I hated them.
Marcus looked at me as he got out of the Mustang, and then he grinned like a little boy who was about to do something wrong.
“Ready, boss?” he asked.
I’d never be ready, but I smiled gamely and put my hand on his massive arm. He helped me pick my way across the path. The air was cold and damp, but the pine boughs near the house gave off a Christmasy scent that I hadn’t expected.
Suddenly I felt younger than I had in years, almost like that girl I’d left in my mother’s kitchen, and my heart lifted. A party was just what I needed. If I could forget the house, or at least look on its new role as host as a personal victory, I might be able to have a good time.
We stepped onto the porch together. Inside the frosted glass windows, we could see shapes moving against yellow light.
My stomach clenched, and I swallowed convulsively.
I wasn’t sure I could do this.
Marcus gave me a sideways glance. “You okay?”
I nodded because I couldn’t answer. He knocked on the door.
Someone pulled it open and the smells of burning wood and baking cookies filled the air. Laughter came along with Mel Tormé’s voice, singing about Jack Frost nipping at noses. The man who opened the door had a Santa hat over graying hair. The hat didn’t go with his exquisitely tailored suit.
He held a glass clearly filled with eggnog in one hand. With the other, he gestured toward the interior. “Merry, merry!”
“Happy, happy,” Marcus said, making fun of him.
But the man didn’t seem to notice. He clapped Marcus on the back as we walked inside.
The place was transformed. If I hadn’t known it was the house in which I’d spent a week cleaning, I wouldn’t have recognized it. To my right, the curved staircase was once again the center of the house. Someone had wrapped garlands of holly around the mahogany banister, probably with no thought for how old, how rare, or how valuable the wood was.
People stood on the stairs, holding drinks, talking, some looking at the portraits hung over the stairs, others heading up to see what else the house had in store.
Coats were piled on top of the telephone seat built against the wall. The carpets were gone, revealing wood floors that matched the wood trim throughout the house.
I couldn’t imagine what it had cost to clean the floors. I had cleaned the carpets and recommended their removal, but no one had done that — at least not for the first family who bought the place. I had warned the realtors that if anyone took up the carpets, they might find horrible stains beneath. I had removed the rugs myself in the upstairs bedroom where two of the family members had bled to death (there was no saving those rugs, and no attempt to), but the ones down here had had bloody footprints and drag marks, and other stains that I never could quite identify.
“You’re staring,” Marcus whispered.
At least, I thought he whispered it, although he might have spoken in a normal tone. The party noises going on around us made it hard to hear much more than the rumble of conversation. The music was classy and so were the people around me. Hard to believe most of them spent their days in jeans and overalls or uniforms paid for by the city.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“Is it different?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
I led Marcus into what had once been the front parlor. The pocket doors were gone, along with most of the walls that contained them, so now the front and back parlors were one room (with an arch) that modern people would call the living room.
The furniture was fake period, with a fainting couch, a regular couch, and overstuffed armchairs. Too many tables crowded the bay window, and on those tables stood food of all sorts, from cookies and sliced pies to small unidentifiable appetizers and toothpicked bits of fruit and cheese.
Marcus grabbed a small plate, shaking it with surprise. “China.”
“Nothing but the best,” I muttered, and doubted he could hear me.
I couldn’t eat, even if I’d wanted to. I left him there, debating whether to have strawberries dipped in chocolate or chocolate-covered cherry trifles. From a passing waiter carrying a tray of beverages on his outstretched palm, I snatched a flute of champagne, carrying it with me as I went from room to room.
The place had clearly been professionally decorated. From the furniture to the draped pine boughs and hanging mistletoe, the interior looked like something out of House Beautiful.
The Christmas tree, at the far wall of what had been the back parlor, took up so much space that it seemed to be growing out of the floor. It was decorated in silver bows, tinsel, and little silver lights that blinked on and off. An embarrassing display of packages hid the lower branches.
I knew from previous parties that the packages would be gone by the night’s end, a mound of paper left for someone else to clean up, and the gifts would seem less impressive unwrapped than they did at this moment.
A Do-Not-Enter sign had been taped to the swinging kitchen door, the only infelicity in the entire place. I ignored it, and went inside anyway, drawn by the smell of baking cookies. Small women in rented tuxedos, and looking hot, wiped hair away from their faces. Two coaxed a stainless-steel dishwasher to take more dishes. Another woman bent over the stove, and yet another was placing crudités on a silver tray.
Men as tall as the women were small picked up the trays. The men also wore tuxes, but on them, the tuxes looked natural. Maybe because they were in traditional serving roles, where the women, stuck in the kitchen, should have been in simple black dresses with aprons to complete the servant illusion.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” said the woman filling the trays.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I used to work here.”
One of the men looked at me sharply. He frowned a little, as if wondering how anyone could have worked here, given the history of the house. Or maybe I was reading too much into a slight reaction. Maybe he thought my lame excuse for being in the kitchen was just that. I smiled at him, and slipped out of the way.
The kitchen was dramatically different, remodeled about the time of the bones discovered in the sewer drain. The stove was restaurant quality, the refrigerator one of those stainless-steel sub-zero monstrosities that looked like it could eat an entire room.
Everything was different, and somehow I found that more disconcerting than the Christmas decorations around front. When I had cleaned this place, the kitchen had been my haven — the only room without much blood in the entire house, and that blood only came from the detectives and crime-scene techs. Harmless, innocuous drops, left by people who were trying to solve the crime, not the people who had done it.
My stomach was churning. The smell of food was making me ill. I pushed open the swinging door and stepped back into the living room.
Marcus was talking to a pretty woman in a slinky blue dress. Louise was standing near the tree, gesturing at the presents. She looked even thinner than usual, her face bony, her black hair pulled into a tight bun.
Her gaze caught mine, flat and challenging. I lifted my still-full glass in a silent toast. She smiled — a real and warm smile, something I had never seen from her before — and raised her glass as well. We drank in concert from separate parts of the room as if we were old friends.
“I see you’ve kissed and made up.” Greg Raabe, the deputy mayor who had told me about this debacle, had sidled up beside me. He knew how much I disliked Louise, and how that feeling seemed to be mutual.