Ian looked nearer, at a wooden crib on his left. He took a few careful steps over stuffed animals and pillows so he could look down inside.
Lying in the crib, on a dusty pink blanket spotted with rat droppings, were a baby skeleton and a rattle. Ian’s first thought was that a newborn was not a victim that could come knocking on Missy’s front door.
A sob turned Ian back to the star of the show. Missy had gone from happy-happy to sad-sad in a flash. She was not a good actress, and he doubted she could cry on cue. These sobs sounded heartfelt, if that horrible black beating organ inside her chest could be called a heart. To Ian, it was an engine of hate.
Missy looked into the crib with a tilted head, grabbed onto the wooden rim with one hand, and let her tears run off her cheeks and drop onto the baby skeleton’s blanket. Ian bet that crib blanket had been sopping up her tears for years and years.
“That’s my little Saffy. She was ten months old when crib death claimed her from me. That was twenty years ago, right after I got out of that horrible facility. We hadn’t been married all that long. But after Saffy died, my husband left…”
Missy’s eyes looked out of the crib and gave a cautious glance at a male mummy across the room. She had no tears for him. Ian assumed that the mummy was her former husband. For this married couple, death did not part. The deceased husband was just added to his wife’s collection.
“And that’s when I started to shop and buy new friends,” Missy finished.
Shopping and stealing were two completely different things, but Ian knew Missy couldn’t tell the difference. The end result was all she saw, more possessions in her house. Plus, you couldn’t buy or steal friends. Some people did, that was the cruel reality of human history, but they were considered human traffickers, slaveholders, kidnappers, or killers. Missy was the worst kind of criminal, and it was justified as harmless collecting in her mind.
Missy inhaled deeply over the crib, savoring Saffy’s scent. “It still smells like her.”
Ian had to suppress a mad laugh. Yeah, it smells like dead people, he also suppressed adding.
With her painful, personal story told, Missy finally looked at the one she was addressing it to. Ian wore a look of sympathy. Luckily, he was a better actor than she was.
“I’m sorry,” Ian consoled her.
Missy appeared touched by Ian’s concern. As she wiped away her tears, Ian went over Missy’s tall tale in his head. He didn’t think she was lying directly, she probably believed every word she said. But her brief hard history had some glaring omissions, and he expected any original truth had been twisted in her mind to justify her current state, and the state of her house. A hoarder’s history of hardships always became an excuse for their disorderly living conditions.
Ian was glad that Missy had been so forthcoming with him and his camera. He wanted his brother and friends’ killer to confess herself while she was still alive to do so. He hoped she wouldn’t be around much longer. She did not deserve to live, not after she had snuffed out so much life in one night, and all of these other lives over the years. She might have an idea she was a serial hoarder, but she probably had no clue she was a serial killer.
The severity of Missy’s crimes against humanity and other mammals made Ian reconsider burning her house down. There were too many families missing loved ones who needed to know the dark secrets that Missy’s house hid. All of this filth and waste was crucial evidence. It would provide a lot of painful closure, but that was better than never finding out a missing loved one’s fate. Ian knew that all too well.
Missy’s house of horrors had to remain standing until all investigations were complete. Only then could the structure be razed, like Ariel Castro’s dungeon house in Cleveland. Ian wanted to be among the surviving families who would be here to cheer on the wrecking ball. He only hoped it would happen soon, before the decades of spoilage, leaking sewer pipes, and blood of the innocents turned the ground rotten, uninhabitable, and haunted.
Most interesting about Missy’s condensed history was her slip about her stay in a horrible facility. Ian was sure it had been a horrible experience for her. There was no facility that would let you keep a hoard in a cell.
Missy looked back down into the crib with calm acceptance, and a small smile touched her lips.
“It’s okay now. I still have Saffy, she just stopped growing.”
