A Scrying Shame (5 page)

“I’m in here,” Arie called.

“No kidding,” Grady said. “Are you planning on ever coming out? ‘Cause Mr. Petranik needs to sign off on the Completed Work form, and to do that, we need to inspect the work.”

Grady’s voice left no doubt as to his irritation.

Arie was going to lose her job for sure.

She whipped open the door to find the two men waiting in the cramped, overstuffed hallway.

“I’m so sorry,” Arie said. “I just . . . This is my first job and, uh, I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed a single thing. I wanted it to be perfect.”

Grady’s face relaxed a bit, and he shot a glance at Neal.

Neal smiled. “That’s very nice, Miss . . . uh, Amy. I’m sure you’ve done a fine job.”

Neither Grady nor Arie corrected his error about her name. Instead, Arie slid past the men and headed for the exit. It would probably be best if she stayed out of the way.
Way
out of the way.

BioClean didn’t get the trash removal job, but at least Arie didn’t get fired. If the Petraniks had gone with a different cleaning company, she probably would have been, but the family took what Guts called the cheap route and decided to take care of the trash themselves. It was a shame because Arie could sure have used the money.

As she had quickly learned, biohazard cleaning paid well but, unfortunately, not often. It also didn’t help that Grady and Arie were only called out for every other case, alternating jobs with the other team. Both suspected Guts of funneling extra work to Bruno and Rich. Their team had a new hire, too, so they were able to handle larger jobs. Stan, the other newbie, and Arie had gone through the all-too-brief twelve-hour training together. They hadn’t bonded.

Stan closely resembled an ambulatory cadaver, and his sense of humor was about as animated. His former job, carpet installation, had in no way trained him for biohazard cleanup, unless you counted a certain facility with utility knives as a benefit. He’d been laid off at the start of the housing crisis, and with a wife and kids to support, he was apparently willing to do anything.

Bruno and Rich, on the other hand, had both been with Guts since the start of the company. Bruno looked and acted exactly as one would expect a Bruno to act. From the blocky, muscleman body to the thatch of black hair covering his entire body, he looked like Popeye’s rival. It took enormous effort for Arie to refrain from calling him Bluto. His partner, Rich, was blond with wavy surfer hair and a runner’s physique, and had gone to school with Guts. A distinctly unfair advantage—one of the few things Grady and Arie agreed on.

Worse? Arie‘s landlord had finally tracked her down and hand-delivered her very own, first ever eviction notice. She’d never been so ashamed. By now, she was nearly four months behind, and even though she could drag the eviction out, she didn’t want to accrue that kind of debt. Chandra had offered to let Arie crash at her place, but she lived in a studio apartment. That kind of arrangement would only work temporarily, and Arie wasn’t quite that desperate. Yet. She kept telling herself she had options.

Well, one option. And one obstacle.

Arie’s mother had perfected the art of saying the proper things while broadcasting her true feelings through weary sighs, a regal uplift of an exasperated eyebrow, or a slight shaking of her perfectly coiffed head. She even had a way of blinking that signaled her despair of ever understanding her daughter.

“Four months?” Evelyn said after Arie finished fessing up.

“Three, actually. Not counting this month’s rent.”

She got the eyebrow.

“I guess that is four,” Arie relented. “There isn’t a lot of stuff to move—”

Evelyn gasped. “Edward, you’ll never guess what I’ve just thought of.”

Her dad’s typically placid features crinkled into slight worry. “What would that be, Ev?”

“It’s perfect. Absolutely perfect. You know how we’ve been fretting over what to do with Grandpa Wilston? Well, here is our answer.”

Evelyn beamed and clasped her hands under her chin. She loved it when her plans came together, especially before she’d even made them.

Arie’s father shrugged, and he gave her an “I’m sorry” look that terrified her even more than her mother’s creamy expression of satisfaction.

“What?” Arie asked. “What’s perfect?”

“We can have her set up in no time, Edward. We can probably even borrow Norm Kenwick’s pickup truck and save money on a moving van. It’s not like she has much, anyway.” Turning to her daughter, Evelyn said, “Can you be ready by Saturday? That’s if we get the truck, of course. I can’t imagine Norm not loaning it to us, but I guess we’d better be sure. Edward, let’s give him a jingle right now, and—”

“Mom. Stop. What are you planning? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Grandpa Wilston, of course.”

