by D. M. Pulley
“Hey, there!”
Nick squinted in the morning light and said nothing.
“Sorry I woke you up. I just thought I’d bring you some breakfast.”
“You all right? You need something?” He was clearly not happy to be out of bed.
“No, I’m fine. I just wanted to say hi I guess.” Iris tried to look dopey and lovable, but she realized she probably just looked dumb.
He just stood there scowling at her.
She handed him the coffee and the doughnut bag. “Here, go back to bed. Sorry for waking you.”
She turned and scurried back to her car. Being spontaneously romantic was a huge mistake. She drove away, feeling like an idiot.
It wasn’t until she was halfway downtown that she realized she’d given him her breakfast as well. They were supposed to sit and eat together and have their first real conversation. She pounded her hand into the steering wheel.
Where were his bedroom eyes and easy smile that morning, she wondered? Now that he’d taken what he wanted yet again, he was happy to let her just stand there like an idiot—an idiot with breakfast for him no less.
Maybe he wasn’t awake yet, she told herself. Maybe she ran away before he could throw his arm around her and give her a good-morning kiss. Sure, and maybe he’d been up all night writing bad love songs about our torrid night together, she thought sarcastically. How could she be so stupid?
She heard a loud honk and looked up from the wheel. The light was green. The sky was blue, and nobody in all of Cleveland gave one shit about her pathetic love life. She drove the rest of the way to the old bank puffing on a cigarette.
Iris stormed into the building after Ramone buzzed her through and banged on the elevator button. She banged on it again and kicked the wall.
“Whoa, what’s wrong with you?”
Ramone was never in the loading dock, but there he was for no good reason. It just figured that someone would be there to witness her meltdown.
“Ramone, let me ask you a question,” Iris blurted out. “If a woman brought you coffee and a doughnut the morning after a wonderful date, what would you do?”
“Change my locks.”
“What?” she practically shrieked.
“If she’s comin’ over to my house the morning after a date, she’s either desperate or crazy.”
Her eyes widened.
He broke out laughing. “Oh, I get it. This woman is you, right? Well, I didn’t mean no offense.” He was trying to stifle his laughter, but it kept sneaking out of his mouth. He gave her a friendly slap on the shoulder. “So which is it? You desperate or crazy?”
She attempted a smile. “Maybe both.”
Maybe Ramone was right. She wanted to go back home and crawl under her bed. Instead, she pulled out her radio and checked the battery.
“Ah, don’t sweat it. If the guy likes you, he’ll call. Just don’t bug him for a while.” Ramone smiled. “Hey, try not to buzz every five damned minutes today, okay?”
She nodded, avoiding his smirk by rushing into the elevator. Tears stung her eyelids. How pathetic. She needed to get over herself. She had bigger problems than Nick, and she needed help.
Iris stuck her head back out into the loading dock. “Hey, Ramone?”
“Yeah?”
“Was that you in the vault yesterday? You know, when Brad and I were down in the tunnels?”
“You went in the tunnels?” He raised his eyebrows, then shook his head. “I wasn’t down there. Why you askin’?”
“I just thought I saw somebody. Somebody in a blue shirt. They opened the vault door while we were on the other side.” She didn’t mention the keys. They were still at the bottom of her field bag.
Ramone stopped smiling. “You sure?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Might have been one of the owners, but they usually tell me before they come. I’ll make a few calls.” He turned to leave and added, “If you decide to leave the third floor, give me a buzz, okay?”
Iris nodded and ducked back into the elevator as the doors slid closed.
“Sure, don’t worry about me,” she muttered to herself. “I’ll just be up there by myself while some crazy person runs around breathing and dusting! No problem. I’m sure they won’t mind that I have their keys . . . Fuck!” She gripped the radio in her palm and took a deep breath.
