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Across the street, a homeless guy with a shopping cart looked up at me and shouted back, “Ann Alice!” in a hoarse voice. He went on his slow, rattling way, still shouting it every few seconds, still calling it out in an idiot’s echo.
I waited until his progress took him out of earshot, and I was mostly alone. A car or two pulled up to the stoplight and idled, but no one was watching me between their squeaking, slapping windshield wipers. It was safe enough to follow.
Around the corner I slipped back into the rain and let it hit me, since there was no avoiding it.
The building was being remodeled, or maybe only stripped for salvage before it was torn down. You never know, there on south-side. Maybe someone had bought it to turn it into condo space, or maybe it was going to be leveled for another stupid stadium. Anyway, it was empty and boarded up with sheets of plywood and “no trespassing” signs flashing orange and black warnings.
But Ann Alice knew what she was doing. One board had been kicked in or pulled down, and there was a gap large enough to fit through. I saw no further sign of her, so I assumed I’d found what she wanted me to find.
I crouched and squeezed, pulling my shoulders through with a little bit of nervousness. The edges of the boards picked at my sweater and pulled my hair. I scraped my back on the wall’s edge and winced, but kept going inside, into the dark and dusty closeness of a shut-up place.
“All right, you’ve got me here. What is it?”
I stood up straight and took in the sights. All the windows had been covered from the bottom up, though some of them were left exposed near the ceiling and there was light enough dribbling in from the gray afternoon. The air was thick and tasted like sawdust mixed with chalk. A few crates and pieces of debris littered the floors and corners.
On the floor, my boot grazed a flyer for a big moving sale.
That was right, I remembered. It used to be a furniture store after it was a bank. I had no idea where it’d relocated to. Didn’t matter, though.
Ann Alice was lying low. I squinted into the corners and examined every watery beam of light, but there was no hint of her. Then, upstairs, I thought I heard something like a footstep, or a soft scuffling. It was an impatient little sound.
Immediately in front of where I’d entered was a big empty expanse that must have been a showroom. Back deeper into the corner there was more to see and explore. There were partitions and divisions, remnants of the place’s first incarnation as a bank, maybe. Since there weren’t any stairs to be seen in the showroom, I headed back, watching for nails and trying to remember when I’d had my last tetanus shot.
A narrow door that looked like it might have covered a closet proved instead t
o hide a skinny set of stairs. I saw a suggestion of more light where they ended; but between me and the top, there was only blackness.
I pressed a hand against the wall, feeling for a rail but not finding one.
I started to climb anyway. I tested each wooden stair before I put all my weight on it. Every one of them creaked a complaint, but held.
“What have we got up here?” I asked under my breath, not expecting an answer and not receiving one.
The door at the top was hanging open and half off its hinges. I nudged it aside with my foot and stepped into a finished attic with a high triangular ceiling. My nose wrinkled. I detected death, but it was something small. The gnawed papers and pulped clothing suggested rats.
“Ann Alice, you’re not up here, are you?”
A human would stink worse than this, I thought. She wanted to show me something else.
Hey.
I jumped. It was an idle greeting, the kind I passed back and forth with people every day. When I turned around, she wasn’t there—but I was left with the thought that she had been.
“Jesus, kid. What are you doing?” She kept her silence, but I tried to track the syllable to a location. Maybe I’d heard it from the other side of the room, or maybe it came from the big window that overlooked Market Street.
I went with my second guess. I climbed clear of the staircase and went creaking across the floor. Every step kicked up more dust.
Look.
It came out in a whisper, but it was close. Over my shoulder. It was a whisper that pointed.
“At what?” I asked, on the verge of exasperation. “If you’ve got something to share, I’m listening—but I’m not in the mood to play tag. ”
Even as I spoke, my eyes were drawn to a cracked patch of crumbling plaster, there on the wall by the window. But I thought I saw something else under the plaster. Color. A line or two that didn’t fit.
I hunkered down and examined the patch, which was smaller than a fist. There was something underneath it. I took the edge of my thumbnail and gave it a needling pick. A flat bit flicked away and exposed more color—brown, black, and white.
“Okay,” I breathed. “What have we got here?”
