the clearance needed to swing the front door open far enough to squeeze through, there wasn’t a square inch of bare floor as far as the eye could see. The piles rose and fell like the hills of gold and treasure inside of Aladdin’s cave, but in this case, it was nothing but mountains of junk.
Carla had heard it was bad. Carla had known it wasn’t going to be beautiful. But this was so far beyond “bad,” words failed her.
Shoes and receipts and empty pop cans and stacks of books towered over them. A broken wheel from a bike, rusty coffee cans, and towels encrusted with stuff Carla was quite sure she did not want named dotted the piles. A rocking chair sat atop one particularly tall heap, like a throne for a king to survey his domain. Carla wondered for a brief moment if the ghost of Mrs. Roberts came back at night and rocked in that chair, overlooking her estate, and shivered despite the oppressive heat.
“I call it The Hoard – capital T, capital H,” Keila said into the silence. They were clustered together – partially still in the open doorway and partially perched awkwardly on top of the shorter stacks at the base of the hoard – and no one was saying a word. “I’d make a joke about finding a dead body in here, but of course, Mrs. Roberts…well, it wouldn’t be much of a joke, would it?”
“So you know about that?!” Carla gasped in surprise, and then began coughing. The overpowering smell only made worse from the summer heat meant breathing was questionable to begin with; sucking the air in willy-nilly wasn’t her best idea.
“Of course,” Keila said blithely. “It was in the original article I read.”
This was the second time Keila had mentioned she’d read about the mansion somewhere. But where? And why? Surely the Roberts’ mansion didn’t make it into the local news back in Boston. Before Carla could think of how to phrase her question, Keila continued on.
“There’s certainly more to this place than this square foot we’re all squished into,” Keila said with a laugh. “Let’s explore, shall we? Let me know if you find anything interesting.”
Nieves scrambled over to the base of the grand staircase that led to the second floor and stared upwards, clearly trying to find a way to make her way up it. “I haven’t been able to make it up that way yet,” Keila called out. “There’s a back staircase over here that I’ve used to get to the second floor.”
“Cool,” Nieves said, and followed Keila through a narrow opening in the garbage to parts unknown. Carla decided to take a left and follow a wide hallway that would surely lead to something beautiful.
What if I get lost in here? What if I have to call someone on my cell phone to have them come rescue me?
She tended to have a pretty good sense of direction, but in The Hoard – which was the perfect name for this disaster zone – there were very few landmarks. Piles of trash on top of mountains of trash, packed to the ceiling in most places.
Carla was starting to wonder if Christian wasn’t onto something after all. As gorgeous as this place was, a body would need to excavate literally tons of trash to find that beauty.
Turning sideways, she managed to push her way through a partially open door, popping out the other side into a funny-shaped room. With the piles everywhere it was hard to tell, but she thought it had at least six walls. Light struggled to make it through the dirt-incrusted, large-paned windows on the far side, forcing Carla to squint at what she thought were tatters hanging off a curtain rod. Or, it could be wallpaper peeling. She squinted harder. Yup, those’d been red velvet curtains…at least before mice and age had ruined them.
This was probably a gorgeous room at one point. Oh, to have seen it in its heyday!
Right then, she felt something run across her foot and she looked down just quick enough to see the tip of a mouse tail disappear under the trash.
“Ahh!” she yelled, her hand over her chest, her heart pumping a million miles an hour. She was posed to make a run for the door when a sparkle in the dim lighting caught her eye. There was some sort of figurine on the marble mantlepiece she hadn’t even noticed until that moment, buried as it was under the trash.