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“You kinda owe me?” I parroted. “While we were married you spent my entire inheritance on gambling, alcohol and the various sluts you were screwing. You more than kinda owe me.”
“I’ll show it to you before anyone else,” Scott continued, ignoring my brief tirade. “If you’re the first to make an offer the old man might take it before a bidding war has a chance to break out. The guy is motivated with a capital M.”
I chewed on my lower lip and glanced at the Armani guy who was now knocking on one of the walls—probably testing to see if it could withstand the impact. This is what $1.4 million could buy you in San Francisco. I had written six New York Times bestselling novels and yet I could barely afford to buy this moldy rat hole with a view. With that in mind how could I not take Scott up on this once-in-a-lifetime offer?
Another couple walked in and Scott flashed them one of his most charming smiles while whispering through his teeth, “So, we on for tonight or not?”
I squeezed my eyes closed and forced myself to make the only rational decision available to me. “We’re on. Give me the address and I’ll be there at eight-thirty.”
I drove my Audi through the residential streets of Ashbury Heights. Victorian after Victorian blurred into one another as I sped by. There were few pedestrians out although there were probably more than you could count several blocks over where the local shops and restaurants populate Cole Street. I was tempted to turn my car around and head that way now. I could play quarters with some bartender and laugh at the knowledge that my evil ex was standing around an empty house waiting for me. It would be petty, though perversely sweet entertainment. But as I brought the car to a halt at each stop sign, my mind came screeching back to the conversation Scott and I had earlier. I didn’t have a problem with being petty, but stupidity was not something I was comfortable with. I had to at least see the place.
It was 8:40 p.m. when I found the address Scott had given me. He’d told me to park in the driveway, but for a moment I found myself idling my car in the middle of the quiet street and staring at the building to my left. The windows were all dark, but the streetlamp illuminated the details of the exterior. It was no bigger than the houses to the left or right, but still, it was superior. Unlike its neighbors, this house was not painted in pastels, but in a color that hovered between tan and a muted lilac. Its gabled shingled roof shielded its angled bay windows from the hazy evening sky. It was beautiful and oddly familiar. I must have passed it before and somehow taken notice of it. As my eyes traveled from the roof to the foundation I spotted Scott huddled between the Greek-styled columns bordering the front entrance. Watching me and toying with the zipper of his insulated brown suede jacket, his presence surprised me. When I had been married to Scott we had both considered punctuality a dirty word. Slowly, I pulled into the driveway, which was so narrow that it barely accommodated the width of my car.
“How long have you been waiting?” I asked as I slipped out of the car and trotted up the front steps.
“Got here at eight-twenty.” He got to his feet and brushed some nonexistent dirt from his jeans. “I figured you’d be late, but I thought I should get here early just in case you’d changed.” He smiled, bringing his dimple into view. “I’m glad to see that you’re still the same ol’ Soapy.”
I let out a disdainful puff of air. Soapy was the pet name he had assigned to me after we had gotten into a soapsuds fight while washing my old car. It brought back irritatingly fond memories.
“Let’s see the house,” I said coolly. As front doors went, this house had a pretty nice one. Tastefully carved without being too ornate or flowery. “Where’s the owner staying?”
“Hotel Nikko,” Scott said as he fiddled with the key.
“Really? Why doesn’t he just stay here until it sells…oh, Scott!” I exclaimed as he opened the door to reveal the foyer. “Are those crown moldings?”
“Better believe it, baby. Crown moldings fit for a queen.” As we stepped inside he sniffed the air suspiciously. “That’s Pine-Sol,” he said slowly. “Oscar must have cleaned before leaving.”
I barely registered Scott’s comment. I was in the living room looking at the bay windows and the lovely upholstered window seat. The furniture wasn’t my style, very flowery in a Victorian kind of way, but I wasn’t buying the furniture. The gorgeous built-in mahogany bookcases though, those would be mine!
“That’s strange.”
I turned at the sound of Scott’s voice behind me. I had almost forgotten he was there. “What’s strange…wait, that doesn’t look fake.” I pointed at the fireplace behind him. “It’s not just decorative? It’s real? A real honest-to-God fireplace that you can set fires in?”
“Gas starter, too,” Scott confirmed. “But that’s not what’s weird. What’s weird is that Oscar seems to have rearranged all the furniture. This place has been totally redecorated since this morning.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s weird…is that a formal dining room?” I ran past Scott into the next room. Sure enough, it was a dining room, and it was stunning. Not huge, but certainly bigger than anything I’d ever had. Right now it contained an antique oak sideboard complete with carved winged griffins and a beveled mirror. It also held a table that was long and rectangular and covered with a white lace tablecloth. In fact, the table was set as if someone had been preparing for a dinner party of six. There were two beautiful silver candleholders holding long, tapered cream candles, and each place setting shone with Victorian rose-patterned fine china.
