Chapter 1
Velma Danvers pressed the doorbell and kept her finger on it.
The buzzer sounded somewhere beyond the building’s locked entrance: a harsh, sustained vibration that rose through the old woodwork and seemed to lodge inside the walls.
She waited.
A reasonable person might have released the button after a second or two.
Velma allowed considerably longer.
She had called the office. She had called Alisha’s cell. She had sent a message whose reassuring lack of punctuation had required more effort than she cared to admit. None of those attempts had produced a satisfactory answer, and she had arrived carrying a bag of groceries that was beginning to cut into her fingers.
The bell continued.
Behind the frosted glass of the entrance, the hall remained dim.
Velma shifted the bag to her other hand without lifting her finger.
“Come on, Alisha.”
In Apartment 1-C, August Derleth stopped typing.
He did not stop immediately.
At first, he continued through the interruption, striking the keys with sufficient force to make his objection audible to no one but himself.
Then the buzzer persisted.
August lifted his hands from the typewriter.
The last key returned slowly to its resting place.
For several seconds, he sat without moving, his narrow shoulders raised beneath an old cardigan, his head inclined toward the wall that separated his apartment from the hall.
The bell went on.
His expression suggested that he had expected very little of the present century and had nevertheless been disappointed.
August was an elderly man.
Everyone in the building agreed on that much.
Beyond it, estimates varied.
He might have been eighty. He might have been older than the woman who had once owned the building, or older than the woman’s mother, whose name still appeared in faded ink on a maintenance record nobody had bothered to discard.
Seen unexpectedly in the hall, he could give the impression of a man somewhere between eighty and a hundred and eighty, depending on the light and how directly one looked at him.
His face was long and deeply marked. Heavy folds descended beside his mouth. His eyes sat beneath brows that seemed to have continued growing after the rest of him had begun to diminish.
He dressed as though clothing were a problem he had solved decades ago and saw no reason to reconsider.
Old trousers.
Old slippers.
Cardigans with pockets stretched by objects no neighbor had ever seen him remove.
He was not sociable.
This, too, was universally agreed upon.
Some tenants described him as bitter. Others preferred difficult. The less charitable said he was simply angry at the existence of anyone who had not yet had the decency to die.
August himself had offered no clarification.
The buzzer continued.
He turned his head toward the door.
“Vulgar,” he said.
Providence had a way of making long residence seem less remarkable than it ought to have been.
People remained.
Names remained.
A house could change hands, be divided into apartments, have its front steps replaced and its windows sealed, and still be referred to by the name of a family whose last member had been buried before anyone currently living there was born.
The building had been sold four times since August moved into Apartment 1-C.
Ownership passed from one set of signatures to another.
Letters arrived announcing new management. Rent instructions changed. Someone occasionally appeared to inspect a pipe or discuss the possibility of improving the entryway.
August paid on time.
He did not ask for new appliances.
He did not submit written complaints.
He did not encourage conversation.
As a result, successive landlords discovered the advantages of leaving him alone.
If he occupied the apartment for an unusually long time, he occupied it quietly.
For the most part.
There was the typing.
Tenants heard it late at night: the rapid, uneven clatter of a machine that did not belong to the age of silent keyboards and illuminated screens. Sometimes it continued until morning. Sometimes there would be a pause long enough to suggest he had finished, followed by a single violent strike, as though one particular word had required punishment before he could sleep.
There was the talking.
Not always loud enough to distinguish.
A low, irritated murmur. An objection. Occasionally the sound of August apparently interrupting himself.
And there were the lights.
They appeared beneath his door or through the narrow gaps in his curtains, depending on where one happened to be standing.
Blue, sometimes.
Violet.
A reddish color that seemed too dense to have come from an ordinary lamp.
The light would shift without any accompanying music.
Neighbors made jokes because jokes were easier to carry away than questions.
Disco lights, they called them.
August’s little private nightclub.
The dance floor in 1-C.
During the seventies, a couple returning home drunk had taken the joke literally.
They were young, cheerful, and sufficiently intoxicated to believe that the sight of colored light beneath an old man’s door constituted an invitation.
They knocked.
When August answered, they asked whether they could use his dance floor.
Accounts of his response varied afterward.
The couple remembered his expression more clearly than his words.
He had not been amused.
They returned to their own apartment laughing too loudly, shut the door, and found the story less funny once they were inside.
Eventually, they moved out.
They had children.
Their children had children.
Photographs changed from glossy squares with white borders to images kept inside telephones. The couple grew old. One died, then the other. The apartment building became a place occasionally mentioned in family conversation, a first home belonging to a period no one listening could quite imagine.
