Twelve Rooms with a View
Theresa Rebeck

For Jess Lynn

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Theresa Rebeck:

Also by Theresa Rebeck

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

I was actually standing on the edge of my mother’s open grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was more or less perturbed that everyone else had taken off the way they’re supposed to and then there I was just standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It’s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn’t go. The service in the little chapel had totally blown, all that little deacon or whatever he was talked about was God and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her so I was just standing there and thinking maybe there was something else that could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specific. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.

“Come on,” she said. “We have to talk about the house.”

And I’m thinking, what house?

So Lucy drags me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison clearly had already been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously has an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I’m way too busy trying to catch up and get something resembling a shred of information out of them all while we crawl to Manhattan from Hoboken through the Holland Tunnel.

This is what the conversation is like, in the crummy old beige Honda that Daniel insists on driving because even though the thing is ugly it still works:

“The lawyer says that it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.

“What lawyer?” I ask.

“Mom’s lawyer,” she says.

“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel says.

“Why would he lie?” Lucy shoots back at him.

“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“Yes I did. He’s our lawyer. Why would he lie?”

“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I point out.

“It’s the same thing,” she tells me.

“Really?” I say. “I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”

“Bill left her his house,” Lucy tells me again, staying on point. “And since she died without a will that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”

This entire chain of events seems strangely impossible to me. I’m always so chronically broke and lost in a kind of underworld of trouble that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping on my head could only be true if it were literally true, and I was about to find myself like the Wicked Witch of the East squashed to death under somebody else’s house. Surely this cannot actually mean that. To get to the bottom of it all I continue to repeat things people previously said. “Bill left her his house?”

“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snaps.

“Didn’t he have kids?”

“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel pipes up. “He had two sons, two grown sons.”

“Well, didn’t he leave them something?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucy says, firm. Daniel snorts. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!”

“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison notes, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about the fact that somebody left us all a house.

“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informs her. “I called Ira, he’s going to take a look at the documentation and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”

“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy notes, sort of under her breath, kind of peevish. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t all marry him, just Alison.

So we take a left out of the cemetery and go straight to the lawyer’s. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things. Which I didn’t mind being spared and I don’t know that we would have been able to find anybody who knew Mom anyway, but truly I did think that at least the four of us were planning to stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business. Before noon there we were, squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that vaguely looks like wood, in somebody else’s imagination. Honestly, I was thinking, this is a lawyer’s office? What kind of lawyer? There was an overweight receptionist who wore a pale green sloppy shirt which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, the first time to ask us if we wanted any coffee, and then a couple more times to tell us that Mr Long would be right with us. Then he showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face, with a good head of brown hair, and then the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Alison interrupted him in mid-sentence and said, “Can you tell us about the house?”

She’s not usually that aggressive, that’s more Lucy’s turf, but she was so nervous she couldn’t stop herself, apparently. “I think we all would just love to hear about the house,” she explained, immediately apologetic for having been so tentatively forceful. Daniel put his hand on hers and smiled like he forgave her.

“The house?” said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought, Of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.

“Bill’s house. The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom his house, and that the house would be part of the settlement. You left this, didn’t you leave this—”

“Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine—I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, we spoke, and you talked to me about the house,” Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy kind of stiffen up, because Daniel clearly had told her and Alison that he got “a message”, when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer which he had no right to have, much less lie about.

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting all above it all, like he was the one who had the right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia had been living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death, that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said, kind of nicely. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. “But I take it from your questions that you’ve never actually seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to come over.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to come over, because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this house—this apartment? We’re inheriting this place, right?”

“Yes, well—the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so close upon her husband’s the title was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“But it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t you just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr Long blinked, but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, or it could be worth a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Guy could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he explained. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr Long—”

Lucy actually rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie,” she shot back.

Mr Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice because frankly I was starting to feel a little embarrassed that they were acting like this. Also, like everyone else in the room, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling with as much adorable charm as I could muster under the circumstances. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.

“A ballpark. A ballpark,” he said, smiling back at me. “I don’t know. Eleven million?”

There was a big fat silence at this.

“Eleven million?” I said. “Eleven million what?” I swear I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?

“Eleven million dollars,” he clarified. “That is of course almost a random number, there’s no way really of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates.”

