Rachel Caine - Duty.pdf - Rachel Caine - widez2

DUTY

anoriginal short story by RachelCaine

Miz Grainger had trouble fitting the key in the lock, not because of any problem with either one. Her

hands were shaking so bad thatOlida had to stop herself from reaching out and grabbing the big brass

keyring away from her.Miz Grainger had some kind of a silver bell on the ring that chimed and kept

chiming like Santa’s sleigh, which did not lessen the heat of themidsummer day or make any of them

believe for a second it was Christmas.Miz Grainger bit her lip with enough force to drag tooth-furrows

through the field of her shiny peach-colored lipstick, muffled the bell with her palm, and finally got the

brass key into the hole.

Olida and Rita-Mae breathed a sigh of relief.Zenobia just rolled her eyes in theirracoon -holes of dark

green shadow.Miz Grainger hesitated a second, long enough to makeOlida tense up again,then turned the

key. They all heard the oiled snick as the deadbolt slid back.

"Mary Mother of God,"Miz Grainger whispered shakily, and turned the doorknob. It was a new one,

shiny brass. Her fingers left damp prints on it as she released it and the door opened with a softshhh of

weatherstripping . "Oh. Oh. Oh, I can’t go in there, I can’t."

The three of them looked at each other.Olida felt the weight of responsibility settle and stepped

forward to tapMiz Grainger on the shoulder; she jumped with enough of a snap to dislodge stiff strands

of hair from her carefully sprayed-together beehive.

"Land!" the woman blurted, face as pale and gray as a corpse’s. Her eyes glittered with panic. "I told

you, I can’t go in there. You go on, go do what I’m paying you to do. I’ll just wait here by my car. I’ll

have your money ready when you’re done."

"Ma’am,"Olida said patiently, "It’ll be some hours. There’s a lot of work to things like this.Lotta

cleaning. Now, we all done this before, and our new one didn’t show, so you don’t worry none and just

go get yourself a cold drink. Sit and rest. You come on back in three hours or so and I’ll come out and

tell you what we’ve done. That fair?"

Miz Grainger,Olida knew, was not about to disagree with a five-foot-ten black woman. It only helped

thatOlida was about ten shades darker than any other black woman inParker County,Nebraska, and

therefore ten shades more frightening.Olida didn’t mind that at all.

Miz Grainger nodded at her, a convulsive jerk that let loose some more of herbeehived silver hair. She

nearly backed off the steps untilOlida caught her elbow and steadied her.

That sent the woman immediately and hurriedly down the driveway to her Bonneville and peeling

rubber out ontoMontrainStreet.Olida grinned. Rita-Mae andZenobia grinned back.

"Well, lay-dies, wegonna sit around and stealMiz Grainger’s money or wegonna do some work?"

Olida asked. Rita-Mae promptly set her white trash butt down on the steps and lit up a Camel.Zenobia

checked her eye makeup in a little cracked hand mirror. "You two are just as useless as ever. Rita-Mae,

suck that thing and get in here. You, Miss War Paint, pick up that box."

It was really just a game to loosen them up.Olida , Rita-Mae andZenobia had been doing this for

more years than any of them wanted to think about.Olida thought about quitting it, knew the others did

two, but something kept pulling them back in, and it wasn’t just the good money.

It was duty. They had a skill, and they had to use it the way God intended, or at least that wasOlida’s

thought. She had no idea what the other two thought, and didn’t care. For her, it was duty.

And cash.

"Well, thank Jesus, somebody left the air on,"Zenobia said as she set her box down in the shadowy

living room. "Won’t be so bad when it’s cool, will it, Lid?"

"Yeah,"Olida said absently, and flicked on a light. The carpeting blared to life, an orange-red that had

probably seen the seventies in its middle age. She bent closer to look at it and noticed something odd. It

was clean.Really clean. Somebody had taken the time and toil to shampoo it a lot, and rake it with one of

them plastic rakes to get the shag to stand up. She’d left footprints in the deep pile. She looked at the

furniture more closely, thinking again about her first impression of Salvation Army. It was all good

furniture, not fancy but perfectly well-kept. The coffee table had a fine veneer of dust, residue of a couple

of days of summer, but it stillgleamed the kind of red-brown that only came from careful polish. The

books lined up in the shelves were all carefully arranged, neatly ordered. Everything in the living room,

from the little china dolls on the mantle to the shiny fireplace irons, had been placed there deliberately by

somebody who liked everything just so.

Olida felt a sudden chill. Her house looked the same. Oh, the furniture was different, the carpet green

instead of orange, but she took care with her home.

So had --

"Lid, shit, wegonna work or sightsee?"Zenobia asked crossly.Olida snapped herself together and turned

toward the kitchen.

