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“Forty thousand,” Maël said, lovingly stroking the stacks of bills in his hands.

“You can tell by looking? Ok, everybody take a breath,” I said to them. “I don’t know the law, but I only rent this apartment. The money and the weapon probably belong to the actual owner of the Milaflores Building and the building manager is their representative. I’m going to go talk to her.” I pointed at Maël. “Put down the gun,” I told him sternly. “Stay calm until I come back.”

It was too late for calmness but I had to leave them. Mrs. McGlothen never answered her landline, the only phone she had, so I had to go and fetch her. But when I got downstairs, there was a note on her door: “Visiting my sister. Contact Mrs. Doyle in the garden apartment in case of emergency.”

I rushed to Vera’s place but no one answered there, either. I didn’t want to wait for the elevator, and I made a call as I raced back up the stairs to deal with the situation there. “I need your help,” I said. I was more used to running now but I was taking the steps two at a time, so the words came out as gasps. I needed someone who could help me convince my mom and Maël that the contents of the safe weren’t ours, or someone might have needed to help me keep it away from them.

“What’s the matter?” Oliver asked but before I had a chance to answer, he spoke again. “I’m on my way.”

That was a huge relief but somehow, things were worse by the time I got up to my apartment. I could hear my mom wailing as I approached my door, which was open. She hurtled toward me as I walked in.

“He’s gone!”

“Maël? He took off?” I asked. He had moved fast! Of course, he hadn’t owned anything to bring with him, not even a toothbrush. Everyone needed a toothbrush.

“He ran out the door and he took everything. He’s gone!” she moaned.

It didn’t really surprise me—leaving him with that stash had been risky. “The same thing happened with the guy you were seeing in Arizona, remember? He found your wallet and took out all the cash, and he stole our car, too. Oh, no! Where’s my purse?” I asked wildly.

I left her crying and ran to find it. Luckily, I had hidden it when I’d first entered the apartment, and I’d put it in a place where Maël was never going to look: in the bathtub behind the shower curtain.

“Where’s your stuff?” I demanded when I returned to her. She didn’t have a purse but had tied up her remaining money into a gauzy scarf that she’d attached to the end of a stick.

We dug through some of the piles but, as I had expected, it was gone. “Well, the good thing is, you don’t have much to steal,” I tried to reassure her. “What else was in there? Your ID? Did you have a valid one anymore?”

She wailed louder for a while and we got nowhere. Then Oliver ran in. He was also out of breath, although he was the fittest person within the city limits and beyond. “What happened?” he asked me. He kicked some plastic-y wood parts out of the way to reach where I was sitting on the floor. I’d been trying to dig under my desk to see if Maël had found the box where I’d stored my passport and other important documents.

“He’s gone,” my mom told him. Her tears had made clean streaks through the white plaster powder on her face. “Maël is gone!”

“Oh, good,” Oliver said. He reached down and picked me up, drawing me to my feet. “Did you fall?” he asked me.

“Maël is gone!” my mother repeated, more urgently. “He left with the money!”

“What money?”

It took a moment to explain that they had busted up my shelves and busted up the wall, and in doing so, they had found a hidden safe.

He didn’t seem as surprised by that as I would have expected. “Mrs. McGlothen told me about them,” he said, staring inside the empty cavity in the wall. He didn’t need to stand on anything. “She was talking about strange things in this building, like the unexplained extra space between the apartments on the sixth floor. She said that when she moved in, however many years ago, the previous manager told her that every unit had a safe, but most of them had been removed. The one in my old place had been turned into a niche that she had styled with a vase of plastic flowers.”

“That’s right, they did have safes!” I burst out. “Remember how I found the old advertisement for the Milaflores Building in the newspaper archives at the library? I copied it.” I started to dig through the mess around my desk because somewhere, I had files of papers. “They listed the building amenities and that was one of them. Maid service, an elevator, and safes.”

“Is anyone here worried about Maël?” my mom asked us plaintively. “He’s gone!”

“Good,” Oliver said again. “There was something wrong with him.”

“He stole everything that we found in there,” I announced and my mom softly murmured something about finders, keepers, which I ignored. “He thought that there was forty thousand dollars of old, old money, from the nineteen-twenties.”

“And a gun,” Mom added and Oliver swiveled.

“Then we have to call the police.”

In the time it took before we saw the DPD cars through the windows, Oliver and I straightened up the apartment, moving all the plastic-y wood of the broken shelves and the unassembled bed out into the hallway. He said that later, he would help me carry it down to the dumpster in the back. I thought about trying to put the mattresses in there, too, but decided that I shouldn’t waste them even if I was disgusted by the thought of a naked Maël with my mom on them.

The police took our report and wanted more information about the building, like who the owner was, but Mrs. McGlothen’s note was still on her door and Vera was still gone. I did learn more about Maël, though, as I listened to my mom talk to the officer. For one thing, his actual name was Michael and he was from Ohio. He could speak perfectly well, but he just didn’t like to. Also, he was twenty-four (only one year older than what I would turn in January) and she was pretty sure that he’d previously been in jail.

“You probably have some kind of record of that,” she suggested, and the police officer assured her that they did and would check. “He’s very strong and self-sufficient,” she continued. “He’s the kind of man who could take care of you.”

“Except he didn’t,” I reminded her. “He ran off with stolen goods.”