Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Jay
I stare at the text from Phoebe.
Phoebe
I’m stuck. Need help. You busy?
It’s after 7:00 PM. Why is she still working?
Then again, who cares? She’s reaching out to me. This is good. You ask friends for help.
After her practically doing a Broadway number called “I Won’t Date You” on Monday in the library, winning her concession of friendship felt like Ethan Allen must have felt when his Vermont militia took Fort Ticonderoga. It was one of the early battles that gave the rebels their first surge of momentum.
The fact that this is the second text she’s initiated today? I’m feeling a dopamine boost.
Instead of texting, I walk outside to meet her at the big house, but within a minute, I can see that her car is gone and all the interior lights of the house are off. I call her instead. Have to keep the momentum going.
“Jay?” Phoebe says when she picks up .
“Yes, ma’am. What are you stuck on?”
Phoebe is silent except for the sound of metal rattling, like she’s shaking a fence or something.
“I’m stuck in, not on, actually. The basement. I’m stuck in my basement.”
“Oh, so that was an all-caps NEED HELP?”
“No. Not all caps. I’m not in danger. I’m just … stuck.”
“Give me the address.”
She hesitates. “Are you sure?”
“Only if you want to get out,” I tell her. “Otherwise, no.”
She snorts and gives me the address.
“Do I need a code to get in?”
“You need a key, which is stuck in the basement with me. But you can follow someone else into the building, or maybe knock on a window on the first floor and explain the situation?”
“I’ll figure it out. On my way. Hang in there.”
“Basement access through the elevator or stairs in the back of the building.” She gives a weird laugh and the call cuts off. Okay …
I make it to The Serendipity in fifteen minutes and find a spot on the street right away. It’s a cool building. Reminds me of a brownstone in some ways. I’ll wait a few minutes to see if someone comes in or out, but if not, I guess I’ll knock on windows.
A minute passes with no residents appearing, and I decide that’s as long as I’m going to wait. I’ll check the front door just in case but then I’ll knock?—
The main door clicks open. Oh, good. Bad for security, though.
I spot the front desk Phoebe was talking about. A glance around shows a staircase to the right, so I head that way and pass the mailboxes. I don’t want to slow down to figure out which one is hers, but I wave and say “Thank you” to the whole bank of them for giving me a reason to talk to Phoebe about something besides work.
Those stairs don’t go down, but the hall leads me to more stairs at the back of the building. They’re lit well enough to not be creepy, and when I reach the bottom, I’m in a basement with a concrete floor and exposed air ducts and beams. It’s not a murder basement, but it’s also not a hangout basement.
“Phoebe?” I call.
“Here,” she answers from around a corner just ahead.
I find her inside a chain-link storage fence, surrounded by old file storage boxes. You can’t spend time in archives and not recognize their size and smell. One box sits on the ground with the lid off and a pile of loose papers inside.
A bike is chained to the fence. And Phoebe is … chained to the bike? I can’t exactly tell from my vantage point.
I squint and hurry toward her. “Hi. What am I looking at?”
She’s sitting crisscross on the ground, facing the bike and me, her head bent so it’s even with the bike chain and parallel to the floor.
“My hair is caught in the chain,” she says.
I might have noticed that right away if she wasn’t in cutoffs again. I’m distracted by her killer legs. What does this woman do on her off time? Spend it all running stairs? Squatting marble sculptures? It’s working for her.
“The gate is unlocked.”
I lift the latch and hurry in to crouch beside her. Saying her hair is caught in the chain is like saying tornadoes are breezy. Her hair is forming a symbiotic relationship with the bicycle.
“Sorry to drag you over here,” she says. “There’s an apartment down here, but no one answered when I yelled. I don’t want to call the building manager because he leaves at 5:00, and I try to save after-hours calls for stuff like ‘Help, my bathtub fell through the floor.’ The only two numbers I have for people in town are you and Harvey. Not saying this is a job for you, but it’s definitely not a job for Harvey.”
