Bloom of love, p.8
Bloom of Love, page 8
That seemed to do the trick. As if waking from a dream, Keila had the wherewithal to send her a clearly dubious look, but instead of arguing, circled back to her original question. “You said you could help me find teenagers to clean up the mansion?”
Right. She’d said that, hadn’t she.
She’d been in somewhat of a panic, simply trying to save the woman, but clearly Keila was single-minded about the whole thing.
“Sure, sure,” Carla said absentmindedly as she mentally flipped through the possibilities. “I’m assuming you’re wanting teenage girls, right?” As they talked, she went back to putting the finishing touches on Iris’ monthly bouquet.
Not pregnant.
Again.
Gah. It was stupid awkward. When Carla saw her on the street, she wanted to give the frail red-head a hug, but she also couldn’t acknowledge that she knew what was going on. As a florist, she had to help people get through their problems, while also pretending that they didn’t have any.
It was an interesting balancing act, for sure.
Keila got a mulish look on her face. “I’d hoped to hire some teenage boys, actually, but that very rude man down at the hardware store told me that every teenage boy worth a bucket of warm spit,” she pulled a face, clearly indicating her thoughts on warm spit, “already had a job for the summer, and the good ones have two. Is that true?”
Finished with Iris’ bouquet for the month, Carla began cleaning and facing the flowers, pulling a bouquet that looked past its prime to throw away. She hated it when flowers didn’t get to go home with someone to make them happy, but she never wanted to sell them when they got to this point, either. High quality was part of what she offered her customers. “Yeah,” she said as she worked. “It’s true. Where are you from?”
Keila looked startled but answered, “Boston.” As soon as she said it, things clicked into place for Carla. That was the accent she was hearing. Not just northeast somewhere, but the very distinct Bostonian accent.
She loved the thrill of figuring things out, and matching the accent together with the town was like sliding a puzzle piece into place. She still had no idea why a woman from Boston, Massachusetts would be in rural Idaho, but that would be the next mystery to solve.
“Right,” Carla said, trying to figure out how to word this next part as delicately as possible. “Well, this probably isn’t a thing in Boston, but here in Sawyer, there’s a lot of hard physical work that needs to be done. Feeding cows, stacking hay, moving water, castrating and branding calves…it isn’t that girls aren’t hard workers and aren’t willing, but quite often, they lack the muscle necessary to pick up a 90-lb hay bale and toss it into the back of a truck. Teenage boys – the ones worth talking about, anyway – tend to get snapped up real quick. There are some teenage girls who will help out on a farm or ranch, but they mostly stick with babysitting, working at the grocery store…things like that. Mr. Burbank,” (who was rude, but Carla decided to keep her thoughts to herself on that topic), “is right – it’s the middle of summer. These teens have already been working at their summer jobs for a couple of months. I promise you, there isn’t an available teenage boy in town who you’d want to hire.”
Just then, the front door to the shop opened and Carla turned, automatically sliding her professional smile into place, until she saw it was Autumn coming in, and then it melted into her friendly smile instead. It was so fun to have Autumn as a business partner. Instead of being alone in the shop, alone in the decisions that she had to make, she had someone else to run things past. She hadn’t realized how much she’d love that until it happened.
Autumn shot Keila a harried smile and then pulled Carla off to the side. “I’ve got Mrs. Hoffmeister wanting to talk to me,” she whispered, “about the flower arrangements for the retirement party for her husband, but she wants to go through every detail of every flower, and…I tried to tell her that it’d be best to call you, but she keeps claiming she can’t find your number.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Can you call her? She’s driving me crazy.”
“Yeah, of course.” They moved over to the front counter so Carla could scribble a quick note and stick it to the computer screen. Otherwise, she’d never remember to call the client back. Mrs. Hoffmeister was a difficult woman on the best of days, so it’d be all too easy to “accidentally” forget she was supposed to call her.
Finishing up, she looked at the two women. “Keila, this is Autumn. Autumn, this is Keila Wilson. Keila just bought the Roberts’ mansion and is looking for help to clean it out. Autumn has a small office here in my shop that she uses to run an event planning business out of.” She couldn’t help the note of pride in her voice at that. It had been one of her finer ideas, if she did say so herself.
Keila put her hand out to shake Autumn’s, and then Carla turned to the newcomer, snapping her fingers, a huge grin spreading across her face. “You know who you should hire?” she asked rhetorically. “Christian’s sisters!”