The smell coming from that direction was what had madeMiz Grainger turn her beehive around and

run. It was dark and sickly-sweet, with a faintundertaste of old copper.Olida breathed it in andsighed it

out, feeling it spread through her pores like a second skin. No getting around it, this was going to be a

long one.

"JesuMaria,"Zenobia breathed as she peered overOlida’s shoulder.Olida snapped on the light switch

and felt Zen’s muscles twitch in response.

The kitchen screamed.

The rust-brown stains splashed up from the baseboards, over faded chintz curtains,spidered across

shiny white cabinets. There were splatters on the ceiling, looming over them like little red stars. The floor

was a clotted lake, extending from the corner by the stained breakfast table to disappear under the

refrigerator and puddle unevenly where the gold-flecked linoleum had buckled.

Olida’s eyes fixed on the cheery country wallpaper over the breakfast table, and her breath stopped.

There was no mistaking the fragments clinging to the wall. They were gray and gelatinous, filmed with

red. They’d dried to look like bits of salted slug.Olida looked at them for a long time,then hitched her

weight from her right hip to her left, easing a slight cramp along her calf.

"Gonnabe a bitch scraping her off the wallpaper,"Zenobia observed unhappily.

"Has to come down. We’regonna have to move that damn refrigerator, too, probably bits of her under

there, too,"Olida said, and let herself look at the rest of the kitchen. It was small and, where the blood

and brains hadn’t spattered, incredibly scrubbed. The woman had collected little salt and pepper

shakers. They were neatly arranged on the windowsill, tiny windmills, a pair shaped like sunflowers, two

in the back of kneeling angels, their hands folded in prayer, their yellow wings outstretched. There was

one long string of blood jagged along the salt angel. The pepper angel was untouched.

Olida collected spoons.All kinds of spoons. She had them displayed in a handmade rack and polished

them every other day to keep the silver shiny.

The burners on the stove were free of burnt residue. They were lined with clean foil.Olida swung open

the oven door and saw what she knew she’d see,a crystal-clean inside that could have done for an oven

cleaner commercial. There wasn’t even any dirt at the corners of the baseboards.

"Neat," she murmured with a frown. For some reason, it made her deeply uneasy to be standing in the

woman’s kitchen, seeing her brains on the wall, when the woman herself had been so neat. It hadn’t

mattered so much in the house on Jackson Street, where she and Rita-Mae had worn masks to keep out

the stench andZenobia had worked with two of her sons to haul out about six months worth of garbage

rotting in various rooms in that pig-wallow of a place. Murder in a place like that didn’t bother her near

as much as it did here in this painfully clean house.

"Mop,"Zenobia said, and shoved the stick intoOlida’s hand without expression. "I’ll work on the

goddamn wall."

Olida dipped the mop into the bucket of steaming water and Pine SolZenobia had filled. The first

drops of hot water gave the old blood new life. She dragged the sponge through a patch of rust and left

bitter red smeared behind.

"Gonnatake forever,"Olida murmured.Zenobia sighed and snapped her rubber gloves into place. She

paid no attention to the blood sticking to the soles of her running shoes; she hadOlida had stood in

worse. Her sponge made the blood spatters drip dark red, as if they were freshly wounded.

"Rita-Mae!"Olida yelled, leaning into the mop. She rinsed it in the hot water and scrubbed harder; it

was hard as hell to get the stuff out of the cracks in the floor, and if she knewMiz Grainger she’d be

checking every nook once the smell was gone. "Rita-Mae, get your cracker ass in here, or-- "

But the woman who stepped into the kitchen wasn’t Rita-Mae. She was small, shorter than even

Zenobia , and as slight as a willow. She’d worn a plain faded smock over her blue jeans and tied her

dark hair back with a matching scarf. LikeZenobia andOlida , she wore tennis shoes.

"What-- "Zenobia started.Olida held up her hand.

"You Carmen?"Olida demanded. The younger woman nodded, eyes taking in the carnage of the

kitchen. "You’re late.Supposed to be here atten o’clocksharp.Ever done this work before?"

"No," Carmen said softly, her voice nearly a whisper."No, but I done plenty of cleaning.Used to work

at a nursing home."

"Well, then, you’ve cleaned plenty of shit,"Olida nodded, satisfied. "Here, you grab a mop and help

me here. Don’t be too fancy rightnow, just try to get the worst of it up. We’ll do fine work later."

Carmen took the mop leaning in the corner.Olida blinked.

"Not that one, that was -- "Olida’s voice faded.Hers. Why the hell not? "Never mind, that’s fine. Just

get to work."

Carmen dipped her mop and started up.Zenobia cursed under her breath in Spanish, a running litany

thatOlida only slightly understood. When most of the stain was mopped away,Olida took a large sponge

and rubber gloves and got down on her knees to clean under the cabinet edges.

