“I grew up in my grandmother’s garage. My grandfather put a wall down the middle so I could have a little privacy. One night a lady came in late to collect her car and found me washing my hair at the sink. I was fifteen. I thought I would die.”
Maya looked at her. It was the first time the woman had sounded like somebody who might once have been fifteen.
“The thing about living in a garage,” Simone said, “is you learn to respect a building that has always been exactly what it looks like on the outside. I have found very few such buildings. This is one of the more complicated.”
They reached a gate covered by a bright orange notice. Only authorized personnel could enter. The name on the padlock was Winter Quay. Luis took a key from the pocket where he kept his van keys.
“You authorized?” Barry asked.
“I’m the only one who’s been keeping the drains clear.”
The courtyard beyond the gate smelled of rainwater and the faint sweet rot of last year’s apples. An abandoned sandpit stood by a set of mailboxes. The lid of number six hung at an angle. A receipt for a parcel, its ink gone pink from the light, still waited for the occupant of number eleven.
“My wife keeps asking me to get the curtains,” Luis said. “I bought them for our first place. Green things with birds on them. When we moved here, she cut them down for the kitchen windows. There’s absolutely nothing special about them. Once a week I promise her I’ll get them and once a week I leave here with something else.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like going into the rooms. Soon as you go in, you start hearing how they sounded with everybody home.”
Barry got out his phone to photograph the front entrance. Then he went down the basement steps with Luis. Simone stood beside Maya at the mailboxes and took in the darkened windows.
“Are you still thinking about buying this building?” Maya asked.
“I don’t buy anything. I put together financing for people who sometimes want mutually exclusive things. Sometimes I manage to wrap one thing around another and everybody makes a little money.”
“Will you make money on this?”
“Yes. I am quite good at my job.”
“Is it still a good job if ten families never come home?”
“That’s the wrong calculation. If I walk away tomorrow, how many of the eighteen come back? Do you have any independent source of finance? Is the building insured for ground movement? Who is carrying the repair guarantee? How much equity has the property owner got left in it?”
“The person you’re asking is the one who keeps finding out she owns less than she thought she did.”
“Then understand that the people who think I own everything I get paid to discuss make the same mistake in the other direction. I can ask. I can’t give you anything.”
Barry came up the steps. “I’d like Mrs. Ward to see the beams. Miss Bennett, could you make sure nobody follows us into the basement? Especially children. I heard somebody.”
Simone disappeared downstairs. Maya heard it too then. A faint rhythmic tapping through the wall. It paused, resumed, and moved. It was coming from behind a window at the back of the adjacent shop. Her mother’s shop.
She walked to the window. The sound became unmistakable. A single finger, playing the opening notes of a tune on an out-of-tune piano, stopping in the same place each time. She knew the tune. Her mother had taught it to children who were still learning which hand went where. The left played three descending notes. The right repeated the first until the player found the courage to land on the fourth.
She knocked gently on the pane. The music stopped.
“I know you’re there,” she said. “I’m not coming in unless you ask. That fourth note is an E. Same as the first one.”
A long silence, then a hand appeared and twitched back the curtains.
The girl on the other side might have been twelve. She had pink barrettes in her braids. She put a finger to her lips, then pointed downward. Maya looked. On a thin mattress beneath the piano a woman was asleep. Her shoes were neatly set beside her feet, the laces tucked inside. The girl let the curtain fall.
Maya went back to her place outside the basement door. She thought of Marisol’s request that she not tell them who was behind the green door. She thought of the hour at which people packed things into boxes, of how much a good mattress cost, of how many questions you could ask at a door before the person inside stopped having a home and started having a case.
Barry and Simone came out. Barry had lost the jaunty expression he had brought from the hotel.
“Luis was right. The crack we saw comes through a coal bunker that’s been isolated from the residential structure. The apartments aren’t in immediate danger from that crack. There’s water getting in around the electrical entrance, though. Somebody has to make that safe before anybody moves back.”
“Ballpark,” Maya said.
“I’ll give you two. If all we need is a new seal and a repair to the service enclosure, fifteen thousand. If water’s got inside the distribution panel and we have to replace it, that could run a hundred. I can recommend a firm. They’ll need the power shut off to inspect it.”
“How long?”
“An hour to take a look. An hour to make it safe enough to turn on again. Tuesday if we can get authorization.”
Maya glanced toward the shop. “What else loses power when the Linden goes off?”
Luis followed her eyes. “Shop lights. Fridge. The rooms upstairs if somebody still lived in them. I’ve been paying the account out of the building maintenance money. Comes to very little.”
“Have you got my mother’s green curtains?”
He considered the peculiar form of the question. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll come get everybody’s in the morning.”