Good old Marin.

Good old boring, rich, stuck-up Marin.

I hated this place.

We needed to cut the county off from the mainland and push it out to sea. It already existed like it was another planet entirely. San Francisco was barely a step up, but moving to New York had spoiled me for this place. Where else in the world could you get Chinese takeout at two in the morning that would be delivered to your damn door? Not Marin. There wasn’t a decent ethnic food restaurant in the entire county. The whole fucking place went to bed at ten PM every night.

Fuck Marin.

Fuck Dad for making me come back here.

I had a place in Pacific Heights which was where I stayed when I came to the Bay because there was nothing out across that bridge for me. I owned it, but a couple of people other than me had the key. Literally two; my mother and Sissy. Mom was using it because she wasn’t an idiot.

Marin was like a huge high school. The people there were ridiculously cliquey. Her only in had been the fact that she was married to Jackson Strickland. She was an immigrant from the wrong part of the world in the wrong part of California. I understood her reluctance to go back. After the funeral, I’d be surprised if she ever came back again. If I was her, I would have pulled a Sissy and moved to another time zone.

Thinking about going back to the house made me angry, but it was mine now. It didn’t matter anyway—Jackson was dead. I couldn’t wait till all his shit was gone so I could flatten that house to fucking dust. Maybe I’d put something nice up. The land was expansive but not that expansive. The zoning laws would only let me build so high. There was definitely someone with deep pockets who’d be interested in getting it to build their own home. I didn’t like dealing with individual home developments like that. Condos, office parks, marinas, golf resorts—I liked to think big. That was where the money was.

Once upon a time, the Strickland family home had been filled with the sounds of children’s laughter and family warmth. That must have been when it was the family home of some other family. Sissy and I had been born in Marin. It was our childhood home. When we had all lived there, it was pretty fucking great. There was a pool and a pool house and tons of space. Since Mom, Sissy and I had left, the pool was empty, but the grounds were still tended. Dad didn’t get rid of the landscaper.

The inside was a different story. Mom had been in charge of decorating when they were married, so it was nice. Dad had always liked collecting art and antiques, and she had managed to incorporate them tastefully into the house’s aesthetic. There was this one room which Sissy and I used to dare each other to go into at night; we called it the crypt. That was because that was where Mom made him keep all his taxidermy. Dad loved dead shit. I didn’t get it. He liked them big. There were bears, cougars and lions in there. There was this albino moose Sissy and I had named Frostbite. Fucking huge, especially to two little kids.

As far as I knew, he hadn’t shot a single one himself. Nope. He was mean, but he wasn’t a hunter. He talked a big game, but that was it. I never went to see him after moving out, and I had heard rumors but hadn’t seen for myself. The man had taken the house and filled it to the brim with shit. Now, until it was sold at auction, it was all my shit.

Speaking of the auction, they were sending over somebody today. I was itching to demolish this place. Max had been getting the messages intended for me; his assistant had been forwarding them. He had gotten the auction house, so they seemed to think he was Dad’s consignor. The purchase and establishment of the auction house had come out of left field, like when rich guys just buy their city’s baseball team for the hell of it. Dad had always liked old, expensive shit, but he didn’t own any museums, art or cultural centers or anything that would indicate a desire to expand into the art world.

He’d literally gotten it because it was a place all the art he loved to buy could come through. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he had had intentions to grow the house, open up more. It didn’t matter because he wasn’t going to now. As far as I knew, the house was richly bolstered by his own investments and donations. They’d have to figure something out.

Walking through the house, there seemed to be a meaning to the madness. First, the place was spotless. He had a dedicated staff who he paid to keep it that way. I had called his housekeeper Vanessa; she’d been there since before Sissy and I had been born. I’d called her the day before to make sure she and everyone else knew their jobs were safe until the house had been cleared out. I’d be staying there. I’d have to make sure they got somewhere to work; you couldn’t just leave people hanging like that.

I’m sure that Vanessa had been hired initially as a housekeeper, but as the years went on, her job description morphed to meet the family’s, then Dad’s, new needs. She was basically his personal assistant by the end. The messages I would get about him would come from her. She was the one who informed the family that Dad had died in the first place since she was the only one with him when it had happened.

We had had a nanny, but Sissy and I were always loitering in the kitchen or following her around. She would speak to us in Spanish, something our mother would only do when we were alone. Everyone would have to get a new job; her, the guy who did the landscaping, the driver. I’d take care of it. I was the new master of the Strickland house; I sort of had to. Loyal and capable staff were hard to find; they’d all get excellent recommendations.

The junk in the house was sorted by room. The crypt was still intact, bigger than I remembered. He must have knocked a wall in to make more room. There were rooms that had never been there before everywhere. Our old playroom still had its light blue walls, but they were covered with paintings—so many that some were just stacked on the floor or leaning against the wall.

How much was all this shit worth? All this trash was probably valued at a price higher than the fucking house itself. Any indication of how the man liked to live was overtaken by the sheer volume of things in his house.