Keila gave her a blank look, and Carla realized belatedly that that wouldn’t mean much to her new Bostonian friend.
Autumn chimed in. “Oh, that’s a great idea! Rosa was just telling me the other day that her younger sisters were on the hunt for a job.”
“Christian,” Carla explained to Keila, “is my…boyfriend.” She stumbled over the word, not sure if her tongue was going to handle it or not. Such a weird word to use. Boyfriend…boyfriend…were they boyfriend and girlfriend? He hadn’t asked her to be his girlfriend, but she also wasn’t sure what the etiquette on that was. Did he have to ask? Or was it just assumed?
If she’d had more experience with this sort of thing, she would know the answer to those questions. Alas…
“Anyway,” she hurried on, feeling a blush stealing into her cheeks, “Christian has six younger sisters. He’s the oldest, and there are no other boys in the family.”
Keila just stared at her like she’d grown a second head, and Carla laughed.
“I know, right?” she said dryly. “Seven kids in one family. Welcome to Idaho. Anyway, most of them are married and have plenty to keep them busy, but Yesenia is always looking for a way to make more money for college, and Nieves needs to do something this summer that doesn’t involve kissing her boyfriend.”
Not that Carla had anything against kissing, of course, but it didn’t seem healthy for a 15-year-old girl to be this obsessed with boys. There was something about Nieves that made Carla think there was more to her than just boy obsession, but so far, she hadn’t had that theory borne out by facts. If Nieves wasn’t sucking face with her boyfriend, she was texting him. Getting her to do something this summer that didn’t involve a phone screen would be an excellent step forward.
“Autumn, you should text Yesenia and Nieves. See if they’re free.”
Autumn smiled at Keila, her natural friendliness on display. “You’ll like Yesenia,” she said in a confidential tone as her fingers flew over the screen. “She’s a hard worker.”
Carla couldn’t help but notice that Autumn left Nieves out of the compliment, and mentally applauded her tact. Hiring Yesenia meant she’d keep Nieves focused and working. Nieves by herself…was not a great idea.
As they waited for Yesenia and Nieves to show up, they fell easily into chatting.
Keila leaned forward as if about to share a secret. “I’m going to turn the mansion into a bed and breakfast,” she said, her voice low.
Carla clapped her hands with glee. “I was just telling Christian the other day that someone should turn it into a hotel.” She decided to opt for her own bit of tact and leave out the part where they’d laughed uproariously at someone flying from one side of the continent to the other to buy the place. “It’s certainly big enough. Seventeen bathrooms?! I mean, c’mon. No single house needs that many bathrooms.”
“As soon as I read about it, I knew it’s what I wanted to do with it.”
Carla opened her mouth to probe more – read about it? Where? How? – but Keila’s next words made her forget the questions. “I had you on the list to talk to,” the woman said, her giant blue eyes pinning Carla in place, “so I’m glad we ran into each other down at the bakery. Once the B&B is up and going, I’d like to arrange to have you deliver fresh flowers for the foyer every week. A huge, gorgeous bouquet on the table in the entry would strike the right tone for the guests coming in.”
“Ooohhhhh…” Carla breathed, and her face split into a huge smile. “I would be delighted. Oh, to do a new bouquet every week, and always use whatever’s in season right now…I’d cut you a great deal if you’d give me total leeway on which flowers I use. If you want the bouquet to be roses every week or something, that’s a different story. But if I can change up the bouquets depending on the time of year and what’s in bloom, we could totally make that work.”
“I’m not a huge flower person,” Keila confessed, “so I’m happy to let you decide. Whatever you think is best.”
Before Carla could press her for more details, the bell over the front door tinkled and Yesenia and Nieves came in, looking dressed to work. Well, Yesenia looked ready to go, with her hair in a braid and work jeans on, but Nieves was buried deep in her phone, not even looking up to say hi, and her jeans looked artfully distressed. Those rips and holes definitely didn’t come from cleaning out horse stalls or washing cars.
Carla mentally sighed. Nieves was…
Well, spoiled rotten. She remembered again how Christian was helping to pay for Yesenia’s college while Nieves was getting fancy quinceañera parties.
Sometimes, life just wasn’t fair.
After the round of introductions, Keila said, “I’d like to get started right away. There’s a lot that needs to be done.”
