Out Of The Smoke

by Becca Jameson

  Soft laughter to her left made Liz look up and smile at her neighbor, Dorenda Ikeman.

  “Door giving you grief again?” She grinned at Liz’s efforts. “I don’t know why you don’t make Mary Ann switch that thing out for you. You’ve struggled with it since the day you moved in. Obviously it isn’t keyed quite right.” Dory chomped loudly on a big wad of pink bubblegum, which was better than the usual cigarette hanging from her lips.

  Liz sighed and relaxed her arms for a moment. “I’m too embarrassed to find out it’s user error,” she lied with what she hoped was a convincing chuckle. Under the radar was Liz’s only motto.

  “I seriously doubt that, chickadee.” Dory blew a huge bubble, popping it with a snap, before she leaned against her doorframe. “By the way, I’m glad I caught you. Do you have any free days you could pick up another client? One of mine gave my number to a friend, but I’m booked solid right now.”

  Dory had been a godsend when Liz had first arrived in the small town outside Minneapolis. She’d selected the city purely at random when she left the big apple and the coincidence of moving in next door to someone willing to help her find a job defied logic. They’d been friendly ever since, although Liz was completely aware that Dory would love them to be closer. Liz preferred to keep to herself and not run the risk of getting so involved with anyone she’d find herself needing to lie to in order to keep her past a secret. It was just too risky. How long she could keep this up, she wasn’t sure. But she was saving every spare dime she made to enable her to move again and maybe get a house somewhere else. Live her life comfortably, some small country town where Matthew would never find her.

  “As it happens,” she looked up at Dory’s weathered face, “I have Mondays free. My Monday client just transferred to another city. It was a shame too. They paid well, didn’t complain much, and gave good bonuses at holidays.” Liz shook her head in dismay over the loss. It hadn’t helped out with the saving at all. Perhaps this new client would be a perfect way to fill the hole.

  “Great.” Dory began to dig around in her “purse”. It was really more of an oversized bag. How the hell she ever found anything in there was a mystery. “I wrote his number on a gum wrapper…”

  Of course she did. Liz stared at the top of Dory’s bleach blonde head while she waited.

  “Ah, here it is.” The tiny wrinkled pink wrapper was barely legible when Dory reached out with her long slender fingers to hand it to Liz, her hot pink nails in contrast with Liz’s dull short ones.

  “What’s his name?” Liz squinted at the scrawled letters on the scrap.

  “Alex…or maybe it was Alan. Yes, Alan.” Dory pushed into her apartment. “Gotta run. Hot date in fifteen.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the referral. I’ll give him a call.” Alone again, Liz resumed the wiggling and jiggling of her key, until the door finally gave way and let her in.

  On a huge exhale, she meandered with her precarious sacks through the door and kicked it shut. The bags she dropped right inside before she collapsed onto her threadbare sofa. She leaned her head back and stared up at the water-stained ceiling, exhausted. Not the kind of physical tired a person feels after jogging a mile, simply worn out from the stress of feeling like she was on the run every day.

  Even after two and half years, she couldn’t stop wondering if someone had seen her at the coffee shop. Or on the street? What if Andrew didn’t actually die that day? What if he actually was one of the few people who’d escaped the building and then told Matthew she hadn’t even been there? But no, Liz knew that couldn’t be true. She’d seen the list of the dead many times. Andrew Thurman was on it. The only glitch in that line of thinking was that Elizabeth Martin was also on it. Still, how could she be sure?

  Besides, even if Andrew had died in the tragedy, Matthew was so pig-headed he probably wouldn’t accept that his “Beth” was gone too. He’d either be searching for some proof or trying to torment her in the grave for dying on him.

  Liz rehashed her steps following that fateful day for the millionth time. Again, to reassure herself that no one could possibly know she’d escaped.

  Moving had been difficult when she’d left the little drug store. Debris covered the sidewalks and streets as though an atomic bomb had deployed. Briefly, Beth considered what it must have been like in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the nineteen forties.

