Authors: Lorena McCourtney
Mac suggested ice cream at a new place in the shopping center, and we sat at an outside table with our cones, mine butter pecan, his blueberry cheesecake. It seemed like a time to glorify the good ol’days, when Madison Street had friendly neighbors and a nonexistent crime rate, when the flavors of ice cream were a simple choice between vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. I, same as almost everyone in my age group, sometimes lamented that the “good ol’ days” were gone, but I liked some changes. Wasn’t it great to have all these wonderful flavors of ice cream now? I’d try coconut-macadamia next time.
Maybe I’d make another change and sell the house too.
But then guilt and responsibility for that woman’s death kicked in again.
By the time we got back to the motorhomes, the crime scene people had closed up the house. I hoped that meant they were done. Lack of electricity for lights was a hindrance for me, but they surely had their own light system and could have continued. But, arguing against the hopeful possibility they were done, was the crime scene tape still fluttering in an evening breeze.
We used the battery power in Mac’s motorhome to watch a DVD but I excused myself by 10:00 to go back to my place. All the windows were open, but humid heat still filled the bedroom. I could run the generator so I could use the air conditioner, but that might be noisy enough to rouse the ire of the few neighbors remain
ing in the area. I hadn’t recognized anyone among the watching group this morning, and no one had given me a
Hey, Ivy, welcome home!
Madison Street was different now, no doubt about it.
And my thoughts kept circling back to the woman dead in the tub and the unpleasant reason she was there. Because of
me.
Finally I got up to sit on the sofa and stare out at the house.
I’d come here so eagerly, sure that the ending of my job in California was a favorable sign from the Lord telling me to go
home
. But maybe the Lord hadn’t been in the sign business after all, and I’d read something into the end of my job because that was what I wanted to see. Maybe all I was really doing here was setting
myself up for Death by Braxtons.
Chapter Six
The crime scene people were back the next morning, along with a detective who put us through another round of questioning, but they removed the yellow tape before they left about noon. I immediately headed for the house. Mac followed. Koop chose to prowl in the garden weeds.
The crime scene people had done a thorough job of checking for fingerprints, as evidenced by the fine, grayish-black fingerprint powder covering every available surface. It looked like the collapse of a vast dust-bunny civilization. I’d known cleaning the house would be a big job even before this, and now, with the leftovers of a crime scene investigation everywhere, the task loomed as almost overwhelming.
“Does the police department pay for clean-up or send someone out to do it?” Mac asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Insurance?”
“The premium was going to be so high with the house vacant that I dropped everything but basic fire insurance.”
“You could just accept that company’s offer to buy and let them take care of the cleanup. From what I hear, they won’t care what shape it’s in because they’ll be bulldozing everything down anyway.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. People.”
Right. Mac is an outgoing, gregarious guy. People talk to him. He can go for a stroll in a new town and come back with information on everything from directions to local RV parks and churches to the tumble some old lady
took chasing teenagers away from her stash of homemade wine. The small crowd outside the yellow tape had no doubt been full of information. As proved when Mac added, “Stay away from the people in that yellow house on the other side of the street.”
I felt mildly alarmed. “They’re dangerous?”
“Very. You go anywhere near them, and they’ll inundate you with cucumbers. They’re new gardeners who wanted to make a few pickles and didn’t know eighteen plants would produce enough cucumbers to start their own pickle factory.”
I’d never overproduced cucumbers, but I’d had zucchini that grew so big and so numerous so fast that I began to think they had world domination in mind. “Did anyone know the dead woman?”
“A couple of people had talked to her, but she mostly kept to herself. No one could remember what name she used, but she let them think she was renting the place.”
She’d apparently done a careful balancing act. Passing herself off as owner Ivy Malone to the utilities and library people but making neighborhood people think she was legitimately renting the house. Unfortunately for her, the Braxtons had latched onto the Ivy persona.
“Did anyone say what the company would do with the area after they bought and demolished the houses?” I asked.
Mac had heard the same rumors I had, including the billionaire survivalist, but the most prevalent belief was that the company was planning to put in an artificial lake and build luxury condos around it.
