Chapter 6
Nobody wanted Haymarket.
It came up on the Monday board in orange, which meant it had been sitting for three weeks, and Chris Lattimore said what everyone said about it, which was that it was a dog.
"City building," he said. "Nineteen seventy-two. Market floor over a parking structure, retail on two, offices above that, and every one of them thinks they're the client. Sixty-day window. There's no margin in it and there's a lot of ways to look stupid."
Nobody put a hand up.
Nicole said, "I'll take it."
The room did the thing again — that half-second where thirty people decided at once not to look at each other.
Lattimore's mouth moved. "It's a delivery lead's—"
"Then give me a delivery lead," Nicole said. "Who's technical on it?"
"Nobody's technical on it. It's orange."
Two desks down, a young woman said, "I did the survey."
Nicole turned around. Small, fast-looking, twenty-nine or so, in site boots at a desk job because she'd clearly come from somewhere that morning. The hard hat with BOWERS on it was on the floor by her chair.
"You surveyed it?"
"In November. It's in the folder. Nobody's opened the folder." She said it flatly, without complaint, which was somehow worse than complaining.
"What's your name?"
"Kara."
"Kara, do you want it?"
Kara Bowers looked at her for a second longer than was polite.
"Yeah," she said. "I want it."
They walked it on Wednesday in a wind coming off the water that got in at the collar.
Nicole had forgotten this. That was the honest thing, and it hit her in the stairwell of a parking structure at nine in the morning: she had forgotten what it was to be cold in a building with a drawing in her hand and a problem in front of her that did not care at all who she was married to.
"So here's the thing nobody wants to say," Kara said, crouched at a header with a flashlight in her teeth. She took it out. "The garage exhaust and the market makeup air are on the same shaft. They shouldn't be. Somebody in the eighties cut a hole and it's been a hole ever since."
"Show me."
Kara showed her. Nicole put her hand on the duct and felt it and looked up the shaft for a long moment.
"Whose hole is it?"
"What?"
"Somebody cut it," Nicole said. "Somebody signed the change. If we can find out who, we find out what year, and if we know the year we know what code they were building to, and then we know whether we're fixing an error or a decision."
Kara stared at her. "That's — nobody does that."
"We did that. It's cheaper than guessing." Nicole took her glove off and rubbed the scar at the base of her thumb. "Who's the mechanical contractor of record?"
"Corbett. Sal Corbett. He's about a hundred years old and he yells."
"Corbett," Nicole said, and something moved in the back of her head, in the smell of a banker's box.
She called him from the truck.
"Corbett."
"Mr. Corbett, my name's Nicole Doran, I'm at the Haymarket building and I'm—"
"Say that again."
"I'm at the Haymarket—"
"No," he said. "The name."
"Nicole Doran."
There was a silence with a television in it. Then:
"You gave me my first purchase order," Sal Corbett said. "The Dorchester school. You gave me a PO for four thousand dollars on a Friday and you paid me on the following Friday, which nobody did, and I've told that story at every job I've ever been on."
Nicole sat in the passenger seat of a company truck with the heater going and could not speak for a second.
"You still with Sutton?" he said.
"It's complicated."
"Ah." A wet laugh. "Yeah, I read it. Listen, sweetheart, everybody in this trade over sixty knows exactly who ran that outfit. It's only the office people who got confused."
The Ironworks in Quincy had the same carpet it had had in 1998 and a chalkboard listing three beers that were not available.
Bridget got there first and had a booth. By eight there were seven of them in it — Bridget's brother, two women Nicole had gone to high school with, a retired dispatcher who'd known her father's route, a couple of others.
Nobody said one word about Gordon.
That was the deal, and Bridget had clearly made it in advance, and it was the kindest thing anybody had done for Nicole in three weeks.
Instead they asked about the Haymarket building, because Sharon's son was a plumber and had a theory about that building, and the retired dispatcher, whose name was Dennis, told a story about her father that she'd never heard.
"He used to come off the route and go straight to your school," Dennis said. "Sat in the lot. Wouldn't come in, wouldn't take you home, just sat there til the bell. I asked him once. He said, She doesn't need a ride, I just want to see her come out the door like she owns it."
Nicole looked into her drink and did not trust her face.
"Oh, don't," Bridget said. "Don't you dare, we're having a nice time."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, you're leaking—"
"Shut up, Bridge."
Everyone laughed, and the moment went by, and she got to keep it.
