Killed by Clutter

by Leslie Caine

  Audrey looked up from her novel, which had been propped open on the oval-shaped mahogany coffee table. (Audrey was so hyperactive that she routinely did at least two things at once.) “Clutter reduction. I love it! That is such a good topic for my show. It’s almost a standby of mine, in fact, even though there are more than enough cable shows concerning clutter. It seems as though half the homeowners in America can never get the hang of clearing their homes of all the things they don’t need.”

  “Said the pot to the kettle,” I couldn’t help but grumble. Granted, we were sitting in a cozy four-seat arrangement in front of the fireplace. But that was merely thanks to my ceaseless furniture arranging—necessary due to Audrey’s equally ceaseless tendency to use her house as a test tube for home-improvement experiments. She was forever testing out ideas for her local TV show: Domestic Bliss with Audrey Munroe. Even as we spoke, old hat boxes and leather trunks lined every wall. Audrey had acquired them for an excellent piece on how to jazz up old containers and use them as accent pieces. The episode had aired three months ago.

  “My house isn’t cluttered,” Audrey sniffed; “it’s merely imaginatively utilized with nonstandard spacing between items. As well as being a tad excessively furnished.”

  I had to laugh. “I’m impressed. That’s the most creative description for clutter I’ve ever heard. You should help real estate agents come up with new terms besides ‘fixer-uppers’ for dilapidated houses, and ‘charming bungalow’ for dinky.”

  She shot a quick glare at me over her reading glasses, then flipped the page of her novel, blending the motion in with her incessantly moving knitting needles. “You know, Erin, just last week I had a closet organizer on the show. I have to say that—” She paused to peer at her needlework, cried, “Oh, shoot!” and started to undo her latest row, an action which she’d told me last night was termed “unknitting.”

  “By a ‘closet organizer,’ do you mean the shelving, or the occupation?”

  “Both, actually. But my point is that I would love it if you were to replicate that closet design you showed me for the master bedroom in north Crestview. You know...the one where you installed built-ins on the short wall at the end of the closet?”

  “That worked out nicely,” I muttered into my teacup, hoping to avoid the issue of the fact that I didn’t want to appear on her show. Ever. I was extremely camera-shy, and her show taped at seven a.m., far too early for me to indulge in a sedative to relax me. Such as a martini. The design she was referring to had been to update a master bedroom that had been built before the advent of walk-in closets. My clients had to round a closet to get to their bathroom. The bedroom was too small for an armoire, and they were clamoring for storage space. My solution was to salvage the wasted area at the end of the closet by installing six built-in drawers topped by a breakfront, which enclosed shelves for their linens.

  “As the closet expert was saying on my show, in today’s society, we’ve become possessed by our possessions. I’m just as guilty of it as the next person—of buying too much.” She paused, eyed her ever-growing scarf, and added under her breath, “And of making too much. We get obsessed with holding onto all our excess belongings—with not letting anyone else take them from us. Yet, after a fire or a flood, victims are always grateful that they and their families are all right—because everything else was just...stuff.”

  “True, but it’s nice to live comfortably, to surround yourself with nice things.”

  “Absolutely, but that’s the key—to ‘live comfortably’ means to take comfort in your nice surroundings. Having too many possessions prevents that. When I find myself keeping some obscure item solely because I might want to use it someday, I ask myself: Am I’m going to be able to find this when the need arises? Because if not, there’s no reason to keep it. There’s great comfort in well-organized closets and storage areas.”

  “Yes, there is.” I couldn’t help but eye the hatbox-and-luggage display in the room, thinking that there was even greater comfort in having a well-organized den.

  “Well, that’s enough knitting practice,” Audrey grumbled. “It’s time for me to move on to my grandchild’s booties and blanket. And, since I need to practice what I preach, I’ll call a charity and schedule a pickup. We’ll get rid of a few surplus items from this house.” She sighed as she unfurled her knitting. “Starting with this scarf.”

  “No offense, Audrey, but the person who wants that scarf will have to have a neck like a giraffe. Have you measured it? I’m guessing that’s about sixteen feet long.”

