Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  But the door wasn’t locked.

  Damn it! Maddie was shocked. Tessa, for God’s sake, when you’re in here by yourself, lock the door behind you! Didn’t being raised by two drunks in a domestic demilitarized zone teach you any distrust? This is the big city!

  Tessa’s dance bag lay in a corner of the big studio, where the fluorescents still blazed twenty feet above the sprung wooden floor. From the door, Maddie scanned the room. The mirrors threw back her own reflection, medium height and still slim, though she’d put on ten pounds since her own stick-thin ballerina days. Belly dancers might not get the respect ballerinas did, she reflected, but at least they didn’t have to starve themselves to get into productions. Her light-brown hair hung nearly to her waist, still curled into a maze of braids and twists, the jeweled clasps in it incongruous against the drab green duffle coat and jeans.

  There was no sign of Tessa.

  Bathroom , thought Maddie. She walked over to the black canvas bag: pink silk pointe shoes repaired with duct tape, worn and holed knit warm-ups wadded into a ball, jeans hanging over the barre. They brought back to her so clearly the first time Tessa had slipped apologetically through the door of the Dance Loft’s front office last July, as if she expected to be thrown out for daring to breathe the air in there. “I’m Theresa Lopez,” she’d said in her soft voice. “Is there, like, a bulletin board where I can put up a notice asking if anyone needs a roommate?”

  Maddie had shown her—the board was crammed with similar ads—and because it was midmorning and Maddie had just finished teaching her own class, she’d got her a cup of coffee and they’d sat on the spavined old sofa in the front office and talked.

  Though there was ten years difference in their ages—Tessa was just eighteen—Maddie had liked her immediately. Maybe because her response to Maddie’s teaching belly dancing had been a heartfelt “How cool!” instead of a condescending “Oh…like those girls in the clubs?” Maybe because of the careful expression in the back of those huge brown eyes that had identified Theresa Lopez as a survivor of the same sort of war that Maddie herself had, at that time, only recently gotten out of alive, though in Theresa’s case the enemy had been parents, and in Maddie’s case…

  Sandy.

  Maddie’s mind still flinched from the recollection of her ex-husband.

  And the flinch woke her to the fact that a good five minutes had passed.

  “Tessa?” The hall outside the Dance Loft’s front office was dim and it seemed like miles to the bathroom. When Maddie reached it and pushed the door open a crack, she saw that the room was dark.

  Tessa wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there, at least not when Maddie had come upstairs.

  Maddie stood for several minutes in the gloom of the hall, listening to the silence of the building around her.

  Not empty silence. Silence that breathed, and listened.

  Well, duh, she told herself quickly, Of course it’s not empty, Tessa’s here someplace….

  But a part of her knew it wasn’t Tessa whose presence she sensed.

  Maddie walked back to the office, checked the big studio again, hoping against hope she’d find Tessa there, folded into some impossible stretch and simply oblivious of the fact that it was now eleven-thirty.

  Nada. She called out Tessa’s name, hesitantly, but there was no reply from the other, smaller rehearsal rooms that the Dayforths rented to freelance instructors in tango, Hawaiian, hip-hop and, yes, belly dancing…so long as they didn’t need them for ballet classes of their own.

  Now truly uneasy, she let her bag slip down off her arm and knelt quickly to fish through the gaudy jumble of gold sequins and green silk for her cell phone. Damn it, she thought, I knew this would happen …without being precisely certain what “this” was. There was a miniflashlight in the bag, too—the electricity in the Glendower Building was notoriously erratic—and Maddie’s wallet, which she transferred to her coat pocket along with the pepper spray.

  Getting into the ABA was one thing—Maddie knew well how few new students they took each year, and how, with a direct feed from the most prestigious ballet company in the country, they chose none but the absolute best.

  Putting your life in danger was another.