“He set the table?” Scott choked.
“Guess he thought that setting the table would give the place a little more ambiance or something,” I muttered, glancing over at the door that led to the kitchen. There had to be a problem with the kitchen, right? No house was perfect.
I carefully stepped inside and broke into a grin—a totally charming kitchen. The cabinets were white, and while I usually prefer a natural wood finish, this white actually worked well with the Victorian ambiance. There wasn’t a huge amount of counter space, which would be a problem for Anatoly, who loved to cook almost as much as I loved to eat, but I could always put in an island or something.
The thought tickled me. Last month, Anatoly and I had been on the Marina watching the ferries riding over the bay. He had kissed my cheek and then my neck while mumbling about the way the salt water tasted on my skin. Then, out of the blue he had taken my hand and suggested we move in together. He wanted to wake up with me in the morning…every morning. Only a year ago he had expressed discomfort with the level of commitment implied by the words boyfriend and girlfriend and now he wanted to share his life with me. It had almost made me cry.
Almost. The truth was that I didn’t want to move him into my apartment, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to move into his. I have come to believe that domestic partnerships have a higher chance of success when they exist within spacious houses. Conversely, cramped quarters and limited closet space is a recipe for domestic violence. But Anatoly made significantly less money than I did, so if my dreams of romance and elbow room were going to come to fruition I was going to have to find a house that fit my budget. He could help me with the mortgage if he chose (and I knew he would), but the down payment was a burden I would have to bear alone. I hadn’t detailed my objections for Anatoly, knowing that he would have dismissed them. Instead, I had stalled for time with whispered abstract promises of future arrangements. He hadn’t argued, but he hadn’t been happy, either.
I glanced at a paned glass door in the back of the room and was hit by yet another wonderful revelation. “Scott, this place has a yard? Why didn’t you tell me?” I ran to the door and flung it open. Yes, the yard was about the size of your average master bathroom, but in San Francisco any house that came with grass was a huge commodity.
“He took his small appliances with him.” Scott was now standing in the doorway. “The man took his appliances to the Nikko.”
“Or maybe he moved them into a storage unit,” I suggested, not really caring what had happened to some soon-to-be ex-owner’s toaster oven. I walked across the room and opened a door discreetly adjacent to the pantry. “Or maybe he put them in here with the washer and dryer.”
“Huh?” Scott peeked inside and noted the coffee machine, blender and a few other basic kitchen tools on the floor of the laundry room. “Why would he do this?”
“Why are you so freaked out by it? The guy wants to sell his house so he spruced it up a bit. That’s normal, Scott. As a real-estate agent I would think you would know that.”
“Sophie, the reason I got this listing is because I know the owner. Oscar and I…travel in some of the same circles.”
My eyes slanted in suspicion. “You, the man who once speculated that life after sixty wouldn’t be worth living—you travel in the same circles as a seventy-year-old with the beginnings of Alzheimer’s.”
“He’s a friend of…a friend. He called me at, like, six this morning all agitated and upset, insisting that I come over immediately and help him sell this place. I made him wait until eight and then I sat and listened to him rant about the ghosts who were driving him out of his house. He’s not well, Sophie. In addition to the mental stuff he’s got a heart condition. There’s no way he has the physical strength to move the furniture around. This is just weird.”
“Maybe he just called another friend…someone who travels in his eclectic circles, and asked him to help fix the place up. Really, Scott, for a man who has mastered the fine art of lying you sure don’t have a very good imagination.” I shut the door to the laundry room. “Show me the bedrooms.”
Scott’s expression morphed again, this time into something that made my stomach churn. “Soapy, I thought you’d never ask.”
He showed me the one downstairs bedroom (which would make a great office) and half bath, then led me up the staircase and brought me to the second bedroom and full bath. They were both beautiful. The house was so underpriced it was sick. But sick in a good way. I could deal with this kind of sick.
With each room Scott made another comment about how everything was different from this morning. When we looked at the second bedroom he shook his head and pointed to a ceramic vase that hadn’t been there before. “It’s weird,” he insisted again. “It’s like he tried to make this place look more…” He snapped his fingers a few times as if trying to command the word he was looking for to pop into his mouth. “Victorian,” he finally said. “He made the place look more Victorian.”
“It’s a Victorian house, Scott. What did you expect? That he would try to make the place look art deco?”
“I didn’t expect anything, that’s the point! I thought he was just going to leave and let me deal with fixing it up for the sale. You should have seen him this morning. He didn’t even feel comfortable hanging around here to talk. Now I’m supposed to believe that he spent the day here redecorating and cleaning?”