  She stretched it out along the floor, but stopped when Hildi raced across the floor toward her, twitching her tail and pouncing on the scarf. “Sorry, Hildi,” she chided gently. “I wasn’t trying to beckon you to play with my yarn.” Audrey looked up at me. “I did get a little carried away with all this green wool. Maybe the Jolly Green Giant is in the market for some new neckwear.”

  “He could probably use it. He spends all that time in freezers, hanging out with frozen vegetables.”

  She brandished her knitting needles as though they were carving utensils. “Well, Erin. Now that I’ve mastered scarf-making, it’s bootie time!”

  Chapter 5

  The next morning, Steve Sullivan was waiting for me in the cab of a small U-Haul truck when I arrived at Helen Walker’s house. We exchanged our pat “hey” greetings and some small talk. But we avoided each other’s gaze as we walked to Helen’s front door.

  Sullivan commented on what a “nice place” it was from the outside. Although I kept the remark to myself, it struck me that, for all the amazing homes I’d been in since I’d moved to Crestview nearly three years ago, this was the house that best fit my own style and sense of scale. Much as I loved my home in Audrey Munroe’s fabulous mansion, it was too large for me. Ironically, second-highest on my list of dream homes was Sullivan’s, but I would allow myself to be dangled by my thumbs above open flames before anyone would ever drag that tidbit of information out of me.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. “Just a minute,” Helen soon called from inside.

  In what I chose to take as an encouraging sign, she let us in through the front door, as opposed to the garage. With his typical suave manner when meeting new clients, Sullivan exuded charm and acted as if the ceiling-high stack of brown-paper grocery bags by the front door was as common a sight as an umbrella stand.

  Sullivan leapt at her offer of a “fresh-brewed cup of coffee,” and I was curious as to how she could manage such a feat. She’d told me she used her microwave exclusively. We followed her into the kitchen, where Sullivan’s jaw dropped at her superstore-warehouse-run-amok interior. As we squished ourselves into the clearing, I spied an ancient-looking Mr. Coffee atop a Mount Everest of magazines.

  “Erin? Is that you?” a vaguely familiar voice called from behind a wall of boxes.

  “Stephanie?” I replied, hazarding an educated guess.

  “Over here.”

  I followed her voice. Stephanie was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the back door, sipping a mug of coffee, and reading a newspaper. “Brought an old coffeemaker over this morning. Thought I’d get filled in on current events back on—” she glanced at the header “—November sixth, nineteen eighty-seven. Kind of uplifting, really. World events back then were every bit as frightful as they are today.”

  “Morning, Stephanie,” Sullivan said, stepping beside me. We were all but wedged shoulder to shoulder. The close quarters, frankly, were making me edgy, but there was no place for me to escape, with Stephanie leaning against the back door.

  Her smile spread from ear to ear. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Steve Sullivan. The world’s most macho designer. You finally got bored with those West Coast babes?”

  He gave her a sexy grin. “Started to miss the lovely ladies of Colorado. How are you, Steph? Great to see you.”

  Well, he was certainly wasting no time before sucking up to his former client. She had to be at least ten years older
than him, but her facial expression had suddenly turned downright coquettish.

  “It’s been so long, I was rather expecting to hear through the grapevine that you’d turned into a surfer dude and flown the coop for good.”

  “Not me. I’m strictly into mountains.”

  I dearly hoped that my eyes were playing tricks on me, and that I hadn’t just seen him ogle Stephanie’s breasts as he spoke!

  “You picked the right house, then,” she replied, gesturing at the piles and stacks surrounding us.

  Helen produced Sullivan’s cup of coffee—in a World’s Greatest Dad coffee mug—and promptly excused herself to go “clean out Ella and Vator’s litter boxes.” I wound up holding Sullivan’s cup for him while he gallantly assisted Stephanie to her feet. This time I saw clearly that he did give her body an appreciative once-over. Yeesh! Whatever had I been thinking when I’d let him kiss me like that two months ago?!