So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated and worried over things that hadn’t happened and might not be happening but maybe were happening and had happened already, and the solution, apparently, to all these things that no one understood was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven million dollar apartment, like right away, like that very day.

So it was complicated, how that happened? But that’s where I ended up.

CHAPTER ONE

This is the thing you have to understand about these big old apartments in NewYork City: they are more completely astonishing than you ever thought they might be, even in your wildest hopes. When you walk by them, like, just walking along the edge of Central Park at sunset, and you look up at the little golden windows blazing and you think Oh My God those apartments must be mind-blowing, who on earth could possibly be so lucky that they get to live in one of those apartments? My mother and her husband were two of those people, and they lived in an apartment so huge and beautiful it was beyond imagining. Ceilings so high they made you feel like you were in a cathedral, or a forest. Light fixtures so big and far away and strangely shaped that they looked like bugs were crawling out of them. Mirrors in crumbling gilt frames that had little cherubs falling off the top; clocks from three different centuries, none of which worked. So many turns in the hallways, leading to so many different dark rooms, that you thought maybe you had stumbled into a dwarf’s diamond mine. The place was also, quite frankly, covered in mustard-colored wall-to-wall shag carpet, and the walls in one of the bathrooms were papered with some sort of inexplicable silver-spotted stuff that you couldn’t figure out where that shit even came from, plus there was actual moss growing on the fixtures in the kitchen, no kidding, moss. But none of that was in any way relevant. The place was fantastic.

There was nobody there to let us in—we had to let ourselves in, with the keys that the nice round lawyer handed over, telling us about six different times that he didn’t think it was “necessary” that we take immediate ownership. Seriously, he was so worried about the whole idea—that I would just up and move into this huge old empty apartment where my mother had died—that he kept repeating himself, in a sort of sad murmur, “There’s no need to rush into anything. Really. You must all be overwhelmed. Let me walk you through this.”

“But you said there might be some question, about the will,” Daniel reminded him.

“No, no question—well, no question about Mr Drinan’s will. Your mother, as you know, does not seem to have left a will,” he pointed out, trying to drag us all back into this nonsense. But now that the words “eleven million” had come out of his mouth, none of us were listening.

“We’d really like to just get a look at the place,” Daniel announced.

“Before we lose the light,” Lucy said.

Sometimes I am amazed when she pulls out lines like that. She just says this stuff like she really means it even though she already said maybe a second ago that we needed to get over there and get Tina moved in so that it was clear right away that we were taking ownership because if there was going to be any contention or cloud on the title we would need to have already established a proprietary right to the property. She’s not even a lawyer; that’s just the way her brain works. She figures out the meanest truth, gets it out there, deals with it, and then a second later pretends that really what is worrying her is some weird thing about the light. It’s spectacularly nervy and impressive. And maybe Daniel doesn’t like it, because Alison is the oldest, which means in his imagination that they should be calling the shots? But as I already noted, he just married into this situation, and there is no way around how smart Lucy is.

I, meanwhile, am the problem child who doesn’t get a vote. This is the reason, I guess, they don’t explain anything to me. Why bother? She’s caused too many problems; she doesn’t get a vote anymore. Even when it comes down to the question of where is Tina going to live, Tina doesn’t get to vote. I didn’t care. The truth is I didn’t have anything better to do anyway than let my sisters move me into my dead mom’s gigantic apartment on Central Park West. At the time, I was living in a trailer park, for God’s sake, cleaning rich people’s houses out by the Delaware Water Gap. I didn’t even have a bank account because I couldn’t afford the monthly fees and I had to borrow the fifty bucks for the bus to the funeral from my stupid ex-boyfriend Darren whose bright idea it was to move out there to that lousy trailer park in the first place. Oh well, the less said about the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco the better, as it was not my smartest or most shining hour. So when Lucy leaned back in her chair and said, “We probably should take ownership right away, just to be safe. Tina can stay there,” I wasn’t about to put up a fight. Move into a palace—why not?

So we got the keys, crawled through traffic to the Upper West Side, actually found a meter four blocks away from the promised land, and there we were, before the light was gone, while the sun was setting and making those windows glow. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown with the occasional purple brick stuck in the mix. Above, strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled at everyone from the cornices three stories up. Two gargoyles guarded the entryway as well, on either side, serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions. While they didn’t look like they were kidding around they also didn’t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, with the ones higher up, you were not quite so sure. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle lions, and another one of those gas lamps, a really mammoth one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge word in Gothic type that said EDGEWOOD. In fact all of the windows on the first two floors had additional scrollwork and carving and additional inexplicable Latin words inscribed over them. It all added up into a kind of castle-type Victorian abode that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you’d never come out of alive.

