Go, Ivy, Go! (3 page)

The smell grabbed me in the living room too. I’d have to go out to the motorhome for a can of deodorizer and a flashlight before I looked in the bathroom or upstairs. I headed for the door,
then hesitated.

The house felt odd. There wasn’t the welcoming sense of home I’d expected. Instead the house felt strange and unfamiliar, even . . .
hostile. As if strangers lurked in shadows and dangers hid in corners.

I scoffed at that. My own home
hostile
?

I’d planned to sleep in my old bed here in the house tonight, but now I decided I’d have to postpone that. Only because of the lack of lights and water, plus the scents of disuse and stuffiness, of course, not because of any
hostility..
I opened every window and propped the back door open too. Halfway back to the motorhome, I realized I was
scurrying
. I deliberately made myself slow to normal pace.

“We’ll stay out here just for tonight,” I told Koop when I opened the motorhome door.

He yawned and blinked his one good eye at me. Koop is a very laid-back cat.

I fixed a ham and cheese sandwich for supper, fed Koop some of his favorite Fancy Feast, the kind with gravy, and went to bed early. Big day tomorrow. Get the utilities turned on and those bills straightened out. Air out the upstairs too. Start cleaning.

***

I didn’t sleep great, even though there was no noise from street or neighbors. Koop usually curls up on my bed, but this night he padded restlessly. And I couldn’t seem to get that unpleasant smell out of my head.
It clung like a bad dream.

But in the early morning, when I stepped outside and sniffed, all I smelled was the familiar and wonderful freshness before a hot summer day in Missouri. I impulsively decided to take a quick tour around the old neighborhood, maybe see someone I knew. The Daggitts, Ed and Marie, were always up early working in the big garden in their side yard.

Not this morning, however. Their house had that shades-pulled, empty-eyed look of vacancy, and the yard was as weedy as my own. In fact, most of the houses that I’d last night assumed were dark because the occupants were outside enjoying the evening were actually vacant. One had boarded up windows. A tire-less car on concrete blocks decorated the yard of another. Only slightly less dilapidated cars sat in the driveways of a couple of places that appeared to be occupied. A basketball hoop on a stand had fallen into the street. The figure of a rearing horse made of welded slabs of metal, with mane and tail of copper wire, stood in one yard. Not exactly fine art, but attractive in a funky way. Better than the garbage strewn in the yard next to it.

Getting back to my own place, I saw the missing screen door, frame broken and screen torn, now leaning against the side of the garage.

I determinedly made myself think of happy days here, days when the kitchen smelled of baking bread and children’s shouts and laughter sounded in the yards. Harley building birdhouses in his woodworking shop in the garage. Me tying fishing flies for him. Colin building a treehouse in the maple tree and tangling in the branches when he tried to parachute out of it with an inflatable mattress. Giggling with Thea as we colored our hair together, hers coming out a soft beige, mine a strange burned-beet color. Magnolia and Geoff barbecuing in their back yard. Meeting Mac for the first time at one of those barbecues . . .

That last goodbye with Mac poked a hole in my determinedly upbeat thoughts. The happy memories leaked out and others barged in. Colin, disappearing in a ferry accident during a peacetime assignment in Korea, his body never found. Harley’s passing. Thea’s too.

But it was a beautiful morning here on Madison Street today, and God never intended for us to dwell on the sadness of the past when he had much more waiting in this life and beyond. I briskly fixed oatmeal with sliced bananas for breakfast,
then marched to the open back door of the house.

I took Koop with me. He arched his back and hissed the instant I set him on the kitchen floor. “Lighten up,” I scolded. “This is home.”

Another hiss.
His stubby tail jerked like a disapproving wag of finger.

Maybe it was the open pack of cigarettes on the counter. Koop is fanatically anti-tobacco.

In daylight, I could see everything more clearly. Not an improvement. I tentatively lifted the lid on a garbage can by the door.
Empty cardboard cartons of macaroni and cheese topped by three empty wine bottles. But no smell emanating from it. The kitchen table looked as if it had been used for table-top dancing. With logger-style boots.
Two chipped flower pots held dried and dead remnants of some unidentifiable plants. The cans of chili, chicken noodle soup, and tuna in the cupboard bore dents, as if they’d been picked out of some bargain bin at the store.

