleaning when Jerry asked me to start the clean-up job over in Taftville.

  He sent me and the new guy, John, who looked strong enough to tear a house apart beam by beam with his bare hands, over to clean up a meth lab located in an old Cape Cod. As company went, John was a good guy. He had dreams of becoming a fireman and considered the heavy lifting at this kind of job to be good physical training.

  I hated cleaning up meth labs. For one thing, they were dangerous. Noxious fumes from chemicals like ammonia, ether, and paint thinner filled the air. They were used to "cook" the drug…which meant they could create heat…which meant they could go "BOOM!" without warning. Those nasty vapors also smelled terrible. This particular meth lab smelled like cat pee.

  I hated cat pee.

  I could smell it from the driveway as John and I pulled on our protective, impermeable, Tyvek suits, gloves, and, thankfully, respirators. Once we were dolled up like extras from a bad 1950's sci-fi flick, we made our way into the house. Slowly.

  Not only had the house been used to manufacture crystal methamphetamine, it had been owned by a hoarder. You couldn't see the walls through the ceiling-high stacks of Sophisticated Living magazines.

  "Crap," I muttered.

  "What?" John asked.

  "We're going to have to bag all of this." I waved my arms to encompass the mess. The "cooking" chemicals had seeped into every non-porous object in a house, contaminating everything. Everything in the house, magazines, furniture, ceiling fixtures, carpet, cabinetry, and anything else that wasn't part of the structure needed to be torn out.

  I stood there, overwhelmed with the enormity of the job, unsure of where to even start. That was another reason I hated meth house jobs. At least when you had to clean up after a dead body, the area you worked on was pretty defined…and most didn't smell like cat piss.

  "Start bagging the magazines." I didn't trust John to clean up the actual chemicals that still remained. I went in search of them.

  I found them in the kitchen. An awful lot of amateur chemists seemed to take the "cooking" part of meth production literally and did their work in the kitchen. Which was insanely stupid considering any spark might send the whole place up. Thankfully this abode boasted an electric stove, so there was no pilot burning to ignite the fumes. There were however, a million metal bottle caps. Everywhere. Apparently the Sophisticated Living devotee had also been a heavy beer drinker. Caps covered the floor and the top of the fridge and filled the kitchen sink.

  "Double crap," I muttered to myself. They were going to be a bitch to clean up.

  I couldn't feel the caps through my industrial work boots as I walked through the kitchen taking a quick inventory, but they crackled underfoot, miniature cap guns exploding, with every step I took.

  I don't remember the explosion.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor, my respirator knocked askew, breathing in cat pee…or deadly chemicals. I lay there gasping for breath and disoriented. The room started to fill with smoke.

  "You have to get up, dear." An older woman who looked like Liza Minnelli, wearing a housedress with a print so garish it hurt my eyes despite my protective goggles, stood over me. "Get up."

  Obediently I struggled to a sitting position. It felt as though my skull was being crushed, and my lungs burned from the effort of getting upright. I fumbled for my respirator mask and repositioned it, filtering out the majority of cat pee and smoke. My heart rate tripled when I realized the house was burning. "John?"

  I got no answer. All I heard was the crackling of flames. I imagined them feeding on the magazines that filled the rooms. An eerie orange glow washed over everything. I didn't have much time. I hoped that John had found his own way out.

  "This way." Liza beckoned me toward a pantry door.

  I scrambled on my hands and knees toward her, my gloves and biohazard suit were no match for the ridged edges of the metal caps. The tiny teeth cut into my flesh, but I ignored the pain.

  She was gone when I reached the pantry door. I looked around, but she'd disappeared.

  The heat in the room rose relentlessly.

  I ripped open the pantry door and was hit by a blast of cooler air. It wasn't a pantry. Stairs led down to a basement. I slid down the stairs on my butt like a two-year-old. The door swung shut behind me. The only light was the orange glow seeping underneath the door.

  I groped in the darkness trying to get my bearings. My hand hit something icy cold, and it was as though whatever it was, tugged me along, led me.

  I found something. It was cylindrical, metal, and about a foot long. I gripped the pipe in the dark, unsure of what it meant, but knowing it was important.