“Are you going to show me the master bedroom or are you going to just stand here flipping out over a vase?”
“Right, the master bedroom…let’s just hope he didn’t get rid of the bed, I’d really like to show you that….” But the flirtation lacked conviction. Oscar the redecorator had thrown Scott off his game.
The door to the master bedroom was closed and for a second I entertained a disturbing thought. “You don’t suppose he’s in there, do you? Maybe he’s been sleeping the whole time we’ve been wandering around his house.”
“Oscar assured me that he would be out of here by six at the latest.” He reached forward and opened the door to reveal a charming, if somewhat foul-smelling, room with delicate moldings and paned glass doors that were left open to reveal a pretty little deck—and there was Oscar…sitting on the bed…mouth wide-open…face tilted up toward the ceiling. It didn’t look like a natural position and he didn’t acknowledge us.
He didn’t move at all.
“Oscar?” There was a slight tremor in Scott’s voice.
I crept toward him. “Hello?” I whispered, although I had an ugly suspicion that I could scream and not get a reaction out of Oscar. Something crinkled under my foot and I realized that I had just stepped on a bunch of antique photos. They had that lovely golden glow that always made me think of horse-drawn wagons and Ellis Island immigrants. But these photos weren’t of people, they were of rooms. I was tempted to take a moment to examine them more closely, but I knew that was just my natural inclination to put off the inevitable. “Oscar? I’m Sophie…can you hear me?” I got a little closer and very carefully checked for a pulse. Nothing.
I pulled my hand away and stared at the two white prints the pressure of my fingers had left on the corpse’s flesh.
“Scott, I think he’s dead.”
“You think?” Scott asked.
I looked down at Oscar’s lower half and realized his pants were wet with urine, which explained the smell. “He’s definitely dead.”
I waited for Scott to respond and when he didn’t I turned to look at him.
“Scott?”
He held up a finger as if to indicate that he needed a minute, then ran to the attached bathroom where I could hear him promptly regurgitate whatever it was that he’d had for dinner.
And now I was alone with a dead stranger. Hesitantly, I turned back to Oscar. I didn’t see any blood or sign that he had struggled with someone, although the expression on his face was anything but peaceful. He looked kind of horrified, like he had seen the grim reaper. My eyes traveled to his left hand. His fingers were curled around a piece of jewelry. I leaned over, not wanting to touch him again, and realized that the jewelry was actually an antique brooch with a cameo. Little goose bumps materialized all over my skin and I tried to suppress the anxiety building within me. I wished Scott would pull himself together and handle this. But I expected that would take a while. Scott liked to deal in fantasies and what-ifs. Death was one of those things that was just too real for him.
I turned my back to the body. Actually, this was a little too real for me, too. With shaky hands, I gathered up the photos I had stepped on. One Victorian room after another…a bedroom, a dining room…this bedroom, this dining room. These were pictures of the house as it once was. The furniture had been different, obviously, but not the placement. Oscar had rearranged his furniture to fit the images in these pictures. Even the table setting was similar. Mechanically, I turned back around.
“How did you die, Oscar?” I whispered. I reached over and tentatively touched the brooch in his hand. It was cold, colder than the dead hand holding it. The colorless depiction of the woman on the cameo was surely meant to be flattering, but to me her sharp chin and unseeing eyes appeared sinister. It was then that I became vaguely aware that I was frightened.
At that moment Scott stumbled out of the bathroom and looked purposely at the floor. “So,” he said in a scratchy voice, “do you still want the house?”
“Report this,” I said pointing to the phone on the nightstand closest to Scott. “Dial 911 and tell them we found a dead man.”
Scott looked up at the phone, noted its proximity to the bed and then quickly looked away. “Didn’t I read that you discovered a body in Golden Gate Park a few years back?” he asked hopefully. “You have more experience with this kind of thing. Why don’t you call?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, be a man, Scott,” I said, once again inching away from the body.
“I am a man! I just happen to be a man who suffers from necrophobia.”
“What?”
“I have a fear of dead things. I’m working on overcoming it. Still, this,” he waved toward the bed without looking at it, “is a bit much for me to deal with.”
“You weren’t necrophobic when we were married.”
“Yes, I was, we just didn’t talk about it. Remember how upset I got when we went to that restaurant and they served us the fish with its head still on? That was a traumatic moment for me, Sophie.”
“Wow, Scott. I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Now suck it up and call the police.” I stared at the floor. The urine was getting to me. The smell had been bad when we first entered the room, but now that I knew what it was and why it was there, it had become unbearable. I had to get out of the room.
Scott swallowed hard and then pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll call from this.” He walked over to the bedroom door and motioned for me to exit with him, which I gladly did. I left the pictures where I had found them.
