Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 04 - Trash Out

by Catharine Bramkamp

  At first I was impressed with her analysis. But then, she looked like she had lived in Claim Jump for quite some time, at the very least, she must have heard stories about the infamous Lucky Masters, who didn’t? Maybe she was just like a carnival gypsy intoning that just from one glance at my palm, she could tell I was about to meet a tall, dark stranger. I meet strangers all the time; it’s my job.

  “Lucky wasn’t bad.” Donna picked out a large abalone shell from the collection, and piled leaves of sage (not weeds after all) into it. She whipped out an antique zippo lighter and set the green leaves to smoke. Once armed, she stepped carefully from room to room murmuring prayers to the goddess.

  She waved the sage and the pungent smell wafted to my nose. “He was ambitious. You probably want to keep that energy.” She cocked her head at me.

  I nodded.

  “He wasn’t all that loved you know.” She walked to a corner and waved vigorously, the smoke swirled and curled.

  I studied her card. “You live in the co-housing?” Of course she did. She had all the hallmarks of communal yoga class and vats of homemade lentil soup simmering in the communal kitchen. Sonoma County offered two co-housing, or intentional communities within its boarders. Residents own a small unit and share the rest of the space – like one big happy communal family.

  “The child in this house was sad, there was excessive depression.”

  Everyone knew the story of poor Penny and her mother. When it came to familial relations, Lucky did not live up to his name.

  “And you want your husband happy here.” She ducked into the guest bath downstairs, waved the sage smoke and returned to the hallway where I waited.

  “It won’t take much. Pour ammonia down every drain in the house at least once a week to eliminate negative influences. I also have an oil, we sell it here in town, for cleaning.”

  She pulled out a blue glass apothecary jar packed with layers of liquid and chunks of salt. I resisted asking if I could put any of it in my mouth.

  She noticed my expression and laughed. “It’s mostly creosote oil, ammonia, and sea salt. It will remove the most negative thought forms that linger in a home. Add this to about four gallons of hot water and mop the floor. Then do it again but don’t mop anything away.”

  She set it all back down on the ad-hoc hall table and headed up the stairs.

  “As an added bonus, we thwart the mosquitoes,” I added irreverently.

  She ignored me and crested the stairs. She glanced up and down the hall. “Once you clean, it won’t take much to maintain. Bring in a couple dozen roses, their vibration level will work wonders to change the negative to the positive.” When don’t they?

  She waved the sage smoke, stepping briefly into the two guest rooms and the master bedroom. I waited in the hall. She emerged from the master bedroom and approached me. She stopped suddenly, as if something transfixed her. I automatically glanced at the narrow ladder leading to the widow’s walk.

  “What?” She put one hand on her hip and leaned back, squinting at the ceiling and the neat square opening.

  “Oh my,” she said softly. She set down the still smoking shell and retreated downstairs to fetch her magic bag. “What the hell was up there?”

  “Mostly sadness.” A few months ago when I was the acting listing agent, I discovered a bag of burned baby dolls heads hidden under the floor boards of this otherwise perfect little room. I never asked about them. It was all I could do to remove the vile things and toss them deep into the trash bin. I did know that burned baby doll heads were much easier to handle than a real detached head. I’ve encountered one of those as well.

  She pulled out more sage and lit it again. Curls of smoke were immediately drawn up through the trap door.

  “Can I go up?”

  “Be my guest.” I pulled down the ladder and held it as she carefully climbed up.

  She teetered on the ladder rungs and thrust the shell with the burning leaves up into the widow’s walk space. Ben had just insulated the walls and floor and it was painted last week, so it was pretty clean already. I hadn’t dared venture up there, I was happy to have her do the work.

  “This isn’t bad.” She ducked back down the stairs, keeping the big shell level. “I expected much more anger in Lucky’s home.”

