The Silent Housekeeper

The Silent Housekeeper

“SOME STAINS CAN NEVER BE REMOVED” Selma Lou Comer hadn’t been able to speak a word since her 8th birthday. She’d arrived home from school that day looking forward to changing from school clothes into a party dress and welcoming her school chums to a birthday party at her home. Instead, she opened her front door into the scene of a massacre. Both her parents had been violently killed, the blood splatter reaching the helium party balloons bouncing across the ceiling. They were still dripping when she arrived home. After nearly a decade in a mental health facility after she’d shut down and become nearly catatonic, her case worker felt she was well enough to rejoin society, but she felt like an alien. She’d always loved cleaning things, setting things to rights, so she set up her own Cleaning Business, ‘Lou-Lou’s Quik Kleen’, and soon had clients. Cleaning, like doing Math, (her second favorite activity) was safe, predictable. It soothed something that was gnarled and busted apart inside of her. It was something she could control. When a better opportunity, offered to her by one of her regular clients fell into her lap, she jumped on it. But her job required her to reside in the same home as the people she worked for - -And she would find that people were never quite what they seemed to be- And not remotely predictable! Her life seems a twisted mystery, and one not so easily solved!