“Grumpa?”

Evelyn’s face emptied as if a plug had been pulled.

I should be so lucky . . .

“Don’t call him that. Grandpa Wilston has been a bit of a concern lately.” Evelyn closed her eyes as if suddenly weary. Maybe she needed a nap? “Do you know, just the other day, he gave his social security number to a telemarketer? A scam artist, really. And then—”

“But what does this have to do with me?”

“If you’ll just be patient, I’ll tell you. Your father and I have been worried sick. I went over last week and found four boxes of those Ginseng knives. The ones on the TV? I couldn’t believe it! Who needs four boxes of steak knives? We always knew we would have to make this decision one day, but I, for one, thought we were many years away . . .”

Arie let her mother prattle on. It would be a good five minutes before Evelyn stopped circling the conversational airport and landed the plane. Meanwhile, icy foreboding seeped into Arie’s heart.

She had always wanted a grandpa to love. Her father’s parents had died before Arie was even born, and she’d always been jealous that Brant had known them, even if he’d only been four when first Bapa, then Nana had passed. When Arie had died and gone to the Other Side, she’d looked for them, but she’d been forced back into her body before she’d had a chance.

Grumpa, though. He was a grandparent of another color. Gray, mostly. Maybe a little murky brown thrown in.

It explained a lot about her mother, though at the moment, Arie wasn’t able to feel sorry for her. She was too busy resenting the continuous machinations her mother went through to arrange Arie’s life. Maybe she just didn’t have the energy.

“And so I said to your father, something has to be done. We can’t just ignore the problem.”

“
I’m
the problem?” Arie said.

“I never said that. We’re discussing your grandfather and his living arrangement.”

It was no use. Arie could feel herself being sucked in as usual.

“What about his living arrangement?”

Evelyn sighed and rubbed her forehead. “His living arrangement is now your living arrangement. We’re going to move you in with Grandpa Wilston and kill two birds with one stone. Perfect. Like I said.”

Perfect.

“Dude, you’re creeping me out!”

Grady’s voice cut through the home movie version of Agnes Weaver’s life that had been playing in Arie’s head. It had been so beautiful.

She struggled to erase the silly grin from her face. “Sorry,” Arie stuttered. “I was only—”

“I don’t wanna know. Get busy. We’re only contracted for eight man hours. Guts doesn’t pay overtime if we go over the estimate.”

Arie struggled to pay attention to the task at hand. They hadn’t had a job in over a week, and Arie was desperate not to screw this one up. No matter how she dreaded the situation, she’d about resigned herself to an eighty-three-year-old roommate with telemarketer issues. Not that he had agreed to the arrangement yet; her mother was still working on him. But even that couldn’t spoil her current mood.

Death had gotten it right for Agnes—a pleasant surprise for both her and Arie. Even though her left-behind body had remained undiscovered for three long summer days, the actual leaving of it had been welcomed, by Agnes, anyway—or so her visions told Arie. The dead woman’s relatives were far less sanguine about the event, and after several days of the body left untended, were understandably squeamish about doing the cleanup themselves.

Grady’s phone rang, startling Arie all over again. He went outside to answer it. Despite her good intentions, Arie hurried back to the small spot of blood caught in the grout of the kitchen tile. Agnes must have hit her head when she’d fallen. Arie stared at it.

The mist swirled—green this time, like apples and springtime and a new love. Joy rose in her chest like a bubble, and the most profound sense of peace she’d experienced since her visit to the Other Side settled over her.

Flash.

Pat Boone’s on the jukebox singing “Ain’t That a Shame,” makin’ my foot tap. Well, now. Who’s that fellow headin’ my way? He’s a tall one, ain’t he? A curl of black hair falls over his face, and I laugh when he brushes it back. He actually blushed! And oh my . . . them eyes. Hazel, maybe. A girl could get lost in them eyes.

Flash.

Smoke is rollin’ from the oven. Burns my eyes. Oh, lordy! The roast! Bennie’s laughing so hard he can’t hardly throw water from the pitcher on it. I guess this means PB and J for supper again. Lordy.

Flash.

