But when her rich neighbors walked by the mansion, walking their dog Fifi or Fufu, they would probably assume that the property was vacant or maybe even abandoned. The only reason they might suspect that someone was living in the estate would be the dirty McLaren F1 her father had driven and her mother’s Pagani Huayra. The luxury car and supercar sat unused on the circular paved driveway, neglected to the point they were literally rotting away. She drove the dirty Aston Martin One-77 that was only a tad cleaner than the more expensive cars.
The poor little rich girl had never been one of the tidiest people in the world. She never had to be. Even as a young little rich girl, she could never recall a time when there hadn’t been a maid around to pick up anything she had dropped onto her bedroom floor. She would leave a huge mess in her bathroom, and minutes later, she would come back from getting clothes out of her massive walk-in closet, and the bathroom would look like brand new. It was kind of spooky. It was like little cleaning ghosts were always floating around the mansion just looking for messes to descend upon. For the longest time, she thought Mr. Clean, the guy who did those funny old commercials for some cleaning liquid, was real. She thought he lived in the mansion and followed behind her, magically cleaning messes she had made.
When her parents had died, all the upkeep on the mansion just kind of went away. The sad little rich girl neglected opening mail and paying bills, and one day those ghosts just stopped cleaning. The outside ghosts that mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, tended to the pool, cleaned the scum out of the pond and all the other things that grew stale—well, they all went away. The yards encircling the mansion were overgrown to the point where trick-or-treaters were too scared to walk up to ring the doorbell.
Not knowing how to clean clothes, make food or perform most of the other skills humans learn when growing up, she was operating in a world that was very foreign to her. She bought clothes and threw them away when they were dirty. She ate at restaurants or picked up take-out to eat at home, alone. And all of those workarounds made her feel like she was dumb—that she wasn’t a real person. She had been the beautiful doll that had been kept in the immaculate dollhouse her entire life. And dolls didn’t have to know how to do anything. Everyone knew that.
The poor little rich girl had turned into an unhappy rich adult. She had become consumed by the deaths of her wonderful parents. They were good people. She knew they had cared about her a great deal and had always told her how much they loved her. When they had died, the purpose of her life had died as well.
Like everything else in her world, her life had already been planned for her. She didn’t have to worry about that. She would go to college and become a famous doctor like her father or maybe a real estate mogul like her mom. That’s the way her parents told her things would work out, and she always believed them. Her parents had always been in control and very much in charge of their own lives. Therefore, when they said something would happen, it normally did. But her folks hadn’t counted on a natural talent being ensconced in their child’s DNA. And that was the ability to learn languages very quickly.
So, what are parents supposed to do when they plan for one thing, but then a natural talent pops up, and their plans go askew? It probably happened to other kids who weren’t rich kids. Boys who could throw a football or shoot a basketball into a hoop were redirected into such ball throwing and basketball shooting occupations.
Her parents would have liked her to do something other than learning languages, but her particular skill did have a value associated with it. Not the kind of value that could make millions of dollars, but then she didn’t really need to have a profession that made a lot of money. After all, she would inherit all her parents’ money if they were to ever die. But long before that, she would marry Richie Rich and go on living her fairytale life.
Now the poor little rich girl was all alone in the big world with no one to clean up her messes. No one to mow the lawns. No one to advise her on what to do or how to do it. The only thing she had to go on was an instinct to avenge her parents’ deaths. Her gut instinct wasn’t to save lives, in contrast to what her father had spent his career doing. Her overwhelming desire was to take the lives of those responsible for screwing up her life so badly. The only thing she had truly taken responsibility for during her entire life was to leave college and join the CIA in hopes that her looks and language skills could get her close to those she longed to kill.
Someday it would happen. Not long from now, she would find those responsible for her parents’ deaths, and then she would not be the poor little rich girl. Instead, she would be the happy and merry assassin. And, she would make sure that there was no one left alive to clean up that mess.