Chapter 43
Oona happily lent me her cell phone—fully charged? What a world!—to call Sicily. I scrounged for a tissue for my runny nose and the sticky note the kid had left me and dialed her number, apprehensive. But did anyone pick up for a number they didn’t know?
No one except maybe a girl hoping to hear from her missing mother.
I got Sis’s voicemail and was caught flat-footed to leave a message trying to warn her about Edith but without too many specifics that might send her straight into trouble, demanding answers.
What came out was ramble: vague warnings of danger and not trusting anyone, even family, and I realized as I was still talking that I sounded tin-hat paranoid and also had implicated myself as well as her other mother.
Was this a helpful call at all? If the kid wasn’t in therapy for her anxiety, this would send her.
“Call the tavern as soon as you can,” I said just as the system cut out.
Should I call back? How much babbling would she put up with? I’d just have to try her again once I’d learned more from Quin’s friend.
I hung up and reached under my pillow, giving it a long, lustful gaze.
Had it been a month since I’d put my song fragments under there?
How many nights since I’d had any sleep?
My eyes stung, wanting to close, but I couldn’t curl up with the dogs right now, as much as I wanted to. The band was still waiting on me.
I grabbed a pair of Joey’s thick socks and changed into fresh clothes, another of Alex’s stolen oversized sweaters, a pair of leggings.
Then I tucked the notes for my most promising song into my pocket, grabbed my sweet Peggy Lee by the neck, and went to return the phone to Oona, from whom I received a sworn promise to be down in five minutes to help Alex behind the bar.
On my way out, I kiss-kissed for the dogs, reached into the jar of Wufers treats, threw one each before they charged at me, and took the hall at a dead run.
I swung open the door. At the bottom of the stairs, the door to the alley stood wide open.
If the alley door was broken again—
But it was just open. The air was freezing cold and thick with fumes.
Fumes.
I hustled down the rest of the stairs and stuck my head out into the alley. Sure enough: the white delivery truck with the canted front grille and the junk spare sat in the alley, running, no one at the wheel.
I sat my guitar down carefully in the spot usually reserved for Oona’s softball bat—thinking, right, I needed to return the bat—and marched outside and next door. It was time to meet the neighbors.
I knocked at the door. Polite, but firm.
Someone had to be inside, right? Someone who might know a few things about how Joey had died.
At the very least, a witness Aycock should talk to.
Someone authorized to move this smokestack on wheels out of the alley.
I switched from my knuckles to my fist and pounded until my breath came in puffs. Nothing.
I reached for the handle. The door swung easily open.
I poked my head in. “Hello?” I called warily. “Hey, your rig is out here pumping greenhouse gases into the ozone, you wanna turn it off?”
The fire door to the storefront was propped open again. These people! I trudged inside and through the door. It was long past time to let Alex know what was happening over here, even if I dreaded having to be the messenger.
The wide front room was empty, the floors still wrecked, no further progress made. I shook my head at the mess. I hadn’t even heard a lot of work going on lately, had I? Had they skipped out? And left us to deal with this? It was too much.
A moaning wind was blowing through again. Another leak Alex would have to locate and fix. I looked toward the windows up front. The corner of the paper in the windows hung low, but it wasn’t moving. One of the windows upstairs?
I turned back to the disaster made of the floors.
I was so tired, my sluggish thoughts were nearly physical things I could reach out and snatch out of the air.
Here was one. I felt as though I was standing on a stage half constructed.
It was a bit of theater, all the props in place for a performance that would never happen.
Me, the actor who hadn’t been given her lines, and a high wind sound effect playing offstage.
It was hypnotic. I pictured the wind, onstage, represented by pieces of painted plywood shifting back and forth, cloud faces with puffed cheeks.
All the actors standing behind a wooden flat cut in the shape of pirate ship.
All hands on deck, their salutes visoring over their eyes for the horizon—
I snapped out of my trance.
The treasure.
Someone really had leased the space next to McPhee’s in order to dig for treasure. And when they hadn’t found it …
Treasure that Alex swore was real. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
Just like I didn’t believe in the ghost.
Above, the high keening wind rose to a screech, then cut out. After the full-throated performance, the silence was almost worse. I peered up at the ceiling, listening hard. There was a scrape, a thump.
All noises that were very much corporeal.
Is that the word? You know, the opposite of supernatural, like every culprit ever on Scooby-Doo once their masks had been ripped off?
I charged back through the corridor to the alcove, rammed the door to the alley and spotted the truck still running, then turned and took the stairs two at a time toward the second apartment.
The door’s weak push-button lock and I were old pals, of course. Pull and jiggle the handle, lift and push, pop.
The door swung open to a cold and dirty room. An old couch left behind from some past tenant had been pulled apart by mice and time.
Mice and time had a smell.
I stepped inside, then felt the situation lock in around me. What was I doing? Joey had died, Quin had invoked the specter of organized crime, and I’m creeping around this place like I’m still six, fresh from the streets with my arm in a cast, and nothing else can ever harm me again?
Why hadn’t I brought Alex, or Oona’s softball bat? Even one of her crappy knives would have been something for my shaking hand.
I turned to go back, but then off to the side, in the room that mirrored Oona’s bedroom, something shifted. I sensed the movement more than heard it: A fluttering gesture, like a bird beating its wings at a window from the inside, fighting for the open sky.
Outside the door sat a big black garbage bag spilling plastic water bottles, dripping soda cans, and greasy to-go containers.
The wail started up again, not a whistle of wind through a leaking window but a cry frantic and moaning and human, rising like one of my voice exercises toward panic and punctuated with the scraping and thumping I’d heard from downstairs.
Through the crack in the door, I could see something moving—and then stillness.
Was that—
Someone sat hunched in a chair, their back to me.
I inched closer, my foot finding a creaking board in the floor.
At the noise, the head turned to profile. Straight nose. Gray electrical tape across mouth, one wild eye.
It was Marisa.