I couldn’t disparage that, of course. Sometimes I pick a can out of the dented bin too.

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet still held generic aspirin and Pepto Bismol, and powder from an overturned can of foot-fungus remedy trailed across the counter.

After an overnight airing-out, the smell wasn’t as heavy as it had been last night. Plenty of scent upstairs, however, when I went up there to open windows. Maybe a mouse – or a whole herd of them - had crawled between the walls and died.

Ugh.

Koop echoed my opinion with another hiss.

A battered sleeping bag lay on my bed, a flattened pillow sticking out of it. Cigarette butts half-filled a jar-lid ashtray on the night stand. A dark stain blotched the carpet. Spilled wine from one of those bottles in the garbage can? Cobwebs draped the corners of the room. Purple pants and several faded sweatshirts hung in the closet, a pair of old brown shoes
on the floor beneath them. Certainly not mine, but they looked as if they’d fit a woman about my size. A hairbrush entangled with hair as possum-gray as my own sat on my old dresser. That spooky feeling returned, and I had to fight an urge to run headlong back down the stairs.

I opened the bedroom windows, then went down the hall to the closed door of the upstairs bathroom. I briskly shoved the door open. And got blasted by a scent strong enough to make me a little dizzy. Koop, warily following me around the house, skidded claws on the hallway floor as he made a fast getaway. I put a hand over my nose and peered further into the bathroom. I didn’t see anything to cause such a scent.

A well-used bar of Ivory lay in a soap dish. A single toothbrush hung in the holder, under it a flattened tube of toothpaste. A threadbare towel draped the rod by the sink. Long ago, Harley had installed a hand-held showerhead over the tub. An unfamiliar plastic shower curtain concealed the tub now. I
yanked it open, shower curtain rings rattling on the rod.

A lumpy pile of ragged blankets covered the bottom of the tub, and I realized this was definitely the source of the scent. What was under those blankets? Rotting garbage? I felt a big rush of indignation. I was almost certain I’d paid that property management company for a cleanup.

Right now what I wanted was to get this smelly mess
out
of here. Along with that ratty old sleeping bag in the bedroom.

I reached into the pile, intending to gather up everything and haul it outside. But my hands bumped into something, something both squishy and lumpy. And then I looked at the end of the tub where the blankets had pulled up when I grabbed them.

Toes.

Chapter Three

Bare toes. Blackened, shriveled bare toes.

Dead
toes.

The blankets fell out of my hands. The air in the bathroom closed in on me. Heavy. Suffocating.
My scalp prickled and my own toes numbed. Queasiness clumped in my stomach. I grabbed the shower curtain for support. It ripped and tangled around me like a plastic shroud. I fought it away from my head and shoulders and looked at those awful toes again. Something –
someone
- was under those blankets. Someone had crawled into the tub and
died
there.

Mac’s warnings about dead bodies rose up to choke the back of my throat. Because here was one. Right in my own bathtub. Nausea billowed deep inside me, followed by a dizziness that spun the room around me. Flying sinks and bathtubs and toilet stools zipping around like some mad poltergeist on a rampage.

Not fair! This isn’t what I came home for. I want bubble bath in my tub, not a dead body!

I took a deep breath. Mistake. Do not take a deep breath in the presence of a dead body in your bathtub. But I also chastised myself for my self-centered grumble about bubble bath. A person had
died
in this tub.

Maybe not, I momentarily rationalized. Maybe I’d made a mistake. I risked another peek.

No mistake. Definitely dead toes. The dizziness and nausea billowed again, but I forced them down. No time for that now. Right now I had to
do
something. I steadied myself against the door frame and clawed my way out of the shower curtain, then tore down the stairs and out to the motorhome. Koop was hiding under it. He dashed inside when I opened the door. I grabbed my cell phone. The first number that came to mind was Mac’s. But no point in calling him, much as I unexpectedly wanted to. I tried to punch in 911.

Nothing. I hadn’t been able to plug in the phone for several days while I was on the road. Now I might as well be trying to make a call on a rotten potato.