Dang this wind. The sheet flaps against my whole body, twisting me up like a mummy. My arms ache from wrestling to get these stupid linens on the line, and the clothespin keeps slipping from my lips. But it’s gonna smell so good tonight. Tonight, when Bennie holds me—

Arie pulled out of the vision right before Grady walked back in. She coughed to cover the lingering smile, but he didn’t notice this time.

“Almost done?” he asked.

“Yep. How’s it look?”

Grady peered at the floor. There was still a dark spot, but the kitchen hadn’t been remodeled in twenty years—one dark spot among a multitude of coffee spills and grease stains. Agnes had been a good cook once she’d learned to use the oven timer.

Arie’s grandfather had worked most of his adult life as a member of the most hated profession ever created. Being an IRS auditor had suited him. Unlike Agnes Weaver, his personal life hadn’t. All her life, an aura of mystery had surrounded any mention of her grandma. From the little bits that Arie had unearthed, she knew Lily Wilston had stayed in the marriage just long enough to produce a daughter for her chronically cranky, perfectionist husband, and then had abruptly vanished.

After living all those years on his own, Grumpa wasn’t any more eager for the transition than his granddaughter. In fact, he had refused to discuss the possibility for nearly two weeks. He had even hung tight in the face of his daughter’s thinly disguised threat of sending him to a retirement community. When, in seeming retreat, she’d shifted tactics and given her father a choice between his granddaughter moving in or “hiring a nice, respectable lady from Happy Helping Hands,” he too had given in to the inevitable.

Moving everything Arie held dear really only took one afternoon. As pastor of the smaller of the town’s two Baptist churches, her father had plenty of resources to tap into. For the cost of a half-dozen pizzas, the youth group had shown up en masse to transfer Arie’s things from her apartment to Grumpa’s house. The adolescents cheerfully hauled boxes, garbage bags, and a couple of suitcases through Grumpa’s sunken living room and then down the hall to the former guest room. A few paused to remark favorably on the retro look of the furnishings. The sunken living room with the red brick fireplace received the highest raves.

While Arie didn’t mind the decor—in fact, she agreed it was kind of funky—she hated the plastic-covered couch and the plastic runners that had been laid down on the high-traffic areas of the carpet. The couch made the backs of her legs itch, and she knew from childhood that if she tried to lie down, she’d end up with a pool of sweat puddled under her cheek.

Ignoring Evelyn’s frantic efforts to keep them organized, the laughing, hyper teens poured around the adults like frothy water in a babbling brook. Grumpa grumbled loudly about the invasion and scolded any who stepped off the plastic runways.

Arie decided staying out of the way was the best choice, and she made for the front door. Sneaking out, she hid around the corner of the garage, where she pretended to supervise the unpacking process.

Instead, she called Chandra. “Where are you?”

“Calm down,” Chandra said in a voice dripping with patience. “I told you I wouldn’t be there ’til after lunch. Any pizza left?”

“Are you kidding? These kids are like a hoard of locusts. They swarmed the pizza delivery guy while he was still in the driveway. The boxes never even made it to the kitchen table. I didn’t even get to
smell
the pizza.” Arie’s stomach rumbled.

She peeked around the corner of the house. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I forgot all about the pink bathroom. Did I tell you about that? It looks like a flamingo experienced epic amounts of intestinal discomfort in there. The whole room is pink—tub, sink, all the tile. Even the
toilet
is pink. And do you realize I have to share it with Grumpa?”

“Holy crap,” Chandra said. “You have to share a bathroom? That seems, like, medieval. Can’t you use the guest bathroom?”

“There is only one bathroom in the entire house. One. And Grumpa has his Aqua Velva and his shaving stuff scattered all over the place. And get this, Chan. He leaves his denture goop and the glass he sticks his teeth into at night right there on the counter.”

Chandra’s groan rattled through the cell phone.

“All night long,” Arie continued in a horrified voice. “If I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, they’re going to be there,
smiling
at me.”

“I’m on my way, and I’m bringing sustenance.”

Arie clicked off and rested her head against the siding. She didn’t even care if there was bird poop on it.

“Yoo hoo!” Evelyn called from the side of the truck. “What are you doing over there? We need you. No time for breaks.”