Jocasta’s House

Jocasta lives in a small bungalow, longer than it is wide, of the kind that was popular about fifty years ago. It's a two-story in an Arts & Crafts style, cozy and with a spacious back yard (which is overgrown with lush grass and contains only a beat-up grill and and old deck chair).

The inside is … well, it's not a disaster. It's generally clean, in the sense that there's not trash everywhere or rats and roaches having a field day. But it's also the house of someone who lives alone and doesn't really think about anyone being around. Books are left wherever Jocasta stopped reading them, nothing is neat, and most of all, there are dirty clothes everywhere: she clearly prefers buying new outfits to doing laundry. There's also drug paraphernalia all over the place — a couple of bongs, a shisha, small baggies of weed and mushrooms, bottles of wine — and the fact that it's all out in the open probably gives her a tinge of guilt for the white privilege of not having to hide it.

The kitchen and bathroom are unexpectedly clean, but the bedroom is a bit of a wreck: an overwhelming scent of nag champa and cannabis smoke, discarded outfits and bedclothes everywhere, overflowing ashtrays, and a closet stuffed with new clothes, some still in the store packages. There's also a few well-tended to pistols and rifles, and stacks of books and notebooks; Roger can probably spy a drawer in a tallboy with nothing but gloves.

The place that seems the most chaotic is the upstairs bedroom: Jocasta uses it as an office, and while the desk is merely messy (a proper office chair in front of a desk covered in half-opened books, magazines, newspapers, research articles, and more notebooks), the walls are covered in photos, printouts, and Jocasta's own sketches. There aren't any pins or strings connecting them, but the sheer mass of them, and the hint of a pattern impenetrable to outsiders, would make most people worry.