Polished Off Read Online Free

had been a toddler. As a single mother, she’d been on a shoestring budget. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that buying cleaning products in bulk from a supply house was a lot less expensive than buying stuff off the grocery-store shelves.
    The only problem with buying in bulk, though, was storage. And since some of the supplies were hazardous, she’d been uncomfortable about the idea of keeping them inside the house, especially with a small child around who seemed to get into anything and everything in spite of all the precautions she’d taken.
    The solution had been to build a storeroom on to the back of the carport that was attached to her half of the Victorian double she owned.
    As Charlotte refilled containers, she tried to recall if there was anything else she needed. Early on, she’d learned that each of her clients had her own idiosyncrasies about what she wanted done and how she wanted it done. It had been a couple of years since she had personally worked for Patsy, but if she remembered right, Patsy was one of the most particular clients that she’d had to deal with. And just one of Patsy’s peculiarities was that she insisted on each of the ten ceiling fans she had in her home being dusted every week.
    Charlotte eyed a brush hanging on a peg. The odd U-shaped brush stuck out at a ninety-degree angle to the handle, and the yard-long handle was telescopic and could be extended to almost twice its length. It had been designed to dust ceiling-fan blades. But even with the handle fully extended, she would still need a ladder to do a thorough job.
    Charlotte shivered at the thought of climbing to the top of the ladder. Some of the ceilings in Patsy’s century-old home were as high as twelve feet, and Charlotte never had liked heights. Like it or not, though, to Charlotte, a thorough job included not only dusting the fan blades, but wiping them down with a scented cleaner as well. That way, when the fans were turned back on, the motion of the blades would spread the scent and leave the room smelling fresh and clean.
    Propped against the wall near the brush was an aluminum ladder. Charlotte was pretty sure that Patsy kept a small stepladder in one of the ground-floor closets in her house, but if she remembered right, Patsy’s ladder wasn’t very tall. Maybe she should bring her own ladder as well as the brush, just in case.
    But would her ladder be tall enough? She estimated that the ladder was six-feet high, then she added her own height of five-feet-three plus another two feet for an upstretched arm. Shrugging, Charlotte picked up the bottles she’d refilled. Patsy’s fans, she recalled, hung from extensions that varied in length from six inches to a couple of feet from the ceiling. If she really stretched, she might be able to reach them without having to climb to the very top of the ladder... if she really stretched.
    After she’d loaded the brush and the refilled bottles of cleaner into the van, she went back for the ladder. Though it was made of aluminum and wasn’t that heavy, it was cumbersome, especially in the small, crowded confines of the storage room. With a firm grip on it and being careful not to knock anything over or off the shelves, she slowly backed out the door. She’d just cleared the storeroom door with the ladder when—
    “Hey, let me help you with that.”
    At the unexpected sound of the deep male voice, Charlotte let out a startled squeal, then whirled around. The end of the ladder just missed Louis Thibodeaux’s head by inches.
    Jerking his head back in the nick of time, he yelled, “Hey, watch it!”
    “Well!” she snapped back at him. “What do you expect? You scared the living daylights out of me.”
    Charlotte could still feel her heart pumping overtime from fright. Lately the newspaper had been full of stories about people living in Uptown and the Garden District being accosted and robbed right in their own driveways or garages.
    “I swear, Louis, the least you