The foyer of this place was predictably spectacular. Marble floors, dotted with some kind of black stone tiles for effect, vaulted ceilings and the biggest crystal chandelier you’ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair which I later found out was carved out of pure ebony sat right in front of an equally enormous fireplace, and improbably, the chair actually had wings. Two more of the giant eagle-like lions stood on either side of the fireplace, which was filled with an enormous sort of greenery arrangement I later found out was plastic but which was convincing and impressive nonetheless. The doorman’s station, a nice little brass stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes piled on top of it, was empty. And then behind that there was a tiny bank of two elevators.

“Wow,” I said. “Check out the chair with wings.”

“We’ll have time for that later,” Lucy told me, giving me a little shove toward the elevators.

“We should wait for the doorman, shouldn’t we?” I said, looking around. The place was deserted.

“Why? We live here,” Lucy announced, pushing the elevator button, pressing her lips together, like don’t mess with me. She kept tapping at that stupid button, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry up God instead of just pissing him off.

“Seriously, we can’t just go up there,” I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed so dicey to me. Alison started pushing the elevator button too, pressing it really hard. Both of them were in such a rush, like rushing through all this would be what made it okay; it was just like Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap Story—things happen too fast and you end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a complete shithead and a shitload of trouble. I was just about to hopelessly attempt to explain this to my two sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.

“You guys, come on,” I said. “We should wait for the doorman.”

“Who knows where he is?” Daniel said. “We’re not waiting.”

And since no one showed up to stop us, I got in.

According to the set of keys the egglike lawyer had given us, Mom’s apartment was number 8A so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a tiny, horrible little landing. Green fluorescent lighting flickered from an old strip light and didn’t make anyone look good, and the speckled linoleum tiles on the floor and Venetian blinds were so old and cracked and dusty even a hapless loser such as myself would have to find it offensive. The door to 8A was triple locked, so it took Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys. I was in a little bit of a bad mood by this time. I really did think we should have waited to at least tell the stupid doorman we were there, and I was worried about what might happen if a total stranger showed up and said, “Hey! What are you doing?” There was one other door, just behind the two elevators, which had been painted a kind of sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it another door, painted a gorgeous pearly grey, with heavy brass fixings which announced “8B”. The 8A on our door was just a couple of those gold and black letters that you buy in the hardware store that have sticky stuff on the back. It made you wonder all of a sudden: Eleven million dollars? For this dump? Which in fact had not even crossed my mind, up to this point.

And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a little click, and then a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.

You couldn’t tell how big that place was right away. The blinds were drawn and obviously nobody knew where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled, too, a sort of funny old people smell, not like someone died in there, but more like camphor, and dried paper, and mothballs. And then somewhere far off, in with the mothballs, there was something else that smelled like old flowers, and jewelry, and France.

“Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.

“What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room, looking for a light switch in there.

“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me that that’s what it was, even though she hardly ever wore the stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. My dad gave it to her on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again so she only wore it once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to some cocktail party, and we would watch her put her one black dress on, and the clip-on earrings with the sparkles, and the smallest little bit of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was, way back in that huge apartment, lost in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

“It’s that perfume. What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved that apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Don’t you smell it?”

“No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”

Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there, in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled like time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and turned it on, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling, you could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was, of course, that time actually had stopped there. Somewhere between 1857 and 1960, things had happened and then just somehow stopped happening. The ceiling was high and far away with sealike coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling there was the strangest of old chandeliers, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and crawling out of it. It seemed to have been poorly wired, because it only had three working fake-candle 15-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then on the floor there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned before, and then there was like one chair, in the corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.

“What a dump,” said Daniel.

“Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy, from the kitchen. But she said it friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.

Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this all the light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, sounding all worried.

“Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so then there was just a little doorway-sized window of light that didn’t actually make it very far into the living room, or parlour, whatever you wanted to call this giant space.

“Oh that’s a big help,” said Alison.

“Wow, this kitchen is a mess. You should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh God, there’s something growing in here.”

“That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.

“No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in there in a kind of sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s something growing—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No wait—never mind, never mind.”