Bridget walked her out to the lot.
"You're different tonight."
"I'm tired."
"You're not tired, you're lit up," Bridget said. "You've been talking about a duct for two hours. Do you know what you look like when you talk about a duct?"
"Don't."
"You look about thirty." Bridget pulled her coat shut. "I haven't seen that face since — Nic, I'm being serious, since before the second house."
Nicole stood by the car with her keys in her hand and the cold coming off the water two streets over.
"I thought I'd lost it," she said. "The knowing-how. I genuinely thought it had gone."
"It doesn't go."
"It goes if nobody ever asks you anything."
"Yeah, well." Bridget hugged her, hard and briefly, the way she did everything. "Somebody's asking you now. Go be insufferable about ductwork."
She drove back to Charlestown at midnight through the tunnel with the radio on, and somewhere under the harbor she caught herself singing, and it startled her so badly she stopped.
The mixer was at a hotel by the water on a Thursday and she went because Yolanda Beckett told her to.
"Half that room is diocesan property people and city facilities," Yolanda had said on the phone. "You want the next thirty buildings, don't you? Then be in the room, Nicole."
She wore the gray. She got a glass of wine she didn't drink much of, and she talked to a woman from the city about deferred maintenance for twenty minutes and enjoyed it more than any conversation she'd had at any gala in ten years.
"You're the header woman," a man said at her elbow.
He was about her age, maybe a bit more. Tall, unremarkable coat, the face of someone who'd been outside a lot.
"Sorry?"
"St. Bride's. The shared header nobody drew." He put out a hand. "Miles Ashby. I run mechanical for a firm you've beaten twice."
"Have I."
"You've beaten us twice. You personally, apparently, which is what half this room has spent the last hour talking about." He said it easily, no edge. "That's a real piece of knowledge, by the way. That's not a story about a company. That's somebody who was in the crawlspace."
"I was in the crawlspace."
"I know. That's why I came over."
They talked for forty minutes. About buildings. He was funny in a dry way and he listened properly, and he never once said the words your husband, which she noticed, and then noticed that she'd noticed.
When it broke up he said, "I'd like to buy you dinner sometime."
Nicole stood there with her nearly-full glass.
She was forty-six years old. She had been married for twenty-four years. She had not been asked a question like that since she was twenty-two, and she had spent a decade believing that the version of her that got asked questions like that had been quietly retired.
It landed. She was honest with herself about that, standing right there, with the harbor black in the windows. It landed hard, and it was not about him at all.
"I'm not going to," she said. "I'm about four weeks out of a marriage and it wouldn't be fair to you."
"Fair enough."
"But thank you." She meant it and let him hear it. "Genuinely. Thank you for asking."
"Well," Miles Ashby said, "if you beat us again, I'll ask you again," and he went off to get his coat.
Sal Corbett's records were in a storage unit in Braintree and they were not, in any sense anyone would recognize, filed.
"It's in there," he said, waving at forty years of cardboard. "It's all in there. My kid keeps saying scan it. Scan what? Scan that?"
They found it on the second evening. Kara found it, actually — a change order from 1987, handwritten, for a penetration through a shaft wall, signed by a mechanical engineer who had been dead for nine years, with a note in the margin that read per city — ok'd verbal, get it in writing and no evidence anyone ever had.
Kara held it up in a cold storage unit under a bare bulb and said, quietly, "It was a decision."
"It was a decision."
"They knew. They did it anyway because the alternative was a two-month shutdown in 'eighty-seven and somebody decided a market that's open beats a shaft that's right."
"And it's been open ever since," Nicole said. "Thirty-nine years."
Kara looked at the page. "So we're not fixing a mistake."
"We're finishing an argument," Nicole said, and Sal Corbett, sitting on an upturned crate behind them, laughed so hard he had to take his hat off.
The pricing took nine days.
She did it the way she had done it in 2006 and the way nobody did it now: on paper first, at the kitchen counter in Charlestown, with the drawings spread over the floor because there was no table, and then into a spreadsheet only once she already knew the answer.
Kara came over twice. The second time she stood in the doorway looking at the drawings covering the entire floor of a furnished rental and said, "Do you not have a — like, a conference room? At the place where we both work?"
"There's a conference room."
"Right."
"It's got glass on two sides," Nicole said, and Kara said "Ah," and got down on the floor with her.
They argued about the contingency for an hour. Kara wanted six percent. Nicole wanted twelve.
"That's not competitive."