Getting There

DH dropped Raquelle off around the corner from the cul de sac where the bank president, Barbara Darcy, lived with her husband.

Nobody would see her on the street, it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. It was too bad, because she loved her outfit. She had found this kind of double-breasted wool bouclé suit in olive green at one of the outlet malls, and managed to find a pillbox hat in a matching color online.

She knew appearances meant a lot, and in her outfit she looked like she should be selling make up or some high-end thing targeting women. She thought it would make more sense if she had a rolling bag but DH didn’t think so.

Anything a door-to-door decluttering services salesperson would need would fit into an attaché case, he argued. It was a suitcase. Raquelle hated that DH called it an attaché case. It seemed out of place. Going door to door with a rolling bag made so much sense. It was something to do, to focus on.

Instead she stopped at the corner of the cul de sac and had a cigarette and looked at the mansion at the end. It was so much bigger than the others. It looked out of place.

In fact, there had been several additions made to it ever since the bank president moved in with her husband about five or six years ago, just before the pandemic started.

They managed to have the backyard patio extended before the lockdowns, and a hole dug for a pool. But the crew that was supposed to start working on the outdoor pool stopped halfway to her house when they got called back by the contracting company because all work had been suspended because of the state of emergency. It was a Friday the 13th, Barbara would never forget it.

It was only supposed to be two weeks and she was at first hopeful the work could still be done by the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day, then by the official start of summer, June 21st, then by the Fourth of July. The contractors didn’t return to work on the pool until after Labor Day. By the time they were done, temperatures were in the forties.

Barbara considered this one of the big tragedies of the pandemic, next to being stuck working from home with her husband in the house for a month before the board finally let her go back to work at the bank. Her husband was so worried he bought all this personal protective equipment for her and wouldn’t let her go back to the bank unless she promised to wear all of it.

So she’d sit there at the bank alone, looking like she had a plastic bag over her head. Once she got home, he never made her shower or seem to care about whether she was bringing disease into the house.

After the pool was finally finished she went into overdrive. She had a greenhouse added, then a second floor over the garage, then an additional garage, then a new east wing for the mansion.

Raquelle did not like the way it all looked. It wasn’t just bigger than the other houses, it looked like it had been jammed into the lot on which it stood. She put the cigarette out on her heel and resisted the urge to pocket it for later, throwing it into the street instead before realizing someone might notice that and make a big deal out of it. She should’ve kept it.

She looked back, as if wanting to pull on something. Like a rolling bag. Then she took a deep breath and made her way up the rest of the street to the front door of the mansion.

She felt like a ghost or an apparition, gliding down the street unseen, but she was being watched. There were not a lot of pedestrians in this cul de sac and she didn’t look like the type selling politics or religion, though she must be selling something in that briefcase.

The eyes followed her as she got to the lawn of the mansion and followed the meandering path to the front door. Saw her wait before she knocked. Why was she nervous? Better to keep keeping an eye on her.