Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
“Apparently, your wife, a Mrs. Helen Archer, brought them into the house.”
“Why the hell would she do that?”
“I’m not sure, sir; you’d have to ask her that.”
“Where is she?”
“I have no idea. She was told not to vacate the premises until we returned to decontaminate her a few hours ago, but she wasn’t here when we returned. We have to accelerate demolition because the situation is only going to get worse the longer we leave it, and that could put the other homes in danger.”
My head was spinning in all different directions at once. “When did this happen?” He looked at some notes on his clipboard.
“It says here it was called in on Saturday.” Okay, so that has nothing to do with Alyssa. We didn’t tell her the truth until Sunday and on Saturday she was busy with the wedding.
But what the hell was Helen thinking? I pulled out my phone to call her to see what the hell was going on. I guess my phone got screwed up inflight or something because when I turned it on, there was nothing. No calls, no texts, nothing.
Which, now that I think about it isn’t normal. After she didn’t show up in Cabo, I was so relieved that I didn’t even think about calling her, and since she wasn’t harassing me, I figured she was sulking because I’d gone to the wedding ahead of her.
I didn’t want her there in the first place, which she knew, and I wasn’t too worried about her retaliating because I had already made up my mind to file for divorce as soon as we got back anyway, so nothing she did was going to make much difference to me at this point.
Had she somehow found out about my plans? That can’t be. I’d been very careful not to give myself away in any way. She doesn’t go into my room, so she wouldn’t have noticed that I’d been removing my stuff over the last year or so.
There were just a few suits and toiletries left in there anyway, and only my tools and my old classic Aston Martin in the garage, along with my golf clubs; that’s all that was left for me to take.
I’d planned on taking care of our finances sometime this week because that was the last thing needing doing before I filed. I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to scalp her in the divorce; I know that judges don’t look kindly on things like that, and though I hated the thought of giving her half my shit, it was well worth it to get away from her.
She would probably have won the house in the divorce, though, so why the hell would she do this? I looked for her number, which I didn’t know by heart and it wasn’t even in my contacts and didn’t show up anywhere.
I started to ask the boys if they knew it, but I knew that was a lost cause because why would they? I don’t think any of them ever had a conversation with her and I know for a fact that they never even said Hi to her after Alyssa went off to college.
None of my kids had crossed my door in more than five years except for the night Alyssa came over, and they came to threaten me if I called the cops on her, as if I would. I guess they knew that Helen would have, but I had put my foot down that night, which was the first time I had done so in I don’t know how long.
All of this is what is leading me to believe that bitch had done this purposely. “I need to get my car out of the garage.”
“Uh!” He looked like he wanted to argue, but I wasn’t having it.
“The only way to do that is if you get the vehicle cleared by an exterminator. They’ll have to decontaminate it and leave it in a secured location to get rid of the infestation if the fleas have made it to the garage and inside the car, which may be the case.”
“How many fleas are we talking about?” Where the hell did she get fleas? We don’t have any pets.
“You see that window, sir? Those are not curtains.” I looked at the window he indicated, and it took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. There had to be thousands of them if that was indeed fleas.
I opened and closed my mouth, at a loss for words. My kids were already on their phones looking for help for me, which I appreciated because I didn’t know what to do first. Brian was the one who came up with the idea of calling the fire department to hose down the car once we got it out, which we had to wait to do because they needed to set up a decontamination tent.