Carla thought that was probably the understatement of the century, but her naturally inquisitive and friendly nature drove her to find out just how true that was. “Would you be willing to let us tour it?” she asked hopefully. “Mrs. Roberts wasn’t exactly one for having a lot of visitors, and I’ve always wanted to see the inside.”
Just from what Carla could see from the road, she knew it was gorgeous. And huge. And a real mess. The landscaping alone was in terrible shape.
Keila nibbled on her bottom lip for a moment, looking torn, and then finally said, “Sure. It’d be good. I could see what ideas you have.”
Carla only just kept herself from squealing with delight.
They headed out, Keila in a rental car and everyone else in Carla’s Happy Petals van; Carla making sure to lock the door and turn the sign back off on the way out.
Once inside the van, Yesenia – who’d claimed the front passenger seat – confided, “I’ve never seen it in real life either, but I’ve heard horror stories. It can’t actually be as bad as they say, though, right?”
Carla sent Yesenia an encouraging smile. “I’m sure it can’t be that terrible. Someone was living there just last year!”
Autumn, in the backseat, let out a cough that sounded a lot like, “Yeah right!” but when Carla looked at her friend in the rearview mirror, she was gazing innocently out the window.
Carla let out a sigh, her hands tightening on the steering wheel as she remembered that they’d found Mrs. Roberts’ body weeks after she’d died, and with the oppressive summer heat last year…
Maybe the mansion wasn’t ready to be a summer home right now, but surely it couldn’t be too far off the mark.
“I’ve only ever seen it through the trees as I’ve driven past,” she admitted, taking a right at a stop sign and heading farther out into the country, following Keila’s car as she led the way. “I think I’ve seen the whole county at this point because of the flower deliveries, but of course, Mrs. Roberts wasn’t one to get flowers delivered on the regular.”
As soon as the words escaped her lips, she felt terrible that she’d said it. Emphasizing the fact that Mrs. Roberts was a recluse without any visitors or friends wasn’t a kind thing to do, and if nothing else, Carla was always kind.
They took a left and began heading down a dirt lane, huge maples arching over the driveway, enclosing them. It was beautiful in a wild sort of way but they were in desperate need of a trimming, and she worried that some of the lower-hanging branches would take a chunk out of the van’s paint job. She gripped the steering wheel harder, doing her best to avoid the worst of the ruts in the road but not sure if she was succeeding or not. She gritted her teeth, trying to keep from breaking a tooth when slamming through a particularly large hole.
Damn. If Keila was actually going to make a go of this, the driveway would have to be completely reworked. She hoped the Bostonian had cash. A lot of cash.
With one last curve of the road, the view opened up and the mansion was on full display.
“Holy…” Carla whispered under her breath.
“Shit,” Autumn finished from the backseat. Carla noticed in the rearview mirror that even Nieves had stopped texting and was staring out the window of the van, her mouth hanging open.
Stunning. That was the word that kept reverberating in Carla’s mind.
It was gorgeous but broken; stately but wildly overgrown. Idaho wasn’t littered with historic mansions like the states back east were, and to let this kind of a house fall to ruin was a travesty, in Carla’s not-so-humble opinion.
“Wowee, wowee,” Autumn breathed. “Yesenia, how many friends do you have? If this is just up to you, Nieves, and Keila, y’all are gonna be cleaning this up for the rest of your lives.”
“Not enough,” Yesenia said quietly, her large brown eyes, so like Christian’s, huge with surprise and what Carla thought might be a little bit of well-deserved terror. “This is…” She trailed off.
Carla rolled to a stop behind Keila’s rental car, putting her van in park.
“Well, ladies, let’s see what it looks like on the inside,” Carla said, trying to keep up a cheerful façade. It was rude to ask Keila what the status of her bank account was, of course, but this house was bigger and more rundown and needed more work than she’d even remembered, and her memory hadn’t exactly been positive.
Didn’t they make a movie about this back in the 1980s? The Money Pit with Dan Aykroyd? No, it was Tom Hanks. Well, whoever it was, I think it might’ve been a documentary of the remodel of this place.
Keeping her thoughts to herself, they all piled out of the van and followed Keila’s petite figure up to the front porch where she unlocked the door, and then turned back to them. “Be careful where you step,” she said, a comment that didn’t make a whole lot of sense until they’d made their way inside.
Because simply walking in was not possible. Other than 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.
