Page 3 of The Irish Redemption

I love it.

My next two rooms are swift cleans. Nothing more than ashtrays to empty, bins to unload, and a restock of the bathrooms. By the time I reach the third, I’m calm once more and fully engrossed in the music pouring through my brain. There’s nothing but me, my summer playlist, and the sharp scents of bleach, drain cleaner, and the peach scent bombs I leave as I exit each room. It’s hardly a deserving scent for a place like this, but I’ve seen the people who stay here. Many look like they’re in need of an escape, so I like to think they are the ones who appreciate the fruity or floral scents I leave behind.

The third room shows evidence of a party, and it takes me longer to clean up the empty beer cans and chip bags. I make the bed, timingmyself and cheering softly when I beat my record of three minutes and eighteen seconds.

“Tastes like strawberries on a summer evening,” I sing to myself, nudging open the bathroom door with my hip. “And it sounds just?—”

My singing halts abruptly and my breath catches in my throat as my chest seizes up tightly. The cleaning basket in my hand clatters to the floor, landing in a large pool of blood and sending a spray of crimson droplets up the walls already covered in the thick, dark gore.

My heart freezes, turning my blood to ice as the carnage of the bathroom registers in my mind.

I scream.

Loud and sharp.

Splayed out like a twisted piece of art is the blood-soaked body of a man with his throat slit so wide I can see the white bone of his neck.

There’s a corpse in the tub.

Holy shit.

2

EVELYN

I’ve never seen a dead body before.

In the movies, they make them look peaceful. Like death was something they expected and was as painful as ripping off a Band-Aid, and like the blood is nothing more than the strawberry syrup you pump into your morning coffee.

Reality is painfully different.

I can’t get that man’s face out of my mind. His eyes were open, staring at me but not seeing. His mouth hung open, twisted in a silent cry that still oddly rings in my ears, and his fingers were rigid and claw-like as if he were still gripping onto his attacker for dear life.

But what haunts me the most is the wound at his throat. It was so wide and open, stretching the width of his neck as if his entire skeleton was trying to claw its way out of his flesh. There was so much blood soaked into his suit, sprayed up the walls, and pooled out across the floor.

And the smell.

A terrible wet, coppery smell that clings to my nose and floods my lungs even now as I sit in my manager’s office clutching a paper cup filled with cold, terrible coffee.

That man. That poor man.

How can he be dead?

How can someone be murdered here and no one heard a thing?

“You know what to say, right?” Gerald paces in front of me, wearing a hole into the floor with how frantically he walks back and forth. “You tell them nothing, you hear me? Not a fucking thing.”

I don’t speak. I can’t. I’m frozen, staring at the dirty carpet as if the body is still there staring back at me.

“Do you hear me, Evelyn?” Gerald snaps. “You don’t say a thing.”

Slowly, I lift my head and stare at the blurry version of him that dances through my unshed tears.

“Are you even fucking listening? Those cops upstairs don’t care about you, alright? They don’t give a shit about anything, so you don’t say a word about how we run things here, understand?”

We.

As if I have a stake or responsibility in running this place. As if the dead body in the bathtub is my fault as much as it is his.

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