  Losing count of the blocks, Beth put one foot in front of the other, grateful for the hated flats that protected her feet from the broken glass littering the ground. Small favors. Matthew always insisted on her wearing the ugly shoes to keep people from gawking at her legs. Somehow, it was always her fault if someone glanced her way. Dressed in what her husband chose, she certainly never attracted anyone’s attention.

  After what seemed like hours, Beth stopped walking and looked around. The air improved the farther she trudged from the chaos. Looking back, she saw only gray clouds in the sky. She remembered the scene like it was yesterday and it gave her a new chill every time she thought of it.

  A nice little old lady named Martha Shields approached her on the street. She must have been a sight and terribly confused by then. The sweet woman ushered her into her brownstone, let her clean up, gave her some fresh clothes and a pair of sneakers, fed her a mouthwatering stew, and let her sleep off her stupor on her sofa. Without her help, Beth had no idea how she would’ve escaped New York. She’d had no money and no way to get any.

  Without explaining herself in the least, Beth had left the kind woman’s flat the next morning, fed, refreshed, and ready to leave her past behind. But the best thing she’d acquired while staying overnight with Martha was the two hundred dollars the woman pressed into her palm.

  Shocked speechless, Beth stared into Martha’s warm friendly eyes with tears in her own.

  “It’s all right, dear. I don’t know how, but somehow I know you need this worse than I do…now go.” With that, Martha gently pushed Beth out into the world and on to her new life.

  Getting out of the city and halfway across the country had been extremely difficult and took several days. Transportation had been at a standstill. Beth spent the better part of twenty-four hours in a bus station waiting for any available bus heading west. Once she managed to find one, she carefully went from station to station across the northern states until she literally ran out of money. And that was the end of “Beth”. A new life meant a new identity. The name Liz suited her perfectly. Common. Generic.

  The first thing she did after stepping off the bus in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was head for a pawn shop. The only thing Liz had of any value two years ago was her wedding ring, and she didn’t care if she ever saw it again.

  It wasn’t hard to find a pawn shop in the part of town she found herself in. Without flinching, she’d pulled the ring off and handed it to the manager.

  He barely did more than nod at her before turning his bald head down to peak through the tiny magnifying glass he held up to his right eye. He saw this sort of thing every day. Desperate people selling whatever they could to stay alive.

  “Ma’am, I hate to break this to ya, but this is fake. The diamond I mean. It’s cubic zirconia.”

  Liz stared at him, stunned. Fake?

  “There must be a mistake…” Liz stammered. How was she going to live? Where would she get money?

  “I’m sorry. You could take it to another shop if you want, but they’re going to tell you the same thing.” He paused and stared at her with only a tiny amount of sympathy playing across his face. He also saw this sort of thing every day. “The gold is worth something, of course. I could weigh it for you and give you a quote if you want.”

  The ring meant nothing to her. Absolutely nothing. In fact, she never wanted to see it again or have it weighing down her left hand even if he gave her two dollars for it. “Fine.”

  Now what was she going to do? Liz glanced down at herself, her purse, her borrowed sneakers. Her loose sweat pants. Her dirty T-shirt from three days of wearing the same outfit.
She gasped and reached up to twist her earrings. Her mother’s earrings. They were always on her. She never took them off. Surely her mother’s diamonds were fake also. She’d never considered otherwise. Especially considering her mother hadn’t “given” her anything at all. They’d been the only thing Liz had taken from her mother’s apartment after she died.

  “Worth about two hundred dollars.” The owner handed the ring back to her. His hand was almost black from handling jewelry and working with filthy objects all day. His nails embedded with grime that would never come out. He was probably much younger than he appeared. Did his line of work make a man prematurely age? Hard to imagine what sort of people came in there each day. Liz shivered and thanked God no one was in there right now.

  “How about these?” Slowly, Liz removed first one earring, then the next. The ring didn’t make her flinch, but taking off the earrings made her feel naked.

