Scribbles in

Cleaning houses is my mother’s business. She encouraged me to go to college, get a degree and find a job doing something I loved. ‘Do well in school’ she said to me. 'So you won’t have to clean toilets and mop floors. Use your brain not your back’, she said. Although it was my first job at sixteen and where I worked on the weekends and summer vacations, she didn’t want to make it a family business. Don’t get me wrong, mom has a thriving business in the Seattle area with some wealthy clients and she’s grateful for the work. Most of her clients are tech guru’s or CEO’s who live in mega mansions whose houses are still clean when you come back because they are never at home to dirty them.

It was the summer vacation between my college junior and senior year, and I was working with mom cleaning houses. She let me use her van with all the self-promoting signage all over it. It had room for vacuums, mops, buckets and cleaning products in case the client didn’t own any. My mom would text me the night before the job with the address, any alarm codes and any specific instructions the client had and where the check would be located.

The next morning, I typed in the address into the GPS and arrived 25 minutes later at a 5,000 square foot craftsman house. I let myself inside, punched in the alarm code and carried my supply caddy upstairs and began cleaning the master bedroom and bathroom. I finished with the other bathrooms and bedrooms upstairs and made my way downstairs to the office.

Looking around for a place to begin. Bookshelves lined one wall and were completely filled. I’d rather dust shelves full of books than tchotchkes which you had to pick up and dust underneath them and then place them back on to the shelf. While dusting the shelves with my microfiber cloth, I took note that the owner of this office alphabetized their books by the author’s last name. Someone may have a case of O.C.D.

One of the shelves had a hardcover book on display on a small easel in front of twenty copies of the same book stacked up behind the one on display, DIANE STEEL was her name. I recognized the famous author’s name as one of those romance novel writers whose books always had the same formula. But she was very popular among women, they loved her books. She was a best-selling author and that made her rich.

Looking around the room, there were open boxes each filled with copies of her last five books. I straightened the boxes and headed over to the desk to empty the trash can. I dusted in and around the items on top of the desk. One set of instructions my mother had for every house was: never straighten up their desks, unless asked to, only dust around anything on top. And that’s what I was doing when “THUMP”! A bird flew full force into the windowpane and dropped alongside of the house and startled me. I accidentally knocked the pile of Moleskine notebooks onto the floor.

I bent down to gather them up and put them back onto the corner of the desk where I found them. All the notebooks were small, but one was orange, one was green, another gray, red, black, and as I picked them up, embossed on the front cover were the initials D.S. 2017, D.S. 2018, D.S. 2019, D.S. 2020, D.S. 2021 in white lettering. Each book had the tail of a silky ribbon hanging out, but not every book had the elastic closure wrapped securely around them and those spilled open. When I turned over the red book and was about to close it, the front flyleaf had a pre-printed message which read: “In case of loss please return to:” and Diane Steel was handwritten with the address of this house written below it and below that another printed message: “As a reward” $5,000 was handwritten in. The next book I picked up was from an earlier year, with the amount of $1,000 was filled in. I opened the 2020 little black notebook, and the reward was for $20,000. Each book had a slightly different layout. Some were horizontally ruled, some dotted which reminded me of a game Dots and Boxes I used to play with my mother on the paper menus at kid-friendly restaurants we occasionally dined at when I was younger. Other notebooks had pages printed with squares like graph paper. All the books were full of handwritten notes.

I opened the black notebook again and thumbed through the pages reading the author’s book ideas, with character arcs, plots and lists of words which probably only meant anything of significance to the author.

I stacked the notebooks onto the corner of the desk where I first saw them. I placed them in chronological order with 2021 on top and prayed it was the correct order. As I was vacuuming the rug, my eyes kept returning to the pile of notebooks and my conscience wouldn’t allow me to think of anything else except what I could do with $20,000.

My mind was racing with ideas. What if she misplaced a notebook and I found it and returned it for the reward? Maybe if I took the notebook and held on to it for a few weeks and then returned the book to her, tell her I found it in the booth at Starbucks and noticed the address in front and decided to return it because it must have meant the world to her with a reward as large as that one. She wouldn’t recognize me, I've never met her, and my last name is different than my mother’s last name, she took my stepdad’s name.

