by Hodge, Brian
Sometimes she went to the windows to try taking in their views as an antidote. Every vantage point was unique, or should’ve been. Different streets, different rooftops, different elevations.
It was no remedy. Not this morning. A change in perspective couldn’t change the view. Everything in sight was frozen and frosted, the sun imprisoned behind walls of cloud while the snow strafed down in flakes the size of coins.
As above, so below; as within, so without. The desolation gnawed through the windows to the inside. Because there was a vacuum here, no pressure to drive back the intrusion. The end of winter felt ages away. Measureless eons away.
She turned from the windows one last time. Maisie was either here, or was not.
So Wendy kept looking.
Until, during her next round of searches, she found the bodies in 12-C.
««—»»
I dreamed my soul was a fixed point in two worlds.
But that was after I already woke up.
««—»»
Back in the lobby, Barrett knew something was wrong before she’d gotten anywhere near his station. Of course he did. Reading faces was vital to his calling. He spoke fluent body language. When she leaned on his desk, he cupped his hand over hers and readied for the bomb to drop.
“That look says it all,” he said. “Is she…?”
Wendy shook her head. “It’s not her. I don’t know who they are.”
“They? How many?”
“Two. Two women.” She only now realized there was room for worse. “But I didn’t look for any more. I got out of there as soon as I found them.”
He sat for a moment with his eyes squeezed shut. “Where are they?”
“A bathroom in 12-C.”
“Did the scene look violent?”
“Not really. But there was something on them. Some kind of shiny…gunk.” She remembered their clothes. “They’re wearing some sort of uniforms. Like a cleaning crew or something.”
Barrett sagged in his chair, then whirled to the LCD display angled on one side of his desk and called something up using the keyboard of an unseen computer. Then he sagged even more.
“Let me show you,” she said. “I should show you.”
He held up his hand in pause. “This is going to sound ridiculous, and it is. I’m not supposed to leave my station. Union regulations. This is going to be longer than a bathroom break.” He pressed his mouth shut, clearly hating every present moment. He went for his phone. “Let me at least get someone up here to cover the desk.”
The world really was this insane, wasn’t it? This was what it cared about most. Rules, obedience, minor infractions. These were the easiest things to get your head around, the easiest to punish.
“It’s okay,” he told her as they waited. Her impatience must have been more obvious than she thought. “They’ve been there for three weeks. A few more minutes won’t matter.”
Three weeks? She recalled him telling her that many of these empty places were given a routine once-over every few months. Maids coming in to keep the obsolescence at bay and the museum quality alive.
Only now did she grasp the spot Barrett was in.
There was no plausible reason for anyone to have found these bodies. Not today. Not until the next scheduled cleaning. According to the rules, they should have lain undiscovered until then. According to the rules, he probably should have sent any suspicions of a squatter up the chain of authority.
“I’m sorry, Barrett,” she whispered.
She watched him sit with the knowledge, the responsibility. The pride? That too. What he did, some may have seen it as a servile life, but he took pride in it. He was as conscientious as anyone she’d ever met.
After one of the custodians arrived to mind the desk, the two of them took the elevator to the twelfth floor and let themselves into 12-C. The air was cool, even chilly, and dry, which had no doubt helped the bodies keep longer. Had this happened in summer, a smell may have given them away long before now.
The apartment’s great room was dominated by a baby grand piano, gleaming white, a Yamaha logo stenciled above the keys in gold lettering. She’d noticed the sheet music on the rack earlier—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—and at the time had thought it was just for ostentatious show. She’d soon enough had worse things to worry about, and hadn’t given it another thought until now.
She pointed it out to Barrett, then leaned in for a closer look. The pages were worn, dingy with age and thumbed a thousand times. This was not the crisp, bright folio a property investor would have set out to complete a sterile scene. This was music that had been loved.
“They’re back here,” she said, and led him the rest of the way.
The master bath was all earth-toned mosaics and gilt-edged mirrors over a long marble vanity; a shower stall in one corner for convenience, and an egg-shaped recessed tub for leisure. One of the dead women lay in it, carelessly, as if she’d tumbled there, or been dumped. The other lay slumped against a wall. They were both dark-haired and brown-skinned, and she guessed they’d been middle-aged, but it wasn’t easy to tell. Neither woman looked freshly dead, their faces slack and sunken and withered, but neither did they look badly decomposed, as if the cool had made them more prone to drying out than decay.
No blood. They didn’t appear to have died violent deaths, just terribly unpleasant ones. The throat of the woman against the wall was bloated, the end of her tongue distended, as if she’d suffocated where she sat.
The only possible sign of a struggle was a cell phone broken on the tiles. It was in two pieces, along with fragments of the shattered screen. No way had that happened just from dropping it.
“How could they be here all this time and no one reports them missing, no one checks out where they’ve been?” Wendy asked. “The agency they worked for, when they didn’t return, those people had to know this was one of the last places they’d been.”
“They’re Salvadoran,” Barrett said. “I knew that much about them. And that the agency they worked for hires a lot of illegals. If that’s what they were…well, that’s why. Employers don’t report missing illegals.”
