Page 2

A little music didn’t really make a difference and anyway, they turned it off again when I got into the tub. Then I sat there, leaning forward because the sides were fairly straight up and down and the white enamel was very cold. I picked up my book to read but I got water on the pages from my wet hand and I felt a little weird. What was I missing?

Bubbles. Next time, I was going to do a bubble bath. That was what people did to relax, and I could even play songs of my own. I had never really been into music but I didn’t mind that one girl who was kind of upbeat and sang about…I didn’t really remember and I wasn’t sure of her name, but I could also listen to a true-crime podcast. Or an audiobook, so that I didn’t wreck a paper one.

I opened the drain and stood up to take a shower (carefully, since another item on my To Do/Purchase list was a shower curtain so that I didn’t soak the entire room)…and it happened again. I heard that music! I quickly finished and dried myself off, then dried off the floor. I walked around the rest of the rooms, listening, but I didn’t pick up anything at all. He or she, whoever lived next door to me, must have had their speaker pushed up against the wall that they shared with my bathroom. Fine, I would get a speaker of my own and we would see how they liked unsolved murders from the nineteenth century, which were my favorites. I would drown them out.

The next day was Sunday, so I had time to make my apartment perfect. First, I lay on my mattress on the floor and enjoyed the quiet. I didn’t enjoy the sun as much, which poured through the big windows. That was why I had woken up near dawn and that was why I moved “curtains/window coverings” to the top of my list. I needed groceries and I also wanted to check out my new neighborhood. Mrs. McGlothen had bragged about it when she’d met me in the lobby to show me around apartment 1C.

“There’s Bruna with her flower shop and a party store on the corner,” she’d said, pointing. She’d been disgusted when I had asked if you could buy things other than party supplies there. “Where are you from?”

“I’ve lived a lot of places but I went to college here, in Michigan,” I had told her. It had been on the other side of the state, though, the western part. That explained why I didn’t know specific Detroit vocabulary like “party store,” which was what I might have called a “corner store” and did not specialize in streamers and balloons. “What’s the shop under that black awning?”

“Oh, just vinyl records. Nobody needs those anymore,” she’d said, and continued on.

I wanted to see it all, so I got dressed…and I heard the music again as I was rinsing my toothbrush. They sure started early, didn’t they? Up and already turning it on. If I listened as hard as I could, I caught what might have been a man’s voice singing, but the volume was still too low to really hear the song.

Before I went on my trip of exploration and also tried to find some curtains, I scouted around the apartment building. I wasn’t great at spatial stuff but when I went into the hallway, I immediately saw that I had been blaming the wrong person. If I was right about the layout of this building, then my bathroom backed up to a stairwell. It was possible that someone was playing music in there, but unlikely.

The lobby was underneath my apartment, a big, beautiful space that the building manager had been very proud of. “They knew how to decorate in the twenties,” she’d said. “You know what I mean.” I hadn’t, but I did think that the room was pretty. Even the mailboxes were brass and fancy.

It was unlikely that the music had been coming from there, either, so it had to have been the neighbor above me. I used the stairs to ascend to the second floor. It looked almost exactly like my floor below, except with a dark green runner down the middle of the wide hallway instead of the navy blue rug that was outside of my apartment. I listened as I walked but didn’t hear anything at all, no music and not even normal sounds like a microwave beeping, a TV turned on too loud, or people arguing. Maybe these masonry walls really did muffle sound and maybe it was the floors that were the problem.

But I hadn’t heard the people above me walking around. I hadn’t heard anything except for their music.

I went over to the door marked with a brass 2 and a C, but it was quiet. I leaned toward the dark wood and listened harder. Nothing.

I pressed my ear to the door but I still couldn’t detect any sound. My upstairs neighbor must not have been home, I decided, or it could have been that this unit was empty. Although, Mrs. McGlothen had told me that apartments in the Milaflores Building rarely opened up and they were always at a hundred percent occupancy. She had stamped her foot as she’d said it. That could have been a sales tactic but if no one was here, then where was the music—

The wood door opened and I jerked back. I leaped, too, and landed in the middle of the green runner.

A man frowned at me, as anyone probably would if confronted by an eavesdropper. “Can I help you?” he asked sharply.

“Hi. Um, hi. I’m your neighbor,” I told him. “I just moved in yesterday, right below you.”

“Ok. And you’re casing the place?”

“No, not at all. I just…” I tried to look past him into his apartment but his body blocked my view. “Are you playing music?”

“No.”

“Were you, before?”

“No,” he repeated.

Then we just stood there. I didn’t hear anything, either.

“I’m Kat,” I said. “It’s short for Katherine. Katherine Truman.”

“Good to know. If you want to contact me again, feel free to knock rather than trying your hand at surveillance.”

“I wasn’t—”

He shut the door.

I hadn’t been surveilling him! I had been trying to find the source of that annoying music, which I didn’t hear again when I walked angrily down to my own apartment. It was very, very quiet there.

I spent the rest of the day trying to complete the items on my To Do/Purchase list and exploring my new neighborhood. It was fun but I did get hot, and after a while, I wanted to go home to put away my new stuff. Due to not carrying much in my youth, I hadn’t built up a lot of stamina for it. I was glad when I walked back into the cool lobby with its high ceiling.

I got out the keys that Mrs. McGlothen had given me the day before and decided to check what was in my mailbox, the pretty brass one. First, I tried to open it while holding all my bags, but then I had to put them down. The little key just wasn’t turning. I twisted it hard enough that I was afraid that it would break off in the lock.