“Nothing.”
Her face was simultaneously beautiful and cruel, but as I would learn in time, cruelty was the truth of Fiona Cassidy. She stared at me, and I held her stare because I thought that if I glanced away she would come around the bed again and hurt me. Finally she stepped into the hallway, leaving the door open, and moved out of sight toward the front of the apartment.
At that moment, as though she willed it to add drama to her exit, the sky loosed an entire quiver of lightning bolts, and cataclysmic thunder followed closely, rattling window glass and reverberating through the walls as if the building were a drum, and rain fell in torrents.
I stood there, trembling, mortified, having betrayed the image of myself that I had crafted and cherished. The man of the family. How absurd that seemed now. I was a boy, not a man, and the merest stick figure of a boy.
Grandpa Teddy often said that musical talent was an unearned grace, that I should give thanks for it every day, and that it was my obligation and my honor to make the most of the gift. But right then, I would have traded talent for brawn, youth for age, wishing myself a grown man, thick-necked and broad-chested, a tower of muscle.
Although I intended to give Fiona Cassidy plenty of time to leave the apartment, shame and a need for redemption compelled me to follow her sooner than might have been prudent. I hurried along the hallway to the living room, but she wasn’t there. The apartment door was shut, the deadbolt engaged, which suggested that she remained somewhere in our few rooms.
Summer rain slanted under the raised sash of each front window, spattering the sill and spilling into the apartment. I closed one, then the other, and with considerable trepidation, I searched our rooms and closets and even looked under my mother’s bed, and then under mine. I was relieved to find myself alone, but I was also mystified. Creepy. Definitely creepy. But nothing serious yet.
22
When Mr. Smaller, the superintendent and conspiracy theorist, failed to answer his bell, I sought him elsewhere. He might have been in any apartment, attending to repairs of one kind or another, but first I went to the basement, where he could often be found. I used the interior stairs instead of going outside to the alley entrance, and as I descended those steep wooden treads, I heard my quarry talking to himself from somewhere in the labyrinth of mechanical systems that sustained the building.
The footprint of that lower realm was the same as any floor of the apartment building, and yet it seemed larger, cavernous, partly because the pipes and boilers and electrical conduits and big fuse boxes and other equipment created a maze bewildering to one as small as me, and partly because the lighting scheme was decades old and inadequate. Shadows pooled everywhere and hung like funeral bunting along the work aisles. Here also were many unlabeled barrels and large packing crates stenciled with numbers that didn’t reveal what they contained, contributing to the basement’s air of mystery.
With the muffled tumult of the storm echoing down through vents that led all the way to the roof, with windblown rain churning at the narrow and filthy ground-level windows near the ceiling, the basement had become an even more off-putting realm than usual.
On the floor, a spider the size of a quarter scurried out of shadows and along a band of light. I froze at the sight of it. I didn’t like spiders, but my aversion to this one was inexplicably strong. The encounter with Fiona Cassidy had spooked me more than any movie about space aliens or voodoo. My nerves were taut. Instead of stamping on the spider, I watched with apprehension as it crossed my path, convinced that every moment of this strange morning was fraught with occult meaning and peril, and I thought, Worse luck than a black cat.