Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

for even a minute. We stopped for a quick lunch and arrived in Vegas shortly before 4:00 P.M .

    Ignoring the DO NOT DISTURB sign, my dad banged on the door to room 385 of the Excalibur, I think even louder than he banged on my door that morning. There was no answer and my father managed to convince the hotel manager to open the room for us. A commingling of scents greeted us at the door—stale cigar smoke, flat day-old beer, and the sour, distinctive odor of vomit. Fortunately, the manager excused himself and allowed my father and me to take in this spectacle privately. Upon viewing the room, with its tacky winks to medieval times, Uncle Ray’s debauchery seemed a fitting homage to King Arthur’s court.
    My father scanned the room, searching for evidence of Ray’s present whereabouts. He gathered a few scraps of paper from the nightstand, studied the refuse, checked the closets, and then headed for the door. In the foyer, my father turned and looked back at me.
    “I’m going to find Ray,” he said. “You clean this place up while I’m gone.”
    “What do you mean, clean?” I asked, needing clarification.
    My father replied with the dry, even tone of a computerized voice, “To clean. Verb. To rid of dirt. To remove half-empty beer cans from window and dispose of appropriately. To empty overflowing ashtrays. To mop up vomit on bathroom floor. To clean.”
    That wasn’t the definition I was hoping for. “Dad, they have this thing in hotels now. It’s called housekeeping,” I said in my own instructional tone. But my father didn’t like my response. He closed the door behind him and came back into the room.
    “Do you have any idea how hard those people work? Can you try to imagine the kind of filth that they see, smell, and touch on a daily basis? Do you have any idea?”
    I’m pretty good at not answering rhetorical questions, so I let him continue.
    “Uncle Ray is our mess,” he said. “We clean up after him, whether we like it or not.” With that last sentence, my father stared at me pointedly and then left the room. I knew he was reminding me that my messes, too, had to be cleaned up. I was sixteen at the time, and although his lesson was not without some impact, I didn’t change. Not then.
    Phase #2: The Foyer-Sleeping Incident
    At nineteen, I wasn’t much different. Instead of going to college, I went to work for my parents. I moved into an attic apartment in the Spellman home that was refinished as part of my employment contract. While I was still an asset to Spellman Investigations, I continued to be a liability in the Spellman household. My list of misdeeds had lengthened in three years and many of my habits, like staying out long past midnight and returning home too tanked to find my keys, were now out of my parents’ control.
    I don’t remember much about the night of the Foyer-Sleeping Incident other than the fact that I had been at a party and had to be at work at 10:00 the following morning. I walked up the front steps, searched my pockets for the house keys, and came up empty. In the past, when I’d locked myself out—as I mentioned, a common occurrence back then—I’d climb up the fire escape to my bedroom or shimmy up a drainpipe in the back of the house and knock on David’s window, which was closest to the ground. However, the fire escape ladder was not extended and David had left for college two years earlier, so his room window was locked. I weighed my options and decided that sleeping on the porch was more reasonable than dealing with my parents at this hour and in my state.
    Rae, now five, discovered me the next morning and shouted out my location to our mother. “Isabel’s sleeping outside.” I slowly came to as my mom stood over me. Her expression was a hybrid of confusion and annoyance.
    “You slept out here the whole night?” she asked.
    “Not the whole night,” I replied. “I didn’t get back until three.”
    I picked up my coat/pillow, casually walked inside