Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [25]
Completing his inventory, Martin reached out to shut the medicine cabinet, simultaneously glancing at his watch (3 minutes, 27 seconds remaining), when the sleeve on his left arm brushed up against Cindy Clayton’s electric toothbrush, standing upright at the edge of the sink, nesting in its charger. Cindy Clayton’s to be sure, for the ancient plastic toothbrush, nearly devoid of bristles, that was kept in a drawer below the sink was surely her husband’s. The toothbrush tottered for a moment, clinging to its perch, and then succumbed to gravity and toppled over, falling toward the open toilet bowl beside the sink.
Martin saw all this happen, as if the events were occurring in slow motion, but did nothing, his left arm frozen over the empty charger and his right affixed by his side like a slab of beef. He watched in a mixture of awe and terror as the toothbrush completed two and a half turns before slicing through the water in the bowl as smoothly as an Olympic diver. A baritone plop, followed the toothbrush’s contact with the water, caused him to start out of his trance. Had he been more alert, there was a good chance that Martin could have caught the toothbrush on its way down, or perhaps stopped it from leaving the charger entirely, but the incident was beyond his initial comprehension.
It was something for which he was completely unprepared.
Contingency plans were Martin’s bread and butter, the secret to his success, the reason he was able to work with very little anxiety or fear. He had designed plans for every conceivable emergency and genuinely loved preparing and rehearsing them. He had fire-escape plans drawn up for each of his clients’ homes and rehearsed these plans yearly, as children are instructed to do when firefighters visit their schools in September with coloring books and blankets used to simulate smoke. He knew what to do in case of an earthquake and had identified the best place to stand in each of his clients’ homes, even though the last earthquake of any magnitude to strike Connecticut took place on May 16, 1791 (a date Martin had committed to memory). He even had a plan of action in the event that he encountered a genuine burglar while visiting a client’s home (drop to the ground, cry and beg for mercy while pretending to be a visiting cousin from Pennsylvania with little familiarity of the home). Even this he rehearsed yearly in each home (practicing the actual crying and begging from the confines of his own home), because one can never be too prepared.
But this situation was anything but conceivable. “The toilet lid should’ve been down to begin with!” he thought as he watched the toothbrush bob up and down in the bowl. “Why can’t people put the lid down? Why can’t people put the lid down?”
But now what?
With time running out (2 minutes, 40 seconds and counting), Martin had to make a decision. His choice seemed simple and yet impossibly difficult. He could remove the toothbrush from the bowl (thankfully he was wearing gloves, though the thought of reaching into the bowl still made him cringe), run it under hot water, dry it off and return it to the charger. No harm, no foul.
Only there would be a foul, the foulest of fouls, because this would mean that despite any amount of washing, Cindy Clayton would be brushing her