Traci Tyne Hilton - Mitzi Neuhaus 04 - Frozen Assets (8 page)

Mitzy clutched her door handle. “Thanks.”

9

The phone rang first thing the next morning, before Mitzy had finished her coffee.

“Did you find me the house yet?” Bonnie asked.

“Not yet. It could take a while to find the perfect place.” Mitzy sipped her coffee. She was actively searching while she had breakfast, but the pickings were slim. “How far out of town are you willing to go?”

“We want as close to downtown as we can get, but we are willing to go as far out as… well…. we’ll go into outer East County if the right place comes up, but we are sticking to the city limits.”

Mitzy sighed. Of course they were. “Okay. Well, let me keep looking, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I find something.”

“The minute you find something, okay?” Bonnie’s voice was tense.

“Of course. Have a good morning.” Mitzy ended the call and rested her head in her hand. Eleven months of the year she loved selling houses, but whenever a mystery popped up, the clients and their needs were kind of a drag. She wanted to find the perfect foreclosed, modern, huge, cheap house, too—so she could cross Bonnie and Dirk off of her to-do list.

She shuddered. The mess the squatters had left in the master bathroom of the traditional house flashed into her mind. She’d also like to see the people who had done that to the house do some serious community service.

Mitzy tapped her fingernails on the tabletop. She could always go back to the house and see if it had been taken care of. She could call the bank, or even the police, and just follow up. It was kind of her civic duty after all.

While she finished her coffee, she made a quick call to the police. They did not have the answers she was looking for.

Alonzo popped open the back door and stamped his dirty boots on the back step. “Hey, babe.”

“Hey.” She snarled at her phone.

“What?”

“Remember the squatters at the foreclosed house?”

“Yeah.” Alonzo shuddered.

“I just want to see what’s going on with that, so I called the police to ask, and they couldn’t tell me anything!” Mitzy clanked her cup down on the table. “What do we pay these people for?”

“What did you expect them to tell you?” Alonzo wrapped his hands around a mug of coffee. His knuckles were red.

“You should wear your gloves in the snow,” Mitzy said.

“What did you expect the police to tell you?” Alonzo rubbed one of his cold, red-knuckled hands across Mitzy’s cheek.

“I just thought they would say if they had gotten them out and maybe if they had talked to the bank or cleaned up the mess.”

“They’re not going to tell you that.” He sat down and flipped the newspaper open.

“What I need is a friend in the system.”

Alonzo snorted. “You burn through ‘friends’ in the police system faster than….”

“Than?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But listen to this.” He thumped the paper. “Arnold English, owner of English Cottages—”

“Paraphrase it, okay?”

“Fine.” He read in silence for a few moments. “It says here that Arnold English died of exposure and not his wounds.”

“Where does it say that?” Mitzy leaned over Alonzo’s’ shoulder.

“Here.” Alonzo pointed.

A creepy feeling stole over Mitzy’s spine. “Someone brought him down, onto the fence, and then left him to die. That’s cold, Al. Very cold.” Mitzy leaned her chin on Alonzo’s shoulder.

“I think whoever did that intended to do it all along,” Alonzo said.

Mitzy took a deep breath. “But what did Arnold want up on his ex-wife’s balcony? And did he accomplish what he was after before he died?”

Alonzo shook his head. “Good questions. I don’t think our Charlie or his sister would know the answers to them.”

“Some psychic she is.”

Alonzo pulled Mitzy onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. “Let’s lay low on this a bit, okay? This sounds like the work of a lunatic, and I don’t want them to set their sights on you.”

Mitzy leaned her head on his shoulder. “How about I try and figure out what happened with those squatters instead?”

Alonzo pulled her laptop over. “How about you find a house for you clients?”

“There is that.” Mitzy sat down in her own chair again. “And maybe a buyer for the English house so I can win our challenge.”

“Sounds good to me.” He kissed her on her head and left again.

