Silence Of The Ghost (Murder By Design Book 2) by Erin McCarthy

Author:Erin McCarthy [McCarthy, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SilverHart Publishing
Published: 2017-08-21T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 7

On Thursday I was back at the hoarder’s house. Wednesday I had enjoyed consulting with the owners of a new coffee shop set to open on Detroit Avenue, helping them create a design plan that would deliver their brand’s message to customers. It was new, it was fresh, it was exciting. I got to exercise my creative muscle with young entrepreneurs and be with someone who understood that the marriage of beige and gray, aka greige, was the world’s greatest thing.

Returning to the dark, boxy house on West 42nd was depressing. Kathy wasn’t able to be there, so she had given me a key, warning me Mark came and went at will when he wasn’t at his job at the appliance store. The walls in the house were yellow, or more like an ivory that had simmered down into a yellow, as the years of dust and nicotine from cigarette smoke had steeped into the plaster. Even though no one had smoked in the house in a few years, it still lingered in the background, an underlying odor gripping the carpet and walls. It made me relieved that 1) I had never smoked in my house and 2) I had quit.

There was something so melancholy about a house that a woman had lived the majority of her life in, presumably at one point taking pride in creating a safe haven for her children. But then she had reached a place where she hadn’t been able to care for it in years. Aside from the hoarding, it couldn’t be easy for an almost ninety-year-old woman to keep the cobwebs and dust bunnies at bay in a hundred-year-old house. I knew that her Alzheimers meant she might not even remember what it had looked like, but I wanted to clean it out and make it nice and let June see it one more time before her kids sold the property.

So it was with a renewed sense of purpose that I tackled the living room. When I finally had the entire space cleared out, except for the neatly stacked moving boxes by the front window, I could see that although it needed a good scrub down, it was a typical Victorian space. I did some measurements and mentally planned to bring in more modern furniture to update it. I would have to discuss ripping up the mauve carpet with Kathy. A glance at the corner showed that underneath were hardwood floors with a decorative inlay. Buyers would want to see that.

I moved on to the dining room, which was essentially Mark’s library. Somewhere under that stack of magazines and books and papers was a rosewood table and chairs. I could see just a peek of it. There also appeared to be a sideboard and a hutch, but there was a stack of printer paper boxes blocking access to that portion of the room. I found a pocket door between the dining room and the living room and pulled it closed to admire the beveled glass and the natural woodwork.

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