Chapter 28 Taylor
Taylor
She’s early for her interview, so she pauses under her umbrella to look around her.
She’s never been on this small stretch of street before; it’s quietly folded into the Beacon Hill neighborhood like the dog-eared corner of a page.
The road is cobblestoned and so narrow a car couldn’t fit on it, only the horse and carriage for which it must have been originally designed.
Elegant gaslit lampposts dot the sidewalks, and the road rises at an incline, so the redbrick houses stack at sharp angles into the hill.
Rain droplets plunk into the street cracks with a strange rhythmic quality, adding to the ambiance of a forgotten era.
A feeling akin to excitement bubbles in her for the first time in weeks.
She suddenly feels with an absolute clarity that quitting the hospital was the right move.
Not only has this job opportunity with access to the kind of life she’s always desired practically landed on her lap, but given the top hat symbol, this place is somehow connected to both Vivian and her mother.
It’s as if, in a weird way, Taylor has been led to this very moment.
One side of Clapboard Street has beautiful townhomes with proper doors and window boxes packed with bright pansies and begonias and cascading greenery.
The other side of the street feels like the back of a house, consisting mostly of a continuous brick wall interrupted every so often by a flat, unmarked black door or a small, iron-grated garden window.
It is on this unadorned—unnumbered—left side that the Knox building sits, or rather the back of the Knox, where she’s been instructed to show up for her interview.
Employees must use the back door. That’s fine with Taylor if this is the street she has to traverse each day.
As she makes her way toward number 17, she glimpses up into the tall windows of the townhouses on the fancy side of the street.
Sam once told her the reason why the front entrances are elevated from street level is because they were designed to avoid the horse shit that littered the roads back in the day.
All she knows is that now, this elevation adds to their allure.
In one home, she spies the upper portion of a rich oil painting positioned beneath a picture light, and the curved, glossy black lid of a baby-grand piano.
In another, she sees wainscoting on the walls and an ornate ceiling medallion from which hangs the most opulent crystal chandelier—the likes of which she’s only ever seen in one of those magazines that showcase celebrities’ homes. Imagine turning on that light each day.
At her dad’s Outer Banks restaurant, a crab house and tiki bar that swells with seasonal tourists and second-home owners in the summer months, Taylor could always tell which people were the really wealthy ones.
They didn’t ask for the price of the specials; they didn’t even glance at the restaurant bill.
They just handed over their credit cards; they left tips that were sometimes too much and sometimes too little, the former because money was irrelevant to them, and the latter because they were too drunk to do the proper calculations.
In the South, wealth seems to translate to excess, and so far, in the North, it appears more buttoned-up, museum-like, viewed from behind a rope. Or from a rainy street.
But for Taylor, this is about to change.
When she reaches number 16, she swivels toward the opposite brick-faced side, where there is a black door with a small brass knocker in the shape of some flower thing. A camera attached to the upper right of the building angles toward the door.
This has to be number 17: the Knox.
From her pocket Taylor retrieves a slip of paper, and a packet of orange Tic Tacs falls out. Sam must have slipped them in there; he knows they are her favorite.
He seemed impressed that she would be interviewing at the Knox but was also slightly apprehensive.
“Anna must like you,” he mused, somewhat enviously. “She never tries to hook me up.”
“I think she just wants me to be able to make rent,” Taylor said, only partly kidding.
“Well, remember, you’re not committing to anything—not yet. See how it goes, what you think.”
“Okay.”
“But—if you can, snap some pictures on the sly. I’m curious, of course.”
Smiling, she now slips the Tic Tacs back into her pocket and rereads the note she jotted down earlier during her phone call: Knock three times, wait five seconds, and knock twice. Repeat until someone answers.
It seemed utterly silly when the man on the phone spit out these directives, and she almost laughed, certain he was pulling her leg.
But a silent pause had ensued, and then the man continued, his tone maintaining the same businesslike quality.
Taylor was glad she hadn’t responded, and later she wondered, Was that the first test I’d passed?
Now, being here on a street that feels like a charming colonial-era movie set, and standing in front of a plain, almost-speakeasy door that apparently opens into an exclusive private club, the instructions seem perfectly reasonable.