“I’m glad you called,” I tell her. “I know you thought I was angling for a date the other day, but I just wanted to check out this building, so thanks for that. Now that my curiosity is satisfied, I can go.”
“Ha, ha,” she says. “Go ahead. But remember, I grew up with a brother, and I’m an expert in retaliation.”
“Fine, I’ll help.”
“I’m hoping you have sailing experience that makes you super handy with knots.”
“Not this kind.”
After a beat, she asks, “But you do sail?” She barely stifles a laugh.
I sigh as I carefully touch the strands of her hair closest to the chain. “Yes. It would be wrong not to when you grow up in coastal New England.”
“Uh-huh. Do you belong to a yacht club?”
“About your hair …”
“That’s a yes to the yacht club.”
“I belong to a yacht club, but I don’t have a yacht, know-it-all. Never have, never will. Just a sailboat.”
“Okay, just-a-sailboat. Would it look like ones I’ve seen in, say, a Nautica or Ralph Lauren commercial?”
“What I’m hearing is that you’d like me to leave you here to wait until someone else finds you?”
“I bet it’s such a nice sailboat, and everyone should own one. And it’s not an East Coast prep school kid cliché at all .”
“Either way, my knot skills aren’t transferable to hair and bike chains. I don’t know how to approach this but if I say scissors?—”
“I’ll cry,” she confirms. “You’re going to have to yank. I tried but I kept tangling myself up even more. Just grab it and pull. I don’t have a tender scalp, so don’t worry about it.”
I lean close to study the entanglement. “I need immunity if I accidentally hurt you. You make me nervous.”
“It’s fine, Jay. I’m only going to be grateful when you get me out of here. Oh, but also I’ll never speak to you again out of embarrassment.”
I touch her hair near the chain again, sliding my finger beneath a small hank of it to separate it and pull.
Phoebe reaches up to touch my hand. “Pro tip: if you hold it in two places, you can create some slack so it won’t pull at my scalp when you tug.”
Her hand is soft and warm. She keeps it on mine as I follow her directions.
“Like this?”
“Yep, like that.”
“Here we go.” I tug, and the piece comes free of the bike way more easily than I feared. “One down, no idea how many to go. You okay?”
“Yeah. Just kind of hurting from being in this position so long.”
I look around for anything that might help, but I don’t see anything I can use. All I can do is work fast. I untangle several more dark strands fairly easily, but she hisses and readjusts her position.
“Did I pull your hair?”
“No. My wrists and shoulders are hurting.”
That’s it. “You can be mad if you want, but I’m going to reposition us. I’ll stretch my legs out beneath you, and I’ve got enough slack in your hair that you can rest your head on me like a pillow.”
“You want me to put myself in an even more awkward position?”
“Are you talking literally or figuratively? ”
“Socially.”
“Then yes. But even moving fast, this will take a while, and you’re going to start getting hot spots or muscle cramps or something.” I free strands of her hair as I talk, but it still seems to be just as much tangled in the chain as ever.
“I have to take you up on that.”
I immediately stretch out my legs, and with careful hand placement on my part and pained puffs of breath from Phoebe, she’s soon lying on her stomach, her head resting on my thighs, facing toward my shoes. I’m glad I slid on sneakers instead of flip-flops so she doesn’t have to stare at my hairy feet. They’re a normal amount of hairy, but still. No one’s ever commented on my sexy toe tufts.
The change in position makes the process go faster, and soon I can see more and more of the chain. As a man—a not-so-good one at this moment—I toy with the idea of going slower because I like the warm, solid weight of Phoebe’s head almost in my lap.
As someone who knows Phoebe will put up with exactly zero nonsense, I continue to work quickly. I don’t want to give her more fuel for her flirting accusations. Her true accusations.
As if reading my mind, she says, “I googled you.”
My hands slow. “Did you discover I’m a certified historian?”
“More like certified loverboy,” she says with something close to a laugh in her tone.
I groan. “Let me guess: you read the comments.”
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that.”
