Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [52]
Upstairs, a total of five rooms wrapped around the staircase, including a full bath off the master bedroom. As a child, Martin had inhabited one of the smaller rooms tucked into the northern corner of the house, but now this room served as his business office, the door always locked when not in use. Upon inheriting the home, he had moved into the master bedroom and kept the other two rooms as guest rooms, leaving them furnished just as they had been the day he moved back in. In fact, one of the guest rooms had yet to be occupied since the day Martin had inherited the home, and so he had yet to change the sheets that his mother had put on the bed sometime before she died.
The garage wasn’t the only place where Martin had made changes to his parents’ original design. Almost immediately upon inheriting the house, Martin re-tiled the kitchen floor and countertops, replacing a hunter green, which his mother had installed just a year before her death, with pristine white surfaces. Martin despised the color green and had found it amusing how often his mother would emphasize the word “hunter” when describing the color of her newly decorated kitchen, as if one word apologized for the other.
More significant than just despising the color, Martin also did not approve of dark colors in the kitchen or bathroom, as they served as effective agents in the hiding of dirt and germs. He believed that if there was a germ festering in the kitchen, it was better to be able to deal with it rather than allowing it to hide in the grout between green tiles.
Though much of the furniture throughout the house remained primarily the same, Martin had removed a great deal, emptying shelves of bric-a-brac, throwing away ornamental chairs that decorated corners of rooms but served no real purpose, and tearing up the carpeting in the family room and master bedroom. An empty shelf was a thing of beauty in Martin’s mind, with its clean, straight lines and absence of useless objects. Carpeting was another household furnishing that Martin deplored because it was impossible to keep clean. Dirt on a hardwood floor or on tile could be seen and removed easily, but carpeting allowed dirt to linger and hide no matter how powerful one’s vacuum cleaner might be. Though it had cost him a considerable sum, one of Martin’s first projects was to hire someone to restore the hardwood floors that his parents had covered with carpeting long ago.
With his newly acquired items stored in their predetermined locations throughout the house, Martin went to the upstairs bathroom to shower, placing his contaminated jeans into a brown paper bag before rolling it closed. Once in the shower, he began scrubbing vigorously, removing any microscopic evidence that he had potentially collected from his clients’ homes, as well as any of the fetid remnants of the toilet water that had once covered Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush. Even in the presence of these germs, Martin smiled when he considered the contrast between this shower and the showers that the Claytons had taken earlier that day. Standing under the nearly scalding water, Martin’s muscles finally began to relax. But just a short time ago, he had been straining to hear the sound of a shower from a nearly unimaginable position.
An incredibly foolish position too, Martin reminded himself. With his years of experience, he wondered how he could’ve been stupid enough to break so many rules in order to help a client.
All that danger over a toothbrush. It was almost impossible to believe.
As he washed his hair for the second time (as prescribed on the