I looked around for cameras, there were none inside the house. I saw them on the outside, but I have a plain white baseball cap on, I kept my head down and I'm wearing my facemask. I removed the little black book from the pile and tucked it inside the back of my pants while I finished cleaning the rest of the house. Afterwards, I took out the trash, gathered up my supplies, set the alarm and locked up and left.

I was preoccupied driving to my afternoon job thinking about whether I should return the book? No, I couldn’t go back now. I wondered how long it will take her to notice the notebook missing, if at all? They will question my mother. The cleaning company is always the first to blame. I didn’t think this all the way through, stupid me. I don’t want to ruin her business and I may have done just that. She has worked for Diane Steel for years, they’ll believe her.

A few weeks went by and my mother never asked me any questions about any missing notebooks, and before I was due to return to school, I decided it was time to return it to its’ rightful owner.

I pressed the doorbell and waited until someone to answer. A woman in her seventies with long red hair pulled tight into a ponytail answered the door. She was beautiful up close and kept her body in shape. A personal goal of mine is to look as good as she at her age. Did I mention how well she was dressed too?

“Can I help you?” She spoke.

“Yes, is Diane Steel here?” I asked. I knew it was her from her book jackets.

“I’m Diane Steel, what can I do for you?”

“Well, this may seem kind of strange, but I found this notebook at a booth in the Starbucks downtown.” I reached into my oversized purse and extracted the little black notebook and handed it to her. “It says that if found, return it to this address.”

“What? Wait just a minute, won’t you come in? Let me go and check something.” Ms. Steel said and then disappeared into the office down the hallway only to come back into the foyer less than one minute later.

“Does it belong to you?” I asked.

“Yes, it does, I didn’t even realize it was missing. It’s a very important part of my work. It’s my notebook where I jot down book ideas, character information, new plots. I’m an author and these notebooks are where I keep my thoughts and ideas because if I don’t write it down, I will forget it. It stinks getting old, try not to let it happen.”

“Yeah, they say the memory is the first to go.” I smiled. “That’s what my Grey-ma told me. She’s really my Grandma, not that you look old, but that’s what we call her.”

“Where did you say you found it?”

“In a booth at Starbucks. It was kind of stuck in the crease of the booth. It’s a good thing you had your name and address in there.”

“I haven’t been to Starbucks in about a month. But I don’t remember bringing the notebook with me that day. But I was meeting with my agent, so maybe I did? The memory recall thing again.” She shook her head.

“Oh well, it’s back where it belongs.” I replied. “Okay, I have to go now, it was a pleasure to meet you Ms. Steele.

“Wait here just for a moment.” She gestured with her hands and returned to the office where she first disappeared to.

I stood in the foyer pretending to look around in wonder and admiration when she came shuffling down the hallway with a piece of paper in her hands.

She handed me a folded piece of paper. “Here this is for you.”

“What is it?”

“The reward of $20,000 for its’ safe return.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary, that’s too much money. I just dropped it off on my way back to school.” I replied.

“Like I said, you have no idea what that little black book means to me and to my career. Please take it, use it to help pay for school. I can’t thank you enough for returning it.”

“Nah, I can’t.”

“I insist. I can afford it. It’s a cost of doing business for me. I just don’t know how it ended up in a coffee shop. It must have fallen out of my purse. Please take it. It’s why I put my name and address in it.” She handed me the folded check again.

I accepted the check with reservation in my mannerisms.

“If you insist. That’s a large reward for a notebook, with scribbles. You don’t have to give me $20,000 for it, I’ll accept $20.”

“Nope, I insist, that’s what it’s worth to me, those are all my ideas for my new novel I’m about to start writing within the next month.”

“Okay if you insist. Thank you so much. The money will help me pay for my tuition and my schoolbooks.”

“No, thank you! What is your name young lady? I’d like to dedicate this book to you.”

“Ann Ryan.”

“Thank you again Ann Ryan for finding and returning my little black notebook.”

“You’re welcome Ms. Steele. Take care. Next time I'm in the bookstore I will look for your new book.”

I turned away and got into my car with the $20,000 check in my hand. What should I buy first? Maybe I’ll stop by the mall and pick-up a few new outfits for school and use the rest for school stuff. Yes, that’s a good idea. I felt an ounce of guilt creep in, but quickly pushed it aside by justifying my trying to return it without accepting the reward, but she insisted.