Free The Altar Girl by Orest Stelmach

bills. His earnings from his antique business were modest and unreliable, or so I had always been told. This news suggested his profits had grown recently. I could hear Donnie Angel’s voice in my ears.
    Tell me what you know about your godfather’s business.
    The house was a hoarder’s dream. Stacks of magazines and newspapers were piled four feet high on the floor, and on every seat in the living room. I saw an old copy of Look magazine from 1961 with a picture of an African-American girl walking among four uniformed white men. He appeared to have kept every issue ever printed of the Ukrainian-language newspaper Svoboda .
    The kitchen resembled a storage closet for tableware and cutlery. Boxes upon boxes occupied every nook and cranny. Dirty dishes and glasses filled the sink. The two bedrooms on the second floor were no different. Every horizontal surface was covered with pottery or knickknacks. Dust clung to everything but the most frequently used surfaces.
    I had no idea if any of the items I was looking at were valuable, but the state-of-the-art televisions in the kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom appeared expensive, as did the big daddy Cadillac in the garage.
    After touring the house, we returned to the kitchen. I stood staring at the door to the basement.
    “It’s creepy,” Roxy said. “I keep thinking, this man is gone forever. I’ll never see him again and that’s so sad. He was a good guy. A good uncle. He never preached or asked me for anything. He was just nice. And then you walk around looking at the stuff wondering what it’s all worth. Makes you feel cheap. You think somebody would actually pay for these old cutlery sets?”
    “Yeah,” I said, eyes still glued to the basement entrance, wondering how my godfather had died, whether someone had pushed him down the stairs or walked him to the bottom and smashed his head in there.
    “Really? You really think they’re worth something?”
    “Yeah.” I was barely listening to Roxy’s questions. “It is creepy.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s go downstairs.”
    A steep descent of narrow steps greeted us. To make matters worse, the center of the steps was covered with carpet so worn and weathered it had turned slippery. I found myself grasping the side railing out of fear I would slip and tumble.
    “I can’t believe he didn’t replace these stupid steps given he was afraid of stairs,” I said.
    Roxy slid effortlessly down the stairs like a ninja, unperturbed by their slope or width. “Tell me about it. He used to send me to get a bottle of wine when I visited. Said it saved him the risk of falling and breaking his neck. Drove me nuts. But he refused to fix them. That would have cost money, and he said he didn’t need luxuries at this point in his life.”
    The new televisions and car suggested otherwise, but I kept my deductions to myself. I held my breath as I got to the bottom of the stairs, fearful I’d see visible signs of how my godfather had died, but there weren’t any. No chalk outline or tape, no garish bloodstain on the gray concrete floor or the strip of blue carpet at the bottom.
    “The cops don’t outline bodies anymore,” Roxy said, after I told her of my surprise. “Our neighbor is a state trooper. He said they rely on digital photography. There was a small bloodstain on the floor. I got most of it out with grout cleaner. I couldn’t leave it there. It felt disrespectful. You can still see where his head landed if you look close.”
    I saw what she was talking about. It looked like a coffee stain that had been washed a hundred times and had almost come out. The rest of the basement contained shelving with twenty or so cases of wine, a work area with tools, and a mountain of giant plastic containers filled with expensive-looking Christmas decorations, all in original boxes. The presence of plastic and absence of larger antiques made sense given the basement flooded during heavy rains.
    We found his inventory of furniture