“You couldn’t just stick with LinkedIn, huh?”
Now she does laugh, and her warm breath skims over my knee. “That was LinkedIn. The top comment says if I ever get a chance to hear a lecture from the Hot Prof, I should run not walk. But don’t worry, I saw your history bona fides too. PhD from Harvard, and yet I saw you in a Stanford shirt first. Now, that’s impressive.”
“The Stanford shirt causes problems wherever I go.”
“That’s why you wear it?”
“Yep. When a Harvard grad tries to talk smack about how Harvard is better, I admit that my doctoral studies at Harvard were hard, but Stanford was still harder.”
“If those people calling you the ‘Hot Prof’ could hear you picking nerd fights, you’d get a downgrade.”
It takes about ten more minutes to free her hair, but I can finally say, “A couple more and you’re free.”
She doesn’t respond, and she’s been so quiet that I wonder if she’s fallen asleep.
“Phoebe.”
“Yeah, sorry. I’ve been surviving this by pretending I’m somewhere else.”
Ouch . I untangle the last few strands. “You’re done.” I smooth my hand over the top of her head so she can feel that none of it is connected to the bike chain. I like the way it feels against my palm.
She pushes herself to a sitting position, offering me a smile. “Thank you.”
I notice for the first time what she’s wearing with her cutoffs: a boxy, sleeveless white shirt, cropped, with sunflowers printed on it. She looks like a slice of Americana, and somehow, even in the antiseptic basement light, her amber eyes lose none of their richness.
“Glad I could help.”
“Now I owe you.”
“You can repay me by telling me how that happened.” I jerk my head toward the bike. “I’m dying to know.”
“I’m not sure.” She reaches up to run her fingers through her hair, like she’s trying to resettle it to the way it usually falls. “I talked to the building manager when I got home and asked him about the building. It turns out he applied for the job when it changed ownership this spring because he’s super into this place. He knew a lot about it and talked my ear off for about ten minutes straight. It used to be a women’s dorm for Spring Brook College.”
“That makes sense,” I say. “Community kitchen. Parlor. Ballroom.”
“I asked about old rental records, and he said there were some in the basement he has to organize but I could look if I wanted to.”
“So you came down here to see if you could figure out who was in 3E in 1965?”
“Obviously.”
“I would have too.”
“The boxes aren’t labeled, so I have to open each one. Most of them are from the early nineties, although I found a couple from the eighties. I was setting that one down”—she nods to the open box—“when my key fell out of my pocket and bounced under the bike.”
That doesn’t seem possible. She’d have to be pretty much upside down for her key to fall out, but then to end up over by the bike? Physics doesn’t work like that.
“I bent down to get it, and my hair got caught. The more I tried to untangle it, the worse it was.”
“Then, in your worst nightmare, you had to ask me for help.”
“That part was terrible.”
“I bet. Want me to help you go through the rest of the files? Dusty papers are my happy place.”
She smiles at me. “Historians are weird.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m done with those boxes tonight. I’m not coming back until I have my hair in braids on my head like a German house frau.” She glares at the bike .
“In that case, let’s get out of here.” I stand and hold out a hand to pull her to her feet.
She slides her hand from mine once she’s up. Slides it. Slowly enough for me to wonder if she was trying to prolong our contact. But she turns and walks out of the storage cage without a word, and I follow her to the stairs.
When we reach the first floor, I stop at the exit. “I’m outta here. I have a historical rogue to disparage. And by disparage, I mean tell the truth about.”
“Thanks again for coming.” She slides her hands into her back pockets. She’s also in sneakers, and with the cutoffs and sunflowers on her shirt, the effect should be wholesome.
It is not. It’s hot, and not because we’ve left the cool of the basement.
“I could show you what I’ve learned about the building,” she says. “Probably in less than ten minutes, if you’re in a rush.”
Like I can say no to that. “Sammy’s been dead close to three hundred years. He can wait a few minutes. But head’s up that this is a test of your docent skills.”
