by David Berens
“Later, Troy,” he said to no one. “Let’s get these old bones in a hot shower and then we’ll figure that out.”
At the top of the stairs, he dumped the bottles into a recycling barrel. They probably don’t take glass, but neither do I, he thought. Let the rental people deal with ’em. He rinsed his feet with ice cold water from a green garden hose that sprayed water in random jets from the various cracks in it. One such jet hit him in the face and he jerked backward from it. His Costa Del Mar sunglasses flew off his face. Troy was happy to see that they survived the short fall but now they had a nice new gouge in exactly the center of the right lens. He wiped them clean and put them back on as he took the next flight of steps up to the massive back deck on the house.
The screen door squeaked loudly as he entered the house, and the frigid air conditioning made him shiver as he wrenched the sliding door open. It was hard to pull, and when he closed it, it slipped suddenly and slammed onto his right pinky. Pain shot up his arm and he gripped it tightly, willing the sudden shock out of it.
When it finally calmed down, he looked at it and saw his fingernail was dark red but other than that, it looked like it was fine. He wriggled it gently and decided it probably wasn’t broken.
“Dang rich people.” He threw his hands up. “Thirteen million dollar house and they cain’t get a new hose, or a new screen door, or a new slidin’ door. Typical.”
But the massive house had no answer for him, and his voice echoed off the tile floor making it feel emptier and lonelier than ever. He tossed his hat onto the white Italian leather sectional and laid his sunglasses on the glass table next to it. He stripped his khaki shorts off as he walked back toward the ridiculously extravagant master bedroom on this level—there was another equally impressive master upstairs.
He turned on the water and stepped in when it had reached a temperature that wouldn’t be acceptable to any but those with military training—just above Antarctic cold. The stinging water jabbed at the sunburn on his shoulders and back. Trails of sand swirled off his body and drizzled into the drain at his feet. Slowly, the water began to warm until it filled the tennis court-sized bathroom with steam and the long wall of mirrors fogged. He picked up a generic bottle of body wash and emptied it onto his head. His black hair drooped down and lay on his back just below his shoulder blades.
“Time to get a haircut,” he mumbled, knowing he didn’t have enough money for that just yet.
The thirty minutes he spent rinsing left him crinkly and prickly. He wrapped a white towel around his waist and used a second one to wipe a small circle away in the mirror. His face was ruddy, his beard was thick, and his eyes were slightly red.
“Dadgum, Troy,” he said to his reflection. “You need to get away.”
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice from the door surprised him.
He jerked around to see who was there and as he did, his towel slipped and fell to the wet tile floor. A girl with a long, auburn ponytail stood in the doorway, a look of shock on her face.
Troy looked down and realized that his lily-white midsection was exposed for all the world—or at least one red-headed girl—to see. He bent down and grabbed the towel covering himself.
“Beg pardon, miss,” he said, struggling to keep his nether regions covered. “I didn’t know anyone was supposed to be here.”
“That makes two of us.”
Troy saw that she had a kelly green, polyester polo shirt on with a bright yellow logo that read: Martha’s Maids. And her arms were full of folded white towels.
“You’re the maid, I reckon?”
She nodded, her eyes still wide from the troubling situation. He could see that she was young, maybe college. Probably working to pay for school. There was a little edge of fear in her eyes and Troy raised one hand. That left his towel dangling precariously over his middle.
“I was just gettin’ in a last shower before I took off. I’ll be gone before you can say, ‘lickety split.’ ”
She glanced around the bathroom, found an empty marble shelf, and laid the stack of towels down. Troy took the few seconds of her looking away to secure his towel around his waist.
“Doesn’t matter to me much.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m just doing the check-out cleaning.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. As she studied it, Troy noticed her eyes. Green. Almost as green as her shirt with a darker green ring around the outside. She looked up and saw him staring at her. A hint of a smile edged up on her lips.
“Looks like the place is empty until next month.”
“Oh, well, okay.”
“Meaning, you could stay if you want.” She waved a hand around the giant bathroom. “Not like anyone else is using it. Hell, I’ll come by in a few days and clean it up again if you like.”
As she spoke, Troy decided she was beautiful. He wondered what she would look like prancing around the house naked like Clarice. He shook his head.
“I couldn’t,” he said. “I reckon I should be going.”
“Well, take your time leaving.” She smiled a little broader. “I never like being here alone. You could keep me company, mister … um … ?”
“Troy. Troy Bodean.”
He stuck out his hand. She shook it with the softest hand Troy had ever felt. As he did this, his towel slipped again and he grabbed it just in time.
“I’m Prosperity.” She grinned and put her hand up to shield her eyes.
Of course you are, thought Troy.
She looked at an invisible watch on her arm. “Why don’t you put some clothes on and I’ll be tidying up in the living room. I can clean up in here when you’re done.”
“Good idea.”
She turned to walk away and Troy felt his pulse quicken. She did have a nice backside like Clarice after all. She glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking at her. She rolled her eyes and disappeared through the door.
Troy looked back into the foggy mirror that was just now starting to clear. He still looked pretty haggard, but his eyes were most definitely brighter. He wondered if his future had just gotten a little brighter too. It scared him that whenever he had that thought. It usually meant something really bad was about to happen.
3
Room To Room
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.