  Please, God, I need your help. Make them be real. The words rumbled through Liz’s mind while the manager looked at her skeptically, clearly uncertain that she had anything of value at this point. Who could blame him? If her husband was too cheap to buy her a real wedding band, how could she possibly have diamond earrings? To think that he made such a fuss about his hard-earned money spent on a woman he wasn’t even sure was worth it. And that’s how their marriage had begun. From there it had all gone downhill.

  With a deep breath, the bald-headed man once again leaned down. Liz held her breath, gripping the edge of the counter. The silence made her aware of the various clocks ticking in the room, random beats with no synchronization.

  “Now, these…these are spectacular.” He grinned up at her. Probably for the first time in a week. In fact, his mouth nearly cracked at the action.

  Liz’s breath escaped on a long woosh. “Thank God,” she muttered. There was hope.

  “I’m Bill, by the way.” He extended his hand to shake hers. Probably reserved the formality for actual customers, which Liz had suddenly become.

  A quick shake made her want to rub the layers of grime off her fingers, but she didn’t want to offend the man before he gave her a dollar amount, so she just waited.

  Bill reached for a calculator with his left hand while once again glaring through the magnifying glass with his right. He turned the diamonds every single direction possible and studied them at great length, measuring them with a tiny instrument. A few quick pokes on the adding machine and he beamed up at her. “I’ll give you two thousand for the pair.”

  Wow. That much? She was shocked. All these years she’d assumed the earrings were fake, just a sentimental token of her mother’s sad life. How twisted to find that her marriage was the complete sham and her mother actually owned something of value.

  She must have paused too long because his smile fell just a little and he continued, “Twenty-five hundred. But I can’t go any higher than that.”

  Liz raised the corners of her mouth in an unfamiliar expression and nodded in agreement.

  “Do you need me to hold them back for you?” Bill asked.

  “What do you mean?” She tipped her head to the side in confusion.

  “Hang on to them. Did you want them back? Sometimes people hawk something they don’t really want to part with and I hold it in the back to sell back to them, ten percent interest of course.”

  Finally, the light dawned. “Oh, no. Definitely not. I don’t need them back. I just need the money.” Might as well make a clean break from everyone in her life. No need to harp on the past and some bond she’d never had with her mother even when she was alive.

  “Fine. Let me just ring this out for you.” Bill headed over to the cash register and punched several buttons to open up the machine. “I assume you want cash?”

  “Please.” This was so much easier than she’d expected.

  After the largest sum of money Liz had ever held was carefully counted into her hand, she shoved the wad into the inside pocket of her sweat pants, walked out the door, and tossed the ugly hateful purse lock stock and barrel into the first dumpster she came across. Good-bye, Beth.

  Parting with thoughts of the past, Liz heaved her tired body off the couch and headed for the phone. It was Sunday. With any luck, she’d line up that new job for tomorrow and be back on track without missing a beat. Her biggest concern these days was getting robbed. She kept every penny hidden in her tiny apartment located in a rough part of town. Well hidden, but still…

  The place had been the cheapest she could find when she arrived and it simply hadn’t ever seemed necessary to move. She’d have difficulty transporting her meager belongings anyway at this point, even though her sparse furnishings consisted of a worn old sofa, a twin mattress on the floor, a small chipped table and two chairs. She shook her head thinking about the futility of having two chairs even. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d even needed the second one, and all those times had been when Dory had barged in to ramble about the latest loser she was dating.

  She liked Dory, really she did. It was frustrating not to have any friends to confide in, but she couldn’t risk it. Fear ruled her world. Sometimes she even wondered if it was all worth it, but then she relived the abuse she’d gone through for five long years, and breathed a sigh of relief at the freedom she had now. Even if that freedom consisted of little more than just the knowledge she could return home at the end of each day without getting yelled at or beaten, eat whatever she wanted, wear whatever she wanted, and for God’s sake, clean whenever she wanted. It was a literal breath of fresh air.