  Not, she thought wryly, that you didn’t do just that, cheerfully, when you were driven to succeed as Tessa was driven. She recalled her own teenage days of diet pills and bloodstained toe shoes. A few nights ago she’d come here at midnight, to see Tessa still in this studio, practicing grand jetés and sautes de basque back and forth across the huge floor with the gem-hard concentration of a gladiator training for a death fight. The younger girl’s brilliance was matched only by her hunger for perfection of technique, a hunger sharpened by a short lifetime of denial.

  In that first conversation six months ago, Tessa had spoken only of parents who “think I’m crazy.” It wasn’t until later—a week after their first meeting, to be exact, when Charmian Dayforth had dropped Maddie’s two belly dancing classes in favor of another children’s ballet class and Maddie had had to take a roommate to make ends meet—that Maddie had learned how hard that slim, dark-eyed girl had fought to dance at all.

  Tessa knew the competition she was up against. Without a dime coming in from El Paso, she worked two jobs, getting up at four-thirty in the morning and putting in hours doing Mrs. Dayforth’s clerking, filing and phone answering in trade for her classes, wanting only to learn. There were nights when Maddie had come up to the school after her own gigs at Al-Medina or the Algerian Marketplace and had found her asleep from sheer exhaustion on the front office couch.

  Maddie flicked on the flashlight, left her bag beside Tessa’s in the studio, stepped back into the dark hall.

  “Tessa!” Her voice echoed in the halls, grating horribly on that watchful silence. “Tessa, can you hear me?” The flashlight was less than the length of her hand and had a beam that broke up a yard from the lens. It took her several minutes to find the light switches in the hall, and the dreary grayish glare was barely less depressing than absolute darkness.

  Big studio, small studio, tap studio…dark. There was another big studio, though without the two-story ceiling, on the floor above, and a medium-size one where Maddie had taught her belly dance ladies the preliminary mysteries of isolation, shimmies and hip drops. Tessa was in neither of those, nor in the big changing room, though something that Maddie suspected was a rat darted out of sight under a locker. At that size she hoped it was a rat and not a cockroach, anyway.

  That was another reason she disliked the Glendower Building.

  Her heart pounded as she turned on the lights to the stairway up and mounted the narrow carpeted steps. The two floors above the Dance Loft—she thought there were two floors, anyway—had been divided and subdivided and redivided over the course of nearly a century into a maze of small offices and tiny studios where a couple of fly-by-night music companies did business, along with three literary agencies and a handful of freelance computer technicians. There were little workshops and padded sound booths, reached by odd little passageways that turned back on themselves or dead-ended into blank walls; windowless cubicles surrounding dreary waiting rooms with names on the doors like Wild Adventure Tours—as opposed to tame adventures? Maddie wondered.

  Maddie thought she’d covered the fifth floor—the one immediately above the two floors of the Dance Loft—thoroughly, trying every locked and silent door. But it was also completely possible that she’d missed a hallway or a whole section of doors. There was no way of telling.

  There were definitely rats up here.

  And a silence that seemed to look over her shoulder, waiting to grin at her if she turned around.

  Grimly, Maddie turned on the lights of the next stairway up, pushing from her mind the question of what on earth Tessa would have come up here for. She wouldn’t have left her bag, wherever she was: Bloch pointe shoes cost upward of eighty dollars a pair.

  Maddie was halfway up the stairs when the lights went out.
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  She cursed, froze as blind darkness shut around her, as if someone had dropped a blanket over her head. Damn the management and its cheap wiring—or were the lights on some kind of timer to save money? Anger carried her through the first half minute while she dug in her pocket for the flashlight….

  “Stand still, you little bitch.”

  The whispered words came so soft that they might almost have been inside her head. Only they weren’t. She knew they weren’t.

  Her heart constricted, then raced like a NASCAR engine as her hand scraped, pawed for the damn flashlight. Oh, God, where the hell is it…?

  “…little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…”

  She couldn’t tell whether that thick, slurring voice was in front of her or behind her. But it was close, close and very clear, for she could hear the hiss of breath, smell a faint whiff of some cloying cologne laid over the stink of sweaty wool and alcohol. Oh, God, where is that flashlight …?

