Read Online The Guilty One by Sophie Littlefield - Free Book Online Page A

morning—not to be underwater on the mortgage. “Isn’t it almost impossible to evict someone without all kinds of paperwork?”
    â€œOh, I imagine Norris warned him,” Pet said. There was complicity in her grin: the kind of warning, then, that fell outside the bounds of paperwork and regulations. What was Maris considering getting into? “Speaking of whom.”
    A black SUV turned slowly into the drive that ran next to the house. Maris brushed a leaf from her blouse while she listened to the engine turn off, the door opening.
    A man walked slowly back toward the front of the house, staring into his phone. Even as he rounded the steps he was staring at the little screen. He didn’t look at Maris and Pet until he was a few feet away.
    â€œHey, Norris, this is Mary,” Pet said.
    Maris held out her hand. “So nice to meet you.”
    He grunted and gave her hand a limp, reluctant shake, the kind a man gives a woman when he doesn’t expect her to shake hands at all.
    Norris was tall, his posture stiff, his skin both freckled and brown. His hair was short, his cheekbones and chin strong and jutting, his mouth set in an implacable frown. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt buttoned almost to the top, his undershirt visible through the striped fabric, a plastic pocket protector in the breast pocket. The brass plating was wearing off the buckle of his belt, revealing dull metal underneath.
    â€œYou interested in renting the apartment short term,” he said, looking not into her eyes but somewhere around her chin.
    â€œYes, I am.” Maris was conscious of a straightening of her spine, the meticulous speech that she so disliked in herself, but that was almost unavoidable when she was nervous.
    â€œJust how long we talking?”
    â€œWell, for several days.” She made a snap decision. “Two weeks.”
    He thought for a moment, twisting his mouth. “Most people like to move on the weekend. I could get someone in here this weekend, likely. But two weeks, starting today, that puts us to a Tuesday.”
    â€œOkay, through the weekend, then,” Maris said quickly. “Two weeks and, what would that be, three days.”
    Norris nodded slowly. “Place is a mess, though. That’s the thing. I was going to clean it up tonight.”
    Behind him, Maris saw Pet roll her eyes. So Norris was trying to work her—that was okay. Now that she’d seen him speak, he didn’t frighten her.
    â€œI’ll do the cleaning myself. I don’t mind.” And she didn’t—she would have gone over every surface anyway, just to expunge any trace of another person’s presence. She wanted to be the deepest kind of alone, with no one else’s shadows around.
    â€œPaint’s pretty bad, though, is the thing,” he said. “I’ll be repainting it before the next tenant. You’d have to take it the way it is. And the floors, they’re pretty scratched up. Wood, you know. No carpet.”
    â€œI don’t mind,” Maris repeated. A wood floor could be scrubbed; carpet couldn’t. Carpets held on to stains, especially the worst kind. Vomit, urine, blood. In her days of presiding over a household with a baby, a child, dinner parties, and craft projects, she’d cleaned any number of things off the floors and furniture. It was a matter of pride to Maris that she didn’t leave the worst stains for the housecleaners to deal with, at least not without making a token effort first.
    This was what had appeared, in her path. If Maris believed in God, she might have thought he’d given her a gift, directing her toward this apartment. Or at least a consolation prize, she who needed consolation so badly.
    â€œSeventeen days—that’ll be eight hundred. Up front, cash. And another five hundred security deposit. Also cash.”
    â€œHey,” Pet objected.
    â€œThat’s fine,” Maris said crisply. A cash