I felt a wave of indignation. My house was old and ordinary, but I didn’t want it sacrificed on the altar of marble countertops, upscale bathrooms, and a pond full of designer fish. I remembered hearing about an elderly woman in the Atlantic City area who’d refused to sell out, and there her old house stood surrounded by glitzy casinos. Maybe I’d be the Madison Street version, stubbornly raising tomatoes shaped like Nixon or Reagan in the midst of condo owners frustrated with the eccentric holdout next door. This was, after all, my
home,
so why shouldn’t I stay?
Dumb question. One answer, and it was spelled B-r-a-x-t-o-n-s.
“I think I’ll clean it up anyway. Just . . . in case.” In case what? I was suddenly free of Braxtons because the entire clan was kidnapped by UFO aliens?
Mac didn’t argue. “Then we’d better see about getting the utilities turned on,” he said briskly. “Cleanup is going to take water and electricity.”
“I don’t expect you to help.”
“I know. But I’m offering.”
Mac planted his feet and crossed his arms, practically daring me to argue. The wary side of me suspected he was plotting more time to convince me to put Madison Street in my rear-view mirror permanently, but I also knew that was unfair. Mac’s a good guy. He helps other people too, not just me. Like back at that California RV park, where he spent several days helping an elderly guy build a doghouse. For a mutt the size of a Brontosaurus. In any case, I’m not one to do the old cut-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face thing by stubbornly turning him down. I could use the help.
So I just smiled brightly and said, “Great! I appreciate that.”
***
We took Mac’s pickup to go to the power company office first. I tried to convince the woman at the front desk that the unpaid bills weren’t my responsibility. She semi-wavered, but finally said she’d have to consult a supervisor first. The supervisor took me into her private office. She was fifty-ish but looked more like a cheerleader than a supervisor. Petite size, curly blond hair, short skirt, and fuzzy kitten earrings. In spite of the cheerleader look, however, she was also immovable as Mt. Rushmore. Their records showed that Ivy Malone was the person who’d had the electricity turned on last December, and owner Ivy Malone would have to pay the past-due bill before it would be turned on again. So Ivy Malone – the frustrated one standing here – paid.
I did glean one interesting fact from the first woman at the front desk. This faux-Ivy hadn’t used Madison Street as a billing address. The bills were sent to an address with a street name unfamiliar to me. So the woman had definitely given this some thought and figured out that if she used Madison Street as a mailing address, the bills would be forwarded on to the real Ivy Malone – me - who would then know an unauthorized person was living in the house. So she’d had the bills sent elsewhere and probably paid with one of those money orders you can buy anywhere, same as I’d done. Until her unexpected demise, and then, when the bills went unpaid, the power company had looked in the property records at the assessor’s office and billed me at the Madison Street address, where they joined the maze of my forwarding system. I jotted down the mailing address the woman had used. Someone there must know who she really was. I also made arrangements to have the electricity turned on as soon as possible.
Same situation, same address, with the water department, so I also had that past-due bill to pay before water would be turned on. I thought there might be some way to fight this double-identity thing, but I didn’t have time for a long squabble with bureaucracies that undoubtedly had more money and clout than I had. I needed the utilities now. I wasn’t
un
perturbed with the woman about all this, but, dead in the bathtub, she’d already gotten the worst of the deal.
We stopped at a store, and I picked up some heavy-duty cleaning supplies, though I had to wonder what I’d do with that big bloodstain on the bedroom carpet.
We couldn’t do anything with the house until the utility people came, so this seemed a good time to visit the cemetery. I planned to take my motorhome, but Mac offered to go in his pickup. I expected he’d wait in it when we reached Parkdale Heights Cemetery, but he came along. At Harley’s grave, and then Thea’s, he didn’t say anything, but he comforted me with a squeeze of arm around my shoulders. I’d never had a headstone put in for Colin. There had been no body to bury, and I’d always held off doing a headstone because that made it too final, an admittance that my son really was never coming back.