  Liz reached for the only phone she had, a wall unit with an actual cord. She’d gotten it at a thrift store. Sure, it was obsolete, but it worked. She had no reason at all to own a cell phone. Who would she call?

  She dialed the number scrawled on the gum wrapper and hoped she was reading it correctly. After three rings, a breathy voice picked up. “Alan McCarthy here.” So formal.

  “Hello, this is Liz…Liz Parker. Dorenda Ikeman gave me your name.” Liz swallowed. She always hated these initial calls and meeting new clients. Sometimes people could be extremely rude and condescending to their hired help.

  “Yes? How can I help you?” She realized he had no idea who Dory was. Hadn’t she said his friend gave her the number? He probably didn’t have a name attached to the friend’s cleaning lady, let alone her own.

  “She said you were in need of a cleaning service and asked me to call you.” It always sounded nicer to refer to herself as a “service” rather than the usual “cleaning lady”. As though she weren’t a one-woman operation.

  “Ah, yes. That’s right. My friend Jake was trying to hook me up.” His voice was low and fun loving. “Frankly, to be honest, I didn’t expect you to, um, well, speak English.” He laughed. “Sorry. That must sound crass.”

  “Not at all. I get a lot of that.”

  “Well, my apologies anyway.” Alan cleared his throat.

  “So, I happen to have Mondays free right now. Would you be interested in my coming tomorrow for a trial?” Would he think she charged too much? She kept upping the amount with each new client. She knew she was good. She knew her references would say she was thorough and worth the money. She needed the extra cash. It was the only way she could eventually move on with her life. She was so close.

  “Sure. I have a three bedroom home. Three thousand square feet. There’s an office in the front, which I just started working out of. I promise it isn’t a disaster, but my friends have encouraged me to pay someone to come in once a week and clean so that the place always looks incredible for clients.”

  “Well, I can certainly do that. You won’t be disappointed. I can be there first thing tomorrow morning and get right to work. I charge a hundred dollars a visit for a home that size and prefer payment in cash. You would provide the supplies. I’d let you know whatever is missing or needs to be replaced as we go along. Does that sound okay?” Liz bit her lower lip and waited. She couldn’t stand the business end, but it couldn’t be a
voided. It was a common practice for cleaning help to be paid in cash and most people were used to the idea.

  Of course, most cleaning ladies liked cash in order to avoid taxes. In Liz’s case she’d always felt rather guilty evading the government in such a way, but she wasn’t most. She was trying to stay under the radar.

  “Perfect.”

  Chapter Two

  At eight a.m. sharp, there was a knock at his door. Hmm. Punctual. He was pleased already. Just to be sure, Alan peered through the peephole and almost didn’t see her at first. She wasn’t very tall.

  When he opened the door, she stood up straighter. She almost reached his chin if she tried really hard. The breath whooshed out of him. The most stunning woman stood on his doorstep. Huge green eyes stared up at him. Her face was so smooth and soft with hardly a trace of makeup covering a sparse sprinkling of freckles. When she reached to tuck a loose strand of long silky brown hair behind her ear, he had the distinct urge to do it for her, to feel the softness of it flow through his fingers.

  This beauty couldn’t be here to clean. Maybe she was a new neighbor or a potential client needing legal representation. Hopefully that was the case, because he couldn’t imagine her coming over every Monday with her sexy good looks and cleaning around him while he tried to work. The distraction would be hell on his nerves.

  “Mr. McCarthy?” Liz cocked her head to the side and leaned toward him slightly. He strained to identify the distinctively pleasant smell that wafted off her skin. He inhaled long and slow without thinking. Soap? Perhaps it was just that simple. Her own personal aroma mixed with that of the brand she used. Or the shampoo.

  “Sir?”

  Crap. “Sorry. Can I help you?” He’d glanced past her and wondered where Liz-the-cleaning-lady was. No one was behind the mystery visitor.

  “I’m Liz. Am I early?” She nibbled on her lower lip and gazed up at him in trepidation.