perfect.
Fuck. The room looks nothing like my mother’s place—without the cracks in the ceiling or the holes punched in the walls—but the spotlessness, the orderliness, is all too familiar. This place reeks of discipline and broken dreams, a life never lived. I can practically hear the echoes of threats and insults, ghosts of cruelty inflicted on a girl who could never hope to satisfy a warden that expects everything in its place.
I shudder. This kind of perfection almost always hides deep secrets. The kind of secrets of someone cut off from the world. Five seconds in here, and I fucking hate this place.
“Okay. Let’s take a closer look,” I tell them.
Rat and Striker split up, Rat going down a hall straight ahead, and Striker going back upstairs.
Pausing in the living room, I turn and take in the two large photos mounted on the wall above the couch. One displays an elderly woman with her white hair pulled back in a bun, a friendly, smiling face, and her arms around two kids who look like they’re in their late teens. I’m guessing that’s Rosie with her grandchildren, and they’re all standing on a cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon, on holiday, maybe. The other photo is of the three of them standing by the fountains in front of the Bellagio.
Stereotypical granny. Well, aren’t they one big fucking happy family. And yet, she’s somehow tied to a man like Adamson. And that girl, her housekeeper, was behaving as if she’s working for a female John Wayne Gacy.
“What the fuck are you hiding, Rosie?” I mutter. I half expect to look into one of the bathrooms and find the bathtub covered in blood, or the stink of death wafting out from a hidden room.
I check half the rooms downstairs—a bathroom, a dining room, a library—but I find nothing unusual. I pass a bedroom near the back of the house and stick my head in. Rat’s inside, rifling through an oak dresser. There’s a four-poster bed with way too much floral linen and ugly wallpaper.
“Find any fucking bodies in here?” I ask.
He snorts and shakes his head, shutting a drawer. “Just fucking granny panties and a lot of mothballs.”
“Rosie’s room, then.”
“Yep. This looks like it’s part of an extension she put on the house recently. There’s a sunroom and a laundry room. I’m about to check the laundry room next.”
I leave him to his search and go into the kitchen. Dee would have loved this room. It’s all top of the line countertops and stainless-steel appliances, with lots of space and a spice rack that would put Dee in heaven. Except that there’s one of those ugly-ass cat clocks on the wall with a slowly wagging tail ticking off the seconds and bugging eyes that move back and forth. I hate those fucking things.
Most of the food in the cupboard and fridge is expensive healthy stuff I wouldn’t eat if you paid me.
Striker comes back downstairs, meeting me in the kitchen. “Nothing up there.” He makes a face.
“If there’s nothing, what’s eating you?”
“No, you don’t get it. I mean there’s nothing up there at all. I mean one of the bedrooms has girl’s stuff in it. The housekeeper’s stuff, I guess. But there’s five rooms and two bathrooms, and except for her bedroom, they’re all empty. No one’s staying in them.”
I snag an apple out of a bowl of fruit on the counter, polish it off on my cut, and take a bite, more alarms setting off in my head. “If there’s no one living here, then how come when Rat asked her if there were rooms available, she didn’t know? If all of them are vacant, you’d think she would have told us.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Spidy, this makes no fucking sense. The woman’s obviously doing a good business. A place like this would never leave all the rooms empty. She’d lose too much revenue.”
“Oh, guys,” Rat calls, drawing the word out. “Get in here.”
We hurry down the hall to the back of the house entering a large laundry room. A washer and dryer sit side by side, clothing sorted in orderly piles in baskets. A panelled wall has golden hooks mounted on it. An apron, a big floppy hat, and a fluffy pink sweater hang from them.
It’s all so homey and… normal.
Rat’s rummaging through the closet, and he waves us over.
“Check this shit out.” He pulls out a hanger draped with the strangest fucking clothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a long white