  “Wait until you check out Penny’s house.” There was no way she could have heard about that widow’s walk. I suddenly had more faith in her talents. I resolved to hire her to work on my other listing. Maybe multiple doses of ammonia would do the trick, but I didn’t think there were enough roses to transfer the energy, but we had to try, or the house wouldn’t sell. And I always sell my listings.

  “This is a nice house, you have some good touches here,” she concluded as I wrote out a check.

  “So, if you live in the co-housing, you must know Debbie Smith,” I ventured. Debbie was my personal bête noir. I had disliked the woman on sight and my grandmother loathed her. There wasn’t a person in town who took poor Debbie’s side on any matter. It was almost like now that Lucky Masters was gone, residents had transferred their animosity to Debbie.

  Donna shook her head. “An acquaintance. She and the theater owner were friends for a while but they had a falling out over the Lucky Master’s trust.”

  I nodded, I knew quite a bit about that particular er, challenge.

  “Debbie does tend towards self aggrandizement.”

  I blinked, not a word I’d expect from a shaman.

  Donna noticed my expression and grinned. “I have a law degree from Stanford and a Masters in religious studies.”

  “And this?” I encompassed all of Claim Jump with one gesture.

  “Better for my soul.” She rested her weight on one hip and dissipated the remaining sage smoke with a wave of her hand. “When I first met her, I assumed Debbie intended to forage that path as well, I mean why else would you move to Claim Jump? She told me she needed a respite from her own worst tendencies. But even though she changed her clothes, let her natural color grow in and serves on the finance committee for us. To be honest, I still don’t think it took. I think she misses the attention of being a big shot attorney,” she finished sadly.

  “Well, suing Harold for the sidewalk improvements is certainly the talk of the town.”

  She nodded and tapped the card in my hand. “Give me a call. I’ll bring extra sage, it sounds like a project.”

  “Just don’t burn too much,” I cautioned. There were still highly flammable quilts lining the walls of Penny Master’s former home, and I didn’t want any more fires. I’ve had enough of those.

  My phone buzzed as I bade my cleanser goodbye. I heard Ben stomping on the roof and instructing the men on the finer points of shingle work. The sound of the nail gun punctuated his talking points. The morning was warm and mild. I paused in the open front door to take the call.

  “Why won’t Patrick answer my calls?” Carrie’s voice was two octaves higher than usual, a bad sign, but at least we weren’t discussing napkin colors, expensive guest gifts or the paucity of silver choices at Gumps. I thought that now she had a place to set up the groom and wear the dress, we were set.

  “Maybe he’s just distracted. You know how he gets.” Unlike Carrie, Patrick’s methodology, when he was distracted, was to not return anyone’s calls.

  The very same Debbie I was just discussing, emerged from Gold Way and strode out to the sidewalk fronting Main Street. She was resplendent in a yellow and red tie dyed caftan much like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Float. At least the colors complimented the turning leaves. She brandished a hand painted sign attached to what looked like a two by four that extended well over her gray frizzy hair.

  “Yes,” Carrie admitted.

  I am the complete opposite of Patrick. I never stop communicating. I’ll call up people and explain, in very lengthy terms, why I’m not currently speaking to them.

  “He hasn’t been himself. Do you think he’s having second thoughts about the marriage?”

&nbs
p; Debbie marched past the Methodist Church and three small private homes to the old library perched at the top of the street. But it looked like neither Scott nor Sarah was there. She rattled the door for good measure, then turned to march back down the hill.

  “No, he’s probably having second thoughts about the scope of the wedding but not the marriage.”

  I watched Debbie warily; she was now on my side of the street. On closer inspection, the caftan looked like it could be silk, but on Debbie, even a luxurious fabric draped like a bed sheet.

  “It is becoming quite a production.” Carrie admitted. She paused. Debbie approached, just four houses away.

  “When are you coming back?”

  Ben was still finishing up the master bath, the hole in the floor was fixed, that much was finished.

  “I just had the placed cleansed, so now I can stay up here indefinitely.”

  She was silent, not taking my comment as a joke.

  Debbie approached and I shrank back into the shadow of the doorway, hoping she’d walk right by.