  "Turn it on." Liza told me.

  "Turn what on?" I asked.

  "The flashlight in your hands."

  I felt along the grooved material until I found a switch. I pushed it and suddenly had white light to combat the approaching orange. I swung it around. Unlike the rest of the house that had been lined with junk, the basement was clean and orderly.

  "Take that envelope," Liza told me, pointing to a thick manila envelope that occupied a shelf of its own. "You have to take it to Father Acevedo over at Holy Mother."

  I grabbed it without asking why she couldn't just take it herself.

  "The door is this way." Liza led the way across the basement which was quickly filling with smoke, giving her a shimmery, murky appearance as the beam of the flashlight sliced across the World's Ugliest Housecoat.

  Suddenly I was at another set of stairs. Five steps, and at the top was metal.

  "It's the storm cellar entrance," Ms. Minnelli chirped. She stood aside, indicating I should go first. "Just push on the doors and out you'll pop."

  Laying the envelope on the bottom step, I hustled up the short flight. Squeezing the flashlight between my knees, I pushed on the door.

  Nothing happened.

  I pushed harder.

  Still nothing.

  I dropped the flashlight which clattered to the basement floor.

  In the darkness I pushed on the doors with both hands.

  With everything I had.

  And they wouldn't budge.

  I was going to die here in the hoarder's house turned meth lab. I'd either die from smoke inhalation or I'd burn to death in a place filled with beer caps and Sophisticated Living magazines.

  "I don't want to die!" I sobbed, which was a bad idea because my goggles started to steam up from my tears. "Help!" I shouted, pummeling the door with my fists. "Help me!"

  Miraculously the door opened.

  Brawny John practically ripped the thing off its hinges. I'd never been so grateful to see another human being in my life. He'd taken off his goggles and respirator, and the wave of fumes that rushed out at him made him choke. He backed away from the top of the stairs.

  "The envelope. The envelope!" Liza yelled.

  I hurried back down the stairs, grabbed the envelope which was illuminated by the fallen flashlight, and motioned for Liza to follow me. I scrambled outside. The moment my feet hit the dirt, John scooped me up in a fireman's carry and put as much distance between us and the house as he could
in ten seconds.

  "Wait!" I tried to tell him as my diaphragm was repeatedly bounced against his shoulder. "The lady is—"

  The second explosion obliterated the house and knocked us to the ground.

  * * *

  I bolted upright in bed, in my dilapidated, haunted house, with the sound of the remembered explosion ringing in my ears.

  "Same nightmare?" Delia asked from where she lounged in the doorway, picking a piece of imaginary lint off the sleeve of her black turtleneck.

  "What time is it?"

  She rolled her eyes and pointed toward my alarm clock.

  I groaned when I saw the time. I'd told him that I'd meet him at nine. It was already 6:03. I leapt from bed and jumped into the shower, hoping the hot water would wash away the last remnants of the meth house memory.

  Liza, or Mary Clark, as she later told me her name was, had been the first ghost I'd helped to move on.

  She haunted me for three days straight, bugging me to take the envelope to Father Acevedo. Finally my curiosity had gotten the better of me, and I'd opened it. Mary Clark, a hoarder who'd died alone, and whose home had been overrun by meth heads, had left behind a considerable estate. Her sole beneficiary was the Women and Children's Outreach Center run by Father Acevedo of Holy Mother church.

  I dressed hurriedly and set a new record for getting across town, the tires of the Spring Cleaning van squealing in protest, as I too quickly cut the corner into the parking lot of my destination.

  A tall, dark, and handsome man waited for me there. He passed the time shooting a basketball through a net that had seen better days.

  He dribbled toward me with a mile-wide smile on his thirty-something face. Not for the first time, I was struck by how much he looked like a young, hot, Benjamin Bratt. It was probably a mortal sin to be attracted to a man of the cloth.

  "I was getting worried, Vicky."

  "Morning. Sorry, I'm late, Father."

  "You're not late," he assured me. "You're right on time. It's just that I've come to expect you to be early." His smile faded as he drew closer. "What happened to you?"

  "I just overslept."

  "To your eye." He leaned in close, examining the bruise.