“Maybe it’s time to get a headstone for Colin,” I said in a small voice.
“Can I help?”
“I’ll see.”
He turned me to him and held me for several long minutes while I grieved once more.
On the way home, Mac, with guidance from his smart phone, located the address the faux-Ivy used for utility bills. But what had seemed a great clue instead fizzled like a bad recipe. The address wasn’t a residence, just one of those private mailbox places with which I was already familiar. I went inside, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything. Faux-Ivy had apparently covered all the bases.
Except the one that put her dead in the bathtub.
Back home, we discovered, much to my surprise at the speedy action, that everything had been turned on. A flick of switch brought a light! The refrigerator hummed. A turn of faucet brought blasts of water and air from long-unused pipes, and then a steady stream. The first thing I did was run out to the motorhome for my cell phone and plug it in to revive it. I still used the el cheapo flip kind, “disposables” some people called them, though I’d had this one for months. I’d heard they were untraceable and had hoped that was true, in case the Braxtons had infiltrated the cell phone world too.
We changed clothes and pitched into the cleanup. Koop still refused to have anything to do with the interior of the house and I, after a couple hours of scrubbing the grayish-black fingerprint powder, made the unhappy discovery that it tended to turn into smears of abstract art rather than washing away. I didn’t see any dead presidents in the designs, but I did spot a tornado carrying a 7-legged cow into space. I also discovered that, up close, a scent of death permeates
everything
. Furniture. Drapes. Carpet.
We dragged the sofa and recliner out to the back yard, and I tossed the drapes over them. I couldn’t throw out the living room carpet, but I inundated it with several cans of spray deodorizer.
I didn’t find anything personal about the faux-Ivy who had occupied my home, but I did run into bits and pieces of her life. An old grocery store coupon for pork and beans, two cans for a dollar. A recipe for caviar and smoked salmon canapés. A packet of radish seeds. A list of the gluten content of various foods. A booklet on growing marijuana for fun and profit. A woman of diversified tastes and
interests, it appeared.
It made me take a wary look at those dead potted plants.
We were both too tired to cook that evening, so we tried to find a restaurant Thea and I used to like. It was gone now, but we located a new Chinese place and had great Szechwan shrimp, chicken chow mein and fried rice. Mac’s fortune cookie cheerfully said he would be taking a profitable journey soon, which seemed appropriate. Mine was a puzzling, “Beware the purple cow.”
I knew I had Braxtons to beware of, but unless one of them was using a purple-cow disguise, I had to doubt the cookie’s accuracy. I crumpled the scrap of paper and left it on the table.
Next morning when we moved upstairs to start cleaning, we made a discovery about that bloodstain on the bedroom carpet. It wasn’t there. No, the crime scene people hadn’t generously used some for-official-use-only cleaning fluid on it. The entire section of rug was gone. They’d cut a big oblong out of it. I was appalled. I couldn’t afford new carpet.
Mac, bless him, didn’t mutter something about this being one more reason to abandon the house. He suggested a simple, man-type solution. Move the bed so it covered the cut-out area.
That worked fine. The smelly mattress was a lost cause, however, and it joined the sofa and chair in the back yard. Which meant I wouldn’t be sleeping in the house for a while.
Mac, more blessings on him, took care of the upstairs bathroom cleanup. He also repaired and re-installed the screen door. I’d wondered about the garage, padlocked with a lock to which I had no key, but Mac peered through a crack and said the building appeared to be empty. Good. I didn’t need another unpleasant surprise, like finding a garage full of marijuana plants the woman had been growing for fun and/or profit. Though I now had to wonder about the identity of those dead plants in pots I’d found in the kitchen.
That afternoon, while I scrubbed away the ominous civilization clinging to the interior of the refrigerator, Mac rented a mower and tackled the yard and garden area. He found several items discarded among the garden weeds. Another empty wine bottle. A plastic frame holding a photo, in surprisingly good shape, of Elvis.
And a mannequin’s head, bald. We set them aside to show the authorities. They didn’t look like clues to me, but you never know.