“You keep a lot of stuff under your bed,” said Kaufmann, without turning her head.
“What? Oh, yeah. I guess.” Susan looked at what had been revealed when Kaufmann took apart the bed: the neat line of shoeboxes and crates from Bed Bath & Beyond, shopping bags full of other bags, a couple rolls of wrapping paper, the case containing Alex’s long-unplayed mandolin. “Is that a lot?”
“Bedbugs live in hidden spaces. They feed for ten or fifteen minutes and then, when they’re sated from their blood meal, return to a dark safe space, close to the bed.” Kaufmann jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Shoeboxes? Clutter? Right under the bed? This is perfect, if you’re a bedbug.”
Susan nodded rapidly. “Right.” She picked up a shoebox and took it toward the closet.
“Tell you the truth,” said Kaufmann, still not looking up. “The closet’s worse.”
Dana Kaufmann put Susan’s bed back together as promised, aligning the slats and drilling them back into the legs, reattaching the headboard with practiced ease. She slumped the box spring and mattress back in place but didn’t go so far as to remake the bed. Kaufmann then slid the flashlight free of the loop where it rested and worked her way through the spacious bedroom closet, sweeping the powerful beam across in methodical rows, training it on the top and bottom corners one by one. To Susan’s mind, the closet was neat and uncluttered; they had moved in only two weeks ago, so even Alex’s deep-seated natural disorder had yet to take root. But Kaufmann exhaled disapprovingly over and over at each potential bedbug hideout she uncovered with the flashlight’s beam: Alex’s tangled forest of dress shirts; Susan’s small fabric crate overspilling with tights and pantyhose; the high shelves above the clothes, stacked with sweaters in uneven piles.
Susan stood behind Kaufmann, arms folded across her chest, anxious sweat beading on her forehead. She kept waiting for the exterminator to beckon her over, to focus the beam beneath a sweater or inside a shoebox, to say, “There? See? There are your bugs.”
But the minutes ticked by in silence, until Kaufmann at last turned off the light, gave her knuckles another crack, and said, “Let’s move on.”
Across the landing in Emma’s room, Kaufmann disassembled and examined Emma’s bed as swiftly and thoroughly as she had Susan and Alex’s and then put it back together just as conscientiously. Kaufmann pawed through Emma’s trunks and bags of playthings with her large hands, entirely uncharmed by the girl’s helter-skelter universe of pink puppies and cockeyed dollies. She chased her fingers through the short fur of the stuffed animals like a monkey picking for nits; she opened the pages of picture books and shined her flashlight through the thin cotton of Emma’s pajamas.
Kaufmann was down on her haunches in the kitchen, searching the cupboard beneath the sink, when a light rap sounded at the door.
“Suze?”
“Oh, hey, Andrea. Good morning.”
“Oh, Susan, I am so sorry to bother you, but I was having this very odd problem with my computer, something about the, the network connection? I think? And I always see you going about with that laptop case, I wonder if … oh, dear — what’s … what’s this?”
Andrea’s voice got high and flutey with anxiety. In her green house shoes and flowing silk pajamas that seemed from another century, she leaned through the front door, peering at Kaufmann. “Do we have some sort of infestation? Please say no.”
“I’m not sure. We’re looking. She’s looking. We’ll see.”
“Well, I wish you had told me. I would’ve arranged for someone to come.”
As Susan led Andrea into the kitchen, Kaufmann looked up and gave her a quick clinical glance, as if making sure she wasn’t an enormous talking bug. “Of course, you’ll take the cost of the exterminator off your rent. You haven’t paid the rent yet, have you? No, I don’t think you have.”
“Thanks, Andrea.”
Susan didn’t offer coffee, but Andrea hung around anyway, hovering at Susan’s arm in the kitchen doorway, watching as Kaufmann closed the cupboard and turned to the pantry.
“My sister, Nan, who lives in Portland — Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine — anyway, Nan once told me a foolproof system,” Andrea said. “You’re meant to sprinkle drops of liquor all over the house. I can’t remember now what kind, of course. But I could call her. Shall I call her? According to Nan, sprinkling this, whatever it was, kills the bugs straightaway.”
“Oh,” said Susan. “Huh.”
Kaufmann straightened up, clicked off her flashlight, and addressed Susan.
“If an apartment is infested with bedbugs, we employ a three-pronged solution. First a contact-kill solution; second, a liquid residual such as Permacide Concentrate; and third, a growth regulator such as Gentrol. If those solutions prove ineffective, there are various means of escalation available.”
“Rum!” said Andrea, snapping her fingers. “If you sprinkle drops of rum in all the corners—”
“No.” Kaufmann interrupted, scowling. “Do not do that.”