  Her fingers touched it, buried deep in the folds of the left-hand pocket, slipped away from it, then grabbed it and flicked it on. Nothing above her on the stairs—she whipped around fast, shaking with shock, saw him….

  Saw his shadow.

  He was farther away than she’d thought, at the bottom of the stairs behind her, beyond the range of the flashlight’s weak beam. A man’s shape, tall and looming, a darkness against the deeper dark of the hall. Still his voice seemed to be right up against her ear as he whispered, “Bitch…”

  And was gone.

  Maddie climbed the stairs fast. The light switch was farther from the top than any sane remodeler would find useful, and as she hunted for it, sweeping the feeble beam along the walls, she listened desperately behind her, wondering if she’d just heard the stair creak, the floor creak.

  Tessa , she thought, Jesus Christ, Tessa, be okay ….

  She flipped the switch. One light went on, far down at the end of the hall. Nothing worked near the stairwell.

  In her mind she still heard the whispering. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from, for it seemed to fill the air around her, some of it intelligible, some half heard and foul beyond the borders of sanity.

  He’s down there. Behind me .

  Maddie retreated down the main hall toward the light. A corridor gaped to her right and she whipped the watery flashlight beam down it, the knobs of locked doors gleaming furtively in darkness. Something lay on the floor, something small—Maddie didn’t know why she recognized it as one of the bandannas Tessa wore in her hair, but she did. She looked for a light switch but there was none, turned a corner into a dead end, retraced her steps, turned another…

  Damn it , thought Maddie with a sinking heart, I miscounted. Looks like there’s another floor above this one ….

  Stairs, narrower yet and as unlit as the fire escapes in hell, ascended at the end of the short hall….

  The next second she realized that Tessa was standing at the foot of them, her back to Maddie, looking up.

  “Tessa!”

  The girl swung around, startled, catching at the corner of the wall for support. In her tights and leotard she looked about thirteen, her thin form half concealed by a baggy T-shirt, whose old rock-concert logo had been nearly chipped away by time and laundering. Her marvelous black hair was wound up into a neat ballerina’s bun on top of her head.

  “Maddie?” She sounded puzzled rather than afraid.

  “Are you all right?” Maddie strode down the hall, put a hand behind Tessa’s back, drew her toward the faint light still visible from the main hall. Through leotard and T-shirt she could feel every vertebra, as if she’d put her hand on a pile of jacks. “I was coming back from Al-Medina, and I thought I’d walk you home….”

  They turned the corner by a locked door marked, Vulgarian Records , Tessa looking around her uncertainly, as if not entirely sure of where she was.

  Maddie herself was just praying that the main hall would be empty when they reached it. “I saw your stuff still in the studio….”

  There were still, of course, the stairs to get down….

  “Thank you.” Tessa sounded hesitant, but then made herself smile. “How was your gig? You get a lot of tips?”

  “Decent.” And I left them downstairs in my bag, like an idiot, for our pal Whispering Smith to help himself …“Tessa, listen, there’s somebody else in the…”

  They stepped around the corner and there he was.

  Maddie’s breath jerked in her lungs, and Tessa stepped toward the tall shadow and said, “So what happened to the lights?”

  “When I fired up the Doomsday Machine to destroy the planet, I had the microwave on and I blew a circuit.” He stepped into the weak glimmer of the flashlight: brown eyes, pleasantly craggy features, dark, stiff hair hanging in disarray over his forehead. Under a greenish-brown wool sweater the tails of a much-faded denim shirt protruded, finished off by patched and battered jeans. “You need something? Other than a better flashlight?”

  “Maddie,” said Tessa, “this is Phil Cooper. He plays piano for the ballet classes—he’s got a studio here in the building.”

