Hoarder (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Missy’s personality matched her massive size, and the diminutive doorframe could barely contain both. Missy was positively giddy with excitement.

“Oh lookie-lookie-loo! And who are you?”

Ian suddenly remembered what he was holding, and he whisked his right hand with the knife behind his back. It wasn’t wise to make an introduction holding a deadly weapon. Missy wasn’t looking down low, so he didn’t think she noticed it. She was completely captivated by her new guest’s face, as creepy as that was.

“I… my name,” Ian stammered.

“You’re with production, aren’t you?”

Missy’s delusion gave Ian a pre-made history to latch onto, and he seized it. Better to go along with her version of their story than flounder for a fiction that might not add up in her fractured mind. So if this was a production, and it kind of was considering the number of cameras in play, he should assume a role of authority. Ian also noticed the camera cap on Missy’s head, pushed away the knowledge of who she had stolen it from, and made a mental note to get it back from Missy before the night was through.

“Yes, I’m the director,” Ian responded with confidence. He had to be as convincing as possible if he wanted to lead Missy on and get himself out of her house. He would direct his way out.

“And your name?” Missy inquired again.

“Chad,” Ian replied. Missy accepted Ian’s pseudonym, much to his relief. Ian didn’t know any Chads, did not even know why that name had leaped out of his mouth. He would have to be careful and remember to respond to his unexpected new name.
I am Chad. I am Chad.

“Well my name is Missy, but you know that already, don’t you, Mister Director? It’s my show after all!” Missy exclaimed with delight, basking in an invisible spotlight.

Ian forced a smile to match his subject’s. “Yeah, it’s your show,” he confirmed to her.

Missy snapped out of her exalted pose. “Wait! What’s the name of my show?” Missy asked the last part in a nervous whisper, as though the crew might laugh at her for having forgotten this simple fact.

Ian had to think up a good answer, and quick. He didn’t have the luxury of sitting around a table in a studio office, bouncing title ideas off of other creative executives.

“
Missy’s House
,” Ian made up on the spot. He grinned because he kind of liked it. It summed up the subject and her location, if not the bad air they produced.

Missy squealed. Ian knew he had picked the right title.

“Ooo, I like that!
Missy’s House
! My name comes first!”

Missy winked at Ian. Ian grinned, although he didn’t like that attention from her. When Dani winked at him, he was elated. When Missy winked at him, it was supremely unsettling. Her wink was dangerous and not to be trusted. She used it as a hook, like a fishing hook tearing through your cheek. He couldn’t let himself get reeled in.

Missy lunged forward, tickling Ian’s midsection with her hard hands. She was far from gentle, and Ian feared she might pinch him and rupture some crucial internal organ. He gasped, backed out of her hands, and bumped into something. Ian looked back at his dead brother lying across the ground, blocking him.

Ian feared Missy would look down at Keith, too, and he whipped his head around, looking into her eyes to seize her attention. Then he did what his new job title entailed, he gave direction.

“Wait! You can’t be that close to the camera.”

Missy stopped in mid-lunge, her open hands eager to grab and fondle.

Ian held up Keith’s handheld camera, brandishing it like a cross before a vampire.

Ian’s makeshift cross had the desired effect. Missy took a step back with a frumpy look on her face. “Oh. Well, make sure you get my best side.”

“Every side is your best side, Missy.” As the director, Ian knew he’d get the performance he wanted out of his actress if he lavished her with compliments.

Missy’s reaction to the compliment scared Ian. She squealed again, the kind of shrill sound that painfully pierced his eardrums like hot needles, and she reached for him with wiggling fingers. Suddenly remembering her direction, Missy shifted back onto her heels away from the camera, which Ian was holding up before his right eye, checking his angle. She smiled for the lens.

“I love the red light!” Missy said.

Ian knew she referred to the record light on the front of the camera. He would have to remember that compliments posed their own danger and would have to be minimized. Also, holding the camera to his eye was a good way to get Missy back a step. The camera was less a cross and more like strong garlic. It wouldn’t kill her, but it could repel her a few feet.

Missy’s delight turned dour. “I am a bit ticked off with your production crew. They have been messing up my house and moving things out of place. I have a very strict order for every single thing in my house, you know.”

Ian knew, all right. He knew that she must have OCD along with a dozen other mental illnesses. Where others saw a garbage dump, she saw her orderly, spic-and-span house. He might have laughed if he wasn’t so terrified of her.

Missy was certainly nothing to laugh at. His dead brother and friend were enough to kill all comedy in the situation. Ian hadn’t seen Missy stab Keith, but considering the limited number of players in this dark drama, it was easy enough to figure out who planted the knife in Keith’s chest. Missy had murder in her. She would probably call it nurture.

“I’m sorry,” Ian sincerely apologized. “But that’s a small price to pay for having a whole series filmed in your house, and turning you into a star.”

Missy considered her director’s explanation, and Ian could see her softening. He could also see that she was having a hard time letting go of her gripe.

“The Kardashians said the same thing,” Ian added.

“Oh! I’m more entertaining than those bitches,” Missy confided in Ian. He couldn’t argue her that.

While Missy prided herself on her classy, lady-like language,
bitch
was a regular word in her repertoire. If they said it on TV, then it must be family approved. There were other non-cuss words that qualified as offensive slurs that she used regularly, like
wetback
,
jig-a-boo
, and
faggot
. If other celebrities, politicians, and even the president (and what better president had there been than the Gipper?) used them, they had to be words appropriate of a polite lady. With the exception of Tickles, who was a prideful potty mouth, there was nobody around to hear Missy’s racist slurs, or correct her from using them.

