Pest by Elizabeth Foscue EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Elizabeth Foscue
- Language: English
- Genre: Marriage & Divorce Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
“Rats,” I said.
“What? No. Are you sure?”
It was the last day of August and the Montecito morning was almost
warm. The soothing tinkle of a water feature screened the ambient sounds
of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. The sky was blue and clear and the air
smelled of flowering jasmine.
I stared down at the field of scattered rat poo. “Yes.”
Irma, the house manager, said some very bad words in Spanish and
stomped back and forth across a patch of wooly thyme. The chateau-style
Montecito estate had been recently landscaped, the guest cottage planted
with a thoughtful mix of drought-tolerant succulents and a ground cover of
flowering ice plant.
Rats love ice plant.
“How did they get in?” Irma wailed. “No, it doesn’t matter. You have
to get them out. The Guests,”—she referred to them with verbal capitals
—“say the noise kept them up all night long.”
This I did not doubt. The rustic plaster application on the exterior walls
camouflaged the telltale rat smudges, but to a trained eye—which, I’m sad
to say, mine is—they were everywhere. And the rat runways, those little
trails rats bushwhack as they go about their ratty business, were spacious
boulevards. This place had serious numbers of rats in the ceiling and
anyone staying here would be getting an all-night, all-rat revue.
“We’ll have to tent it,” I said.
“What?” Irma looked like she might have a stroke. “No! Where will
The Guests go?”
There must have been ten bedrooms in the enormous house I’d passed
in my search for the service lot, but maybe sharing a roof with visitors was
considered gauche, maybe the main house had bad feng shui, maybe the
guests were Suppressive Persons—I didn’t even ask. Rich Montecito
weirdos make all other rich weirdos look like amateurs.
“Can’t you just block up the hole? Trap them in there?” Irma pleaded.
Trapped rats are cannibalistic. If you seal them up together, your ratBroadway becomes the rat-Octagon as they fight and scream and consume
one another. But this is way more detail than most clients want. I gave an
apologetic shrug and pulled the metal clipboard from under my arm, turning
to a fresh estimate form.
“Oh my god, oh my god. Listen, okay? We can tent it if you’re done by
four. The Guests are wine-tasting in Santa Ynez but they’ll be back for
dinner.”
Clients always want the job done by four, if not immediately. And, as
my dad likes to say, if wishes had wings, bullfrogs wouldn’t bump their
butts jumping over logs.
I wrote a nice, big number at the bottom of the form, ripped the sheet
off the pad, and handed it over. “The structure will have to be vacated for
seventy-two hours. And we can’t get to it before Thursday.” I turned and
padded over to the path I’d walked in on. If there was any traffic on the 101,
I was going to be late. “Call that number if you want to get on the
schedule.”
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