Nearly Departed (Spring Cleaning Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B
Author: JB Lynn
doors. Fighting the urge to knock before entering, I swung it open, fully prepared to face another bloody scene…or half-headless ghost. Instead all I got was one extraordinarily trashed bedroom.
A picture frame, hanging crookedly from the wall, caught my eye. I stepped closer to examine it. It was a newspaper article. I recognized the cleft chin of the headless ghost I 'd just encountered. He'd been a geeky looking kid when he'd been alive. I read the caption. "Buck Hopkins wins Pharmaceutical Scholarship." That explained the science equipment.
" Hello, Buck!" I called out.
I got no answer.
The bed was overturned; the contents of upended dresser drawers spilled on the floor, and the closet had been ransacked.
" Either the world's biggest pig lived here," I mused aloud, "or somebody was looking for something."
Receiving no response from the nearly departed, I decided he wasn 't in the mood to make conversation, so I moved on to the next room. This door was open. Like the room next door, the place had been trashed.
I picked up one of the remains of a sport s trophy and read the inscription. Donald McGrath, 3 rd Place Regionals.
" Who knew golfers got trophies?" I muttered, carefully putting it back down.
I didn 't see any biohazard clean-up duties in this room either.
Maybe all three had been killed downstairs. It would explain the bloodshed. If that was the case, this job wouldn 't be nearly as bad as I thought it might be.
Wishful thinking.
The third bedroom, which also had an open door, was a reproduction of the mess downstairs. Dried blood was everywhere, on the walls, soaked into the carpeting, and in every nook and cranny. It was a nightmare.
I shuddered as I calculated how much encapsulant and germicide spray it was going to take to rehydrate the blood and transform it into a form that could be removed. I 'd be lugging cans, not to mention the self-contained vacuum which weighed a ton, up and down the stairs for hours.
Sighing , I turned to the last door and eyed it warily. Having been through the rest of the house, I knew it was the bathroom. I hated, hated cleaning bathrooms. A high percentage of suicides killed themselves in the tub, no doubt thinking that they were making things easier on the person who had to clean up after their mess. It was a nice idea, but in reality, having to clean the cramped quarters of a bathroom was more difficult than cleaning, say, the master bedroom. Also, it was a little known fact that brain matter, for those who thought a self-inflicted head wound was the most efficient way to go, dried to a cement-like consistency that was a bitch to remove.
According to the news, the police now believed one kid , Martin "Art" Nottoway, had killed the other two and then had taken his own life. Surely the guy who'd viciously murdered his roommates wouldn't have shown any kind of "consideration" for whoever would have to clean up his mess. Then again, I couldn't figure out why all the rooms had been trashed. Had he been looking for something…or had he just been that angry?
" Please, please, please," I muttered, offering up a prayer to the porcelain throne god.
I took a deep breath and held it as I pushed open the door.
A blast of ice cold air smacked me in the face. My lungs emptied of their own accord.
It was the bloodiest room of them all.
* * *
" I've never hired anyone without seeing a resume and checking their references before," I told Delia nervously.
Delia, perched on the bumper of the Spring Cleaning van, preferred to examine her split ends rather than discuss my hiring practices.
All day long I'd been second-guessing my decision to hire Smoke Barclay. Now, after spending the day finishing Myron's motel room and inspecting the frat boys' house, I was in my detached two car garage which doubled as the storage warehouse for Spring Cleaning, getting all the equipment ready and fully loaded in for the college students job. Nothing screwed with the momentum of
A picture frame, hanging crookedly from the wall, caught my eye. I stepped closer to examine it. It was a newspaper article. I recognized the cleft chin of the headless ghost I 'd just encountered. He'd been a geeky looking kid when he'd been alive. I read the caption. "Buck Hopkins wins Pharmaceutical Scholarship." That explained the science equipment.
" Hello, Buck!" I called out.
I got no answer.
The bed was overturned; the contents of upended dresser drawers spilled on the floor, and the closet had been ransacked.
" Either the world's biggest pig lived here," I mused aloud, "or somebody was looking for something."
Receiving no response from the nearly departed, I decided he wasn 't in the mood to make conversation, so I moved on to the next room. This door was open. Like the room next door, the place had been trashed.
I picked up one of the remains of a sport s trophy and read the inscription. Donald McGrath, 3 rd Place Regionals.
" Who knew golfers got trophies?" I muttered, carefully putting it back down.
I didn 't see any biohazard clean-up duties in this room either.
Maybe all three had been killed downstairs. It would explain the bloodshed. If that was the case, this job wouldn 't be nearly as bad as I thought it might be.
Wishful thinking.
The third bedroom, which also had an open door, was a reproduction of the mess downstairs. Dried blood was everywhere, on the walls, soaked into the carpeting, and in every nook and cranny. It was a nightmare.
I shuddered as I calculated how much encapsulant and germicide spray it was going to take to rehydrate the blood and transform it into a form that could be removed. I 'd be lugging cans, not to mention the self-contained vacuum which weighed a ton, up and down the stairs for hours.
Sighing , I turned to the last door and eyed it warily. Having been through the rest of the house, I knew it was the bathroom. I hated, hated cleaning bathrooms. A high percentage of suicides killed themselves in the tub, no doubt thinking that they were making things easier on the person who had to clean up after their mess. It was a nice idea, but in reality, having to clean the cramped quarters of a bathroom was more difficult than cleaning, say, the master bedroom. Also, it was a little known fact that brain matter, for those who thought a self-inflicted head wound was the most efficient way to go, dried to a cement-like consistency that was a bitch to remove.
According to the news, the police now believed one kid , Martin "Art" Nottoway, had killed the other two and then had taken his own life. Surely the guy who'd viciously murdered his roommates wouldn't have shown any kind of "consideration" for whoever would have to clean up his mess. Then again, I couldn't figure out why all the rooms had been trashed. Had he been looking for something…or had he just been that angry?
" Please, please, please," I muttered, offering up a prayer to the porcelain throne god.
I took a deep breath and held it as I pushed open the door.
A blast of ice cold air smacked me in the face. My lungs emptied of their own accord.
It was the bloodiest room of them all.
* * *
" I've never hired anyone without seeing a resume and checking their references before," I told Delia nervously.
Delia, perched on the bumper of the Spring Cleaning van, preferred to examine her split ends rather than discuss my hiring practices.
All day long I'd been second-guessing my decision to hire Smoke Barclay. Now, after spending the day finishing Myron's motel room and inspecting the frat boys' house, I was in my detached two car garage which doubled as the storage warehouse for Spring Cleaning, getting all the equipment ready and fully loaded in for the college students job. Nothing screwed with the momentum of
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