23
Because I didn’t feel like making my way to the community center in the rain, I should have gone down to the second floor and rung Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell and joined her little day-care group. I wasn’t supposed to spend more than a few minutes alone in our apartment when my mother was at work. For a boy my age, I was responsible, and my mother had no reason to worry that I would do something like play with matches and burn down the building. Nevertheless, she was more of a Bledsoe than she was a Kirk, and Bledsoes didn’t leave a young child alone for extended periods of time during which he might be tempted to engage in one type of misbehavior or another.
Half a century after the fact, I better understand my potential for mischief than I did back in the day. In spite of all the trouble that found me, I wonder in retrospect why I didn’t bring even more calamity down upon myself.
I knew that my mother’s rules were not to be subjected to the creative interpretations that wily attorneys brought to the wording of laws that snared their criminal clients. She was a plainspoken woman who said what she meant. But after leaving Mr. Smaller to his grumbling in the basement, I convinced myself that the rule against being alone in our apartment for an extended period of time didn’t apply to lingering alone for hours elsewhere in the building, as if Mom would approve of me loitering in concealment for the purpose of spying on one of our neighbors.
I took the back stairs to the sixth floor. Looked through the small window in the door. No one. Imagining myself to be as stealthy as Napoleon Solo, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., which had been a hit on TV the previous year and had fired my imagination even though the stories never made sense to me, I traveled shadow-quiet along the public hallway, Apartment 6-C to my right.
On the left, between Apartments 6-A and 6-B, a door opened to a service closet. The hinges creaked but not loudly. I entered without hesitation and drew the door shut. Fiona Cassidy could be aware of my presence only if she had been standing in her vestibule, keeping watch through the fish-eye lens in her door.
After turning on the service-closet light, I pulled down on the dangling cord attached to a hinged ceiling trap, which swung toward me and brought with it a ladder that unfolded in sections to provide access to the building’s attic.
Doubt afflicted me just then. The woman had threatened me with a knife. Hiding under a bed might be smarter than trying to learn more about her. No, no, no. I’d seen her in a dream and she’d gotten into our apartment through a locked door. She was a threat like no other. I had to know who she was.
I took from my pocket the heart pendant with the captured feather, and my confidence returned at the sight of it.
I was a boy who readily believed in magic, even if I didn’t understand the source of its power or its purpose. Perhaps I was so easily enchanted because, as a Bledsoe, I had been born to music, imbued with it. Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.
At the top of the ladder, on the frame that enclosed the trap, a switch brought sour light to bare bulbs in ceramic sockets placed at wide intervals between the overhead beams. Shadows did not flee, but merely retreated and regrouped and stood sentinel.
Clearance in the attic wasn’t such that a grown man could stand erect, but a boy like me had plenty of headroom. Water pipes for the sixth-floor units were routed through this space, as were electrical conduits and bathroom vents. Between the floor joists, the primitive insulating materials of previous decades had in recent years been replaced with rolls of pink fiberglass.
I pulled on the top tread, and the segments of the spring-loaded ladder folded up upon themselves with a faint protracted twang. The trap thumped softly as it nestled into its frame.
If I stepped wrong and missed the two-inch-wide edge of a joist, my foot would plunge through the insulation. If it also broke through the plasterboard ceiling, it would dangle in view of anyone below.