A Clean Sweep

  Maybe the reason had been what he’d stumbled over this morning.

  “She’s probably married,” Josh said.

  “Probably.” It would be my dumb luck if she is. “But are ya helping?”

  “I’m trying to.” He stared at Mark. “Her dad just died.”

  “I know.”

  Josh sat back in his side of the booth, slowly shaking his head and staring at him. After a moment, he broke his silence. “Wow. Really? Ted will have a damn field day with this.”

  “Not if you don’t fricking tell him,” Mark grumbled.

  “You’re not going to go all emo on us now, are you? I already talked to Purson and gave him a heads-up about the lead.”

  Mark inwardly groaned. Yes, they had a contract with the network for a total of thirty episodes, which at their current rate of hoarding cases, and at the current percentage of people who agreed to be filmed, would take them about another eighteen months or so to fulfill.

  If the people agreed to be filmed. Many of them didn’t.

  Frankly, he didn’t want Essie Barrone’s pain splattered all over TV screens for people to revel in. She was different.

  And this was personal.

  At the time, his two older brothers had busted his balls about moping around for months after Essie ended things between them. Then in college he’d met Carolyn and eventually forgot about Essie.

  Then his nasty divorce four years ago had been the focus of his life for nearly a year, and he hadn’t thought about much other than work since then despite his friends trying to fix him up time and again with women.

  Josh pulled out his iPhone and thumbed through it. “Tracy typed up the notes from the call already,” he said, opening the e-mail with the document file attached. She’d cc’d all three of them.

  Mark watched his brother’s expression as Josh frowned. “What?”

  “That address,” Josh said. “Of the Barrone house. That’s really close to Ross and Loren’s house, isn’t it?”

  “What?” Mark pulled out his phone, but Josh was faster with the Google-fu.

  “It is. Look.” Josh turned his phone around to show Mark. On it, the maps feature, with a pin in place. “It’s right across the street from them.”

  Mark took the phone from him and zoomed in. “Sonofabitch. I wonder if they know the family?”

  “Who knows.” Josh took the phone back. “They’ve only lived there a few years. I don’t remember seeing anything last time we were over there, though.”

  No, as best he could remember, none the houses on Ross and Loren’s street, while some of the yards looked a little scraggly in places, had appeared like a hoarder lived there.

  “Well, if it’s only the inside, maybe that makes our job easier,” Mark said.

  Josh arched an eyebrow at him. “And how long have we done this? You know as well as I do what kinds of secrets can lurk behind closed doors. And not just hoarders.”

  Josh picked up his glass of tea and took a sip. “Look at us, for example.” He grinned. “Just three harmless brothers running a cleaning business. What could possibly be wrong with that?” He gave Mark a look of mock horror.

  Mark tossed the balled-up straw wrapper at him. “Shut up,” he mumbled.

  Josh dropped his voice and leaned in, his tone changing from ball-busting to concerned. “Look, all three of us learned the hard way that it sucks to fish in the wrong pond. If nothing else, even if she is single and interested, don’t settle for less than what’s going to make you happy just because there’s a teenaged boy locked in there wishing things had turned out differently and that the Kraken hadn’t taken you to the cleaners. Ha.”

  The Kraken was one of the nicer nicknames his brothers had for Carolyn, who’d nearly succeeded in her quest to make him liquidate his share of the business. Until the brothers pooled their money for a better attorney, who proved she’d not only had nothing to do with the business, but that it had been Mark’s before they met.

  And Mark hated to admit it, but Josh was right.

  For all three of them, dating and marrying vanilla women had just not worked out well.

  As in, it had ended in miserable divorces for all three of them.

  Josh tapped the table in front of him. “We’ve been through this before. Even Tony told us that. Don’t settle. Life is too short to settle if it won’t make you happy in the end.”

  Mark slumped back in the booth. “I know,” he muttered. “I know.”

  He knew it. His brain had the message chiseled in granite in huge letters.

  His heart, however, still softly pleaded for one more chance.

  Chapter Three

  Essie was glad the exit was clearly labeled, because when she turned off I-75 onto Bee Ridge Road, she didn’t recognize anything. It felt more like sixty years had passed instead of sixteen.

  Heading east in the dark, she tried to make things out with just the street lamps and lit store signs to guide her. So much had changed.

  Well, I guess with Dad gone, everything’s changed.

  She didn’t know if it made her a horrible person or not, but she hadn’t cried yet. She’d loved her father despite what he was, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to shed tears for him.

  She didn’t know if that would change when she finally reached her mom or not. For right now, she knew she needed to be strong and hold her emotions back. For her mom, if nothing else. The next days—and likely weeks—would no doubt present plenty of opportunities for tears. And a fair amount of silently swearing at her father.

  And I still have to call Mark back.

  No doubt about it, she wasn’t relishing the thought of that. She felt horrible, in retrospect, for ending things with him before they’d even had a chance to start. It didn’t matter that they’d been teenagers. She still felt guilty over it.

  Especially since she hadn’t wanted to end it, but she’d panicked at the thought of bringing anyone over to their house.