As we walked down the stairs Scott dialed 911 and I used my cell phone to dial Anatoly’s number.
“Hey there.” The lightness of Anatoly’s tone was jarring considering my circumstances. “I was just thinking about you. A minute ago I accepted another case and it turns out my new client is a huge fan of your books.” Anatoly was a P.I. and lately it seemed that everybody in San Francisco wanted his services. Businesses wanted to prove that their employees were stealing, wives wanted to prove that their husbands were cheating and so on and so forth. But right now all of those problems seemed paltry and inconsequential.
“Anatoly, I’m in Ashbury Heights.” It was amazing how I could keep my voice smooth even as my hands shook. “A Realtor was just giving me a tour of this Victorian he’s representing and—”
“Now? It’s almost nine o’clock.”
“Yeah, I know it’s unusual, but that’s not why I’m calling. Listen, the owner’s here and he’s sort of…dead.”
There was a moment of silence followed by a Russian curse. “You found another dead body.”
“It would seem that way, yes.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah, I’m here with the real-estate agent and he’s calling 911.” Scott and I had now reached the bottom of the stairs and he was standing by the bay windows answering some dispatcher’s questions. “The owner was old so he probably died of natural causes. Still, could you come over? I mean, it’s not like I’ve never been through something like this, you know that and…well, you’d think it would get easier, but…”
“Tell me how to get there and I’ll come over immediately.”
I looked up at Scott. He was describing the state of the body to someone on the phone and gagging between sentences. Thank God for Anatoly because I was pretty sure Scott wasn’t going to be that big of a comfort to me.
2
Smart Agoraphobics Invest in Real Estate.
—The Lighter Side of Death
LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES LATER, A POLICE CAR AND AN AMBULANCE arrived. The paramedics and one of the two officers immediately went upstairs to check out the body while the other officer, a sergeant with salt-and-pepper hair and a face like Paul McCartney, lingered in the living room to ask Scott and me a few questions. He introduced himself as Sergeant Poplar, but in my head he was Sergeant Pepper. After giving him a quick rundown of why we were there and what we had found, his partner (a cute blond woman who looked more cheerleader than cop) appeared at the top of the stairs and said something about it looking like “natural causes,” at which point Sergeant Pepper asked us to stick around while he took a look for himself. Once both officers were out of sight, Scott and I simultaneously collapsed on the couch and stared up at the vaulted ceiling.
“Well,” Scott said dully, “I’ve never had a house showing like this before.”
“Did you know Oscar well?” I asked. The cushions on the couch were overstuffed to the point of discomfort, but neither Scott nor I moved to find a better seat.
He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “He’s more Venus’s friend.”
“Who’s Venus?”
But before he could answer Anatoly burst through the door. His hands were still encased in the thick black gloves he so frequently wore while riding his Harley, and he creased his forehead in concern. Without a second thought I went to him and he received me with a tight embrace. “You seem to have a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he scolded, but his tone was gentle and comforting.
“I just wanted to see the house,” I said, my words muffled by his shirt.
Anatoly pulled back slightly and took in his surroundings. “Nice,” he noted before his eyes landed on Scott. “I take it you’re the Realtor?”
Scott nodded and wiped his palm sweat on his designer jeans before extending his hand to Anatoly. “Scott Colvin, Sophie’s Realtor, friend and ex-husband.”
Anatoly’s smile of greeting froze midhandshake.
“He’s lying,” I said quickly. “At least about being my Realtor, or my friend for that matter.”
“And the ex-husband part?” Anatoly asked, keeping his eyes on Scott. He hadn’t let go of his hand yet, and judging from Scott’s expression, Anatoly’s grip had gotten a little tighter than necessary.
“That part’s true.”
Anatoly released Scott and turned to me. “You came to this house in the middle of the night with your ex-husband?”
“Eight-thirty’s the middle of the night?” Scott asked. “Guess you must be an early-to-bed guy. Sophie and I have always been night owls.”
“We haven’t seen each other in ten years, Scott,” I hissed. “You have no idea what my sleeping habits are like now.” The cool damp breeze coming in from the open door was beginning to get to me and I rubbed the back of my arms in an attempt to increase my circulation.
Scott cocked his head to the side, and shot me the first real grin since we had discovered Oscar. “There’s no way you’ve turned into an early bird. Not my Soapy.”
“Soapy?” Anatoly raised his eyebrows.
“You didn’t tell him about that nickname?” Scott chuckled and refocused on Anatoly. “Man, you’re going to love how she got it. We were washing her car and she was wearing these Daisy Duke shorts and this sheer white tank top—”
“They were regular denim shorts and the tank was not sheer,” I snapped. “I can’t believe you’re trying to play juvenile head games while the paramedics upstairs are trying to determine the cause of death of one of your friends.”