Just like her dolls, Ian thought, except people decomposed much faster. Ian saw another cadaver beyond the crib, encircled by prince dolls. It was a city code inspector with a clipboard in his lap. He was well spoiled, a dripping feast for the flies.
Ian knew just how long dead this cadaver was, six months and five days.
“Dad,” Ian barely managed to voice. No other words would come, and no other word mattered more.
Ian took back every horrible name he had called his father since his disappearance. There had been thousands, and he had meant every one. Cussing him out for his absence had been his and Keith’s way of coping. They had always seen their father as a deserter. He was big and strong, curiously distant, and a loner despite the large family he had created for himself. While they knew it was a possibility, they had never truly believed him to be a homicide victim. His bank account, holding many thousands, had been cleaned out the night of his vanishing, enough to run and start a new life elsewhere.
Now it all made so much shattering sense, and he wished he had considered this possibility sooner. His father had never been one to bring his work home with him, and it was never a topic of discussion around the dinner table. But Ian knew enough about his father’s duties as a senior city code enforcement officer to know that he delivered citations and condemned notices to non-code compliant home and business owners. And who was more in need of being condemned than Missy Wormwood? His father’s job had unfortunately brought him right onto Missy’s killing grounds, her front porch. And it was no wonder he had incurred Missy’s wrath. It had been his job to make Missy remove the one thing she cared about most in the world, her hoard.
Ian’s emotions spun in a cyclone, building a fury inside of him. Now he was becoming the human tornado, and he welcomed it.
Ian wasn’t sure how long he had been staring at his rotting father. He was already in shock from his discovery of Dani, and the deaths of his brother and Will. Too many major shocks, too fast. Who could blame him for going a bit mad in the aftermath of so many grim discoveries? Grief was understandable, but he could not afford it. He was in mortal danger, and had momentarily lost sight and thought of the murderer beside him.
Ian turned to Missy, too fast, giving away his fear of her.
Missy looked at Ian with something like love. Or maybe she saw him as lunch.
“Thanks for your concern, Ian.”
Ian froze. He wasn’t Chad anymore. She knew more than he expected. She was no longer playing a charade, so neither would he.
“You know my name?”
“Yeah, I know you and Keith are Roland’s boys.”
Ian was deeply offended to hear his father’s name spill out of her disgusting, roach reeking mouth.
“How do you know who we are?” Ian asked, although he had a clue. It would have been from the first of their family who encountered her.
Missy climbed past the crib toward Roland’s corpse. Ian had to restrain the urge to lunge at her and push her away from his father. He didn’t want her to touch him again, but what was one more defiling now? It would be Missy’s last time; she just didn’t know it yet. It also wasn’t the right time to play his hand against her. Besides, he really wanted an answer to his question.
Missy leaned over Roland’s corpse and stuck her hand into his front right pant pocket. Ian cringed as Missy struggled to pull his father’s wallet out, joggling the corpse. Bugs crawled out of Roland’s head in alarm.
With the wallet removed, Missy worked her way back toward Ian. She flipped the wallet open, went directly to the pictures in clear plastic sleeves, and flipped it to her favorit
e, which she held out so Ian could see. The wallet size snapshot showed Roland, Keith, and Ian together, at a back yard barbeque in happier times.
“He has your names on the back,” Missy explained, flipping the picture over so the back was revealed. Ian could read their names, and recognized his father’s handwriting. He hadn’t even known that his father carried a picture of his sons with him, but it was a touching fact to know, and painful in hindsight.
“I have a confession to make,” Missy admitted.
Ian wanted to hear her confession. Missy’s behavior had been so offensive and shocking already, he couldn’t imagine what other transgression she could possibly confess to. Once he heard it, he wished he had plugged his ears and shouted “Lalalala! I can’t hear you!”
“For years I’ve had the hotsies for Rollie, he’s just the most adorable man in the neighborhood!” Missy’s cheeks rose in redness as she spoke, her blushing complicit with her overly made up lips to make her face completely red. Ian thought it was only appropriate, they painted her as the devil she was.
