“You haven’t bought anything.”
“I hold an access license, signed by your uncle. You can read it on the dashboard of the truck.”
Maya looked through the windshield. On the clipboard beside the license lay a plan of the hotel and the block behind it. Across the courtyard that held the bench where her father had proposed to her mother somebody had drawn a heavy line in blue pencil. The line went through the bench, the courtyard wall and the front entrance of Linden Court.
“Let the van down,” Maya said to the driver. “I’ll pay the call-out.”
“Already paid,” he said. “And I’m not dropping anything until I have a signed release, because you people keep changing your minds.”
Simone considered her. “Do you want to know why we were buying a hotel we don’t need? Move the van and walk with me fifty feet.”
“Release the van and I’ll walk as far as you like.”
The woman took a pen from the guard and wrote her name in the little box on the driver’s clipboard. He lowered the boom. Luis did not take his hands off the grille until all four wheels touched the ground.
Then Simone walked Maya fifty feet. At the far end of the loading bay, under the light that shone over a drain, the brick wall of the building had come apart. Maya could fit her fist through the crack.
“I’m a structural engineer by training,” Simone said. “The preliminary survey says there are families who ought not to be sleeping on the other side of this wall. Before you promise people they can go home, you should probably find out whether home is still standing.”
Chapter 5 — The Wall Between Them
Luis had plaster in his hair. When he leaned over to look at the crack, some fell onto the shoulders of his shirt.
“Where were you working?” Maya asked.
“Dentist’s office on Laurel. His usual guy was on vacation. I told my wife I could do four walls in a day. I actually did two. A person can lose a little too much faith in me if you tell her that part.”
Simone had called her survey engineer over. He took a light out of his jacket. His name was Barry. He was short and wore blue hearing aids and had the lovely professional habit of telling you how much he could see before telling you what he thought.
“I can see the outer two layers of brick,” he said. “There are four. To know what the other two are doing, we need to see inside the Linden basement. Somebody’s boarded over the windows. The cracks are wider today than in the photographs from December, but I have no accurate measurements from December, no idea what temperature it was or whether there’s been vibration from construction near the site. So, Mrs. Ward, I believe my preliminary survey said there are families who ought to have an independent assessment before they sleep on the other side of this wall.”
“The distinction is meaningful to engineers,” Simone said.
“And usually also to the people whose beds are on the other side of a wall.”
Luis was rubbing his forefinger and thumb together. A fine dark powder came off the bricks. “There aren’t families on that side.”
“We have the plans,” Simone said.
“Then you can sell them to somebody decorating a pub. That wall’s the coal store. It doesn’t even go to the Linden. The people who lived on our ground floor were on the opposite side. We had to move the entrance when the street flooded in eighty-nine.”
“How old were you in eighty-nine?” Maya asked.
“Eight. I spent the summer painting the little white symbols in the new parking places with a stencil. My dad paid me in ice creams.”
Barry made a note. “Would you show me the actual building?”
Luis looked toward his wife. “Depends. Is somebody going to be following me with a clipboard telling me I can’t ever come back?”
“I have a pencil,” Barry said. “I can leave it in the car.”
The joke came gently enough for Luis to smile. Maya liked Barry. She would learn, over the next few days, to attach less importance to whether she liked people and more to whether they were willing to be corrected in public.
Marisol took Ben and Eli upstairs with Arthur, who had received a walkie-talkie call concerning a Belgian visitor’s dog and was beginning to regret his new volunteer duties. Maya made sure her mother had her cell and the right room number. The last thing she heard before the service door closed was Eli explaining to Marisol that there was absolutely nothing to worry about in the laundry chute unless you were a fitted sheet.
Julian had stayed upstairs. Maya wished he would come down. It was one thing to assure people that the relocation payments had been discussed and another to say so looking at a man who knew which wall his father had painted thirty years ago.
They went around the block. It took no more than four minutes on foot to leave the bright new stone in front of the Calder and reach a street where an untended tree had lifted up the pavement. There was a butcher’s shop with a photograph of two pigs riding a tandem bicycle, and next to it a shuttered laundromat with a handwritten notice advising customers with clothes still in the machines to ring the bell for flat three. A blue awning over a locked shopfront said EVELYN’S. Somebody had carefully picked the rust off one of the letters and left the others alone. Maya used to do that, from the fire escape above it, whenever she was supposed to be doing homework.
“You grew up in the shop?” Simone asked.
“Above it. I did have a bedroom.”