to hide. She needn’t have bothered; unwashed and greasy, nobody looked twice. But then, a skinny black man with working hands shifted his pink Conway plastic bag, and made room for her to sit. “Here,” he said, and held his hand over the empty space, so no one else could jump in and steal it. She smiled, grateful.
It was after midnight. As soon as she’d jumped up from her cube (Your red ants are showing!), she’d hightailed it into reception, where security had politely evicted her because the office was closing. When she’d gotten out of the building, it had been raining too hard to do much planning save race for the subway. The doors to most homeless shelters closed by 10:00 P.M. She was out of cash until her paycheck cleared on Wednesday. The flight to Omaha and the Super 8 Motel bill had maxed out her credit card, so she couldn’t afford another night at the Golden Nugget. Besides, her only currency was her Metrocard: she’d left her wallet at The Breviary.
As she’d stood inside the doorway to her office, rain pouring, she’d made a last-resort call on her cell phone: “Hi. It’s me. The girl you loved and left. Thanks a lot. Sorry to do this, but I’m in trouble, and I need your help. Call me back. Like, now.” When he returned the call, she planned to beg for the spare keys he kept at Sheila’s place, so she could stay at his apartment while he was out of town. Tacky, yes. Unpleasant, without a doubt. But necessary, too.
As for tonight, her options were limited. It was raining too hard to walk the streets. She supposed, like Spalding, that she could pass the time in The Breviary’s lobby. Though maybe that was what had gotten him in the end.
She could knock on Jayne’s door, and ask, despite hula girl, if she could stay in 14E for the night. Sure, the whole building was probably haunted (or just as easily, she’d lost her wits), but at least she wouldn’t be alone. And if that fell through, too, there was always Bellevue. Like mother, like daughter. The nice thing about the men with the butterfly nets: they come to you.
The bus didn’t arrive at 110th Street until after 1:00 A.M. She raced past the Haitian doorman in white gloves and shoulder tassels, who was reading what looked like a Japanese girly bondage magazine: two tweens in braids and short skirts, smooching. Along the ceiling of the raised lobby, which she now knew had been an altar, she spied about ten exposed, brown-stained supporting beams. The middle one was where Edgar Schermerhorn had tied his noose, she imagined. Because it was the focal point of the lobby, and he’d wanted everyone to see his body as they’d exited the lift.
Her mind made a picture: a dapper madman with shaggy gray hair and a three-piece suit; a creaking rope that swung, got rubbed raw, and broke. He was looking down at her now, through the building’s eyes. She could feel him.
And how did The Breviary know so much about her? The probe she’d swallowed that lived in her stomach, which had been listening all this time. Spalding Agnew had felt it, too. Maybe it got inside everyone who spent time here. The longer they stayed, the more of their person it devoured, and the more like The Breviary they became.
The elevator took an eternity to ascend. While she waited, she mentally packed: Wolverine, the box full of her mother’s things, her wallet, and the soiled trousers, which she would rinse and wear tomorrow. Then she’d knock on Jayne’s door. Do some begging, maybe apologize. Or, hang it, blame dead hula girl on freaky Mrs. Parker from 14C.
By the third floor she heard a low-level din. The voices got louder as the cage climbed. They sounded convivial: a party. By the fifth floor, she gleaned snippets of conversations: a woman’s laugh, high-pitched and tinkling like a pinged crystal glass; “Baby, you’re the greatest!” As she ascended the seventh floor, she saw a pair of feet, then trouser legs and a blazer, and finally, a plain, white mask: Galton. He reached out and grazed her metal cage with his fingers. There were three or four others who’d poured out into the hall. Their necks craned as she ascended. Pretty frocks and black tailcoats. From far away, all their eyes looked black, like the worms inside them had gotten fat. Like they weren’t