Carmen joined her. With strong, competent swipes she erased streamers of blood. Where it had

soaked into the raw edges of wood she paused to scrub hard, ruining one sponge and using another

almost to rags.Olida , cleaning the cracks with a damp toothbrush, smiled at her.

"You’redoin ’ good," she encouraged. Carmen’s dark eyes flashed at her.

"She died hard, didn’t she?" Carmen asked so softly evenZenobia cursing a few feet away couldn’t

have heard her. "Don’t you think?"

"I think,"Olida said very slowly, "that itain’t good to think about it. You get crazythinkin ’."

Carmen stared at her a minute, then looked away at the wallpaper. She had no expression on her face

at all, just the blankness of someone who looked for a memory she couldn’t quite find.Olida sighed and

bent back to her work. Her spine gave a warning twinge, reminding her she wasn’t twenty any more, and

she kept working anyway. Old age only wins when you let it, her momma used to say, gap-toothed and

grinning.Olida wasn’t ready to lose.

She looked up finally to see Carmen standing at the country-papered wall, sponge in hand. With the

slowness of a dreamer, the woman wiped. Dried gray pieces sounded like dried macaroni when they hit

the breakfast table.

Olida flinched.

"Isn’t this supposed to be done?" Carmen asked without turning around, just like she could feel

Olida’s stare. "We got to wet down the wallpaper, right?"

"Right,"Zenobia said firmly, and shrugged. "Might as well do it now, let you and Rita-Mae pull it

down."

But there was a glitter of fear inZenobia’s eyes, too. She wouldn’t have been the first to touch the

wall. That would have beenOlida’s responsibility, whenOlida was ready.

"Rita-Mae!"Olida yelled, and it felt good. There was a muffled thud from the living room. "You better

be working, girl!"

"I’m working, I’m working,thereain’t room for all of us in there!" Rita-Mae shouted back. "Gettin’ the

dust off in here, then I’ll do the bathroom. Okay, boss?"

"Okay," she answered, scrubbed at a bloodstain until her gloved fingers ached.

Carmen, dreamlike, continued to wet down the brain-smeared wallpaper until it wrinkled like

drowned skin.

"Watch it! Watch it!"Zenobia yelped, and moved her feet out of the way. The refrigerator slid with a

linoleum-scratching shriek the last few inches. "Look at that, Lid. Clean under there, ‘ceptfor the blood."

"Yeah,"Olida said, and puffeda breaths in and out to ease the tightness in her lungs. The woman had

cleaned under her refrigerator.

Jesus God, so didOlida .

The three of them knelt in silence on the floor, mopping up the last of the blood. The remains of the

wallpaper lay in neatly tied plastic sacks, and there was no trace of blood on the walls, windows, floor or

cabinets.Olida had even wiped off the salt angel.

The room smelled of afternoon sun and Pine-Sol and the sweat of three women. Rita-Mae was off

cussing in some other room, her voice muffled by walls but echoing through doors. Carmen had worked

harder thanZenobia , harder thanOlida . Harder,Olida thought, than anybody she’d ever had before.

The thought, strangely, made her nervous.

"Who was he, you think?"Zenobia asked, a nervous blurt that wasn’t like her at all. "The guy, I mean?

Some crazy guy, to bust the door open and come in here and beat her all to hell like that. Shit, he

splashed her brains all over the wall, he must have been crazy, you know? The cops ever get him?Lid?"

"Don’t matter,"Olida said steadily. "Heain’tcomin ’ back here. He got what he wanted."

Carmen’s hands had stopped moving. For the first timeOlida noticed that she wasn’t wearing gloves,

that the blood flecks were clinging to her smooth brown skin and making dark half-moons under her

fingernails.

"He was her husband," Carmen said.Olida’s hands stopped, too, sweating inside their rubber prisons.

"Supposed to be in jail.Got out."

Her daughter's husband Rupert was in jail, god damn his soul.Olida felt a chill slide down her aching

back along with a drop of sweat. She’d sworn to him she’d chop him into fillets if he ever touched her

girl again, and she remembered the murderous hate in his eyes. If he got out --

"Fucking courts,"Zenobia said, voice shaking. She blinked hard and wiped at her face with her

forearm. "Can’t count on nothing’ no more. Not even the jail. Shit, they stuckMano in the pen for not

paying his taxes, you believe that shit? And they let this crazy out.Ain’tsafe. Weain’t safe."

The words hung over all of them, like the smell of Pine-Sol and sweat. Carmen finally wrung out her

sponge and continued wiping, though the floor was long since cleaned.Olida gave up and threw her

sponge in the pail. When she stripped off her gloves the touch of cool air on her hands was enough to

make her shiver with relief.

Rita-Mae appeared in the door, red-cheeked and shiny with sweat.

Rachel Caine - Duty.pdf

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