A compact dark-skinned kid, younger than the Chapsters Sadie had seen, leaned against one of the walls, two sledgehammers next to him. Seeing him, Ford’s mind struck a single, pleasant chord, and the feeling was apparently mutual, because when Ford walked up, the guy ground out the cigarette he’d been smoking and gave him a dazzling smile.
“Did I or did I not hook us up?” he asked. “With all the wiring and pipes in here to harvest, the scabbies’ve already done most of the work for us.”
A soft, warm sensation Sadie hadn’t felt before spread through Ford. Out of the corner of her eye she caught pinprick images of tomato soup and grilled cheese and soggy mittens as Ford started to laugh.
Amusement, she thought. Amusement felt like tomato soup after a snowball fight.
“Couldn’t have picked better myself, Nix,” Ford said, hoisting one of the sledgehammers. “Though the St. Claire was built as a hotel, so no way was this originally a laundry room. They wouldn’t have put it on the first floor off the lobby.”
“Are we betting? I say dining room.”
“Too small,” Ford said, shaking his head. “I say manager’s office or bar.”
“Loser buys lunch,” Nix said. “On your marks, get set—”
For the next hour all sound and thought was blotted out of Ford’s mind by the noise of the sledgehammer smashing through plaster and brick as they skinned the building’s carcass. The two of them worked opposite sides of the room, their hammers settling into a call and response, where one of them would do a set of strokes, and the other would match it and add one.
Ford working, Sadie discovered, was much calmer than Ford doing anything else. She was making a mental note about the importance of jobs to self-esteem when he stopped and dropped the hammer.
“Did I win?” Nix asked over his shoulder.
“Maybe,” Ford said. “It’s a dumbwaiter. It would have gone from here to the kitchens. And it works!” As he spoke he tugged a faded cord, bringing up a dusty wooden box that arrived with a clatter of clinking plates and cutlery. They were filthy and stacked haphazardly, apparently forgotten decades earlier by the last person to use the room. That is very cool, Sadie thought, and Ford gave a whooooop of joy. He was nearly dancing with happiness, shifting from one foot to the other and pointing. “Do you see that?” he asked Nix. “Someone’s last supper.”
Ford carefully stacked the dishes on the floor, surreptitiously pocketing a tiny crystal saltshaker, and poked his head into the dumbwaiter’s shaft. “One of the gears is stamped 1932,” he called to Nix.
“And one of your time cards is going to be stamped FIRED,” the foreman’s voice said. Ford pulled himself out of the wall.
“Harding, you’ve got to look at this,” Ford said, gesturing the foreman over. “It’s the entire mechanism, intact, from 19—”
The foreman shook his head. “Yeah, I heard. Your job is to smash it.”
“But it’s perfect. If we take it out I bet some decorator—”
“Smash, smash, smash.” The foreman pointed to the sledgehammer Ford had dropped to the floor. “Go on, show me you know how to use it.”
“It will be easy to get it out,” Ford kept on. “I swear to you if you tell whatever jackass we’re working for about it, they’ll thank you. It could be worth something.”
“You’re right,” the foreman agreed. “Could be worth your job. Now smash—”
“I’m the jackass.” The tall red-headed guy from the front steps walked into the room. He held out his hand to Ford again. “Mason Bligh.”
This time Ford took it. “Ford Winter.”
“What did you find?” Mason asked.
Ford, suddenly taciturn—You’re shy! Sadie realized, feeling a tiny bit of kinship with him—just pointed his finger up into the shaft. “Dumbwaiter.”
“For the dumb worker,” the foreman said, laughing at his own joke.
Mason gave him a forced smile and looked at Ford. “How would you get it out?”
“Saw around it. Shouldn’t take long, maybe an hour.”
“I’d like to see that,” Mason said. “Let’s do it.” He turned to the foreman. “Do I need to sign anything, Mr. Harding? Pay you more money? Why don’t you draw up contracts for this spot project, and I’ll pay you today.”
“Whatever you like, Mr. Bligh,” the foreman said pleasantly.
Phony, Ford thought, perching himself on the edge of the opening and leaning in. Sadie watched his mind tracing a map of the mechanics of the dumbwaiter the way it had produced the street map earlier. He turned to Mason and asked, “What are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing yet. But it’s too neat to destroy. Have you got a use for it?”
Ford poked his head out of the hole to look at the guy Sadie heard him describe in his head as a twenty-three-year-old bajillionaire nerd. He couldn’t figure Mason out. He said, “I might.”
“Great, you take it. And you find anything else like that, tell me. You’re right, I want to know.” Mason was heading for the door when Ford’s voice called him back.
“Excuse me, sir,” Ford said, his voice sounding young and unsure.
Mason turned. “Yep?”
“I took this.” Ford held out the crystal saltshaker. “I didn’t think anyone would care, but obviously it’s yours. I—I just wanted it for my sister.”
Right, Sadie thought. Because all eleven-year-olds really want a saltshaker.
Mason shook his head. “All yours.”
Ford worked with steady concentration after that, barely pausing to eat, but Sadie sensed an increasing jumpiness in him. Anticipation? Anxiety? By the time he scanned out at the end of the day she was certain he was about to do something illegal, and she was torn between excitement and wariness as he steered his bike in the opposite direction of his apartment.
He rode from the mostly deserted neighborhood around the job site through two traffic-gnarled intersections into an area of wide, silent streets lined with the crumbling hulks of commercial buildings. His bike bounced over a portion of downed chain-link fence and up a cracked asphalt driveway to the front entrance of a large brick factory. It had what looked like a chimney on one side and appeared to be about seven stories tall, but peering through the open door Sadie saw it was empty inside from the floor to the roof except for rusted machine parts, some decaying wood pallets, and broken bottles. The sign propped next to the door read DETROIT WIRE CO.
Ford left his bike and walked around the building to a set of fire escape stairs along the far wall. He climbed them all the way to the top and stepped off onto the roof.
It seemed like they could see for miles all around. The river was a ribbon glittering between buildings in one direction, the traffic on the highway looked like the links in a metal watchband in another, and beyond that the suburbs extended like a rolling green carpet. That’s where I live, she thought to herself.
Suddenly she was flooded with panic. All at once she realized how high up they were, how close to the edge. Her throat got tight, making it hard to breathe, and her heart raced. The edge is right there. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t escape the voice in her head, her voice, cool, logical. One step and you could be over, one step and it would all be over, so easy, just one—
Ford tipped his head back, spread his arms, and gave a loud Tarzan-of-the-apes call. It echoed through the empty landscape back to him, reverberating through him, through her.