  Like the Sonoma County girl she was, Carrie didn’t even pause at the suggestion of cleansing. “I’ll be home Sunday night,” I admitted.

  “Good, we need to discuss the place settings for the shower.”

  It is much easier to fill up a new house, than clear out the old house. I had spent roughly the last four weeks half -heartedly taking inventory of everything in my increasingly perfect Rivers Bend home. When I wasn’t with Ben, I was spending hours aimlessly trailing through my house touching everything I loved and wracking my brain and emotions to figure out what I didn’t love as much, or even if there was anything I could bear to part with at all. When I realized I loved everything and cared about it all and was unwilling to give anything away, I made an emergency call to my best stager, Stacey. I know, I called in decorators to fill up the house in Claim Jump and was calling in help to clear our the house in Rivers Bend. It takes a village to manage my stuff.

  “You have too much furniture and it’s all too big.” Stacey fit me into her busy schedule last Thursday night as a favor. Stacey is a six-foot tall former volleyball player. She is still slender but had traded her tennis shoes for heels higher than I could ever hope to manage. She swayed vertiginously in the center of my living room.

  “It’s comfortable.” I automatically argued. Here she was, fitting me in, making an evening house call, and I was arguing, not the most auspicious way to begin our client/expert relationship.

  “Sure it is, but all this big mission furniture makes your downstairs rooms look too full. And you need to get rid of the books.”

  I suppressed a sigh. I knew she was right, but I loved my books, down to the last ratty paperback. But I asked for the advice. So, after my meeting with Stacey, I began dutifully packing away hundreds of book copies and moved the boxes to the garage, ready for my next trip up to Claim Jump. I found five novels I could part with and set them on top of the last box. I would donate those to Scott’s lending library. Scott and Sarah had turned the old library into a part used bookstore, part lending program. He and Sarah ran Facebook pages, websites and created a way to check out the books on-line. It was pretty magnificent. I don’t know what the former occupants of the space, the ladies of the Brotherhood of Cornish Men thought, nevertheless, my grandmother Prue, member in good standing, thought the idea was lovely.

  “Clean up Claim Jump.” Debbie stood by my gate and blandished her sign like a blunt instrument.

  “Get it? Up and Jump rhyme.” She waved the sign at me but had the decency to stay on her side of the fence.

  I nodded and tried to look encouraging. I’m not good at encouraging idiocy.

  “And what are we cleaning up Debbie?” I could feel the new, good vibrations in my house and felt pretty secure. Shouts echoed from the back. Ben yelled something I couldn’t make out.

  “Everything!” Debbie bellowed. “The pot growing, the pot smoking, the sidewalks, the government, the loitering, the only thing that is working at all is our co-housing unit and that too may be under siege.”

  “The co-housing units under siege? By whom?” Now that Lucky Masters was no longer the villain and no longer capable of clear cutting long swaths of National Forest because the trees blocked his view (what with being dead, Lucky as well as the trees), I didn’t think there were any problems left in good old Claim Jump. Except for dry rot in master bathrooms.

  “Someone found out we didn’t follow some obscure ordinance and they want us to fix it or they’ll shut us down. Can you believe someone would be that petty?” She glared at me, strands of her gray hair waved in the breeze as if it had a medusa-like life of its own.

  I opened my eyes wide and shook my head. “No, who would be such a stickler for the law and details like that?” I knew perfectly well who, it had my grandmother written all over it. She probably created carbon copies and filed each into three different county departments just to make sure the redundancy protected the filing.

  Her best friends, Pat and Mike probably didn’t stand aside and let her do all the work either.

  Summer, head of the theater, walked around the corner from the parking lot.

  “Hey Allison, did your friend find you?”

  I looked at my phone. “Not yet.” I called back.

  Debbie glanced over her shoulder at Summer but did not rush over to commiserate with her. Ah, Donna had been right.

  I did not relish Debbie hovering around looking for a mistakes in our construction, our sub contractors, any of that.