Up in the old personnel office, everything was just as she’d left it. She plopped herself in Linda’s chair. It would take all that day and the next to transcribe her handwritten notes into a computerized blueprint. If she could even get it done in time. As the computer whirred back to life, she wondered how in the world she was going to work ten hours in that creepy office without going completely insane. What she needed to do was go down to the vault and put the keys back where she found them, but after Nick snuck up on her so easily the day before, she couldn’t go alone. If the intruder wasn’t some geek from a real estate company but actually was some sort of psycho killer . . . She couldn’t even finish the thought.
She grabbed the radio to call Ramone and set it down again. If she called him, she’d have to explain how she got the keys and why she took them. She’d have to admit she thought they were his. He might even suspect she had planned to use them to pry information out of him—or worse. If Ramone actually had plans to rob the vault and found out she had taken the keys, there was no telling what he might do. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but she hardly knew him.
Iris leapt up from the desk and began pacing. She was trapped. Between work and Ramone and the keys and the whispering voices in her goddamned head, there was nowhere to go. No way out without coming clean to Brad or Ramone or somebody.
Her sleep-deprived thoughts spiraled as her eyes welled with tears. The keys in the bottom of her bag. Nick’s sour face that morning. Ramone laughing. Desperate or crazy—which was it really? She was crazy for stealing shit from an abandoned building, for taking keys that didn’t belong to her, for hearing voices, for not telling Brad what she’d seen in the vault. Most of all, she was crazy for letting Nick into her house in the first place. She was desperate for trying to turn a few sessions of sweaty sex into a meaningful relationship by bringing him breakfast. The empty feeling she’d had waking up alone that morning hollowed her out all over again. She hadn’t realized how lonely she’d been all these months. Years even. It had been two years since she’d had a boyfriend, and that had been short lived. But Nick didn’t give a shit. He just thought she was easy, and he was right. She was desperate. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she wiped them angrily.
“Fuck him!” she shouted, slamming her hand on the desk. She’d rather be crazy.
She threw her calculator against the wall. Its batteries exploded out the back. Good. Her eyes fell on the locked door. It was getting knocked down by a contractor in a week. Fuck it. She stomped over and gave it a sound kick. It made a loud bang against its jamb but didn’t budge. She kicked it harder and let out a low growl. It was a relief to really hit something hard. She kicked it again and again.
“Fuck this fucking place!”
Whack!
She landed a kick right next to the locked knob and recoiled in surprise when the jamb splintered and the door moved. She’d actually broken some part of the frame. Iris examined the jamb where the door had been forced a half an inch open. Maybe I really am crazy, she thought with a nervous laugh. She’d just kicked a door in. Maybe her lunacy gave her the strength of ten men. The door wobbled in its frame. Might as well finish the job, she thought, and threw her shoulder into it. It took four tries, but the damn thing finally broke open.
“Ha! Take that, you stupid door!” she shouted triumphantly.
She stared at her handiwork for a few moments: the splintered doorjamb, the cracked door panel. Shit. How was she going to explain how she got the door open without sounding
nuts?
A wave of musty, stale air hit her in the face. “Uck!”
She stepped into the hidden room. It was a bathroom, just as Ramone said. It wasn’t that different than the one above it where Nick had had his way with her, except it was filthy. A black crust covered the floor by the toilet. Dark grime coated the fixtures. The light filtering in through the window shimmered with dust and soot.
She took another step. Something metal went ringing across the floor tiles and clinked into the far wall. It was a key. Iris picked it up. Black crust flaked off the bronze as she turned it over in her hand. There were no markings on either face. Maybe it was the door key, she thought, glancing back at the shattered frame.
A cheap white shower curtain hung over the entrance to the shower stall. It was pulled closed. Something about it felt wrong. She didn’t remember seeing shower curtains in the other bathrooms.
The creeping feeling that someone was watching her inched up her spine. She cleared her throat loudly, not taking her eyes off the curtain. It didn’t move. The stagnant air coated her mouth and throat with an acrid film. Iris ordered herself to get the hell out of there and get back to work.
