This week I got called to a house in the Blue Ridge section of Seattle, an upscale neighborhood full of beautiful old houses with magnificent views of the sound. The customer arrived late. I disliked her the moment she stepped out of her Audi, with her purse dog. She was an older woman who didn’t bother to take off her Jackie O sunglasses when greeting me. She explained that the house was a rental and she had reason to believe there might be squatters inside. This is the type of thing I like to know before I arrive at a job. If there were people inside, she had no intention of flushing them out herself.

When we opened the front door, we were immediately hit with cigarette stench. There were butts and beer bottles scattered about. “Let’s see if there’s anyone here,” she told me, encouragingly. I should be paid more for this. Trepidatiously, I walked through the ground floor, opening doors and calling out, “Anyone here??” The toilets were unflushed and had cigarette butts floating in them. One downstairs closet had a trap door to the basement that was flipped open. It was clear that someone had entered through a crawl space. But by the looks of things, no one was in. I continued my calls as I walked up a narrow winding staircase. When I was halfway up, a female voice came from around the corner. “Yes, I’m in here.” I turned around and walked down the stairs and out the door to the client to tell her what I’d learned.

The client went in and walked to the bottom of the stairs, craned her neck, and said, “Miss, you need to leave.”

“Okay,” we heard back.

Then she turned to me and said, “What do I do now?”

“Call the police,” I said. I took out my screwdriver from my back pocket and walked over to the nearest deadbolt to get to work.

My client stood in the kitchen and had an overly loud conversation with the Seattle Police Department. I tried to gesture to her to walk outside with her phone. It was my desire that the police would arrive in time to arrest the intruder(s). I didn’t want her to alert them to the urgency of the situation. It didn’t matter, though. Upstairs I heard some rustling and something being sprayed out of an aerosol can. No one was making a run for it.

I was still working fifteen minutes later when a young woman came down. She was about 20, slightly plump, and had a cold sore. Her bosom was pushed up nearly to her chin, and was dangerously close to bursting out of the top of her shirt. She approached me, seemingly out of breath, and began a ramble. “It wasn’t me. A couple of my friends were staying here and I was just visiting–.” I cut her off with a shake of the head.

“Talk to that lady. I’m just the locksmith.” She went outside and I carried on.

When it seemed like I was finished I looked for the client to hand over the new keys. She filled me in on what I’d missed while I was working. She had told the squatter that a security firm would be watching the house, but that she would gather up her items and leave them on the curb in a bag. I was impressed by the woman’s generosity of spirit.The neighbors later told her that as many as four people had been seen going in and out of the house. Apparently they’d got their hands on the spare keys hanging from a nail in the garage. Also, packages had been disappearing from porches up and down the street.

Then she asked if I’d changed the lock on the door on the balcony. I always miss the door on the balcony. She ascended the stairs with me, wearing a pair of rubber kitchen gloves and shoveling men’s clothes into a bag as she went. The floor of the master bedroom was littered with used hypodermic needles. Both of us got to work–she at cleaning, and me at rekeying the last lock in the house.

“Do you think that if I gave them their clean needles, I’d be enabling them?” she asked, holding a trash bag in one hand and a sealed bag of new syringes in another.

“I think that whether or not you give them those needles, they’re still going to be junkies,” I told her.

“Oh, these wasted lives,” she said, sorrowfully.

My opinion of my customer had shifted. She made me feel guilty for not having more empathy for these thieving drug-addicted trespassers. And it stung a little that I was out-liberalled by this old lady (who didn’t, in reality, have a dog in her purse). But that’s a topic for another blog.

The lesson of the story is this: if you don’t want to have to wrestle with your own reactions to the tragic lives and trespassing ways of smack fiends, check to make sure your crawl space is secured.