Taylor checks her watch—9:13. Two minutes to go. Suddenly, she worries: Will they know my watch is a fake Rolex? Fake designer clothes—and handbags—she is great at being able to discern the difference. But jewelry is a different story.
The second hand slowly ticks down, prolonged, fatigued. And then, finally, it is time.
Knock at the Knox. Here we go.
Her mouth feels dry, her heart picking up a notch, as she knocks as instructed. It takes just one full round before the door slowly begins to move.
“Hi,” a thirtysomething-year-old man says as he rests his hand on the edge of the cracked door, as if opening a fridge to lazily gaze inside at its contents.
He is tall and lanky, with brown curly hair and dark eyes.
A metal necklace hangs over his white T-shirt, and a half apron is pinned over his jeans.
“Uh, hi. Is this, um, the Knox?”
The man smiles. “It depends. Why?” He sounds British, but Taylor doesn’t have a good ear for those sorts of things.
In the Outer Banks, they would get an annual summer influx of foreigners coming to work the tourist season, and she could never discern their accents.
Grayson used to tease her about it. England and Australia are two completely different countries, T.J.
She glances at the paper, now crumpled in her hand. Was she given a contact name? “Um…”
The man laughs and steps back. “I’m just fucking with you. Taylor, right? Come on in.”
She pauses. The hallway behind the man is dimly lit, and she’s suddenly hesitant to enter.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. “I didn’t mean to weird you out. My name’s Liam. I’m a bartender here at the Knox. I’m not the one you want to see. That’s Peter Wales. I’ll take you to him.”
Liam turns and begins walking down the hall, assuming she’ll follow. She collapses her umbrella and trails behind. But a few steps in, Liam turns and points to an ornate brass umbrella holder they already passed. “You can put your umbrella there.”
“Oh, thanks,” she mumbles, embarrassed, and backtracks to do so.
Like the street, the hallway is narrower than a typical one—clearly not up to code, though perhaps Knox members don’t concern themselves with these things.
Nor do they apparently worry about claustrophobia; Taylor concentrates on the action of breathing, trying to edge the focus away from an all-too-familiar sensation.
But her nostrils instantly fill with a musty dampness, the sort of smell one would associate with a basement.
The hall is austere and minimally lit; a single overhead yellowed bulb provides enough light to advance a few feet to the following bulb.
The walls appear grayish white, and painted on the left are a burst of dot symbols that remind Taylor of the game dominoes.
On the right-hand side begin a series of numbers.
Grasping the meaning of those dots is a lost cause, but Taylor can at least make out the numbers.
The first number is seven. “So, is there another entrance to this place?”
“Yep,” Liam calls out from over his shoulder.
“Where?”
“This building runs through to Mount Vernon. That’s the pretty face of it.”
One. Then three—no, it’s an eight. The numbers on the wall spell out: seven-one-eight-one. 7181. Or 1817, depending on how you read it. The year the Knox was formed? The number of bodies buried beneath it?
Suddenly, Liam stops short, and Taylor nearly bumps into him.
He pivots to the right toward a frameless door she missed.
Fiddling with the knob, he swings the door outward into a galley kitchen, whose bright ceiling-mounted lights and three windows make Taylor squint.
She takes a deep, cleansing breath, relieved to be out of that dank hallway.
As her vision adjusts, she makes out a large commercial-like kitchen, with stainless-steel food-prep areas, large refrigeration units, multiple stovetops crowned with exhaust hoods, and deep sink basins.
There is a deep fryer as well, familiar to any Outer Banks local.
The kitchen is empty, save for one older woman toward the back, leaning against one of the counters.
A welcome aroma of garlic and onions wafts toward them.
Liam swoops his arm out in an exaggerated, somewhat obnoxious gesture. “After you, madam.”
Taylor steps through the threshold, where immediately her feet stick to the ground, as if she’s stepped on a film of maple syrup.
Glancing down, she sees a sticky pad, like the one the transplant unit in the hospital uses at their entrance to capture germs on visitors’ shoes.
“What the…” She hops off and glances behind her.
Her boots have left a residue of light brown granules on the sticky sheet, almost like she just tracked in sand.
Was there sand in that hall they just walked through?