Never Use the Good Towels

Chapter One: The Rules

There are four rules of house-sitting, and I wrote all of them myself on the back of a Safeway receipt during my first week in the business.

Never sleep in the master bed.

Never read the mail.

Never use the good towels.

Never eat anything frozen with a date written on it.

By the spring of 2002 I had broken every one of them, many times, in many houses. I kept a second list on the back of the same receipt, ranking the violations by how much I had enjoyed them. Number one was a king-size memory-foam bed in a dentist's house in Trinidad, where I slept for eleven hours straight and woke up believing in God. Number four was a Ziploc of frozen lasagna labeled MOM'S LAST, 3/98. I ate it before I fully read the label. I still think about it with guilt and a certain amount of respect. It was excellent lasagna. She had clearly held nothing back.

My name is Kelly Pawlak. I was twenty-seven years old, and I had not had an address in three years.

I had a P.O. box at the Arcata post office. I had a membership at a gym out by the freeway that I used only for the showers. I had a laminated business card that read PAWLAK HOME CARE: PETS, PLANTS, PEACE OF MIND, and a 1994 Toyota Corolla with my entire life filed in the back in labeled milk crates. WINTER. SUMMER. DOCUMENTS. KITCHEN (BASIC). KITCHEN (ASPIRATIONAL). The aspirational crate held a garlic press and one nice wineglass, wrapped in a sweater, for the day I would have a home to press garlic in.

I did not think of myself as homeless. I thought of myself as between homes, the way a hermit crab is between shells, except that I was very organized about it and the hermit crab is not.

The trick was the calendar. If I booked the jobs back to back, a Monday-to-Friday cat in Sunny Brae into a Friday-to-Tuesday orchid collection in McKinleyville, I never had to sleep in the Corolla for more than a night or two. On those nights I parked behind the Co-op, under the one light that worked, with the seat tipped back and a fleece over my face, and I told myself it was camping. In the mornings I showered at the gym and walked out with wet hair and a protein bar, like a woman with a life.

My clients believed I was a responsible graduate student at Humboldt State, studying something with a long name and no jobs at the end of it. I had three glowing references. I had written all three myself, using three different pens and, for one of them, my left hand.

Humboldt County was perfect for this kind of work. It is full of comfortable eccentrics who own nice houses and leave them constantly. They go to silent retreats and drumming circles and their daughters' weddings in Vermont. They own animals with medical needs and plants with names. None of them wants to come home to a stranger, so they hire one in advance and call her by her first name.

That April I was juggling three regular clients, and I loved them the way you love people whose refrigerators you know better than their faces.

Herb and Peggy Boyle lived in Sunny Brae in a ranch house full of macramé. They traveled every spring to visit grandchildren in Tucson, and they left behind Lyle, an eighty-one-year-old desert tortoise who had belonged to Peggy's father. Lyle came with a binder. The binder was forty pages long, and Peggy had illustrated it by hand in colored pencil. There were sections called LYLE'S MOODS, LYLE AND WEATHER, and IF LYLE SEEMS SAD. There was a full-page drawing of Lyle eating a dandelion, with arrows pointing to his mouth and the word GOOD.

Herb had contributed one page to the binder. It said, in block capitals, HE IS A TORTOISE. HE WILL BE FINE. Peggy had crossed it out with a different color pencil and written underneath it, Ignore Herb.

I did not ignore Herb. I liked Herb. But I read every page of the binder, and I warmed Lyle's dandelions to room temperature in a saucer, because I had once let a goldfish die in Fieldbrook and I was not going to let it happen to a creature who had been alive during the Hoover administration.

Then there was Art Espinosa, who lived in a bungalow two blocks off the Plaza with three ferrets named Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee. Art wrote the police-blotter column for the North Coast Clarion. The column was called The Beat. Art wrote it the way other men tell war stories. A stolen lawnmower was a brazen daylight raid. A loose cow on Samoa Boulevard was a bovine standoff. Art was fifty-four, with a mustache he had been grooming since the Nixon years, and he believed the whole county was one bad week away from becoming a crime novel.

Art went to his sister's in Fresno twice a month. He called it going on assignment. Every time he left, he left his column drafts on the desk, and every time, I read them.

