Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 04 - Trash Out (3 page)

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 a
n
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
,
”
s
he 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 on
e
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
c
arefully 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 stai
r
s, keeping the big shell level. “I expected much more anger in Lucky’s home.”

“Wait until you check ou
t 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
,
”
s
he 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 to
wards
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
r
eligious 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 misse
s
the attention
of being a big shot attorney
,” s
he
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
S
treet
.  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?”

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 luxur
ious
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 ha
d
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 in
to her busy schedule
last
Thursday
night
as a favor
.  Stacey
is
a
six
-
foot
tall
former volley
ball 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.