“So imagine my surprise that day when he finally came calling! He wanted to see my house, and he was so amazed, he never wanted to leave! We’ve been so happy, and now his cute-as-buttons boys have come to join us! I feel like a new woman. A new mommy!”
Missy’s last word stung Ian. His mother had been a new mommy too over the past six months, one devastated by loss and daily pushed beyond her limits to cope and provide for her sons. Missy thought a family was something she could just take, like a sale item off the store shelves or a cool looking bike swiped off a porch. Missy had a lot of backwards definitions of things, but her misunderstanding of the word family was her most erroneous of all. The only family Missy deserved was her shit and mold, but she didn’t even deserve those. Her shit made her happy, and she did not deserve the satisfaction of a shitty, moldy home anymore.
Ian looked back at his dead father. His plan was set. In fact, it was already in motion.
The tone of Missy’s voice shifted, got a bit quieter, which made Ian nervous. “You and Keith surprised me though.”
“How?”
“I didn’t know you boys worked in TV land. My show will be bigger than The Osbournes!”
Ian almost laughed at that, but he knew better. He was lucky he hadn’t falsified his fiction about the show Missy’s House yet, and Missy was too eager for fame to let go of the fantasy. He was still the director.
“Bigger than the Manson trail,” Ian corrected her.
Missy didn’t see a difference between The Osbournes and Manson; ratings were ratings. Ian knew one other misconception Missy had about her show. She was happy to have him here to film it, but she’d never let him out to edit or release it. She had called him a part of her happy family, her happy hoard, and Missy was far too possessive of her happy things to let them out from behind her walls. She didn’t have to say it, and might not even know it, but she never intended to let him out of her house again. She would be fine with him alive or dead. Preferably dead, she had a lot more control over her things that way.
Ian saw that Missy was wiping her eyes again, but these were tears of joy. It wasn’t an act for the camera either. Missy was delivering another one of her honestly good performances.
“I’m just so happy today! I feel like my collection is practically complete. Until the next good sale that is!”
Missy snorted laughter, and once started, couldn’t stop. She didn’t see the glare that Ian was giving her, and good thing, because Ian had murder in his eyes. Ian’s ultimate horror was her ultimate elation. He couldn’t wait to wipe that smile off of her smug face.
Missy’s chortling devolved into a series of rattling coughs that Ian thought might be bronchitis, or pneumonia if he was lucky. She might never know and would certainly deny the fact that her hoard was slowly killing her, too. He and his friends were only unlucky that the hoard had not succeeded in ending her life before tonight.
Missy looked around at all of her wonderful things. She wasn’t done rubbing Ian’s face in all she had taken from him yet.
“There are just so many beautiful things in the world. I want to collect them all! Under my roof. In Missy’s house!”
Ian didn’t doubt that Missy desired every beautiful object in the world within her walls. Only she was done adding to her collections. No more disposable cup sets. No more clown pitchers. No more friends.
“Thanks for being so candid for the camera, Missy. Mind if we sit together?”
Ian pointed at the two beanbags ahead.
“Sure, Mister Director.”
Missy climbed with Ian toward the shiny seats. She pocketed Roland’s wallet along the way, only her tight dress didn’t have any real pockets, she just slipped it into a tear in her dress and the wallet remained pressed against her flesh. Ian made a mental note to take the wallet back before the night was through. He also noticed the slight grimace of pain on Missy’s face as she climbed over the stuffies. Ian hoped the leaking stab wound on her back was slowly sapping her of strength and life, and he could thank his brother, or Dani, for that. He hoped the injury hurt the bitch like a bitch.
