by Misty Simon
Let the games begin.
* * *
Three hours had passed since my jubilation over having Max here for the next month. And that feeling had been tested more than once in those three hours, as I had walked through room after room, making notes on what had to be done and how to do it. Today’s task was to clean one room and one room alone to prove our skills, but I had wanted the lay of the land in the mansion before I got down to business.
This would have been so much easier if I had received those pictures from Bethany. They still hadn’t downloaded in my phone, but being in the middle of the chaos made it all too real. The only thing I could think of was that every room must have been decorated by someone who was on some serious hallucinogens.
About two years ago, Mrs. Petrovski had allowed a group of designers to come in and do each room in a different theme and style to bring attention to the mansion. The designers had done just that, but not in the way she had hoped for. The interest hadn’t lasted, and the mansion had never reopened either as a house or as an inn.
The room I had been given to clean, which I was currently standing in, was indicative of the whole place. The walls were adorned with several different kinds of wallpaper, all patched together like a quilt. It appeared the decorator had then applied a layer of veneer over every wall and the ceiling.
Somehow the owner expected me to strip off the veneer and the wallpaper throughout the entire room and then clean it so that all the surfaces were pristine. Or as pristine as was possible to achieve in one day, to show off my skills in cleaning.
Since we hadn’t even been given a quick glance at the mansion before we were told to clean our one room and ready it for inspection, we had not known what exactly we might be facing. I’d brought everything I could think of with me, just in case.
Thank God for my foresight.
No matter how many times I wanted to walk away from that veneer and wallpaper, I managed to cling to my jubilation and the thought that this job could mean big things for me and Letty and the other ladies.
And no matter how many times Preston came in to heckle me, he couldn’t take the shine off my smile. My biggest question at the moment wasn’t, what might cover the cracks in the wall, but why on earth was he here in my eye-popping room every ten minutes?
“What do you want?” I asked on his seventeenth visit. Should I go complain to Mrs. Petrovski and ask her to make this irritating man leave? My subtle hinting and my physically bumping him out of the way with my hip this morning had made no dent in his resolve to stay. Maybe if I was more direct, he would disappear.
“Just wanted to see what you are doing.” He leaned against the doorway in another overdone vest, this one with peacocks all over it, and what could only be called a cravat. It wasn’t a bow tie or a regular tie or even an ascot. It was a full-on cravat. Who did that anymore outside of a Renaissance faire?
Not my question to ask, and I really didn’t want to know. Heck, I didn’t want to engage him at all. I wanted him gone so I could go back to using my claw-like paper ripper and my vinegar-and-water solution to unglue the stuff on the walls. I was trying to see how hard this was going to be by sampling each wall and putting the details into my tablet.
At this point, I was so dirty, I couldn’t even remember if I’d worn a blue or a green T-shirt, and my jeans would probably need to be washed at least two times before I could wear them again. Preston’s fashion and neck adornment choices were low on my need-to-know list.
“Same thing I was doing ten minutes ago and ten minutes before that,” I answered in hopes that he might go away. “What are you doing here? You aren’t the owner. Your aunt is. And last I heard, she had total say over who gets this job. From where I’m standing, you have no reason to be hanging out. I have things to do and no time to spend with you and your inability to give up when you’ve been beaten.”
“You think you’ve got this in the bag, Tallie, but you don’t. You might as well just save yourself the time and the energy and go home to that little boyfriend of yours.”
I leaned on my broom. “You must be terrified that I’m going to take this job and run with it. Why else would you keep stopping in when you could be doing something else, anything else, like getting your own job elsewhere?”
He huffed away after muttering something I couldn’t hear, and I got back to work. Wallpaper was stripped, and corners were cleaned. The walls weren’t as bad as I’d thought, thankfully. Beyond that, I would worry about the other rooms when I got the job.
I wanted to nail this and get Letty and friends into a place where I could really begin to make my own dreams come true. My sole employee for months had told me that her friends were jealous of her setup with me a few months ago and had wanted to know if they could come in under my umbrella. I had said yes and now I handled all the money and the paperwork, and in return I had a small army of top-notch cleaners. Not something I had ever really thought I’d do, but there was a certain sense to it that I could see from both our perspectives.
A particularly cobwebby corner caught my eye. I reached for my special hand duster and realized I had forgotten it in the car. Running down to the car would take only a few minutes. I had exactly nine before Preston decided to check back in with me.
I waved to the owner on my way out, then booked it back up to my room within five minutes. Only to find myself standing in the middle of destruction where there should have been cleanliness. What had been a clean room now had garbage strewn across the floor. What looked like kitchen scraps littered the wooden planks, with coffee grounds mixed in for good measure. Pieces of paper and paper towels and toilet tissue clogged up the corners of the room. Some sort of wood pulp or chips speckled the paper products, and then there were the plastic bags—like someone had emptied the bag collection bin at the grocery store and just dumped all the bags in here willy-nilly.
I’d come into the room I’d left five minutes ago to find that Preston Prescott had done his very best in that short amount of time to mess up everything I’d worked so hard to clean.