Mitzy thought he was going to head out to the worksite, but the front door didn’t open. She turned to see what he was doing. He had grabbed his Bible and headed down the hall, a good reminder of what she ought to be doing as well. Some quality time with God would solve most of her problems, even if it didn’t solve the whodunit.

***

After some personal quiet time with God, Mitzy restarted her search for the perfect house for Bonnie and Dirk. She scratched notes on her lavender legal pad, but nothing seemed right. The good ones were out of their price range, but the right prices were just too small.

Mitzy wished she had the team from
Hidden Potential
around to show the kids how they could have fixed it back up.

She clicked through the MLS, looking for anything hip and big and cheap.

It would have been even easier to show them how to turn one of the fifty-year-old ranch houses into something modern and spectacular.

She scratched her nose. She didn’t have the cast of the HGTV show, but she did have a builder husband and a stager bestie… She could… She rubbed her lips together. She could make something happen.

She scrolled through her list of houses again. The low-slung ranch homes that translated well to the modern look didn’t seem to foreclose the way the new construction did, but there were two or three that were in the requested price range. Mitzy took some screen shots, then cropped the house pics and sent them to the printer in her office. Alonzo could show her what they could do to the house, Joan could style it, and they could Photoshop the changes. She could move Bonnie and Dirk off her to-do list.

If only the squatters could be dealt with that easily. She was itching to find out what the police had done about them.

She made a file of her ideas for the modern house transformation, the most she could do at the moment. Alonzo might have to be convinced to work with her on this one, so she had to proceed with caution.

Mitzy had another client looking for a house, something big and comfortable. She had model home taste on an apartment budget.

Mitzy picked up her phone and dialed the client’s number. One way to find out what had been done about the squatters was to just go back.

Her client Cheryl was in the middle of a divorce. Mitzy had a feeling she would not want a big project house to tackle, but the squatter house was as good a starting point as any on their search. You couldn’t beat the price per square foot, after all.

She met Cheryl at the house.

“Thanks for calling.” Cheryl ran her fingers through her bobbed gray hair. She had a smooth face and young eyes that made Mitzy guess she was in her early forties at the oldest—about Alonzo’s age—but she was small, almost frail looking, like Karina. She moved nervously, first one foot up on the porch step, then down again, as though she wasn’t sure she could go through with the tour.

“I want to be completely up front, Cheryl.” Mitzy moderated her usually brisk tone, hoping to calm her client. “This house is a bit of a mess. But the money you would save on the asking price would let you hire someone to gut it and redo the whole thing to your taste. Are you willing to pop in and have a look?”

Cheryl looked at her watch, but didn’t seem to take in the time. “Yes, that’s fine.” She looked down the street and shivered.

“It looks like snow again, doesn’t it?” Mitzy looked up at the steely skies. The clouds looked heavy and dark around the edges. She took a deep breath when she opened the house up. The earthy stink of human waste was still there.

“How big is it?” Cheryl’s gaze seemed to wander around the room, from the entry into the formal sitting room and down the hall, never really landing on any one thing.

“It’s three-thousand-eleven square feet.” Mitzy kept her eye on her client. Cheryl’s leather jacket seemed too light for the winter weather, and her canvas tennis shoes were damp. She wasn’t carrying a purse. “Is everything all right?”

Cheryl turned. Her green eyes seemed to focus, at last. “I think I made a mistake.”

Mitzy put her hand on the doorknob. “We do not have to take another step further. I have plenty of other homes to show you.” Annoyed disappointment sprung up in Mitzy’s chest. She really wanted to get upstairs to see if the squatters were still in residence.

“No, not the house. The whole thing.” Cheryl reached for her shoulder as to adjust her purse strap, but there wasn’t one.

“Let’s get out of here.” Mitzy was slow to pull the door open, hoping Cheryl would change her mind. After all, she hardly looked like she knew what time of day it was, much less what she wanted in life.

Once outside, Cheryl didn’t walk towards her car. Her gaze seemed to skip from the homes across the street to the busy road at the end of it. “Can we just walk for a minute?”

