Nudging her toward the staircase, I only just managed to warn her at the last minute before she grabbed onto the railing. “Don’t touch anything.”
She looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes wide as she pointed at it. “Even on here?”
“Oh, yes! The crime scene techs reckon they slid down the banister either after sex or as part of a show.”
She snatched her hand back from where she’d been pointing at it, even though there was still at least a foot of space between them.
“Gross! What the hell was wrong with those people? Do you know if any of their party buddies still live in the area? Just so I know who to tell the girls to wear gloves for if they come into the salon.”
I put my hands on her hips, urging her to make her way up the stairs as I told her what I knew. “According to our neighbor, Mrs. Keegan, they were part of a group that traveled all over the world for get togethers, but they also had contacts in stateside ones who visited each other’s houses.”
“Seriously? Did they have their own social media platform, too? Maybe something along the lines of Tinder? If not, setting one up and calling it Kinker doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”
Layla joked, but I wouldn’t have called it impossible.
Leading her upstairs, I showed her the bedrooms one by one, making sure to touch the light switches with a tissue from a pack I’d brought with me.
When I opened the door to the bathroom in the main bedroom, instead of reacting like I had, i.e., in a stunned stupor, she threw her head back and burst out laughing, almost touching the door frame when she tipped over.
"Oh, God, why would anyone do this?” she wheezed as she stood facing the toilet and looked at her reflection in the small mirrored tiles. “If you’re standing taking a pee and look up, it looks like the tiger’s about to bite your head on one side and the sloth’s climbing up your leg.” Her eyes caught on something else on the wall, and she laughed even harder. “Is the monkey wanking the banana?”
I spun around to see what she meant and gaped. “How does this place get worse? I didn’t think it’d be possible, and I’ve lived in it for a year.”
Yes, the banana was right over the little guy’s crotch, and he had his fist wrapped around it.
Grabbing her hand, I turned the lights off as we left and made our way to the next bathroom.
“This one has more of a Grecian feel to it,” I warned her. “And there’s no way you won’t see the carvings for what they are.”
Layla walked in ahead of me and gasped. “Did they get a Grecian style Karma Sutra for the walls?”
The Mitchells had bought carved stone tiles for the walls, all of which had a scene reminiscent of the Karma Sutra, although some involved water jugs and other objects that I hadn’t looked too closely at. This was the bathroom I’d showered in while I’d lived here, but even my curiosity hadn’t been enough to give in to the need to examine them closely. That water jug had been enough for me, and I still wasn’t even sure what they were doing with it.
“Something like that.”
I knew she’d seen it the moment she shrieked and collapsed into me. Next to the toilet was a stone statue of a Roman soldier who’d been turned into a toilet paper holder, complete with a two-foot-long erection to slide the rolls onto.
“I should give that to Gramps. He’d get a kick out of it.”
“I thought the same thing the first time I saw it,” I murmured, finding it awkward when I made eye contact with the guy.
It wasn’t the first time I’d done it, and bizarrely enough, my awkwardness now was because most of the previous times it’d happened, I’d been taking a piss at the time.
By the time we got to the room I’d slept in, Layla was complaining of a stitch from all the laughing she’d done.
“This was my room while I was here,” I told her as I flicked the lights on for her to see.
“What were all the hooks and weird railings for?” she asked, spinning in a circle in the middle of the room. My old bed had been taken away and hopefully incinerated, so I wasn’t worried about her bumping into anything.
“Well, it appears that they used this as their playroom, so they’d probably have hung their sex toys on them or used cuffs or restraints to attach people to them.”
Layla squinted as she looked at one that was closer to the ground, then she made a noise and lurched away from it like she’d been burned.
“What? Are you okay?”
“I read a book once about this ranch that was centered around BDSM and things like that. They had these little nooks where they attached punishment dildos.”
“Please don’t finish the story,” I begged. “I have so many awful mental images about what went on in this house. In my little corner of sanity, I’m choosing to believe that was for a bedside table, like an anchor for one of those wall-mounted ones.”