Reading drafts was not technically against my rules. My rules only covered mail. I had once considered adding a fifth rule about other people's desks, and I had decided against it, for the same reason you don't install a lock on a door you enjoy walking through.

That spring Art's drafts were about one thing only. The Bath Burglar.

Someone had entered seven empty homes in Arcata and Bayside since January. Nothing had been taken. No drawers had been opened. No jewelry was missing. The only evidence each time was a ring around the bathtub and a towel, folded neatly in thirds, left on the edge of the tub. One homeowner told police the towel had been folded "like a hotel." Another said it was folded better than she could do it herself, and she had worked at the Eureka Inn for nine years.

Art's latest draft lay on his desk under a ferret-shaped paperweight. The headline said BATH BURGLAR STRIKES AGAIN: SEVENTH TOWEL FOUND FOLDED. The first line said: "He comes in the night. He draws the water. He leaves the way a ghost leaves, except a ghost does not need to rinse."

I read it twice while Bradlee chewed on my shoelace. It was the best thing that had ever happened to my business.

The Bath Burglar only went into houses that were empty. Nobody wanted their house to be empty anymore. My phone, a prepaid Nokia that I topped up at the 7-Eleven, rang from morning to night. A couple in Westhaven wanted someone for their week in Cabo. A man in Bayside wanted someone just to sleep at his place while he went to a trade show in Reno. A woman on the Arcata bottoms wanted someone to sit with her three llamas, which, she explained, were not in danger from the burglar but would be upset if he came. By the end of April I was booked solid into June. For the first time in three years, I was looking at a whole month without a single night behind the Co-op.

I was standing in Art's kitchen, feeling rich, when the Nokia rang again. I thought it was another client. It was my sister.

Melissa Costa is my half-sister. She is six years older than me, from my father's first marriage, and she grew up mostly at her mother's place across town in Redding. We share a father, a chin, and a way of saying "Okay" that means the opposite. She had a husband named Dwight who drove a propane truck, and a ten-month-old son named Brody, who was screaming in the background of every phone call I had had with her since he was born.

"Kelly," she said. "Don't hang up."

"I wasn't going to hang up."

"You were thinking about it. I can hear you thinking about it."

Brody screamed. It was a long, high sound, like a kettle with a grudge.

"Is he okay?"

"He's teething. He's fine. Dad is not fine."

I pulled a chair out from Art's kitchen table and sat down without meaning to. Woodward climbed up my leg.

"Shasta County cited him," Melissa said. "For the house. Somebody from code enforcement came out because the neighbors complained about the smell, and they couldn't get the front door open. Kelly, they couldn't get the door open. It's blocked from inside. There's a hearing in six weeks. If he doesn't clear it, they condemn it."

"Condemn it," I said.

"That's the word they used. They gave me a pamphlet. It has a drawing of a sad house on the front."

I looked at Woodward. Woodward looked at me. Ferrets are not good at comfort.

"I need you to come help me clear it," Melissa said. "I can't do it alone. I have a baby. Dwight works six days. And he's your dad too."

My father, Fred Pawlak, was a retired pharmacist. He had counted pills for thirty years at Shasta Drug, and he could tell you the side effects of anything you named. He was a gentle man who wore cardigans in August. I had not been inside his house since I left it at sixteen, which was the year after my mother walked out. I had not been inside it since 1991. I had not wanted to be.

"I can't," I said. "I'm booked."

"Booked until when?"

"Through spring."

"Kelly, it's April. It's spring right now."

"Then I'm booked through now."

There was a pause. Brody stopped screaming for a second, probably to catch his breath for a bigger scream.

"He asks about you," Melissa said. "Every time I go over there. He stands in the doorway, because that's the only place left to stand, and he asks if you've called."

"Tell him I'm fine."

"Are you fine?"

I looked around Art's kitchen. It was clean. It was warm. There was a ferret on my shoulder and a pot of good coffee on the counter, and none of it was mine.

"I'm great," I said. "I have to go. A tortoise needs me."

I hung up before she could say anything else, and then I sat in the kitchen for a long time with Woodward asleep in my hood.

On Friday I was starting a new job, a three-week stay at a Victorian on J Street that belonged to a widow named Joyce Dempsey. Joyce was going on a Puccini cruise. I had never met anyone who went on a Puccini cruise, and I was looking forward to it.

That was the house where I found the man in the bathtub.