  He was too focused on Stephanie to as much as look at me, let alone thank me for serving as his cup holder while he reclaimed the World’s-Greatest-Dad mug. World’s Worst Egomaniac would have been much more appropriate. “How’s that rec room of yours coming along?” he asked, once again wasting no time on subtleties.

  “Still waiting for the right man for the job.” She gave him a sly smile. “Say, that gives me a good idea.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, taking a sip of coffee to play up his oh-so-cool routine.

  “You two aren’t booked solid right now, are you?” Stephanie looked at me, then back at Sullivan.

  Sullivan and I exchanged confused glances. “You mean Gilbert and me? We’re not partners, in any sense of the word.”

  The last phrase was hardly necessary—unless he felt he needed to make it crystal clear that we also weren’t sexual partners. Our kiss truly had meant nothing to him. All his cute little emails must have been mere compulsive flirting. I glared at his coffee mug, willing it to read: World’s Most Arrogant Bastard!

  “Oh, you aren’t?” Stephanie replied. “When you showed up here together, I just assumed.”

  “No. He’s just here to do the heavy lifting for me,” I said.

  “Maybe you’ll nix this idea, then,” Stephanie said, “but I’d like to hire you both to work as a team, to design my game room.”

  “Both of us?” Sullivan squared his shoulders. “You do understand that Sullivan Designs is fully autonomous, right, Steph? I’m just here as a favor to Erin. Plus I figured this’d be a great chance for you and me to get caught up again.”

  “Glad to hear you’re not out of work and forced to schlep for other designers, Steve. But I’ve felt for a while that the one thing lacking in your work is a woman’s sensibilities.”

  “Huh,” he said, covering his indignation by taking another loud sip of coffee. I, on the other hand, didn’t bother to hide my grin.

  “’Fraid so. Whereas Erin Gilbert here could stand to be a touch more imaginative in her designs...making them more on a par with your work.”

  “Ah,” he said with a knowing nod. He clearly had no trouble agreeing with my having been handed the much more severe criticism.

  “How did you come to that conclusion?” I asked, suppressing my umbrage as best I could; the last thing I wanted was to get on the wrong side of a powerful developer in this town. “I haven’t even shown you any of my designs.”

  “It’s what I gleaned from looking at the pictures of rooms on your website. They’re all a tad too predictable.”

  I held my tongue, but her statement contained more garbage than this kitchen.

  “Whereas, as a team,” she went on, “Gilbert and Sullivan would be without equal. And, as you can imagine, I have my new homeowners asking me for recommendations on designers all the time. I’d be happy to pass along your names. It sounds so cute, when you link them.” She chuckled. “Face it...you two could make beautiful music together.”

  It was almost worth having to hear that insipid joke for the umpteenth time to watch Sullivan suppress a groan by noisily clearing his throat.

  Helen appeared and exclaimed, “My goodness. Are you young folks still just standing here and gabbing?”

  “We’re discussing a business proposition, Aunt Helen. One that’s going to work out great for all three of us, don’t you think?”

  Sullivan merely glowered at the steamy surface of his coffee. Damn it! Even though Stephanie was way off base in calling the fabulous designs on my website “predictable” (which could only mean that they were predictably stunning), the part about this being beneficial for Sullivan’s and my careers was all-too accurate. One of us was going to have to swallow some pride and say “Yes” first, and heaven knows I was the more emotionally mature.

  “I agree,” I said. Sullivan blinked at me in surprise. Once you’ve resolved to knock down a wall, there’s no sense in stopping at the first dent, so I continued, “Sullivan and I have worked on a couple of designs together, and I’m sure we can do one for you that will absolutely dazzle you.”

  “Wonderful!” She looked expectantly at him.

  “Right.” He took a swig of coffee and set down the cup. “Let us know when you’d like to start on your rec room, Steph, and Erin and I will be there.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon’s fine by me. Whenever the two of you are ready. Any time after three p.m., I can—” She broke off when her cell phone rang, answering in harried-businesswoman tones. She tugged fitfully on her dark hair as she listened. Within the next sixty seconds, she cursed a half-dozen times, said a gruff goodbye to the three of us, and rushed off to handle a “crisis.”

