Page 31

31

I’m at the laundromat.

It’s not my favorite place to be, especially after I spent most of last night tossing and turning, having nightmares about finding Mr. Zimmerly’s dead body. But I don’t have much of a choice. I don’t have Krista to wash my clothes at work anymore, and I can’t trust my own washer and dryer.

So now I am relegated to using the laundromat two blocks away. It’s the weekend, and I don’t have anything else to do, so I threw my clothes in the washer, and now I’m sitting in the corner with my phone, the laundry basket and bottle of emasculating detergent with a stuffed animal parade on it at my feet. I’ve got another twenty minutes to kill until I need to switch over to the dryer.

My life is exciting.

Krista still hasn’t messaged me back after I told her I missed her. But the fact that she messaged me at all is a good sign. Maybe I won’t die alone in my bathroom.

Although at this point, I would give anything just to live in my house alone again.

I didn’t see Whitney last night at all. I assume she came home at some point, but she wasn’t around when I went to sleep. I expected to get woken up by that loud thumping coming from above me—I was waiting for it—but the top floor of the brownstone was silent the entire night. I’m not even sure she was there this morning. Of course, we’re not on speaking terms, so it’s not like she would let her presence be known to me.

While I’m waiting for the clothes to finish in the washer, I type Whitney’s name into the Google search engine. The first search I did of her name didn’t turn up much, but I’m feeling a lot more motivated right now. And bored.

Once again, the results are minimal. I check all the social media outlets one by one, but I don’t see any accounts under her name. She’s a ghost.

Then I get an idea.

When she was applying to move in, she allowed me to take a photo of her driver’s license. I find the image, still saved in my photos, and crop it out of the license. Then I bring up a facial recognition website and upload the photo. I hold my breath as the search engine runs.

Apparently, Whitney has an extremely generic face, because pages of photos appear on the screen. I scroll through the dozens of women who look like Whitney but not like her at all. A photographer named Cherilynn. A software engineer named Alexandra. A PhD candidate named Amanda.

None of them look familiar to me. None of them are women I have wronged in the past. Not that I’ve wronged a lot of women. I can be an asshole at work when I need to be, but I’ve generally been decent to all the women I’ve dated. There have been, of course, a few exceptions. There was that party during my senior year of high school when I made out with a cheerleader in the bathroom while my girlfriend was doing shots in the kitchen. There was that pregnancy scare during my sophomore year of college, and I acknowledge I could have behaved better. Still, I eventually said the right things before she miraculously got her period and we broke up.

Anyway, Whitney isn’t any of those girls. I never dated her. I never laid eyes on her before she came to live with us. I’d bet my life.

It’s driving me out of my mind trying to figure it out. Who is this woman that I allowed into my home? And more importantly, what does she want from me?

I lower my phone in frustration, and as I stretch out my legs, I accidentally kick the bottle of laundry detergent. I knock it over, and of course, I didn’t manage to screw the top on properly, so detergent spills freaking everywhere. This is not my day. Actually, it’s feeling like it’s not my year .

I find the bathroom in the laundromat and grab a bunch of paper towels to clean up the mess. I return to where I spilled the liquid detergent, and I crouch down on my knees. Well, at least this will give me something to do until it’s time to move my clothes. It really has come to this.

But as I’m bent over the spilled laundry detergent, the scent of citrus smacks me in the face. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now, with the detergent out of the bottle, it’s painfully obvious.

Limonene.

There’s limonene in my freaking laundry detergent.

I grab the bottle, which is now nearly empty. It’s the same sensitive skin detergent I’ve always used with no extra chemicals or fragrances. I check the ingredients, making sure it doesn’t contain limonene. It doesn’t.

Which means somebody mixed a detergent with limonene with my detergent without me knowing it.

It finally makes sense. I finally understand why I was having an allergic reaction to all the clothes I washed, even though I was obsessively cleaning the washing machine prior to each use. Because I was washing my clothes in limonene .

I’m so furious, I want to throw the bottle of laundry detergent across the room. Impulsively, I grab my phone and shoot off a text to Krista:

Whitney has been putting limonene in my laundry detergent! That’s why I’ve been breaking out in a rash! I told you she was behind all this!

As soon as I send the message, I regret it. Krista already thinks there’s something strange going on between me and Whitney. I’m not helping things with this message.

I try to unsend it, but it then gets marked as “read,” so now it’s too late. Krista read what I wrote. And once more, she’s not replying.

Okay, winning Krista back is not going to be as easy as I hoped. But right now, I need to focus on getting Whitney out of my house. My life is never going to recover until that woman is gone.

But before that, I need to go out and buy myself more laundry detergent and wash my clothes. Again.

Time to clean up this mess.