“I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place please? Daniel.” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her, she just gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once it gets going. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good looking and seriously could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, right about now was when that apartment literally started to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was just ignoring how scared she was; he was heading all the way across that gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole; it was a hallway. But from where we all stood it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear right down it.

“Daniel, just wait, could you wait please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked now. “I cannot see where you are going!”

“It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, just before he disappeared.

“Daniel, WAIT!” she yelled, almost crying now.

“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open one of the blinds.

And then we were all showered with light. This incredible gold and red light shot through the window and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move; the sun was going down so the light was cutting through the branches of the bare trees, which were shifting in the wind. So that big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, and it skipped everything in between.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”

“Is it going somewhere?” I asked.

“It’s going down, and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless, all the way up there. You’d think they’d have had some area lamps in a room this size.”

“You’d think they’d have had some furniture in a room this size,” I observed.

“Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is, that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the giant empty parlour, now filled with the light of the dying day. “But it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough, it might be, oh God, who knows what that stuff is. And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator. I was afraid to look.”

“There’s really something growing?” I asked. Her dire pronouncements were having the opposite effect on me; the worse she made it sound the more I wanted to see it. I slid over to the doorway just to take a peek.

“Is it mold?” Alison asked, her level of panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”

“It doesn’t cost millions,” Lucy countered.

“A serious mold problem in an exclusive building, that’s millions.”

“You’ve never had any kind of mold problem in any building, Alison. You don’t know anything about it,” Lucy informed her.

“I know that if the rest of the building finds out, they could sue us,” Alison shot back. “We would be the responsible parties, if mold in this apartment made anybody in the building sick. It could be making us sick, right now.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said, looking at me and rolling her eyes. Seriously, everybody rolls their eyes at Alison behind her back, even if she might be right. She’s just so irredeemably uptight.

“Holy shit,” I said, finally getting a good look at the kitchen.

“What, is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“No, no, it’s not that bad,” I lied. The whole kitchen was green. Or, at least, most of it. “And I don’t think it’s mold. I think it’s moss.”

“Moss doesn’t grow inside apartments,” Alison hissed. “We have to go now. We have to leave immediately, it will make us all sick. It’s probably what killed Mom, truth be told.”

“Mom died of a heart attack,” I reminded her.

“We have to leave now, before we all get sick. Daniel. We have to go.”

“There’s another apartment back here!” Daniel yelled.

“What?” said Lucy, heading after him into the black hallway.

“There’s a whole second apartment, like another kitchen and another living room or parlour—there’s like six bedrooms and two dining rooms!” he yelled.

“How can there be two dining rooms?” Lucy muttered. And then she disappeared. I looked at Alison, who was standing very still, her arms down at her sides. I completely did not want to contribute any extra fuel to the coming conflagration. But I did want to see the rest of that apartment.

“It’ll be okay, Alison,” I said. “It’s not mold. It’s moss! And Mom died of a heart attack. Let’s go see the rest of this place. It sounds awesome.” Realizing that I sounded like an utter fool now, I bolted.

But the place was awesome. The hallway was dark and twisty, and there were rooms everywhere, which all hooked onto other rooms and then hooked back to that twisty hallway further down. Seriously, you sort of never knew where you were, and then you were someplace you had gone through six rooms ago, but you didn’t know how you got back there at all. And while some of those rooms were as empty and lonely as that giant room at the front of the apartment, some of the others were cozy and interesting; one was painted a weird shade of pink that I had never seen before, with no furniture but with framed pictures of flowers all over the walls, except for one wall that had like the most gigantic mirror on it that you have ever seen in your life. No kidding, you thought that room was six times as big as it was because of that mirror and then you also jumped because as soon as you walked in you thought someone else was there with you but it wasn’t someone else, it was just you. Another room had little bitty beds that were like only six inches off the ground, and there were these old crazy solar system stickers stuck on the ceiling. One of the walls had a giant sunset painted on it, someone had actually painted a picture of the sun setting over the ocean, right on the wall itself. One room was painted dark purple, and there were stars on that ceiling too, and a little bitty chandelier that had glass moons and suns hanging from it. There was no furniture in that room either.

Twelve rooms is a lot of rooms. It’s something I had never thought about; twelve is such a low two-digit number it’s almost a one-digit number, and so you think in general that twelve of anything is frankly not all that many. But twelve rooms is actually so many, it seems almost to be the same as a hundred rooms. That apartment felt like it went on forever, before I got to the second kitchen and two dining rooms, which is where Lucy and Daniel had ended up and were figuring things out.

