CHAPTER THREE
Wren
My apartment is above a laundromat on Pell Street and it has three good qualities: it's cheap, it's warm because of the dryers, and it came with a cat.
The cat's name is Detective Meatball. He was here when I moved in, sitting on the counter like he was conducting an interview, and the landlord said "oh, him," in the tone of a man discussing a load-bearing wall.
Meatball weighs eleven kilos and hates me in a way that has become, over three years, a kind of marriage.
"Something's wrong with that flat," I tell him.
He does not respond.
"Not this flat. The other flat. The dead man's." I get the bun out of the bag and break it in half. "There was a mark under his table and Mari went white and told me to delete it, and Mari has personally carried a decomposed spaniel down four flights of stairs without changing expression, so."
Meatball turns around so his back is to me, which is fair.
The photos are still on my phone. I put them up on the laptop at the kitchen table, all four, blown up until the pixels get soft.
Two curves crossing, one line struck through.
Carved with something narrow, and — now I can see it big — carved fast, the strokes overrunning at the ends.
Whoever did that did it in a hurry, in the dark, with a dead man on the rug behind them.
I reverse image search it. Nothing. I try describing it in six different ways to six different search engines and get: a Norse rune I'm fairly sure is fake, a brand of Portuguese olive oil, and a tattoo forum where somebody's asking about the same mark in 2011.
The thread has been deleted.
I sit back and look at that for a while, because here's the thing about a deleted thread: the reply count is still there. Forty-one replies. Somebody asked a question in 2011 and forty-one people had something to say about it and then the whole thing went.
I try the archive sites. Two of them have nothing. The third has the thread title cached — anyone know this symbol? found it on grandad's boat — and one line of the first reply before it cuts off, and the line is:
Where's the boat now
I close the laptop.
Outside, the dryers thump. Rain on the window in the crooked way it comes off the Aldren's updraught, sideways then straight then sideways.
"Mari's abuela drew it on a doorframe," I say to the room. "In August. Every year."
And I get up, and I go to the closet, and I get down the box.
◆ ◆ ◆
It's a wine box with WEDDING PHOTOS AND OTHER LIES written on the side in my mother's handwriting, which is the single funniest thing she ever did and she did it while dying.
It's the only box I kept. Inside: a christening spoon, a mortgage statement from 1994, my mother's hospital bracelet, and eleven letters from her mother — my grandmother, Ilse Verity Kelleher, who lived alone in a house in Rimebrook two hours north and who I met exactly twice.
I've read the letters maybe four times in ten years. They're not warm. Ilse wasn't warm. They're mostly about the weather and the roof and a woman called Doreen who was, from context, a monster about the church flowers.
But there's one, dated the year I was born, that ends:
Keep her out of cities, Anne. I don't ask you for anything and I'm asking you for this.
Keep her north, keep her boring, keep her out of anywhere with more than one bridge.
If it comes on her the way it came on me you'll know because she'll bleed for no reason and it will smell like nothing you've ever smelled.
Don't take her to a doctor. Take her to me.
My mother moved us to Ashmoor when I was seven. Ashmoor has nine bridges.
I read it again. Then a third time. Then I put my fingers to my top lip because something's gone warm there, and they come away red.
The blood runs down onto the letter, onto keep her north, and spreads through the paper, and I sit very still at my kitchen table above a laundromat at seven in the morning with my head tipped back and a dishcloth to my face, laughing, because there's nothing else to do with a thing like that.
Meatball comes over and sits on the box.
"Yeah," I say, through the cloth. "Same."
I text Mari: need to talk about your abuela
Three dots. They start. They stop. They start.
Not on the phone.
◆ ◆ ◆
Here's what nobody tells you about the beginning of the end of your life: you still have the disposal run.
I sleep for four hours. I wake at noon with my nose crusted and my head full of wet sand, and there are eleven bags of regulated medical waste in the back of a van in a parking structure, and they cannot stay there, because the licence we hold requires transfer to the transfer station within twenty-four hours and because losing that licence would end the only thing I have built in my entire adult life.
So I do the disposal run.
I drive out to Corvin with the radio on.
I queue behind a man in a hi-vis vest arguing about a pallet.
I hand over the manifest to a woman called Bree who has been on that desk since before we started and who once, memorably, described our entire industry as the last honest work in America, and she scans the barcodes and says "you look rough, hon," and I say "long one," and that's the whole of it.
Then I sit in the van in the transfer station car park for eleven minutes and look at a photograph of a mark on the underside of a table.
Because the mad thing — the thing I keep coming back to — isn't that it's there. It's where it is.
I have cleaned four hundred rooms. I know exactly who looks at the underside of furniture, and it is a list of one profession, and I am on it.
The police don't. The police photograph at eye level and body level and they take the room; they don't lie on their backs with a UV torch under a console table, because they've got no reason to, because nothing happens under a console table.
But we do. Every time. Because blood goes under things, and because the family walks back into that room afterwards, and because I would rather be thorough than sleep.
Somebody put a mark somewhere that only a cleaner would find it.
I turn the engine on and turn it off again.
"No," I say, out loud, in a van in a car park. "That's mad. That's completely mad."
I drive back into the city and I do not go home.
I go to the office on Corvin Street, which is one room and a kettle and a filing cabinet, and I do the invoicing for the Ansel job, and the client is a management company, and I look up the management company, and they've held that building since 2019.
Then I look up the four jobs we've taken this year that came to us the same way — direct, no insurer, paid inside a week.
And I sit in a plastic chair under a strip light at four in the afternoon with a pen in my hand and my heart going, because three of them were in buildings held by the same management company, and I have been in three rooms this year where a person died with the door locked from the inside, and I made a joke about every single one of them.
◆ ◆ ◆
At six I ring the management company that holds the Aldren, because the invoice needs a purchase order number and because I want to hear a voice say something ordinary to me.
I get a call centre in another state. A young man called Dev finds the account in about nine seconds and reads me a PO number and then says, conversationally, "Oh — that's the one where the guy died, right?"
"That's the one."
"That building's got a note on it," Dev says. "Like a flag on the account. Any incident reports go to the owner direct, not through us."
"Is that unusual?"
"It's a bit unusual. Normally we handle everything and the owner gets a monthly." A mouse, or paper, or nothing. "This one's been like that since 2019. Every incident, straight up."
"Who's the owner?"
"Holding company. I've only got the name." He says it. Four words that mean nothing, of the kind any lawyer can generate in an afternoon. "Sorry. That's all I've got on my side."
"That's fine," I say. "Thanks, Dev. Have a good one."
I write the four words on the back of the manifest and put a box round them, and I sit in an office on Corvin Street with a strip light going and one window facing a wall, and I think about a mark carved fast in the dark under a table in a building where every incident report goes straight to somebody nobody has ever seen.
Then I ring Mari.
It goes to voicemail. That's the second time today, and she has never in four years let me go to voicemail twice.
WREN ok i'm not going to be weird about this
WREN but you've dodged me twice and you're the one who told me to delete a photo so i'm going to be a LITTLE bit weird about it
Three dots. A long time.
MARI i'm at my mum's
MARI i'll be in tomorrow
MARI wren i'm sorry, i just can't do it on a phone