Super glanced from the open doorway of the laundry room as I passed. “You break it?” he called.
“I didn’t break it,” I answered over my shoulder.
“I find many socks under the wash plate!”
I paused halfway up the stairs and turned to Super. “What color are the socks?”
“Are you asking me?” Aubrey asked in my ear.
Super held up two handfuls of soaking-wet socks. “Many colors.”
“I don’t own many colors. Mostly black. I had a red pair, but those were a mistake.”
Super shook the socks in my direction. “Maybe they are Boyfriend’s socks.”
“Boyfriend doesn’t wear colorful socks.”
“Who the hell are you talking to, Seb?” Aubrey tried again.
“My super,” I answered.
Said man dropped the socks to the floor with asplatand pointed at the sledgehammer. “What do you do with that?”
I glanced at the tool, then said, “There’s someone in my wall.”
“Whoin the wall?” he repeated, brow furrowed.
“I’m going to find out.”
“Have you been drinking?” Aubrey asked.
“Bring my sledgehammer back,” the super called. He’d hardly taken a step out of the doorway when there was a loudclankfrom the laundry room, and then a current of water flowed out of the threshold. He yelped and ran inside.
I turned and finished hiking to the first floor and then hurried up the stairs. “I think there’s an old lady in my wall,” I told Aubrey.
There was a very loud silence over the line, before Aubrey said with a somberness I rarely heard from him, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Youfound a person in a wall,” I protested.
“A skeleton. A very old skeleton. And that was different.”
“It’s not,” I replied. “An old lady in the wall makes more sense than it being a ghost or a banshee.”
“It actually doesn’t. Say those words again. Slowly.”
“I think there’s an old lady in my wall.”
“Your building is a hundred-year-old multiuse in the East Village. Suffice it to say, you probably have rats. Isn’t there a coffee shop next door?”
“It’s not rats.”
“How would an old lady get in your wall?”
“How did Fortunato?” I countered.
“What?”
“Someone is screeching in the wall,” I explained, reaching the fourth floor in a rush and out of breath. “No one believes me, but I’m going to prove it.”