  “You ready to get to work?” Sullivan asked me.

  “Of course. I’ve just been waiting on you to finish your coffee.”

  Helen was peering at us, her arms crossed. I noticed the bun of her snow-white hair was much neater than it had been yesterday. Maybe this meant she’d slept in her bedroom and had put up her hair while using the bathroom mirror, as opposed to the rearview mirror. I took a calming breath, buoyed myself with a silent, “Confidence and optimism,” and said, “Helen, as we discussed yesterday, the only way we’re going to be able to do this job is to clear everything out of your house, then move back in only those items that you truly need.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “That isn’t ‘the only way’ you can do this job; that’s merely the easiest way. I need to give my personal okay before anything’s removed from my house. I refuse to let you two load up that big truck out there and then dole out my own possessions to me.”

  “Um...actually, I wanted to first spread everything out on the lawn, then move them either into the truck or back into the house. Does that sound more appealing to you, by any chance?”

  “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t, Erin.”

  Somewhere in all this accumulated chaos a death-knell was ringing for my chances of success in this assignment. “How ‘bout we move things room by room into the garage, then?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing leaves the house, till I’ve given it my okay. You can take away all the recyclable items, though...the cardboard, plastics, bottles, and bags. Everything except for the magazines and newspapers. Those I’ll need to look through first.”

  “Helen, I’m sorry, but that just won’t work,” I said firmly. “If you have to examine every individual item before we remove it, we’ll be here for a year.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean I would look through every single newspaper. I just don’t want any periodicals from the fifties or sixties to be removed without my say so.”

  I sighed, exasperated. “It’s a start. At some point we absolutely must empty out everything in order to clean thoroughly and reorganize. But I guess if we have to, we can move things from room to room.” I looked at Sullivan and found myself longing to take my frustrations out on him. He’d strung me along for two months, only to serve as my ersatz business partner upon his return. Even so, I couldn’t mangle the sequence of events sufficiently to make Helen’s packrat way
s his fault. “Let’s get going.”

  Promising Helen once more that we’d remove “only recyclables,” we started in on the kitchen. Helen informed us that all of the periodicals from the fifties and sixties that she’d wanted to keep were in her den, which allowed us to work quickly. Furthermore, Sullivan informed her that all of her hoarded scraps of paper and cardboard were recyclable. I, in turn, convinced her that old tires could be taken to a local dealer—which I think was the truth. In any case, I decided that my job was, after all, interior design, and she removed her lawn-care tools through the back door. In less than two hours, we had filled the truck and uncovered the kitchenette—an adorable hand-planed pine table and three Captains chairs—and Sullivan took off alone in the truck to drop off the first of what I hoped would be many loads.

  Shortly after he’d departed, the doorbell rang, and Helen grumbled, “That’s probably Rachel Schwartz again. It’s about time for her to arrive...and give me my daily dose of stress.”

  The moment Helen opened the door, Rachel swept through it, chattering a long-winded greeting. Rachel was closely followed by her husband, who set down his toolbox and a small bag of supplies to shake hands with me. Jack Schwartz was a nice-looking man, Helen’s age, roughly twenty years older than his wife. He was medium height—an inch or so shorter than Rachel—with a bulbous nose, short-cropped white hair, and an affable smile. He greeted me warmly and mentioned how happy he was that I was “finally helping to put Helen’s house back together again.” The wording gave me an instant mental image of Humpty Dumpty, which wasn’t far off the mark.

  Interrupting our chat, Rachel deserted Helen and grabbed her husband’s arm. “We’re here to install the doorbell,” she explained to me. “My, you look nice today.” She was eyeing my khakis and dark-green knit top. “You’ve got that casual-elegant look going for you.”

  This being just the second time she’d ever seen me, it was an odd comment, but I simply said, “Thank you, Rachel. So do you.” She was wearing a light-blue skirt suit and pearls that looked disturbingly similar to the outfit she’d seen me wearing yesterday. Was the woman deliberately copying my wardrobe?