I ran down the street toward the yard with the welded horse. I shoved through the gate and hammered on the door. A long-legged young woman in skimpy cut-off jeans opened it.

“I need to use your phone! I have to call 911!” I held up my own dead-potato phone.

I could see me through her eyes. Wild-eyed, wild-haired, panicky little old lady. But she didn’t hesitate. Without asking questions, she grabbed a cell phone from the coffee table and handed it to me. “Okay, sure! Come on in.”

I punched in the numbers and gave the woman who answered a frantic description of what I’d found. She wanted to know a lot of things, but I just gave her my name and the address and told her no medical help would be necessary. This body was
dead.
I handed the cell phone back to the young woman.

“There’s a dead person in your bathtub?” she asked as if not certain she’d heard correctly even though she’d been listening.

“I think she’s been in there quite a while. At least I think she’s a she.” The clothes in the closet had been for a woman, but I couldn’t know for certain if the owner of those clothes was also the occupant of my bathtub. Although that conclusion seemed likely.

“Who are you?” the woman asked, her tone doubtful. She had long blond hair scrambled atop her head with a couple of blue clips, nice skin, no makeup.

“I’m Ivy Malone. I live down the street. I mean I used to live here. I haven’t been here for a long time. I just drove in last night in my motorhome. And then this morning—”

“What’s going on?” A bare-chested guy in raggedy jeans came into the room rubbing a towel over shaggy blond hair. His muscles rippled. He looked as if he’d just stepped off the cover of a Bodies-R-Us magazine. His bare feet left wet tracks on the wood floor. Even his toes looked muscular.

The woman motioned toward me. “This is Ivy Malone. She lives down the street. There’s a dead body in her bathtub. She called 911 about it.”

They exchanged one of those married-people glances that says something without words.

“Well, I think I’d call 911 too, if we found a dead body in our bathtub.” He lifted a muscle-sculpted arm and dried a hairy armpit. “Is it anyone you know?” he asked me, not unkindly.

I recognized him as the guy who’d been taking the elderly woman for a stroll last night. Knowing that about him made me feel kindly toward him even though he seemed to have a rather casual attitude toward dead bodies in bathtubs. Oh, wait. Now I understood the look that passed between them. Woman saying,
I think she’s off her rocker about a dead body in her tub, but she doesn’t look dangerous. Humor her.
Muscle-Man silently saying,
Gotcha.

I looked around the small living room. The glass top of the end table by the sofa rested on the back of an elephant made of pieces of pipe and old pan lids artfully welded together. The upraised trunk of the elephant held a circle of glass, on it a miniature elephant made from a tin can and a teapot spout.
On that stood a tiny circle of glass and an even tinier elephant. Elephants to infinity?
The glass-topped coffee table in front of the
sofa
had angled nuts and bolts for legs. Tin-can lids framed a picture on the wall. A chandelier made of some kind of wheel, maybe something off an old-fashioned buggy, hung from the ceiling by chains. Bulbs covered by copper shades dangled on more chains from the wheel.
The Early Junkyard School of Interior Decorating?

“These are . . . interesting,” I said.

“I’m a junk sculptor,” the guy said. “I have a shop set up out in the garage. I’m working on a cow with motorcycle-handlebar horns and taillight eyes now. Would you like to see it?”

“Umm, maybe later.”

“Eric is very artistic,” the woman offered.

Okay, I could go along with that. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Although bicycle-handle horns might be stretching it. And I wouldn’t want to be under that chandelier in an earthquake.

The guy laughed, as if he made no claim to artistic talent himself. “You’d be surprised how well this stuff sells at flea markets. I call them Ockunzzi Originals. By the way, I’m Eric Ockunnzi, and this is my wife, Tam— ”

“Tasha,” the woman broke in. “Tasha Tremaine.”

We all shook hands. I thought it a little odd that Eric got his wife’s name wrong, and her last name wasn’t even the same as his. But that’s okay. Their generation does things differently than mine. I appreciated that Eric was careful not to crush my hand with his muscular fingers in the handshake.

“Does your grandmother live here too?” I asked. “I saw you taking her for a walk last evening when I drove in.” I turned to Tam/Tasha. “Or maybe she’s your grandma?”