Got it. Illegals first, human beings second.
“Plus, I don’t think they were even supposed to be here. Not when they died.”
“I’m sorry, Barrett,” she said again. “The position I’ve put you in, I’m sorry I—”
“Don’t be. It’s better they were found now than later.”
He excused himself, and she heard his footsteps clicking along on tiles and hardwood, reverberant in so much emptiness. Looking for others, she supposed. Finishing the search.
Wendy sat on the toilet lid, up on her toes, knees drawn together, elbows on her knees, index fingers at her lips. As streamlined as a diver. If she heard the wrong noise, she’d shoot right through the ceiling.
A few moments later, she knew what was wrong with the scene. They were dressed in their uniforms—gray coveralls with a logo—but cleaning supplies were nowhere in sight. Purses, yes, and a compact travel case full of toiletries, soap and deodorant and toothpaste and washcloths and more. And the smashed phone. Just no cleaning supplies.
Yet they’d been into a mess just the same.
Barrett returned to the doorway. “Small blessings. There’s no one else.”
“You were afraid there might be?”
“They usually come in a team of three.” He beckoned her to follow. “Come have a look at something out here and tell me what you make of it.”
He led her to the kitchen, a big square alcove off the great room.
“I walked by the kitchen twice before I realized what was bugging me about it,” he said. “Some of the property holders cut the electrical service entirely. Others leave it on. It makes it easier for upkeep. But even if they do, there’s no reason to keep the refrigerator plugged in and running.”
Right. The hum. It was such a normal, subliminal sound, it was easy to overlook that you shouldn’t have heard it at all
. Barrett opened the brushed metal door. Inside, a cloth market bag sat on the top shelf, holding an onion and a jicama, along with a few plantains and oranges. Beside it, a half-dozen carton of eggs. A paper bag held what looked to be four pupusas, the stuffed cornmeal shells hard and dried out now. A bottle of budget wine sat in the door rack.
“Three weeks, you told me,” she said. “So when was the last cleaning, exactly?”
“December twenty-fourth. Early that afternoon.”
She thought of the food, the wine. The toiletries and sheet music.
“They stayed. They didn’t came back later, they just stayed,” she said. “If there was a third, then she took the cleaning supplies back with her. But these two women, they’d already planned to stay. They just wanted to spend Christmas someplace nice.”
The thought of it made her heart crack. She was enough of a refugee herself to see how this plan must have come together. Timing was everything. If they’d arrived in the early afternoon, then the third woman would’ve departed around the time the doormen changed shifts. Easier, that way, to give the impression the other two had left just before her, or were still on their way.
Stay here, like a getaway night in a five-star hotel. Enjoy some wine, a couple of meals, the view. And music, softly, softly, pianissimo, a chance to play an instrument that cost more than they would earn in a decade of dusting it.
How had it all gone so wrong?
Back in the bathroom, Wendy pointed out the peculiar residue on them. It coated the hands of the woman against the wall, was slathered thickly up the front of the coveralls of the woman in the tub. It streaked the molded fiberglass of the tub itself, and the tiled floor nearby. Whatever it was, it glistened, a milky silver hue with a subtle rainbow iridescence. She couldn’t tell if it was wet or dry, and wasn’t going to touch it to find out. When Barrett moved closer, she backed out of his way and reclaimed her perch on the toilet lid.
He took a pen from inside his jacket and hunkered down to touch the tip to the secretion coating the woman in the tub. When it didn’t stick, he tapped it. It sounded hard, brittle, like tapping glass or plastic. He got the same wherever he tried: on their hands, on the tub, on the floor.
“If I didn’t know better,” he murmured, “I’d say this is mother of pearl.”
“What makes you think you know better?”
“Not a thing. I don’t.” He shook his head. “Just that, if that’s what it is, how did it get on them like this?”
Mother of pearl—she knew it from jewelry, and from inside the lids of old music boxes and curio drawers. But it was a substance the artist worked with, not something manufactured under a roof. It came from the sea. From shells in the sea. It was made in the sea. Not on land, and certainly not twelve floors above sea level.
“Even if it is, that wouldn’t have killed them,” she said. “It’s not poisonous.”
Barrett made a move as if to push himself back to standing, then froze, looking at her. Actually, looking below her.
“Wendy.” Just as calm as could be. “Could you vacate the commode, please?”
She moved more urgently than his tone suggested. Only now did she notice the shimmering trail slicked up the curve of the toilet bowl. When Barrett flipped up the lid with the tip of his shoe, she didn’t know whether to laugh or gag, and a cry of startled fright wasn’t out of the question.
Three of them, as near as she could tell, floated in the bowl. All dead, apparently, but if they started thrashing in the water, that would be it, the thing that finally triggered her flight reflex.
Were they snails? Slugs? Something like that. If they’d been secreting mother of pearl, they had to be some type of mollusk, although the largest she’d ever seen. They were bigger than ears of corn, and a dull maroon in color, speckled with rows of pale blue spots. Their skins were not as smooth as they looked at first glance, their backs bristling with spiny hairs that reminded her of tiny porcupine quills.
