“Then wait for me, Miss Wanda,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
“See you soon.”
In Charlie’s experience, service people were almost invisible to the rich. And once he’d disappeared into the attic, they generally forgot about his existence entirely. Through the thin ceilings of shoddily constructed homes, he’d heard people say and do things-awful things, funny things, embarrassing things. Some of it he wrote down, hoping his observations might come in handy for his novel, if he ever sat down at his computer again and managed something more productive than downloading porn.
He’d heard a toddler call his mother a bitch; she’d slapped him-he’d heard the sharp smack of palm against flesh-and they’d both started to wail. While he was plugging up a hole mice had chewed through some drywall, he couldn’t help but eavesdrop on a man having phone sex and jerking off in his garage while his wife cooked in the kitchen.
He was a silent witness to the full rainbow of the human experience, from the mundane to the tawdry. This condition wasn’t informing his fiction, as he’d hoped. It was causing him to prefer the company of rodents.
“There’s something up there. Something big.”
The client was unapologetically old, with a snow-white head of tight curls, a face where skin hung like melting wax, but thin and alert. She had bright blue eyes that seemed to assess him from head to toe in a blink-not in a judgmental way. In the way of the wise, knowing, accepting what is. She wore a snug pair of jeans and a big sweatshirt that said ATTITUDE PROBLEM. Her Nike trainers looked like they’d seen some miles.
Wanda had said the old lady was upset, but she didn’t seem upset to Charlie.
“I can’t get to the attic anymore, or I’d find it myself and beat it to death with this.” She glanced toward her cane, lifted it a little for emphasis. “I’ve had every critter imaginable up there-been in this house more than fifty years. Never heard anything like that.”
She looked up at the ceiling, and he found himself doing the same.
“What did it sound like?” he asked. They’d climbed two flights of stairs together-in spite of the cane, she was fast-and now stood beneath the attic entrance. He was still catching his breath a bit. It was a big, old house, a veritable museum of dusty carpets, mediocre oil paintings of nature scenes and stiff-looking people, heavy, ornate furniture. A grand piano in a room filled with books, working fireplaces with mantels covered in framed photographs. Beds with handmade quilts, dolls reclining in window seats. A real house, echoing with life lived-full of memories and irregularly shaped rooms.
“Thumping, banging. Almost…
Probably not rats. Raccoons did a lot of thumping and pounding for some reason.
“Okay, Mrs. Monroe,” he said, reaching up for the cord that would release the attic door and ladder. “Let’s see what you have up there.”
The door came down easily, and he unfolded the ladder until it reached the floor. Mrs. Monroe flipped on a light against the encroaching darkness. He looked at his watch; it was already after six. He wondered if Wanda would really wait for him or if she was just being polite. Maybe he’d go in and find a note-
“You just be careful,” Mrs. Monroe said. “And holler if you need anything.”
He hoisted his bag over his shoulder and climbed up, feeling the old ladder groan beneath his weight.
The only light source in the attic was a small circular window at the far end. But in the waning hours of the day, it just served to create a field of shadows. He could stand but with an uncomfortable bowing of his head and scrunching of his shoulders. He pulled out his flashlight and shone the beam around, expecting to hear skittering, maybe something knocked over in flight. But there was only silence. Boxes, an old rocker, a small rolltop desk-a landscape of old and forgotten things. Why didn’t people just get rid of their junk? The old lady said herself she hadn’t been up here in years.
He looked around the floor for feces, lifting his nose to the air for the telltale smell of urine. But all he smelled was dust and mold as he made his way through the junk-an old radio, a box of rotary phone parts, piles and piles of books.
He was sniffling, holding back a sneeze, by the time he’d reached the end of the space. He looked out the window. He could see the roofs of other houses, the church steeple peeking through the gold, brown, and orange of northern fall on the trees-oaks, maples, some old pines and birch, aspen, sycamore. A Florida native, he loved the seasonal slide show of the North-the bright green springs and tawny autumns, the black-and-white winters. All he knew when he’d come up for college was the perennial summer, the swaying of palms, the white sand against green ocean. A beautiful single note that wavered only in extremes of weather-hurricanes, dramatic thunderstorms. Bright, hot sun and still, stifling air, or black skies and ferocious winds, sheets of rain. A couple months of perfect, dry, seventy-degree winter weather seduced the folks from Michigan and New York, only to leave them wilting when August turned to September turned to October and the weather still rivaled saunas and blast furnaces.
Walking back through the attic, he kept his eyes to the floorboards-still not detecting any critter presence by smell, sight, or sound. And then there it was, just as he was about to climb back downstairs. On a draft, he caught just the lightest odor of something foul, the curling, unmistakable scent of death.
He looked around a bit more, moving boxes, garment bags thick with old clothes, and accordion files bloated with yellowed papers, but the beam of his flashlight revealed nothing. If something had crawled up here and died, he’d have trouble finding it in all this clutter. He’d have to wait until the scent got worse. Luckily, the weather was warm. By tomorrow, late afternoon, it’d be ripe. He’d follow his nose.
He climbed downstairs to find Mrs. Monroe where he’d left her.
“Find anything?”
“Well, no. But I
She nodded but looked skeptical. She followed him down the stairs and out to the truck, where he got the traps. He should have been up-selling her, telling her she had an infestation, getting her to sign a contract for more service than she needed. There were bonuses in it for him if he did the sales job as well as the trapping work. But he just didn’t have it in him. He didn’t have that sales personality, that ability to see a need, a fear, or a desire, and then manipulate it. His father was a salesman, always knowing how to mold himself to please, to work a room, to schmooze with a client. But the gene didn’t pass on to Charlie. He could only be himself.
Back at the office, he’d tell them that she was difficult and they’d leave her be. There were enough suckers out there. The difficult ones weren’t worth it, especially these days, when people could post their discontent online. He’d come back and check the traps when he was done for the day tomorrow, write her a bill for the service.
In the late dusk, Mrs. Monroe didn’t seem as tough as she’d appeared inside. She cast a worried glance back at the house, holding the paperwork he’d handed her.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll get rid of whatever you have up there.”
She gave a little laugh. “At this age, it takes more than critters in the attic to worry me.”
But he could tell it was bravado. In the rearview mirror, she was just a tiny, frail shadow in the gloaming.
5
Maggie found the house dark and quiet. She closed the door that led from her office suite to her home and locked it, feeling a familiar mingling of relief and a mild flutter of nervousness. Closing this door and turning the dead bolt was something she made sure she did at the end of every day, a way of leaving her work behind. Some days this was easier than others. It was a door that she discouraged Jones and Ricky from walking through. They were to call her on the phone if they needed her. And they, surprisingly, respected that-though Ricky was not above pounding on the door when he’d seen a client drive away and knew there wasn’t another patient inside.