  He’s probably happily married to a gorgeous wife with a whole minivan full of perfectly adorable kids by now. Would serve me right.

  Finally, she reached her old neighborhood. Slightly rural, the middle-class neighborhood in unincorporated Sarasota County was mostly comprised of houses built in the late ’60s and early ’70s, each with huge yards, front and back.

  She pulled into the driveway, behind an ancient Dodge pickup truck she recognized as her dad’s, and a small Toyota sedan she suspected was her mom’s.

  I can’t believe he’s still driv—drove that thing.

  That a peek inside the truck’s cab revealed a passenger compartment with barely any room for the driver confirmed her suspicion.

  The Toyota was neat and tidy, clean, although it looked like it was several years old.

  At least one thing her mom had been able to hold her ground against, apparently.

  Across the street, an outside light came on. The front door opened, light spilling out onto the lawn. Essie punched the lock button on the rental car’s key fob and headed in that direction.

  Her mom met her on the front walk, tears running down her cheeks. At least she looked healthy, if not thinner and more frail than she remembered, and her hair had a lot more grey in it.

  She didn’t think twice about wrapping her arms around her mom and hugging her as Ross and Loren Connelly stepped out behind her. She’d never met them before, and only knew their names because her mom had told her on the phone that morning.

  “You must be Essie,” he said. “Nice to finally get to meet you. We’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Considering she hadn’t talked to her mom in over five years, Essie wondered how much her mom had told them, and how accurate it was. “Thanks for letting her stay with you guys today. I’ll get us a hotel room and—”

  “No,” Ross quietly said. “We have two guest rooms. You’re welcome to stay with us. As long as you need them, but at least for tonight. We insist.”

  Essie felt too tired and too emotionally wrung
out to argue. Besides, his firm tone really didn’t brook any resistance. Normally that might piss her off, but from the concerned expressions both he and his wife wore, Essie was in anything but an arguing mood. “Thank you again.”

  He smiled and stuck out his hand. “Ross Connelly. My wife, Loren.”

  His wife also shook with Essie. “Nice to meet you,” Loren said.

  Essie looked across the street. “How bad is it?”

  “Honey,” her mom started, “we don’t need to—”

  Ross gently cut her off. “Loren, why don’t you and Corrine go back inside? I’ll help Essie get her luggage and we’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Loren immediately draped an arm around Essie’s mom’s shoulders and led her inside their home.

  “Thank you,” Essie said.

  “You say that now,” he said, pulling a key from his pocket. “You haven’t seen the inside yet. It’s bad.”

  He led the way across the quiet street. “Fortunately, I’ve done work for the county code inspector who came by this morning. Technically he should have slapped a red tag on the front door and had the power shut off as a fire hazard, but I promised him we wouldn’t let her come back here by herself, and that you were flying in and needed a chance to make arrangements to get it cleaned out. So he wrote a warning ticket with a thirty-day mandatory deadline for reinspection.”

  Her stomach tightening, she noticed he bypassed the front door and angled his path toward to the side garage door. Now other people had been inconvenienced, put their own necks on the line, all because of her father and his actions.

  She pointed at the front door before they rounded the corner of the garage. “Do I want to know?”

  “The front door isn’t accessible from the inside.”

  She groaned. When she’d left home, while there was a path through the hallway and foyer, you could still come and go through the front door.

  He unlocked the side door and reached in, finally finding a light switch. “How long’s it been since you’ve been inside?”

  “Sixteen years,” she muttered. “Since I left home.”

  “Then maybe I’d better go first.”

  They had to pick their way single file along a narrow path that wound through floor-to-ceiling junk from the side door to the utility room door. Inside the utility room, the washer and dryer were barely accessible.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

  Somehow she suppressed the nervous giggle that wanted to burp through.

  “I walked over this morning when the ambulance showed up,” he said, interrupting her snarky and what would have been sacrilegious thoughts, if she wasn’t a nonbeliever. “I saw them keeping your mom outside, and I was worried about her. By law, the paramedics had to call in the sheriff’s office and county inspector. Only because Loren and I stepped up did it keep them from taking her into protective custody as an endangered senior.”

  She could see why. He found the light switch inside the kitchen doorway. What she saw when she followed him into the kitchen pulled the breath from her lungs.

  What used to be a spacious open counter looking out over a dining room area was a solid wall of…stuff. Fortunately, it looked like her mom had still held her own in keeping the kitchen functional, because the sink was empty, the stovetop clean, but even the kitchen floor had paths through stuff where the creep had begun. It didn’t appear to be outright garbage by the traditional sense of the word, which relieved her. But it was still a mess.

  There were two chairs at a mostly buried table in the corner of the kitchen, with just enough space for two plates.

  Her eyes couldn’t settle anywhere or on any one thing. It was not only far worse than when she’d left, it was far worse than she’d imagined it would be, even after her discussion with the inspector. A small path led out of the kitchen and through the dining room area. Another led down what should have been a hallway toward the smaller bedrooms.