“Sure.” Mitzy shivered. It was crisp, but not completely frozen out. They would warm up while they walked, surely.

“My mother-in-law lives on this street.” Cheryl led them towards the major road. “In the mint green house at the other end of the block.”

Mitzy’s mouth opened. It took her a moment to pull the words together. “That could be awkward.”

“Oh, Mitzy, I think I made a mistake. I don’t want to leave Sean.”

Mitzy nodded, again at a loss. If she were to write the qualifications for membership into the Association of Realtors, she’d have included psychological training.

“But I need some kind of change, don’t I? I mean, life can’t really go on like this indefinitely.” Cheryl stopped at the corner of the road, her eye on the Starbucks, half a block away.

“Have you had this conversation with Sean yet?” Mitzy asked.

“Now and again. But he always asks the same question. ‘Why can’t it go on like this?’ or ‘What’s wrong with the status quo?’”

Mitzy led them towards the coffee shop. “Can I ask you how you answer his question?”

Cheryl shrugged, a little. “I can’t take the boredom anymore.”

Mitzy stopped. She knew others who had divorced because of boredom, but had never understood that. Of course, she was a newlywed when most of her friends had already been married for a decade or more, but surely bored married life was better than being bored and alone? “Did you suggest anything besides the divorce?” Mitzy cringed at her own question. It wasn’t her place, but Cheryl had brought it up.

“We don’t have kids, we don’t have pets. We’ve both worked the same jobs for decades now. He likes it all just fine, but if I have to take another day of it, I think I’ll scream.”

Mitzy guided Cheryl into Starbucks.

“But seeing his mom’s house down the street. I just don’t know. I’m terribly, terribly bored, but I do love him.”

Mitzy noted the dark bags under Cheryl’s eyes and the general slumpiness of her posture. She guessed boredom was a misdiagnosis. Cheryl looked depressed. “Have you guys tried seeing a counselor?” Mitzy tried to check her watch surreptitiously, but Cheryl seemed to be in the mood for eye contact now.

“Sean wouldn’t. He thinks I’m making too much of it.”

“Have you tried going alone?”

Cheryl shrugged. “What’s the point?”

Mitzy couldn’t get a grip on the conversation to pull it back to the house. Cheryl was not playing along with her need for a reason to pop in and check on the squatters. “Would Sean be willing to move? Just to mix things up a bit?”

Cheryl sighed again. Mitzy crinkled her nose. Obviously Cheryl wasn’t signing a contract today. Did she have anyone else on her list that might want to see inside the deal of the year? She tapped her toe on the wood floor while she waited for Cheryl to say something else. If Sean bored this woman, he must have been a truly boring man.

It was an uncharitable thought, but life was like that sometimes.

“What would you like to do now?” Mitzy asked.

“I’d like to see another house, I guess.”

Mitzy kept her sort-of-smile frozen in place. “Sure, we can do that.” She paused for a moment. “Do you think Sean might like to come as well?”

Cheryl shook her head slowly, and then burst into tears. She crumpled into a pile on the table, her head resting on her arm.

Mitzy patted Cheryl on the shoulder awkwardly. She had been using this woman as entrance to a house—and that just to make herself feel better about it. She had no reason not to go into the house on her own. Instead, she had dragged Cheryl out looking at houses when what she really needed was…

What did she need? Mitzy chewed on her bottom lip and let Cheryl cry. Cheryl needed a reason not to get a divorce. A reason to beat the statistics, to not be another Arnold, walking out on marriage after marriage just because he could. Had his first wife, or Karina, or even his string of girlfriends, all been so terrible he couldn’t have made it work? Mitzy thought not.

And here was Cheryl, willing to walk out on Sean because she was bored, and Sean, losing his family because he was scared of change, or set in his ways, or whatever his excuse for not being willing to compromise was.

Like Alonzo and his dumb little house.