He didn’t like me; I got that. To clean a mansion that had been sitting empty for years would be a real achievement and a gold star on any cleaning service résumé. He and I had had several run-ins when we’d both traveled in the same circles. I knew he was a jerk. But to be this deliberately cruel, this underhanded, this manipulative was even more than I had thought he had in him.
I had worked on this room assiduously, and Preston had apparently decided that I had done too good a job, because he had come in to mess it up.
His words had been irritating enough, but this was too much.
Without thinking, I stalked out of the room, spray bottle full of vinegar and hot water in hand, and headed one floor up, where I’d last heard him tromping around. He was going to get it and get it good, right in the face. I fumed, muttering under my breath with every stomp of my sneakers.
He’d be lucky if I didn’t choke him with his own cravat.
I paused in the hallway outside the room, though, and took a deep breath. Attacking him physically would only be lowering myself below even his level.
Instead, I decided we would have words. Even if it killed me, I would keep my hands and my spray bottle to myself. But we would have words, and then I was immediately going to talk with the owner about the underhandedness going on here. Once I got through the horrible swaths of gauze that some previous decorator must have thought was the height of hallway decorating fashion.
Chapter Three
“Preston Prescott, you are in some serious trouble,” I said as I stepped into the room and found myself face-to-face with someone who was definitely not Preston. Instead, I found another woman, and not Audra, either. Whereas Audra had blond hair and was shorter than me, this woman had to be almost six inches taller and had jet-black hair. She was willow thin, with an almost elfin face.
Her smile, wavering at the corners of her lips, was filled with nerves. As if she wasn’t supposed to be here
. So had she been wrecking Audra’s handiwork while Preston had been wrecking mine? What kind of shenanigans were all these people up to? I’d never dealt with such ridiculousness, even when I was part of the highbrow crowd.
But the room behind her was far cleaner than any other in the rest of this house, and the cleaning person was much further along than I had been even before Prescott pulled his stunt as De-structo.
“Who are you?” I asked when she just continued to stare at me without saying anything. Her eyes wide with fear, she kept running her hand through the ends of her hair and flicking her forefinger over her thumb. After I posed my question, she rapidly glanced left and right, as if she was looking for someone or for a way out.
“I just want to know who you are. I’m not going to do anything. Are you here to clean?” I said. I even put my hands out to show her I came in peace. Unfortunately, I had the spray bottle still, and that set her back a step.
Not the most effective way to show I came in peace.
But was she with Prescott? Audra? Or was she one of the people who had been shut out of the possibility of this job, and had she ruined my room and then come to ruin Audra’s out of spite?
The woman tucked a long strand of inky black hair behind her ear and scuffed her shoe on the floor. “I help Preston sometimes. I was just in here cleaning so Audra could get stuff done somewhere else. He asked me to make sure she had everything she needed.”
Audra had help? And Preston had given it to her? We weren’t supposed to have help. It was very clearly stated in our contracts that this was supposed to be a solo job, so we could show them what we could do alone. Then we could bring in help later.
Now I was fuming, again. Beyond fuming, to be exact, though I didn’t have the right word to express that.
So not only had Preston threatened me and ruined my room, but now he was also helping Audra? I was absolutely going straight to the owner and getting this whole thing out in the open.
“I’ll be back,” I said to the woman.
“Oh, please, don’t say anything,” she begged, grabbing my arm and yanking me to a halt.
I pointedly looked at her hand and then into her eyes. “You’re going to want to let me go. Right now.”
“Please. Please don’t say anything. I don’t want to get in trouble. And I don’t want Audra to get in trouble with the owner. I need the money, and Preston won’t pay me if she doesn’t get this job.”
“And because you were so afraid you might not get this job, you’re the one who messed up my room?”
She blinked five times. I counted as I waited for her response. “Gosh, no. I don’t know why anyone would do that.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or was totally snowing me. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to talk to the owner and get this taken care of.
“Let me go.” I squinted at her as I jerked my arm out of her grip, but then I felt horrible when I saw tears falling from her eyes and running down her cheeks.
I left her quietly sobbing as I swept out the door and into the hallway, which was swathed in black, red, and white gauze from floor to ceiling. My steps faltered when I was halfway through the maze of fabric.
Was I doing the right thing? I knew how it was to struggle for money. Heck, I was still struggling. And if this woman was desperate for money, then maybe she didn’t have any other choice than to work for Audra. And I was going to make things worse by going and complaining to the owner and taking away their chances.
But I wasn’t going to have a chance if the owner saw the disaster Preston had made of my room, and it wasn’t fair to let it slide. I had never been a doormat. I certainly wasn’t going to start now.
I picked up my pace and stopped by my own room before approaching the owner. I needed pictures of the destruction to be able to show her. And I needed to come up with the right words to tell her about all the work I had done before Preston and his cravat had come in like a cyclone. Again.
