“And that’s just one more reason we want the little one to steer clear of the basement. Stinks something awful, it really does. Two big fifty-five-gallon drums of decaying trash. No fit playground for our little duck, right?”
“Right.”
After she had tucked Emma in for her nap, Susan paused at the window to close the shade and saw Louis on his hands and knees at the edge of the garden. He was hunched over and drenched in sweat, grunting with the effort of tugging free the weeds. She watched for a moment, to see if he’d look up, but he did not.
Susan tugged down the shade, whispered “good nap” to Emma, and shut the door.
6
Marni, no doubt shaken by Susan’s anger and thinking her gig might be on thin ice, showed up the following morning at 8:22 with a comprehensive vision for the day. “I thought, as long it’s still so hot, I could take Emma down to that park at the end of Atlantic Avenue, the one that’s got all the water slides and sprinklers?”
“Sure.” Susan smiled at Marni’s puppy-dog eagerness to please. She hoped she hadn’t been too harsh with her the day before.
“And we can get lunch out, if it’s OK?” Marni’s auburn hair was swept up in a thick pile on top of her head. “My friend Lucy, who sits for these twins in Park Slope, told me about this place right on Atlantic called the Moxie Spot, where you can get grilled cheese, sweet-potato fries, that kind of stuff.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Susan, brushing a tangle out of Emma’s hair with her Dora the Explorer brush. “Does that sound good to you, Emma Loo Hoo?”
It sounded very good to Emma, judging by the speed with which she bolted up the stairs to get ready, Marni chasing after to find her swimsuit.
“Lots of sunscreen, please!” Susan called up the steps.
When the girls had gone, Susan put her coffee cup in the sink and stood motionless in the kitchen for a long moment, looking out the window. On Cranberry Street, the first leaves were beginning to turn, with striking bursts of orange appearing amid the clusters of green. A squirrel leaped daringly from an upmost branch to a telephone line, sending a shower of acorns down from the tree and a ripple down the line.
This was it. There was nothing else to do. Small tasks, of course, still clung stubbornly on the to-do list: she needed a couple new coat hangers to replace those broken in the move, for example, and at some point she would need to dig out a flathead screwdriver and tighten that loose outlet cover above the kitchen counter, or get Alex to do it. But all the big things and urgent things had been accomplished. Their renter’s insurance policy and newspaper delivery and banking statements had been transferred to the new address; the shower curtains and mirrors had been hung; the furniture was in place and all the lamps had been reunited with their bulbs.
Susan took a deep breath and strode down the long front hallway like a toreador. There was a single box still sitting unopened beside the doorway to the bonus room; inside were her brushes, rolled-up canvases, and a fresh tin of oil paints. She lifted the box, tucked it under one arm, and pulled open the door. A strong reek of cat piss, warm and cloying, came rolling out, and Susan coughed.
“Oh, God,” she said, pinching closed her nose. “What the hell?”
Susan put down the box and sniffed again, gingerly, then recoiled and clamped her hand over her face. It was urine, definitely, a thick gross cloud of pee-stink, coming in waves from the bonus room. How could she not have noticed a smell like that before? And then Susan remembered the fleeting moment when she had noticed it, when her powerful, almost supernatural tug of love for the apartment had been briefly troubled by a bad smell from this room. But it couldn’t have been as strong as this, could it? Had something happened since they moved in?
Wouldn’t that just serve her right: while she was procrastinating, avoiding her supposedly beloved art, some ungodly stench had been festering in her beautiful new studio.
It’s my own fault! Susan thought, banging her fists against her thighs. My own fault!
Tears trembled in her eyes, and she ordered herself to chill. It’s just not that big a deal. Breathing through her mouth, Susan walked briskly across the bonus room and opened the window. It slid up easily, but then the top of the window banged against the frame, and it slid right back down.
“Oh, come on,” Susan muttered. She tried again, sliding the window up and watching it sail back down again, as if blocked by a hidden hand determined to keep it shut, to let no air into the stale and stagnant room.
“Crapola,” Susan muttered.
First the delightful fragrance of cat urine, now a defective window. Her mind ran to the separating floor boards on the second-floor landing and the spooky Door to Perdition under the front stoop. Anything else we overlooked? she thought bitterly. Railroad tracks running through the kitchen? Faucets spraying fire?
Susan stomped back to the kitchen for a wooden chair. She dragged it back down the long hallway, through the living room, and into the bonus room, feeling damp pockets of sweat open up in her armpits. She pushed the chair into place and climbed up to examine the window frame, not sure exactly what she was looking for. She saw what Andrea had meant about the windows being double-paned against the noise — there was a second pane of glass set in the window, separated by a thin millimeter of space from the frame. But did that explain the …
Oh. Here we go.
There was a thin gash dug into the wood at the top of the window. And buried in the wood, sticking up just enough to keep the window from kissing closed into the frame, was a folded piece of paper.
No, not a piece of paper. It was a photograph.
Susan dug the picture free from the wood and turned it over in her hand. It was a wallet-sized snapshot that had been folded over twice into a fat little square, like a middle-school crush note. She sat down on the chair and unfolded the photograph slowly, carefully tugging it loose from itself; the back, it seemed, had been coated with some sort of adhesive. When she had it open she forgot about getting the window open, forgot even about the foul reek of the room. She sat in the high-backed kitchen chair and gazed at the happy couple in the picture.
They were cuddled together in a red-curtained photo booth, the old-fashioned kind that was set up sometimes in movie theater lobbies or as a fun activity at a wedding reception. The man in the picture was short haired and goateed, sporting a fedora and a pair of those dark, horn-rimmed Elvis Costello — style glasses so favored by hipster dudes. He was planting a fat smooch on the woman’s cheek. She was pretty and pert nosed, wearing a teasing, sexy grin. Her hair was dyed a bold scarlet, with bangs slashed at a fashionable angle across her eyes.
Cute, thought Susan. She turned the picture over, looking for a date, or names, anything jotted on the back. She found instead that the adhesive coating the back of the picture was, in fact, dried blood, tiny bits of which flaked off in her hand. And, at the dead center, was the dark, crusted swirl of a bloody thumbprint.
“Hey, Andrea? Did the people who lived here before us have a cat?”
Andrea’s Scharfstein’s eyes went wide, and she stopped what she was doing, which was spooning sugar out of a powder-blue ceramic bowl into Susan’s mug.
“A cat?” she said at last, with an intensity that made Susan feel a little unsettled. Andrea’s hand trembled slightly as she returned the miniature spoon into the sugar bowl. “Why do you ask?”
Susan had only wanted to ask her question and get back upstairs, but Andrea had been so nakedly delighted at the unexpected visit that she decided a quick cup of tea wouldn’t kill her. Andrea sang lightly to herself as she moved slowly from living room to kitchen and back, preparing a tea service, fruit plate, and cookie tray.