The old man and his imaginary dance floor were forgotten.
Years later, one of their great-grandchildren rented an apartment in the same building.
It was not fate that brought him there.
Not necessarily.
There were only so many reasonably priced places to live, and the listing had appeared at the right moment.
He found the hall narrow, the radiators temperamental, and the old man in 1-C hostile to the world.
Sometimes he heard him talking.
Sometimes typing.
Once, coming home late, he saw colored light moving beneath the door and assumed the old fellow had fallen asleep in front of an enormous television.
Had his great-grandparents still been alive, he might have told them.
He might have described the bent shoulders, the long face, the eyes beneath the brows.
He might have laughed about the old man who looked a hundred years old.
And his great-grandparents, had they possessed the opportunity to compare their memories with his description, might not have laughed at all.
August had looked much the same when they asked to use his dance floor.
Disco, apparently, had not died in Apartment 1-C.
The bell stopped.
August remained still for a moment, listening to the sudden absence.
Then, from the entrance below, came the prolonged mechanical buzz of the door release.
Apartment 1-B had finally admitted the visitor.
He looked toward the wall.
“Eventually,” he muttered.
He turned back to the typewriter.
The sheet of paper waited.
Beyond the reach of the desk lamp, a dim color moved across the ceiling and withdrew.
August put his hands on the keys.
Velma pushed through the entrance with her groceries and a quantity of irritation large enough to conceal most of her concern.
The hall smelled of old carpet, furniture polish, and heat beginning to move through the radiators.
She had been to Alisha’s apartment often enough to know the ordinary sounds of the place. A television somewhere above. A pipe complaining in the wall. The faint closing of a door beyond the stairs.
Today, the building seemed to be listening.
Velma dismissed the impression.
She had not slept especially well.
Neither, from what little she had managed to gather, had her employer.
At Apartment 1-B, she adjusted the grocery bag against her hip and raised a hand.
The door opened before she knocked.
Only a few inches.
The security chain remained fastened.
A young woman looked out.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Velma said, “You must be Missy.”
The girl’s eyes moved over her face.
Then to the bag.
Then past her, down the hall.
“Who are you?”
“Velma Danvers. I work for Alisha.”
Missy did not release the chain.
Velma respected her for that.
“Her assistant,” she added. “The person who answers the phone, keeps the calendar, and prevents her from conducting an entire law practice on coffee and unreasonable expectations.”
The girl studied her.
Velma lifted the grocery bag slightly.
“I brought food. That doesn’t prove I’m harmless, but it should at least suggest I intend to stay long enough to be identified.”
No smile.
Not quite.
But something in the young woman’s expression shifted.
Up close, she was even smaller than Velma had expected.
Perhaps five feet two. Her weight was difficult to guess beneath the oversized sweater, though the thought that came to Velma was not a number so much as the word insufficient.
Dark brown hair lay loose around her face.
It was clean, still carrying the slight disorder of having dried without much attention. Her cheekbones were high, her jaw more definite than her narrowness initially suggested. There was strength in the architecture of her face, and a startling attentiveness in her eyes.
Nothing in the hallway seemed to escape them.
Not the pause before Velma spoke.
Not the way she held the groceries.
Not the faint resumption of typing behind the neighboring door.
The sweater was Alisha’s.
Velma recognized it immediately: brown, soft, a little worn at one cuff. On Alisha it hung loosely.
On Missy, it seemed almost to belong to someone from a different scale of life.
The shoulders fell beyond her own. The sleeves covered part of her hands. The neckline exposed the fine ridge of one collarbone.
Alisha was the thinnest woman Velma knew well.
This girl was thinner.
Velma looked back at her face before concern could become inspection.
“How is Alisha feeling?”
Missy glanced into the apartment.
The movement was brief.
But it told Velma that Alisha was there.
That she was somewhere beyond the door, and that whatever had happened since her departure had not remained outside with the luggage.
“She’s resting,” Missy said.
“Good.”
Velma lowered her voice.
“Is she asleep?”
“I think so.”
“You think so.”
“She’s quiet.”
The answer unsettled Velma more than she wanted to show.
She adjusted the bag again.
“Well, I’d like to put these down before my fingers become a permanent part of the handles.”
Missy looked at the chain.
For a moment, she appeared to consider whether admitting Velma would violate some responsibility she had taken upon herself.
Then she closed the door.
Velma heard the chain slide free.
The door opened wider.
“Come in.”
Velma stepped across the threshold.
Behind her, from Apartment 1-C, the typewriter stopped again.
She barely noticed.
Missy did.
Her gaze moved past Velma toward the hall, and she remained looking there for a moment before she closed the door.