* * *
Thirty minutes later I still hadn’t found the owner. She’d been right in the living room when I’d zoomed through with my special hand duster, but now that I needed her, she was nowhere to be found.
With my luck lately, I wouldn’t be overly surprised at finding her stabbed in the kitchen or shot in the billiards room.
I went through the three floors quickly but thoroughly, even braving the basement and the attic, before buzzing by Audra’s room again. This time she was in there, but the other girl was nowhere to be found. I flicked a wave at her since I was still incensed that she had help, thanks to Preston, but I didn’t stop.
Finally, I went back to my room, and there was Mrs. Petrovski. The frown on her face spoke volumes when she turned around, and right next to her was her nephew Preston.
I started talking before I’d completely cleared the doorway. “This looks bad. I know it looks bad. But I didn’t do it.”
With her arms crossed tight at her chest, she radiated disapproval. “Ms. Graver, this is unacceptable. You and Ms. McNeal were handpicked to compete for this contract, and I see no evidence that you’ve given this room your best attention. You might have money from your previous marriage and feel that it’s beneath you to clean, but I take this business very seriously, and you are not.”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but she rolled right over me.
“Because you are not, I’m taking you out of the running and giving the job to Ms. McNeal. Preston brought this to my attention, and I’m sorry that I didn’t take his advice more to heart when he first expressed concerns about you being here. I don’t need your services. I will not say anything to your other clients about your deplorable attitude. Perhaps they already know it, and that is why so many are moving over and using Ms. McNeal’s services.”
That stopped my brain in its efforts to come up with a retort. How many clients did she think were moving over to Audra’s service? As far as I knew, no one had dropped me in order to hire Audra’s cleaning service. We weren’t even in the same kind of cleaning business. Audra did companies and huge buildings with multiple suites. I did small businesses, like inns, and family homes. Everyone I normally cleaned for had continued to book me and had kept their regular contracts. Even those whose socks I hated to find in the sofa.
I took a split second to breathe through my first response, which was outrage, and clasped my hands in front of me.
After one more breath, I said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am. I was making good progress and had cleaned most of the walls before someone”—I looked pointedly at Preston, who responded to my angry glare with a smirk—“came in and destroyed my room. I provide a good and useful service to my many clients. I’ve never had any complaints.”
I went on. “You’ll want to check in on Ms. McNeal before you give her the contract, because I know for a fact she did not clean that room on her own. She had help, which was provided by someone else in an effort to discredit me. This person also continued to come into my space over and over again, to ask what I was doing and how I was doing it. If you’d prefer to work with someone else instead of me and my honest crew, then all I can do is wish you good luck.”
Preston’s sneer and Mrs. Petrovski’s disdain had me exiting the room without all my gear. I’d call her later to let her know I’d come back for it after she and her odious nephew were gone, he and his judgmental self.
The whole way home, I burned with anger. How dare Preston do that to me? How dare the owner assume that I was above cleaning? I wasn’t, hadn’t been in all the time since I left Waldo. And I certainly didn’t have money left over from the divorce to do anything, so I could hardly turn up my nose at honest work.
Driving through town, I fumed and muttered to myself and probably looked like a crazy person. That was not so different from the usual, so I didn’t worry about it.
I did worry about having to tell Letty and her friends that we had lost out on the job. I had wanted to return triumphant and be able to hand them a j
ob that we could all chip in on together. That obviously wasn’t going to happen.
Letty’s mom had passed two months ago, and so my friend no longer had to worry about splitting herself between helping the poor woman and trying to clean. Of course she was sad, but after all her mother had gone through, she almost felt relief now that her mother was at peace. We’d done a lovely service for her at my father’s expense. Letty had been grateful and had taken on more work as the cleaning side of my life had rocketed due to recommendations and referrals. I hadn’t been sure that would ever happen after I had married Waldo, turned into a jerk, and then swan-dived from grace by divorcing him. Re-entering the tight-knit community after the way I had turned my back on them to get married had been iffy after my divorce. But after I had eaten tons of crow, it was almost as if people trusted me again not to be a stupid idiot. I had truly been enjoying that, until Mrs. Petrovski and Preston had decided to throw acid on my parade.
Now I’d have to go back and make excuses and tell Letty that it was my fault we hadn’t gotten the job. That stuck in my craw.
I’d figure something out, though. Something that would make up for it.
I did wish Mrs. Petrovski the best of luck, if not her nephew. However, I had a feeling things were not going to go exactly as she hoped they would. Then again, if Preston had a secret brigade to whom he paid little money but they worked their rear ends off, then Audra could clean a lot faster and make a good living at the same time. Good for her, but Lady Karma was not often a very nice person. I hadn’t realized Audra and Preston knew each other, but apparently, they did. Either that or he would have helped anyone that wasn’t me. The latter was the more probable scenario.
In the meantime, a sign caught my eye as I drove. My store was for sale. It was no longer just a rumor; it truly was for sale, like, right now. After bringing my car to a squealing halt, I pulled up to the curb to look through the dusty windows. My heart thudded in my chest with anticipation as I climbed out of the car.