Or, she had to admit, like her and her perceived need for some big, fun house. Just as she was using Cheryl to see if the squatters were out of the foreclosure, she had really been using Karina to win a petty bet with her husband. She owed both Cheryl and Karina more than that.

“Why don’t you go home?” Mitzy spoke in a low voice. “Why don’t you try telling Sean how you feel, one more time?”

Cheryl sat up and wiped her eyes on a paper napkin. “I’ve tried so many times.”

“This isn’t my place, I know…” A wave of guilt rolled over Mitzy. Cheryl wasn’t a prop to get her back into the squatter house. She was a hurting person who needed a friend, just like Karina was. “I think you need to talk to Sean again. Tell him how badly you need a change, but also tell him how much you love him.”

Cheryl wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “You’re right, of course. I knew it as soon as I hired the lawyer.” She straightened up, but the faraway look was still in her eyes. “I want change, but I do still want my husband.” She sighed heavily and rested her chin on her hand.

“Have you all thought of just taking a vacation?”

Cheryl laughed, a hollow, joyless sound. “I hired my lawyer a week after we got back from Hawaii. If Sean can’t make Hawaii fun…” She shook her head. “What I really need is a second husband. Sean can be my day to day buddy and the other guy can be for excitement.”

Mitzy snorted.

Cheryl caught her eye, a wry grin on her tired face. “I’ve got to apologize to Sean. If he can forgive me.” She stared at the wall silently for a moment. “I’d like him to forgive me for walking out. But… I don’t know if I am ready to go back.”

Mitzy reached across the table to squeeze Cheryl’s hand, but Cheryl withdrew just a bit. Mitzy wrapped her hand around her purse handle. “Talking to him is a good place to start.”

They walked back to their cars together, noting the cold, but not really talking.

Mitzy got into her car with a sigh. Out a client, a sale, and of course, a trip through the squatter house. She looked up at it. Of course, she could go through herself, but if the current resident happened to be in, she didn’t want to be found alone.

Her first attempt at non-sales related psychology had been a bust. This one had failed, but she wouldn’t give up. She owed Karina a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.

***

At dinner that night, Mitzy proposed her ‘
Hidden Potential
’ style scheme to Alonzo.

“Sure, why not?” He shoveled a forkful of chicken tetrazzini into his mouth.

“Really?” Mitzy stopped, fork poised at her mouth. “You’re sure?”

“Sounds easy, and it would help you.” He shrugged, smiled, and took a drink of water. “I do like to help you with the real estate thing you do.”

Mitzy grinned, a weight floating off of her chest. “Sometimes I wish that first-time home buyers had to take a class or five. Some pre-home-buying finances and relationship stuff.”

“Meh. You can’t be everyone’s mom.”

“But I want to be…” Mitzy whined, but playfully. “I just hate it when people screw up their lives over a house.”

Alonzo raised his eyebrow. “This doesn’t have anything to do with this house, does it?”

Mitzy cast a glance at the early-American stained oak kitchen cabinets circa 1982 and shrugged. “Everything’s connected in one way or another.”

They cleaned up their dinner and moved to the office where Mitzy brought out the images she had printed.

Alonzo started to trace the pictures onto white paper.

“We should do up some drawings of the squatter house as well,” Mitzy mused.

“I don’t think you could turn a huge classic house into a tiny mod place.” He passed her his first drawing.

She squinted at it and tilted her head. Then she erased a few lines and replaced them.

“We couldn’t make it tiny, you’ve got that right.”

Alonzo stared at her addition to his quick design and laughed. “In your dreams, Mitzy.” He erased her contribution and drew a new wall and window combination. He passed it to Mitzy.

“I like that!” She nodded approval, then erased it and put it back, but with low, horizontal windows. She passed it to Alonzo with a smile.

“Hmmm.” He held it out at arm’s length. “We could do that.” He laid the paper down and changed the layout of the deck. Then he passed it back.

“Just no.” Mitzy erased again.