  A lone motorcycle, a Harley, roared by and drowned out what Debbie said next.

  I cupped my hand to my ear and walked down the porch stairs to hear her.

  “Sometimes I think I’m being watched.” Her voice was quieter than I thought possible.

  “You are, Summer is still standing outside, maybe she wants to talk with you.” I shooed off Debbie who looked like a kid being pushed back on the playground after a fall.

  I heard the roar of a construction truck pulling into the driveway behind the house. Just in time. I heard another shout and a crash in the back yard. The rest of the shingles I presumed. I wondered if they’d be finished by the first rains in November. I would normally say “of course, they have two months,” but I’m not that confident in the efficiency of our Claim Jump construction workers.

  I watched Debbie and Summer. They certainly did not act like friends any more. There was tension in their gestures and the more Summer talked, the unhappier Debbie looked.

  What had happened? I waited for Debbie to stalk off. Summer pushed back her black bob and glared at me.

  I smiled and waved. She pointedly looked at her watch. The banging and clanking increased as the workers slide down the roof and began to swarm through the kitchen. In any moment they would burst into the front rooms, intent on finishing the finishing touches. I escaped by crossing the street to join Summer.

  “What do you want? Aren’t you part of the Lucky suit too?” She placed her rough hands on her ample hips.

  “Me? Not me,” I proclaimed piously. I usually get a nicer greeting from Summer; Grandma donates thousands of dollars to the theater. “I bought Lucky’s house and I’m selling one of Lucky’s houses, in the Lucky tradition, but I’m not part of the class action suit. I don’t believe in them.”

  She snorted. “Sure you don’t. Everyone of those people who bought houses from Lucky are suing the estate courtesy of Miss Busy Body.”

  A few short months ago, Miss Busy Body herself was very busy helping Summer transfer choice pieces of furniture out of Lucky’s house and into Summer’s office, so I wasn’t sure that people who performed in glass venues should be hurling stones that hard.

  “I get my cash the old fashion way, I earn it.” I said.

  “You’d be the first,” Summer admitted grudgingly. She smoothed her black bob and gently wiped a finger under her heavy eyeliner. “Do you have any idea what will happen if Debbie’s lawsuit goes through?”

>   I did indeed know what would happen. I had been part of what I considered a sanctioned cover-up. Lucky’s daughter, Penny accidentally killed her father, well, mostly accidentally, but the semantics didn’t matter since the poor woman met with her own accident; death by shoes. She had tottered backwards over the railing on her cantilevered porch. No one could have survived the fall. It made me think twice before donning my favorite high heel pumps by Jimmy Choo. But only twice. I was determined to keep my addiction and just vowed to avoid high places and slippery balconies.

  Anyway. What would happen if hundreds of residents, burned out of their homes due to negligence and willful use of known flammable material could prove their case and win their suit? All the money in the estate would be gone, which wasn’t a problem in of itself, but the money would leave the city and go to outsiders. Most long-term residents would have never purchased a home built by Lucky, not, I was discovering, even a home he built for himself. Although the insulation used in Penny’s former residence was from a different manufacturer than the cheap, and, as it turns out, flammable insulation pumped into hundreds of tract homes built above my grandmother’s house on upper Red Dog Road.

  “No more theater,” I said out loud.

  She nodded. “No shit.”

  “What are you going to do about it?

  “Stop her.” Summer said darkly or like the gathering of a summer storm if I wanted to extend and torture the metaphor.

  Chapter 2

  After yet another idyllic weekend filled with permit negotiation, sanding, dust, refinishing fluid and an ever growing parade of sub contractors who routinely forgot their own tools but helpfully posted drink requests on the refrigerator door, I was ready for work, but apparently, not that ready.

  I was barely in the door of New Century Realty Monday morning when I was accosted by the two most powerful and profitable agents in our office, even the county, if you ask them.

  “They took the toilet and the water heater.” Rosemary flung down a stack of flyers with disgust. “Can you believe that?”