  “She found him here on the kitchen floor,” he quietly said. “He’d been dead for several hours. Your mom said she sleeps on the couch in the living room because he’s cluttered their bedroom so much, there’s only room for one person in their bed. I didn’t make it that far inside. I only made it in here to get her purse for her from the counter because her meds were in it. I had Loren take her out this afternoon to buy her some toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes to get her by.”

  Up, on top of the fridge, it was packed solid with boxes and…stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. Stacks of magazines and newspapers littered the kitchen floor, some of which had been scattered, likely by the paramedics and others. The counter was another meticulously arranged wall of boxes, plastic storage tubs, and carefully piled piles of…stuff. Crap. Junk. Clothes, yard sale finds, things that she had no idea what they were or if they were even worth anything.

  “Holy crap.”

  The air felt stuffy, suffocating. She wasn’t aware she’d started to faint until she realized there was a roaring noise in her ears and Ross had grabbed her, helping her down into one of the chairs and having to knock over another pile of magazines to do so.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she whispered. “How the fuck am I supposed to deal with this?” she said, hoping her language didn’t shock him. “It’d take me a month just to clear out the kitchen and garage. I…I can’t even imagine where I should start or what to do.”

  “We have some friends who have a cleaning contracting company. They specialize in this kind of thing. I can have you talk to them, if you’d like.”

  She focused on trying to drag air into her lungs. “I had a voice mail from…someone I need to call back. Tonight, apparently.”

  “Was it one of the Collins brothers?”

  Her attention sharply focused on him. “You know them?”

  “They’re friends of ours.”

  She nodded. “I went to school with Mark. I guess the inspector from Children and Families called him.”

  “They’re good.”

  Her new phone was in her pocket. “He said I could call him back tonight, even if it’s late.”

  “I’m sure he means it.”

  Breathe. She had to keep reminding herself to do that. “How much and what kind of repairs does the house need?”

  “One of the toilets doesn’t work and hasn’t for years, so they haven’t used that bathroom. It’s apparently not accessible anymore.”

  “Because of all this stuff.” Everywhere. Some dusty cobwebs had been strung along the tops of some of the crap in the dining room, stuff that literally seemed to stretch nearly all the way up to the ceiling in many places.

  “Yeah. And she thinks there’s a roof leak in the master bedroom, because there’s water spots on the ceiling, but she says that only started a few weeks ago.”

  Essie let out a snort. “Well, isn’t that convenient, that it waited.” To her right, on top of the pile of stuff on the table, lay several small, pink Dora the Explorer T-shirts, children’s sizes.

  She didn’t have any kids. She was their only child. So who the shirts were for, she had no idea.

  “Your mom said your dad was the hoarder.”

  Essie nodded. “Yeah,” she quietly said. “It’s sort of why I busted my ass to get a scholarship and never came back after I left for college.”

  “I take it you’re—”

  “Not,” she firmly said, the nearly hysterical giggle burping through. “Definitely not.” She thought about her bedroom at the Spokane apartment, which would make a carefully staged IKEA display look like a hoarded mess by comparison.

  She desperately wished she was there instead of here.

  “Okay,” he said. “I have a lot of mutual friends with Mark and his brothers. We’ll help pitch in. Whatever your mom needs. But you’re her daughter. She’s going to look to you for guidance here. So I need you to tell me what you want to do, and I’ll throw my full weight and effort behind it to hel
p you. We really like your mom. She’s been so sweet to us ever since we moved in. I wondered if there wasn’t a problem when she never invited us over, and wouldn’t even open the front door for anyone.”

  “Oh, there’s a freaking problem, all right.” She looked at a Target bag on the floor next to the table. Inside lay several new plastic dog food bowls, each with orange clearance stickers on them marking them down to the whopping bargain of only one dollar each.

  Her stomach sank. “Please tell me they don’t have any animals.”

  “No. Your mom said they don’t.”

  “Oh, thank god. I don’t think I could deal with that.”

  “She said you’re a vet tech, but I kind of get the impression she didn’t have recent news on you.”

  She felt the tears rolling down her cheeks. Overwhelmed, she confided in him. “Yeah. Dad and I got into it at my cousin’s wedding about six years ago. He was being a jerk to her and I finally called him out on it. I think he forbid her from talking to me after that.”

  “Ah.” He let out a sigh. “From the differences in your mom’s car and your dad’s truck, it wasn’t hard for us to connect the dots.”

  She snorted. “Ya think?” Immediately, she regretted her tone. “I’m sorry. I’m…just…this…everything…” She looked around again, feeling like the mountains of crap were crushing her shoulders.

  He knelt in front of her and took her hands in his. She didn’t get a flirty feeling from him. She wasn’t sure how old he was, probably late forties or early fifties, but she felt almost a fatherly vibe.

  A good fatherly vibe.

  “Call Mark,” he gently said. “Right now. If you want to do it alone, I’ll step outside and wait for you. Or I can call him for you.”

  “The rest of the house is this bad or worse?” Frankly, she didn’t have the mental or physical energy to go explore at that moment.

  “I think so. From what she said.”

  Letting out a defeated sigh, she nodded. “Please stay.”

  He squeezed her hands. “Okay. You’ve got his number? If not, it’s in my phone.”