I walked up the stairs to the second story. There was close to zero actual living space. The room that used to be my father’s office was, like the rest of the house, immaculately clean, but full of garbage. In this room were the safes. More than one because he collected jewelry too.

I found the master bedroom. I wasn’t sleeping in his bed. No way. It wasn’t even that he’d died in it; it was that it was his. I’d asked Vanessa to order a new bed for me and to get rid of the one in the old master bedroom. I wouldn’t be using it if I could help it. It was just because literally all the other rooms were full of stuff. She’d ordered a standard king. White linen. It would serve. I’d also asked her to get rid of all Dad’s clothes. I didn’t have a lot of luggage, but I didn’t want to live out of my suitcase.

Why did he do this shit? Why did he collect things that he didn’t even pay attention to once he had them? He collected stuff the way he had collected children. I had given up trying to understand him years ago. It wasn’t worth it. There were better ways I could invest my time.

I got my computer out. Depending on how long this took, I’d probably have to schedule a number of teleconferences. I wanted to build in Hong Kong. Oceanfront property, with adjoining marinas, extremely exclusive, outside the city. If the development took off like Deep Water Bay, it would pay for itself, three, four times over. If they wanted to talk again, it would have to be from here.

Dad hadn’t dealt with the real estate and property development side of his business since I had started buying myself. After a few years here after college, I went to New York. There was less space there. If you were doing anything in the city, it was apartments or condos, or office space, always up, not out. I preferred it because I preferred New York. California had space, though, I could give it that. I hadn’t stopped developments here, I just based myself and operations in New York.

Dad’s interest had never really been in real estate, it was in money, and since real estate gave him that, he was in neck-deep. I handled most of it though. Since he was gone now, I’d likely be spending a lot more time here. We had completed developments in Pacific Heights and had real estate in Nob Hill and the Financial District. What was next? Whatever I wanted. I’d probably have to go to Dad’s San Francisco office for a courtesy call. Introduce them to their new overlord in person.

I stood up. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, but I wasn’t hungry. There was, unfortunately, a lot of things I had to help Mom with concerning Dad’s funeral. There had to be a wake. There had to be the funeral itself, the casket, the ceremony, the burial plot. The man was so selfish when he was alive—why hadn’t he arranged some of this shit on his own before he died? I heard the door of the bedroom open. It wasn’t Vanessa because she always knocked. I turned. It was a woman.

“Lee!” she squealed, coming at me with her arms outstretched. She caught me around the neck.

“Deb, what are you doing here?” I asked. Her arms were around me. I gingerly hugged her back. Her breasts were really hard. Deborah Fellows was a friend of the family. She’d gone to the same school as Sissy had and was the same age as her. We had never dated officially, but she was referred to by most people as my on-again, off-again girlfriend. She was tall. In her heels, she was almost as tall as I was.

She was pretty but pretty came in levels. There was pretty like the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Then there was pretty like a 2016 Lamborghini Murcielago. The car was pretty because it had been engineered and built and designed. That was the way in which Deb was pretty. Her face had been engineered, built and designed. Her face, just resting, not doing anything, had the cuntiest expression I had ever seen. It must have been her face bones or something; she just sort of looked like a bitch.

“I heard about your dad. I’m so sorry, babe,” she said. I was going to thank her, but she cut me off, ramming her tongue into my mouth. Deborah was hot in the ass like you wouldn’t believe. I respected a woman who liked to fuck. We had had sex under this very roof more times than I could count when my father was busy ignoring his family and my mother was working.

I pushed her away.

“Deb, I can’t,” I said noncommittally. I could. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to, I just had things to do that I’d have to do later if I didn’t do them now. It was no use trying to get back to New York before the funeral. On top of that, the house was mine; I had to be there while they emptied it out. I’d be here for at least a couple of weeks. I’d have to figure out a way to telecommute and liaise with my assistant back in the city. Debbie was just a distraction.

“Why did it take you so long to come back and visit?” she asked. There she went, contrite and sincere to horny and needy all in the same breath. Her tongue was running up the outside of my ear. She lived in Los Angeles when we weren’t fucking, and New York when we were. She wasn’t nice, but she could be when she was happy. When she was mad, she screamed and broke things. For all the years we’d known each other, she’d run me thousands of dollars in property damage.

Debbie… she was just there. When I needed a release, she was always available. That was the base of our relationship. We weren’t together—we weren’t even friends. We just had sex. She knew what I liked, and she wasn’t shy. Her hands were rubbing over my chest, trying to get my shirt off. Vanessa must have let her in. Had she offered her anything to eat or drink? She would have, but Deb wouldn’t have taken it. I’d known her since we were kids and could count the number of times I’d seen her eat anything on one hand. The girl had had my whole scrotum in her mouth, and she didn’t want to eat a couple of french fries around me? I let her pull my cock out and suck it till it was hard. My dad had died, and she wanted to make me feel better.

Why would I turn down an offer like that?