Instead, she took a step toward the shower and timidly reached out her hand. The plastic crackled in her hand, and she swore she could hear a faint buzzing behind it. Squeezing her eyes half-shut, she ripped the curtain open.
A rope hung from the showerhead inches from her face. It was tied into a noose and crusted black and brown. Then she looked down. A mountain of dead flies were piled at the bottom of the stall. Little corpses stacked one on top of the other in an avalanche of shattered wings and hollow black shells. They were everywhere. Dead flies were scattered behind the toilet and along the windowsill. They littered the floor.
The rope was still hanging from the showerhead. Her eyes darted from the noose to the dead flies piled on the floor of the shower. In between the silvery-black corpses, she could now see fragments of what might have once been a gray pin-striped suit. Something resembling a black leather wing-tip shoe was peeking out at the corner.
It was a shoe. It was a suit. They were under the flies. The flies had been eating. She couldn’t breathe. Bile flooded her throat. They’d been eating. Her hand was locked in a death grip on the shower curtain. Her arm was trembling. The shower curtain fluttered in the stall, jostling the empty shells of the dead insects. They tumbled toward her feet, falling weightlessly over the toes of her work boots. Something yellow and hard emerged from underneath the layers of tiny corpses. It was a bone.
Someone was screaming; she was screaming. She tore her hand from the shower curtain violently. Dead flies fluttered into the air. Iris stumbled to the toilet to throw up. The toilet bowl was crowded with insect shells. She turned to the sink. It was littered with broken legs and wings. She staggered back. Her mouth filled with vomit.
Flies seemed to be spilling onto the floor after her. The noose swung from the showerhead. Her heel hit the curb of the shower stall, and flies crunched under her feet. She lurched toward the bathroom door.
She crumpled to her hands and knees and vomited on the carpet. Recoiling, she slammed her back to the wall outside the bathroom, seeing nothing but flies. Hungry flies.
Ramone’s voice crackled over the radio. “Iris, you there? Iris?”
The radio was on the desk over her head. She barely registered the noise. Her mouth opened and shut on its own. She couldn’t make a sound.
“Iris, I’m coming up,” the radio crackled again.
A few moments later, Ramone’s hulking shape entered the room in a slow crouch, moving toward the broken door. His gun was drawn. He straightened up when he found her propped against the wall and lowered the gun.
“Iris, what the hell’s going on? I heard all this racket.” He glared at her for a moment, waiting for an answer. Then he noticed the vomit on the floor.
All Iris could do was shake her head.
He raised his gun again and stormed into the bathroom. “Jesus!” he said under his breath, and walked back out. “You find him like that?”
Iris nodded and clamped her hands over her mouth. Ramone had called the pile of flies “him.” Her stomach lurched again, but she fought the bile back down.
“You okay?”
She shook her head violently and tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.
“Here, let’s get you off the floor.” He helped her stand up and guided her back to Linda’s chair. “I’ve got to go call the police. You stay here a minute. If you can, you might want to gather up the things you gonna need. This whole damn place is a crime scene now. Police are gonna lock it all down.”
He left Iris staring blindly at the desk while what was left of a dead person lay in the next room. The body had been there all along. Every minute she’d spent in the room, a pile of death had been rotting not ten feet away. She shuddered in her chair. The shadow of a moth flickered outside the window blinds. She stared at it blankly for what could have been hours, unable to bring her mind back.
Sirens rang out in the distance on the street below. She blinked. The police were coming. Ramone had told her to take what she needed. She numbly took an inventory of the desk. It was all company stuff she couldn’t care less about. She grabbed her schematic floor plans. She’d worked hard on those. She grabbed her field bag. She looked for her purse for several minutes, until her addled brain remembered it was down in the loading dock with her car. But where were her car keys? She needed her car keys to get home.
