Page 103 of Eyes Like Angel

“Adrian told me,” Marceline clarified. “His mom’s an extreme shopaholic.”

“Are you getting money, too?”

The raven plopped onto my lap, begging me to pet its silk feathers.

“Me? Hell no, I got a solid job. Why would I go to this one? I’d rather deal with angry customers yelling over a small mistake about their lack of frost on top than Mrs. Rivers dragging me by the hair like that last chick. Besides, the customers I got were mainly tame and more tolerable.”

Still clueless, I carefully listened to her story.

“Customers like those bimbos over there,” Marceline pointed at a groupie, “they’re easy to handle. They cry like a little baby in a cradle when their pink drink order goes wrong.It tasted bland, they said to me, and some older women threw a hot coffee at my face, but luckily it’s warm. Mrs. Rivers, on the other hand was a real pain in the ass.”

Cringing at her profanity, my curiosity tempted to get the better of me. “What happened?”

“Mrs. Rivers and I, you mean? Oh, it’s a long story.” She flicked her wrist. “I was working at her place one time, where I needed a first official job. This is back in February or March. When I first came in and, of course, I was being so nice to her, telling her to have a good day, and then she threw me a wet sponge for me to clean up her godawful expensive tiles. That’s not all, Sister Eva, Mrs. Rivers was picky—extremely picky at certain things, even where to position her previous vases.”

“Vases?”

She drew an inward gasp. “She never told you where to position her vases, huh?”

“No, she didn’t,” I said, petting the raven. “She instructed me to do the dishes and wiped off the grimes accurately by using a disinfect spray and dish soap and water to clean.”

“Disinfect spray?”

I nodded almost eagerly. “I wasn’t sure if I was doing the steps right.”

“Geez, you’re the lucky one,” she grunted. “I can’t stand her and her fake-girly shit. All the older women around Fort Heaven are so fucking weird, but not as weird and rude as Mrs. Rivers and Mrs. Divine.”

Intrigued by her blunt statement, I eyed on her curiously.

She leaned forward. “Ah, you wanted an explanation then, huh, girly?”

Unfazed at her statement, I silently encouraged her.

“She’s a pain in the ass. She walks like a stick and she talks like a Chihuahua. Even Mrs. Divine, twice as bitchy, they always had this weird vibe going on, you know? When I used to employ under Mrs. Rivers’ ‘care’, she said all kinds of shit to make me feel fucking tired after work. She’d cry and whine about how I positioned the flower vase wrong, or set the volume down to 11 as she was relaxing with her mini foot spa she set up at her living room as I scrubbed her feet, because eleven is a holy number. Sometimes when she handed me a meal for my lunch break, I’d spied on her spitting on the meal, before giving it to me, even my refresher; she’d spin her spit, mixed it up on her cutesy blender before distributing it to me. Since then I packed my own lunch from the bakery shop, and it’s not the worst part.”

“What was the worst part?” I lowered my voice.

“Do you want to know how I got fired from that crazy lady?” she tested.

Again, I anticipated her backstory, engrossed at an unfamiliar territory of gossip.

Marceline shrugged. “Sometimes when I ushered inside her gaudy manor with an emergency key, I heard noises, like, weird noises.”

My brows scrunched. I stopped petting the raven.

“What kind of noises?”

“Trust me, girl, you don’t want to know,” she said, but mischief is hinted in her serious tone, but in unison, she’s regretting her hasty decision, shaking her head in disbelief as if she’s changing her mind.

I, not once, overheard bizarre noises on the third floor whenever I attended. Mostly, in my sleepless nights, I’d often caught little moths shifting against the wood.

Marceline’s tongue clicked. “She’s desperate, I’m telling you. The moment I came in, I hear moans. Not in a painful kind of moan where you’re dying or whatever.”

Silence droned as the ravens stayed in place, puckered its beak to the pebbles after I tossed the rations aiming at them.

“As I got upstairs on the third floor, the door was slightly open, and as I peeked through the gap, I caught not one but three men—three young men on the bed with Mrs. Rivers. Again the situation wasn’t the worst part, three young men who were on the bed with her; they were Adrian’s closest friends—”

“Hey, I’ve been searching all over for you,” a booming voice called.