Ian went to the blue beanbag and sat cross-legged on it. Missy dropped down onto the red beanbag facing him, but her muscular thighs prevented her from crossing her legs. She sat with her legs wide open, and Ian discovered, like his brother before him, that she was not wearing panties. He thought there might be a road kill kitty on her crotch, because he saw bloody, matted fur down there. Not a very flattering position for the camera in Ian’s opinion, but he kept that to himself. He wanted her to appear the fool she was. She was grinning at Ian, waiting for his direction.
This was when the show Ian was directing radically changed course. Reality was no longer the correct category for Missy’s House. The program had changed to snuff.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“So we’ve done our tour,” Ian started. “Now it’s time to begin the diagnosis part of the show. This is where I talk, and ask you candid questions. And you have to answer them honestly. Are you up for that, Missy?”
“Of course, it’s my show!” Missy replied with enthusiasm. She obviously thought she was a most fascinating interview. So was Aileen Wuornos, Ian thought but didn’t add.
Missy was all smiles as Ian’s diagnosis began. Her smiles did not last for long.
“Good,” Ian said. “You are a hoarder. Do you know what that is?”
“That’s somebody who likes to collect things,” Missy answered.
Ian wasn’t too surprised that Missy knew the word, but had assigned it no negative connotations. But this was the part of the show were fantasies would be shattered, and reality television would earn its name.
“Collections sometimes,” Ian corrected her, “but it’s usually just garbage, and huge amounts of useless waste. But you, Missy, have taken hoarding to horrific, obscene extremes. You are the first horror-der.”
Ian had never heard the term before, this mating of horror and hoarder, but it rolled naturally off of his tongue, as though a new word needed to be created to define Missy and her dreadful mess.
Some, but not all, of the joy had evaporated from Missy’s face. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m not surprised. You have had a complete break with reality, and I expect you’ve been that way for years, decades maybe. The skeletons in here are proof of that. In your mind, what you consider reality is actually the opposite. To you, garbage is treasure. Spoiled is fresh. Neglect is nurture. Murder is friendship. Dead is alive.”
It felt so good for Ian to say these things out loud to Missy, to call her out on her lunacy.
“You’re confusing me,” Missy stated, and it was clear on her face.
Ian needed to spell things out for his simple subject. He wanted her to understand. “You don’t even seem to notice the stink around here. I don’t know how that’s humanly possible.”
Missy looked defensive. “My place don’t stink. It smells like roses
.” Missy took a deep breath to verify her claim. From the look of pleasure on her face, Ian didn’t doubt that the profound reek smelled like roses to her.
“You’re not confused, you’re delusional,” Ian clarified to Missy. “Life is not like the tabloid reality shows you watch.”
“Sure it is. That’s why they call it reality. Your show is reality,” Missy countered.
Missy had a point he had to admit. “Mine is. You’re right. You know, I’m not here to say you can’t be a hoarder, or watch reality TV, or believe what you want about it. The issue I have with you is you’re psychotic.”
Missy could not comprehend Ian’s diagnosis. He noticed that these moments of confusion were the rare occasions where Missy’s voice dropped down out of a sing-songy shout.
“I can’t be. I’m happy and nice. I have lots of friends. Just ask them.” Missy looked around at her dolls, her friends. She knew from their smiles that they agreed with her. She looked justified in her defense.
Ian looked around at the same doll collection and saw the corpses. The silently screaming cadavers could offer no opinion, although Ian was certain they would voice their disapproval if they could.
“Dolls and corpses can’t talk,” Ian said.
Missy leaned forward and shouted in Ian’s face. “My dollies do!”
Ian wouldn’t let Missy’s building anger derail him from the truth. In the rage department, he thought he had Missy beat.
“And I’ve heard firsthand, from those who work at the store where you shop, that you are such an insufferable bitch to deal with, the employees dread your arrival. You’re their legendary worst customer.”
Missy thought about that for a moment, but didn’t appear bothered by the information. “That’s their job,” Missy informed him.
“It is,” Ian agreed, and then countered, “but you can drop the idea that you’re nice. You’re a terror, and a bully.”
Hoarder Page 20