Her field bag was full of keys, but none were the ones she needed. Keys to the vault, keys to the building, they were all wrong. She had to get home. She couldn’t stay here—not tonight, not another minute. She had to get home.
Iris sprung up from the chair on the verge of hysterics. She smeared the tears across her face, searching the desk and floor for her car keys. It wasn’t until she felt a sore spot on her rear end that she thought to check her pockets. They were there. They clinked together as she gripped them in her hand. The metallic clink she’d heard in the bathroom rang out again in her ears. It had come from a small bronze key. She looked down at her shaking hands. It was gone.
She turned her head toward the open door.
On the far wall inside the dead man’s room, she could make out the edge of the metal grille of the air vent next to the toilet. Its iron frame cast an odd shadow against the wall tiles, as if it had been pried open ever so slightly. She inched closer to the broken door. The mounting screws for the grille were missing, leaving two empty holes along its edge. The vent was large enough to crawl through. She could hear a voice from the air shaft whisper, “Iris . . .”
Shut up. Iris tore her eyes from the vent and scanned the ground. Where did it go? A dead fly drifted into view. Oh God. She nearly threw up again. She pressed her back to the wall and slid down, burying her head in her knees, trying to breathe. Something shiny glinted from the carpet at her feet. Inches from her vomit. She squeezed her eyes shut and reached out with her hand until she felt cold metal.
She sucked in a breath and opened her eyes. It was the key.
CHAPTER 46
Monday, December 11, 1978
It was too late to go back to the bank. Beatrice had no choice but to spend the night in the hospital lobby. The seating area outside Admitting was deserted. She found a bench in the corner and slumped down under the fluorescent lights. She didn’t bother closing her eyes. She couldn’t possibly sleep after seeing Max. She gazed at the small bronze key in the palm of her hand. There was no writing on either side. It could be the key to anything—a gym locker, a small safe, a motel room. It was a secret, and Max had told her to keep it safe.
Max had dyed her hair and was wearing oversized clothes. She was hiding. She said the hospital was being watched. The signature of R. T. Halloran in the ICU register scrawled itself across Beatrice’s mind. An “uncle” had come to visi
t Doris the week before.
“Doris was different . . .” That’s what Max had said. “She had her key.”
Beatrice was pulling the safe deposit box key from her purse when she heard an elevator bell ring. At the other end of the lobby, shiny metal doors slid open, and a man in a brown suit stepped out. His gray sideburns and thick waist reminded her of Bill Thompson. She hid her face behind her purse. He turned without looking her way and headed out the hospital doors. She watched him leave and tried to guess from his gait if it was Bill. She couldn’t be sure.
Max had said they were watching the room. It then occurred to Beatrice that they might be watching her too. Bill, Teddy, or whoever “they” were could be watching her right then. She was sitting there in the open lobby, surrounded by windows and holding Max’s key.
Beatrice stood up with a jolt. She gathered her things and rushed out the front door of the hospital. A taxicab was parked near the hospital entrance with its light on. She jumped in the backseat and slammed the door.
“Wha—?” the cabbie muttered as he was jerked awake. He cleared his throat and looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Uh, sorry. Where to, miss?”
She stared blankly at the dashboard. Its clock read 12:05 a.m. “Um . . . the Theatrical Grille, Ninth and Vincent,” she blurted without thinking it through. The bar would be closing soon, and then what?
Christmas lights twinkled from the lampposts as the cab headed downtown. She’d almost forgotten it was nearly Christmas. The lights faded as the car turned down Chester and entered the broken-down Hough neighborhood. Its sidewalks and streets were bleak and empty. A shadow of a person trudged across the snow outside her window, then faded away behind a chain-link fence.
When she arrived at the bar, Carmichael sat alone behind the counter, reading the paper. The rest of the place had cleared out on a Monday night. He looked up at the door and smiled under his thick black mustache.
“Beatrice! How nice to see you,” he said, waving her over.