“This is where they lived,” Lucy observed, looking around.

She was right; it was the first thing you noticed. There was actual furniture in these rooms, a couple of chairs and a couch that stood across from a television set, and a coffee table with a clicker and some dirty plates on it. On one side of this room there was the so-called “second kitchen” but it was really more kind of a half-kitchen dinette sort of space. It had the smallest sink imaginable, a very skinny refrigerator and an old electric stove top and a tiny oven, all jammed right on top of each other. It was kind of doll-sized, frankly, but at least it wasn’t covered in moss. And then on the other side of this TV room/ kitchen area kind of thing, there was an archway through which you could see an old bed, with two little bedside tables, and a chair that someone had thrown some dirty clothes on. The bed wasn’t made.

“Jesus,” I said, and I sat down. Compared to the rest of that great apartment, this little TV/bedroom/kitchen space seemed stupidly ordinary. So of course this would be where they lived. They lived in the most amazing apartment ever, except they just holed up in the back of it, and pretended they lived in a sort of boring normal place like the rest of us. It was overwhelming. Alison, arriving behind me, took a step forward.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the coffee table. “Fish sticks. She was having fish sticks, when she died.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Lucy, and she reached over, grabbed the plate and turned back to the tiny kitchenette, where she proceeded to bang through the cabinet doors.

“What are you looking for now?” I sighed, laying down on the hideous couch. I could hardly keep my head up, at this point.

“It’s disgusting,” she snapped. “That’s just been sitting there for days. I can’t believe no one cleaned it up.”

“Who would clean it up?” I asked.

“Someone, I don’t know who. Who found her? Wasn’t it a neighbor? What did they do, just let the EMS people pick up the body and then just leave the place like this, just dishes and food left out in the open? It’s disgusting. It could attract bugs, or mice.” Lucy started looking under the teeny little sink for a garbage can. “Oh God, if there are mice I’m just going to kill myself,” she muttered. “It’s going to cost a fortune to take care of that mold issue; I do not want to have to deal with exterminators.”

“Relax,” Daniel told her, turning slowly and taking it all in with a kind of speculative grimace. “We won’t have to do a thing. What’d he say, eleven million? This place is worth more than that, as is. With mold and mice and fish sticks on dirty plates and a shitty economy. This place is worth a fortune. We won’t have to do a thing.”

“Oh, well,” said Alison, apparently having something approximating a philosophical moment. “She had a good life.”

“She had a shitty life,” I said.

“Look, there’s actually some things in the freezer,” Lucy announced, swinging open the refrigerator door, and moving on. “Some hamburgers and frozen vegetables. The ice cube maker seems to work…plenty of food. You’ll be all right at least for the next couple of days, then we’ll have to spring for some groceries I’m guessing, because you are, as usual, completely broke, is that the story?”

“That’s the story.” I shrugged. “Look, seriously, Lucy, maybe we should wait a day. For me to move in? So that we have time to like tell the building super and stuff, so they know I’m here?”

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t move in right now,” Lucy said. “You need a place to stay, my place is too small and so is Daniel and Alison’s. Where else are you going to go? By your own account you can hardly afford a hotel room.”

“This is—it’s just—”

“It’s our apartment. Why not stay here?”

There was a why not, obviously; there was a good reason to slow things down, but not one of us had any inclination to mention it. Even me. You split eleven million dollars three ways, even after taxes? Every single one of us suddenly has a whole new life. I’m fairly certain that was the sum total of all the thinking that was going on in that apartment when they handed the keys over to me, and told me to sit tight.

CHAPTER TWO

I can’t say that I was sorry to see them go when they finally left.

The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she saw me do it. She had already managed to moan about how dirty the place was and who knows what was lurking in that crummy shag rug, like I think she thought there might be bed bugs or worms or slime from distant centuries just oozing through it all, waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come in contact so it could spread fungal disaster into your system. She really has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired by that point and I just felt like being flat on my feet before I started checking the place out. As it turns out the carpet was kind of dry and it seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color but I think that honestly is the worst that could be said about it.

