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“I grew up in a suburb but my grandfather has always lived in the city. My parents are about forty minutes north and my sister lives in New York.”

“Mrs. McGlothen said that you work with water,” I mentioned.

“Why would she have said that? Was she talking about me?”

“Um, yes,” I said, nodding. “Spontaneously, with no prompting at all. She does like to gossip.”

He agreed and gave me a recent example, when he’d been cornered by her in the lobby and had to listen to a story about the tenant in 6A. “By the way, have you heard anything about bedbugs in the building?”

We discussed vermin for a while, a topic about which I knew a lot. You didn’t live in thirty-four different places before your teen years without encountering some really gross stuff. He seemed interested as I talked about a rat snake infestation and problems with prairie dogs.

“I think we had mice one year,” he mused. “I remember my mother talking about renting a house and moving out for a while, but it cleared up. Eventually.”

“We never had to deal with anything for long, because we really did move,” I said. “That was probably easier.”

“I guess so.”

By this point, we had circled around until we were back at the Milaflores Building. For me, it had been great exercise, but it probably wasn’t enough for someone who liked to run seven miles and then take the stairs. Also, it had been strange that the man who had shut his door in my face (twice) had wanted to go for a walk with me.

“I thought that you would have avoided me,” I said out loud. “Because I had pestered you about your music—I know that there wasn’t any.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered. “I don’t care.”

“I’m glad. And I’m sorry,” I added. “I’m not going to bother you about that again.” First, I would lure Mrs. McGlothen up to investigate the issue in my apartment, and then I might have sought help for myself.

“I’m not traveling for the next few weeks.”

“Oh. That’s nice for you,” I said.

“I mean that if you wanted to go for a run, I would be available. My sister doesn’t like to go on her own, especially after dark.”

“Oh,” I said again. Wow, I thought to myself. Even after I had harassed him, he was offering to do me a favor? “That would be nice of you.”

“Just come up and knock. You know where I live.” He nodded and then started jogging down the block at a pace approximately doubly as fast as he had gone with me.

Wow, I thought again. Mrs. McGlothen had been right. Oliver Marchand really was a cutie-patootie. I went in, still thinking about him, and hummed along to the song as I took a shower.

Chapter 3

Mrs. McGlothen had left a note on her door: “Visiting my sister. Contact Mrs. Doyle in the garden apartment in case of emergency.” That was her friend Vera, a woman I had met at the mailboxes and who had given me a little more information about Jasper the Great, the former tenant in apartment 1C.

“He died in the hospital, not in your apartment. Just in case you were worried,” she had said.

I hadn’t been exactly worried, but that had still been nice to hear. She had told me that he had been a nice enough guy, always ready to help her with her groceries until he got frail himself. “But he wasn’t a real wizard,” she’d added.

“I thought he was a magician,” I had said, and she’d shrugged.

I didn’t feel like she was the person that I could ask to come up to my apartment to answer a question about water pressure, which had been my plan to get Mrs. McGlothen in there. Then I would have been able to find out if she could hear the music, too.

But I was feeling doubtful that anyone would. I’d tried to record it with my phone, but the only sound I had heard when I played it back was my faucet. I had already prepared a list of therapists but there were other avenues to explore first. One was investigating the rest of the building to find out if anyone was (oddly) directing music through their pipes. Another was hanging out at the mailboxes to meet some of those neighbors and ask them, indirectly, if they were hearing anything themselves.

I had already talked to several people and they had been pleasant enough. But I hadn’t gotten any useful information, not even when I’d used the leading remarks that I’d practiced. “I’m really into older songs. How about you?” I had said. Also, “I find that modern music just isn’t as good as what they used to play on the radio. Do you agree?”

A few of them had shrugged and said yes and that they guessed so, and one older lady had nodded hard and then told me her opinion of the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop conflict from the 1990s.

“I meant music even older than that,” I had hinted, because the song did sound like it came from a completely different era.

But she’d had nothing to add and no one else had taken the bait and given me anything to work with, either. No one had admitted that yes, they loved vintage songs and in fact played them into their drains so that everyone in the building could also enjoy them. So, the next step was to eavesdrop and I had started that at the top floor and worked my way down.