She smirks. “Good thing that’s how I started at the Sutton.” She removes her hands from her pockets, straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin, and gives me a professional “welcome to the tour” smile. “If you’ll follow me this way, we’ll begin.”
She walks us to the mailboxes. “This is one of the building’s many vintage features. The Serendipity began life in the 1930s when it was built as a women’s dorm for the college. Thirty years later, when it was converted to apartments, these were installed and endure even now.”
“Miss, yes, hi, could you tell me what those are made of?” I ask in the voice of that-guy-on-the-tour-who-thinks-he-knows-everything .
“These are brass,” she says, “and the inside of each door is stamped ‘Keyless Lock Company, 1964.’”
Not surprised she knows that. “But, miss, that’s an Egyptian design on the edges. How can you be sure these weren’t stolen during the height of Egyptomania right out of a pharaoh’s tomb? Those could be real gold.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Fascinating point, sir. I hadn’t even considered that, but the use of Arabic numerals instead of hieroglyphs is one of the clues our excellent curators used to determine the correct era.”
“Okay, I can’t do my character anymore. It’s making me hate myself.”
“Thank goodness. Want to see the rest?”
She shows me the commercial kitchen, available for all residents to use, but she’s heard the owner’s girlfriend runs a baking business out of it. The parlor/ballroom is where dorm residents used to receive gentlemen callers and is now where the building manager works.
We pause halfway down the hall, apartments on one side, the courtyard on the other, where the wall gives way to windows. They look out on a rectangular pool and water splashing down a large decorative fountain.
“The coolest thing Steve told me is that the building is fed by Serendipity Spring, the one the town is named for.”
“That is cool. And pretty unusual to build to accommodate it. That must be why I’ve heard of this place. It would definitely explain why my grandfather liked it.”
We follow the hallway around, and once we’re on the other side of the parlor, she points to the elevator and the room next to it, its door open.
“Scary elevator. And maybe not totally reliable? Steve mumbled something about that. And that’s the library. It’s mostly classics plus some map volumes and a full encyclopedia, all from the dorm days. ”
“How do the apartments look? Do they still have dorm vibes?”
“No, Jay, I will not be inviting you up to my dorm room.”
It’s my turn to roll my eyes at her for once, and she grins.
“Mine looks great. It doesn’t give dorm room vibes at all. It feels old in the good way, with the original hardwood floors and crown molding, just like out here.” She points to the ceiling. “The other floors are the same but no kitchen or library. Oh, and I guess the new owner has a penthouse on the top floor. I haven’t explored up there, so I’m not sure.”
“It’s no outdated caretaker’s cottage on the back of your grandfather’s estate, but it’s all right.”
“You don’t like the cottage?”
“I love the cottage, but it hasn’t been updated since before I was born. This place, though?” I glance around us. “This place is certified cool.”
“It’s pretty great.”
Silence falls between us, and it’s awkward. I glance toward the entrance. “Thanks for the tour. I’ll see you at the house?”
“I’ll be pretty busy.” She says it like it’s a warning. “I have to finish my presentation for the board meeting next week.”
“I heard the vice chair is a jerk,” I say. “Watch out for him.”
“I’m miles ahead of you.” She shifts from one foot to the other then sticks out her hand, startling me. I take it and accept her handshake.
“Thanks again for coming over,” she says. “I’ll make sure I meet a couple of neighbors and get their numbers so I have someone else to call if I see any more bike chains.”
She’s back in work mode. Or keep-me-at-a-distance mode. “Sounds good. See you around, your majesty.”
“See you,” she says, already heading down the hall before I’m out the front doors .
Nothing like a woman burning the rubber of her sneakers to get away from you.
I shake my head as I jog down the steps toward the street, but I’m smiling. If Phoebe was consistently standoffish with me, that would be one thing. But she’s not, and that inconsistency tells me something important: she relaxes around me in spite of herself.
I plot ways to see her tomorrow the whole drive home, and by the time I park, I’ve found the perfect excuse.