Mr. Flood's Last Resort

by Jess Kidd

This is an interesting, but a bit bizarre book.

It is the story of a care giver who is assigned to give care to a cantankerous old man. He is a hoarder and hard to get along with. He has been warned this is his last chance to behave or he will be put in a care home.  The care worker learns that the previous caregiver had a breakdown from working with the man.

The caregiver, Maud, has a ghost in her past, her older sister disappeared one day and no one knows what happened to her.  Maud's mother blames her for her sister's disappearance.

When Maud arrives at Mr. Flood's house it is a mess, cluttered, dirty, with lots of cats.  She dives in trying to get some order in the kitchen. Mr Flood is annoyed that she is there.  She keeps calm and puts up with his outbursts, eventually he stops being so grumpy.  Mr. Flood has piles of National Geographic magazine blocking the way to most of the house including the upstairs but Maud squeezes through the magazines and prowls around the house.  She sees a lot of bizarre specimens and a picture of Mr. Flood's wife. 

One day a picture is stuck to the window in the kitchen.  As Maud is cleaning the kitchen she finds a glass bottle with a paper rolled up in it.  Maud looks at it she sees it is a picture of two children, a boy and a girl.  The girl's face is burned out of the photo.  Maud is curious about this.  When she asks Mr. Flood he says he only has a son, whom he despises and doesn't trust.  Maud also learns that Mr. Flood's wife died after falling down the stairs at the house.  Was she killed or was it an accident?

Maud was raised Catholic and one of her favourite books was about Saints.  In the story she now has various saints including St. Valentine who hover around her at times reacting to what is going on and sometimes even talking to her.  No one else can see them.

Maud's landlord is an agrophobic transvestite named Renata.  Renata is a mystery fanatic and when Maud tells her about her job with Mr. Flood Renata gets excited about solving the mysteries.

As the story progresses Maud meets a person who claims to be the man's son, Gabriel. Mr. Flood denies he is is son.  She also meets another man who claims to be the former care worker.

As Maud and Renata seek to learn the truth Maud finds a number of newspaper clippings about a missing girl.  She eventually finds out that the floods had a daughter Marguerite who attempted to kill Gabriel.  She was put in an institution but kept escaping.

At one point Renata's house is ransacked and she is roughed up too.  They get worried as to who would be trying to warn them off.

Eventually Maud discovers that Marguerite and the missing girl are the same person, Marguerite had started to use a different name.  She also learns, with the help of a psychic that there is a body at the bottom of the well on the Flood property.

In the end we learn that Gabriel, and his cousin Stephen had killed Marguerite when she returned to the house and it is she who is at the bottom of the well.   While it appeared that Mr Flood was grief stricken at the loss of his wife we learn that his wife was initially married to Mr. Flood's brother and when the brother died Mr. Flood married her.  It probably was not a happy marriage.

 His wife was the one who had all the money and Flood tried to take control of it but gradually she was able to get back her fortune and in her will she was supposed to have directed that after flood's death all money from the assets should go to the institution her daughter was in.  We learn that the Mother knew what her son and the cousin had done but she loved the son so much she never reported this to the police.  We also learn that for some reason (never explained) the son was pretending to be the care giver and the cousin was pretending to be the son.

At the end of the book Maud, Renata and a retired policeman go back to Renata's childhood village to face the past.  The saints are no longer around.

It was a very interesting, somewhat bizarre story.  It is not often that you have a story where so many characters are bad, or all have done bad things.  It seems like all the Flood family were bad.



Stephen