Andrea left shortly thereafter, and Kaufmann requested a glass of water, which she drank in a single, long draft. “OK,” she said when she was done. “Are there any areas of the apartment I haven’t seen yet?”
As soon as they stepped into the bonus room, Kaufmann stopped.
The portrait of Jessica Spender was now covered in hundreds of bites; they lined the cheeks and chin and covered the forehead like stucco. Worse, Jessica’s eyes had lost the teasing, insouciant expression they bore in the photo, and that Susan knew she had given them in her portrait: the eyes of the girl in the painting looked terrified, helpless, and pleading. A light gouache of tears had been laid over the pale blue of her irises.
Susan clapped a hand over her mouth and fought the urge be sick.
“That’s really something,” said Kaufmann, and turned to Susan with wondering eyes, a flicker of childlike awe peeking from behind her rock wall of professionalism.
“Yeah. I’m a — I’m a painter,” Susan said inanely. She felt clammy; a row of sweat broke out across her brow; the room was spinning before her. Kaufmann continued staring at the painting, and Susan stared at it, too, against her will — she wanted to run desperately from that room, from the house, to take off down the street, find Emma, gather her up, and go go go.
“Well,” said Kaufmann finally, and cleared her throat. “Not a lot of clutter in here. I’ll be quick.” She dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl around the perimeter of the room, running her fingers along the baseboards. Susan stepped toward the painting, intending to take it down, roll it up, maybe even run it down the hallway and toss it into the kitchen garbage or, better yet, the stove.
Why did I do that to her? Susan demanded of herself. Her feet stayed frozen to the floorboards, her hands stuck at her sides. Why?
“Excuse me? Ma’am?” Kaufmann was talking. “Ms. Wendt?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Yes?”
“What was in here?”
Susan pushed away a stray curl that had drifted in front of her eyes. “What?”
Kaufmann had paused in her perimeter crawl around the room, between the door and the left-hand wall. “These scratches just above the baseboards. Here. They’re painted over, but you can feel ’em. Have you felt these scratches?”
“Uh, no. Actually, I hadn’t.” Susan didn’t move. She didn’t want to feel the scratches. What was the cat’s name again? Oh, right. Catastrophe.
“There was a cat. It, uh, it died in here. Really sad.”
“A cat, huh?”
“Yes.” Susan felt the painting watching her, felt Jessica Spender’s pleading, pitiful eyes. “Why?”
“Nothing. Forget it,” said Kaufmann, straightening up. “Not my specialty. Anyway, I’m done. Let’s talk in the kitchen.”
As it turned out, there were no bedbugs in Susan and Alex’s apartment.
Kaufmann had performed an exhaustive search, “from bow to stern,” as she put it, and turned up no evidence of Cimex lectularius, or Leptocimex boueti, which — according to Kaufmann — would be even worse.
“Fortunately,” she concluded, flipping closed her notebook. “You have neither.”
“But …” Susan gestured vaguely to the notebook. “What about all those things you were saying. Contract kill, and, and residual—”
“Contact kill, ma’am.”
“Please stop calling me ma’am. OK?” Susan was flustered. How could there be no bedbugs? It made no sense. “Call me Susan.”
“That’s fine, Susan. But listen, this is good news. Contact killers, residuals, control agents. These things are poisons, and you do not want your home treated with poison unless such a treatment is called for.”
“But …”
“I found zero bugs, living or dead. I found no cast skins, no fecal matter, no larvae. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that you have bedbugs, ma’am …” A smile flickered across Kaufmann’s face. “Susan. But it’s impossible that you have bedbugs.”
“Wow.” Susan forced herself to smile while her stomach twisted itself into greasy knots. “Well, I mean, that’s great.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Wait, wait. What about my wrist?” She raised her hand, turned it wrist up, resisting the urge to hold it under Kaufmann’s nose. “What about the bites?”
As she said it, the bites began to itch, as if she had reminded them of a neglected duty. She lowered her arm and tried to scratch nonchalantly while Kaufmann answered.
“Could be a lot of things. Scabies. Mosquitoes. Could be fleas, though I don’t see any evidence of fleas. Do a Google search on spider beetles. Half the time, when someone’s got bedbug bites but no bedbugs, what they’ve really got is spider beetles. I’m not a doctor, but I think you put some hydrocortisone cream on there, give it a week, and you’ll be fine.”
“OK. Thanks. Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome.” Kaufmann tucked her notebook back into her coveralls while Susan opened the door.
“It’s two hundred for the visit. Tax free, if you’ve got cash.”