Ian smiled back at Missy. He had her on his good side again. Now he needed to lead her away from his brother. Ian didn’t want Missy seeing what she had done on the floor behind him. It could put murder back in her mind. Keith had done something to make her mad, mad enough to kill one of the production crew. She might also want to replace her director if they had creative differences.

“You are,” Ian agreed. “I also see that you’re quite a collector. What are some of your favorite collections?”

Missy let out another shrill screech. Ian didn’t know how many more of those he could handle before his ears started to bleed, or before he snapped at her to shut the fuck up.

“Ooo! My collections! I have so many, I don’t know where to start!” Missy was lost in her elation.

Ian knew he had picked the right tangent to mislead Missy. He was thankful for all of the time he had spent in front of the television watching shows on Missy’s ilk. Ian was the type who watched television to learn interesting things, not to veg out. He was that rare kid who would pick PBS over PlayStation. In schoolyard terms, he was a geek.

Ian had captured Missy’s attention, but he could see that she was stuck in a quandary by his question and would need further leading.

“Why don’t we start with this room,” Ian recommended, nodding at the bedroom behind Missy.

“Okay!” Missy turned into the room. Ian followed with his camera leading him. He glanced back briefly and saw his brother, curled up and lying on his side with his back to him. He wasn’t moving.

Once Ian was inside the back bedroom, he was assaulted by the smell. It was a fragrant stew of crap, blood, and lard, and he found it obscene. Then he saw the source of the smell and had to redefine the word obscene, or at least elevate the severity of his definition.

Ian was finally introduced to the second hoarder of the house, who was nothing but a thousand pound mound of face down fat before the raw flesh upholstered sofa. The hoarder was missing skin from its neck down to its thighs. The exposed jelly of its insides was still seeping, blood staining a wide circumference of garbage around it, at least three times the blood of a normal adult. There was a lot of movement on the gore, as vermin were having a day at the new blood pool.

While Ian had every intention of destroying their footage, he aimed his camera down to film the carnage on the floor, as though an added mechanical eye would help him to process what he was seeing. He really couldn’t make sense of the blob of gore and flesh (there was more of the former than the latter). He had not had the pleasure of making Tickles’ acquaintance during the hoarder’s life, and he figured that was for the better. Considering that Keith had just stepped out of this room and this victim was fresh, he thought Keith may have made good on his plan to murder, only he had picked a different hoarder. The flaw with that theory was he didn’t think Keith had it in him to skin a morbidly obese person alive.

Ian realized he would understand it all later if he watched the footage on Keith’s camera, which had been recording. Watching would be extremely difficult, since the footage would also include the stab that had taken his brother’s life. Maybe the footage needed to be saved, if it answered questions that might haunt him for the rest of his life.

Missy was walking around the body like it wasn’t there, but he couldn’t ignore it.

“Who’s that?” Ian inquired.

Missy turned back to Ian and saw whom he was filming. She didn’t like that. Missy seized Ian’s left wrist, and her hand squeezed like a vice. Ian had to fight the urge to open his fingers in agony, which would cause him to lose the camera. Suddenly Ian was in full movement, being yanked away from the body. His feet scrambled to find purchase on the garbage beneath him.

“That’s Tickles. Never mind that camera whore. This isn’t called
Tickles’ House
,” Missy explained, holding her director and changing his shot. Ian noticed that in twisting his wrist, she was trying to point his camera directly at her.

“It’s called
Missy’s House
,” Ian reminded her.

In hearing the title of her show, Missy released Ian and slapped her hands together inches before his face. He had never heard flesh slapped together so loudly, and the sound had a sting that made him wince.

“That’s it!” Missy exclaimed in agreement.

It occurred to Ian that Missy had lost track of her script, and he had to get her back on his page. Her scatterbrain mentality made her a frustratingly hard subject to direct.

“Your collections,” Ian reminded her.

“Oh, right.”

Missy looked around her hoard with uncertainty. Ian didn’t doubt that she had a number of collections to show off, and she couldn’t narrow it down to just one. Or maybe he was giving her too much credit. It was almost as if in trying to make a decision, the pilot light for her brain activity had gone out, and she was struggling to rekindle a spark. When the spark came, it was more of a lightening strike, because she surged with life and had to restrain herself from grabbing at the camera.

“Ooo, my clown pitchers! On the walls!”

Clown pitchers
? Ian might have guessed sporks or wadded tissues or animal turds as her collections, they were the ones he could see, but he would have never guessed clown pitchers. Then he looked hard at the walls, or the limited portions visible behind the high climbing hoard. And he saw clowns.

Ian raised his camera to capture the clowniness around him. Seeing his interest in her collection, Missy stood proud.

Now that he had been made aware of Missy’s clown
pictures
, they were all he could see. And they weren’t actual pictures; they were paintings. On the wall to the right, a pair of crazy clown eyes peeked over the hoard beside a bookcase. On the wall to his left, a gaping clown mouth with oversize red lips, kind of like Missy’s, silently laughed at him.

So Missy was a connoisseur of fine flea market art. It figured.

“Impressive,” Ian complemented her. He didn’t add that he hated clowns, and found her clown pictures impressively awful.

Ian saw that Missy was also admiring her pictures, was kind of stuck on them actually. He looked around at what lay between the pictures. The majority of junk in this room was of the fast food variety, like bags, wrappers, containers, cups, and torn condiment packets. They were piled in drifts, highest around the sofa.

“You like quality restaurants, don’t you?” Ian asked.

Ian saw Missy’s appetite materialize like a vampire’s thirst for blood when it gets a whiff of the red stuff.