“I wonder if that’s what killed these women,” Barrett said. “If there’s some kind of toxin in them.”
It was plausible. She’d heard of insects and sea creatures, innocent enough to look at, but to merely touch them brought excruciating pain, or worse. The implausible part was how they had come to be here in the first place.
“It couldn’t have killed them that fast,” she said. “All they had to do was call for help. They couldn’t have smashed their own phone. Could they?”
“I think that’s exactly what happened. One tried to call out, the other…” He shook his head. She’d never seen him appalled until now. “The other was more afraid of getting caught than being sick. She knew they’d get fired, maybe worse. Didn’t think it would be as bad as it was, until…”
Barrett slammed the lid closed.
“How many units does this make that you’ve searched again?”
“Ten. Plus the one the other day. No need to go back there.”
“Eleven out of thirty-nine,” he mused. “How long do you think it might take you to get through the rest? It’s taken more than half the day to get this far.”
She did some quick calculating—admittedly, she’d dawdled, going slower than necessary. Because there was no rush. They’d planned for this to take days.
After a moment, she realized what Barrett was really getting at.
“You’re going to leave them here? You can’t just leave them here.”
“Only for a little longer than they’ve been here already,” he said. “You’re still looking for a living person. That should take priority. Because if Miss Danziger is here somewhere, you should be the one to find her, not someone who’s going to drag her out in handcuffs, or worse. But the process can’t take too long. I don’t know what else there is to find in these god-forsaken voids. If anything. What I do know is that if there are three of these creatures in here”—he jabbed a finger at the toilet—“then I have to assume there are more. Whatever they are, I have a responsibility to the people of this building to make sure they’re identified and the rest of them found.”
He wasn’t wasting any more time. He flipped off the bathroom light and waved for her to follow, pausing only for a moment near the piano to glare out the windows at the swirling torrents of snow. She could barely see across the street now.
“And that isn’t going to help anything at all, when we finally call someone in from outside,” he said.
Back in the elevator, Barrett folded his arms across his chest and leaned into one corner and seemed to stare at something past the doors.
“Barrett? I could get through the rest a lot faster if you’d give me all the keys at once,” Wendy said. “I don’t know why you didn’t do that in the first place. Me having to keep running up and down to get them two at a time, that doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like the custodial staff doesn’t know what’s going on.”
He laughed, the tone falling somewhere between stress and relief. “Do you want to know why I insisted on doing it that way? Because I’m worried for you. I can’t know what you might be walking into. The presence of one squatter forces the possibility of another. Or something else I haven’t even considered.” He pointed overhead. “Obviously! So if it took you longer to come back for the next two sets of keys than I felt good about, I knew you could only be in one place or another. That’s why.”
She rode the descent in silence for a few floors. She couldn’t recall the last time anyone had admitted to worrying about her. Not even anyone at The 3 Chocolatiers had known enough to fear for her, not until she’d called them from the safehouse the day after Christmas and told them everything. So as much as she didn’t want Barrett to worry, she didn’t want him not to. After a moment, she turned on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.
“I didn’t want you to know that.” He almost sounded ashamed. “I didn’t want you thinking I didn’t trust you to take care of yourself.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I get it.”
“Dad?” he said, with raised eyebrows and
a little cough of a laugh. “I retract everything.”
Down in the lobby again, he reclaimed his desk and sent the custodian to round up the rest of the keys. He printed her a copy of the list of vacant units he’d compiled, and she checked off the ones she’d been through, circling 12-C as a trouble spot. He gave her a roll of masking tape, and instructions on what he wanted her to do with it.
“I’ll join you up there when I can, as soon as Lucien gets here to take over,” he promised. “That shouldn’t be much more than ninety minutes.”
As Wendy waited for the rest of the keys, she wandered to the front doors and used the sleeve of her sweater to clear a circle in the fog clinging to the glass. The snow fell thick and furious, caking every surface and clogging every street. She watched as a car rounded the corner, fishtailing before skidding sideways to bang into the fender of a parked car. Its own buildup of snow slid off onto the sidewalk with a soft whump. The driver got out to inspect the damage, then glanced up and down the street, and froze a moment when he saw her staring, then decided she didn’t matter and stomped back to resume his journey.
If she could’ve moved her arm in reverse, put the circle of fog back on the glass, she would have.
««—»»
No, scratch that. That was all wrong yesterday.
When the doctor doesn’t believe you, only believes that you believe something…when he tells you so with a smile so condescending you want to rip the lips from his head…when you know what he’s really doing is abandoning you to figure these things out on your own…it’s a given that you’re going to misinterpret the evidence sometimes.
My soul is not a fixed point in two worlds at all.
It’s a quantum point that has begun to oscillate between them.
««—»»
The thing she wondered about most, after resuming the search, was that if she did indeed find Maisie hiding away in one of these gilded voids, what the woman’s state of mind would be. Sealing yourself off, trying to live beneath notice, pretending you didn’t exist…it numbed the parts inside that you didn’t need anymore. Maybe they went dormant, or maybe they died.