  “Hi.” Maddie’s heart was still pounding so hard it almost nauseated her. Her fingers closed around the pepper-spray can in her pocket, though her common sense told her that unless he were armed, the man probably couldn’t take on the two of them. She wanted to pull Tessa back out of arm’s reach but didn’t know how to manage it unobtrusively.

  “Maddie’s my roommate,” continued the girl blithely. “She dances over at Al-Medina—and reads tarot cards.” Her pride and delight in both of these accomplishments rang in her voice. “She’s really good.”

  “Remind me to consult you the next time I get offered a recording contract.” His voice was pleasant, husky and a little hesitant, but Maddie could see that he didn’t miss the way she drew back from him.

  “I suggest you save your money for a lawyer,” she said. “Tessa, we’ve got to get out of here. It’s almost midnight.”

  Tessa’s eyes widened with shocked guilt. “No way! Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry….” She let Maddie pull her down the stairs, Phil trailing behind. Maddie almost told him to get lost but decided that it was better if she knew where he was. The lights worked fine once they got down to the Dance Loft.

  “Makes sense,” said Phil cheerily as the bright glare flooded the halls. “If the Dayforths left, the owners would be stuck with two whole floors to rent out. They don’t give a rat’s ass what we think about them up on the sixth floor.”

  Maddie said nothing. As they collected their bags Tessa chatted with Phil about the long explanation Quincy the caretaker had given her concerning the building’s electricity—“I swear the man took twenty minutes to tell me about buying a lightbulb! Well, first he told me about how electricity worked, then he told me about the lightbulb….”

  “They’ve got a twelve-step program for that,” said Phil as he followed the two women down that last long spooky flight of stairs to the lobby. “On-and-On-Anon. You ladies be okay walking over to the subway?”

  “We’re fine,” Maddie snapped, and stepped out onto the stoop. Phil remained in the building and gave them a polite wave as Tessa followed Maddie out the door.

  The night’s icy mist had almost thickened to rain. Maddie’s boots knocked sharply on the wet pavement as they headed for the subway stop on Park, making her glance back more than once, as if she expected to see someone drifting behind them in the dark. “Is he the night watchman for the school as well as the piano player?” she asked after they had walked a little way in silence. “Or does he just like sneaking around old buildings in the dark?”

  “I think he lives there these days.” Tessa huddled her pea coat more closely around her and glanced worriedly at the sharp note in her roommate’s voice. “But don’t tell Mrs. Dayforth, okay? He rents this studio on the top floor and writes music, and about two weeks ago his roommate at his apartment told him his girlfriend was moving in, so Phil had to vacate—way har
sh, I thought. I mean,” Tessa added contritely, “if you wanted me to boogie so you could bring in a boy, I know you’d give me more than a day to find someplace else. Horny is one thing, but you don’t got to be rude.”

  “Sweetheart,” smiled Maddie, “after my previous experience in the male-roommate department, I promise you, you have nothing to worry about.” They walked on for another half block, detouring around the ubiquitous clusters of trash cans at the curb, glancing down narrow areaways where lights burned in tailor shops, button stores, basement clubs full of smoke. At the corner of Lexington Avenue an all-night Korean grocery glowed like a jewel with produce, bottles, steam trays filled with Oriental chicken salad and lasagna. At length—so as not to let her mind return to the male-roommate department—Maddie asked, “What were you doing up on the sixth floor? Why did you go there?”

  “I don’t…” Tessa hesitated. “I guess I thought I heard a noise or something. Or…or voices talking.” In the yellow glare of the grocery’s lamps her dark pixie brows drew down over the straight little nose; her glance darted sidelong to Maddie again. “I think maybe it had to have been my imagination.”

  “Did someone call you? Or…or whisper to you?”

  Theresa shook her head. “Whisper what?”

  Maddie shivered, remembering the note of vile gloating in the voice, as much as the obscenity of the words. Had it really been Phil Cooper? It was hard to put that hoarse voice together with the piano player’s easygoing friendliness. But then, she thought, she’d trusted Sandy, too.