By then the sun actually had gone away, as predicted, so I didn’t have a lot of light to explore the place with. I decided to just head back to the boring little area where Mom and Bill had more or less camped out, and then I slipped out of the one dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator so I knew there were fish sticks. A little more casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles; and then I noticed that on the teeny tiny counter there was half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room—which was right behind that little kitchenette—there was a pile of clothes on the floor which really looked like nothing until you nudged it with your foot and found that it was stacked on top of two mostly full cases of red wine. So I was feeling so good about that, I just kept looking, and wouldn’t you know, I hit the mother lode: Up in the freezer of that little refrigerator, back behind the ice cube machine, there was a huge bottle of vodka, with hardly a dent in it.

Knowing my mother I also knew that would not be the only bottle out there. She liked to have it in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find something squirreled away in several other thinly disguised hiding places. By the looks of the two cases of pricey red wine, Bill was also a bit of a drinker himself, so for a second I did think, well, at least she finally hooked up with someone who could pay for the good stuff, as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she was surviving on the rest of her life. Seriously, I felt a little better about their utterly inexplicable marriage when I saw all the bottles. Which I’m not saying drinking yourself into an early grave is a good thing? But on the other hand, I honestly don’t see much point in judging the dead.

Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I also found a half a jar of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles and turned the television on for company. They only had basic cable so I found one of those stations that runs endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.

The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though there was a bed in there. There were huge pocket doors which were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of enormous pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed and the bed was shoved up against them. Then there was a little cove that had been built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a little dresser in it. Other than that there were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which in addition to the huge pocket doors made it clear that this room was not in fact ever meant to be a bedroom, and was more likely intended as a dining area. Daniel had said that there were two dining rooms but I don’t think there were two, I think this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was supposed to be the original kitchen, and the servants would cook back there and then come in with the food, through the pocket doors, which presumably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.

I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that sort of freaky half-bedroom-half-dining room you smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into some big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes goes along with that shit just because in general it’s not really worth arguing with Lucy. Then the next thing you know, Lucy’s telling everybody that we have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that’s the only way to be fair, and then she’s handing it over to some thrift store for ten dollars or something, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to me to let Lucy try something like that, so I started looking. I was pretty sure if I found that little bottle first I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.

The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove. It seemed to me that that was probably the only place where Mom might have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room really was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, the dresser really did look like she might have been using it as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror glued to the wall above it, with the feet of half a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser had a few things on it—a hairbrush, a comb, a couple of empty glasses with some dry little well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. Then there was a completely tarnished little round silver boxlike thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis right on top that when you opened it there were a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three little bitty medals inside. One of them said CHEMISTRY on it. In addition to the round silver box there were a couple of really old photographs in really old frames of no one I knew, and then there were a couple photographs unframed, behind them, with the edges curling toward the middle. One of them was of me, when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But seriously it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the drawers.

The top drawer had her underwear in it, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of good vodka. Then in the other drawer, just beneath it, was Bill’s underwear, gigantic pairs of white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to go pawing through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted to find that little bottle of perfume because I wanted to have it and honestly I didn’t think anyone else would want it, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic; who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than just give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.

A wallet; there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. A serious wad of money, the bills smooth and neatly pressed together, like they give it to you at the bank, if you are the sort of person that a bank will actually give money to. So I thought, Oh thank God, and I took it out to count it and those crispy new bills were all fifties and hundreds; Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would I think be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, but was a virtual miracle to a person of my limited means. I pocketed the cash.

When I leaned over to sort of half-scoop the now empty wallet and all that underwear back into the drawer I also happened to notice the no-man’s-land under the bed, which was crowded with boxes. These turned out to be really hard to get to, because they all were just a little bit too big for the space which meant they were really squashed in there. They also each weighed a ton, as I discovered, since they were full of used paperbacks, most of them mysteries. After about twenty minutes of dragging those boxes out of there I was ready to completely give up, until I got to the very last box, which was up by the headboard on the far side of the bed. That one was not full of books. It was full of junk, a crummy handbag, a little red change purse, two pairs of reading glasses, and an old cedar jewelry box filled with fake pearls and junky necklaces, another quart-sized bottle of vodka, nearly empty, and a tiny bottle of French perfume.

It looked just the way I remembered it, pitch black, and shaped like a heart. The ghost of the word Joy ran across one side, in elegant gold letters. And then of course, as much as I wanted it, it suddenly just seemed unbearably awful to me. That perfume started with her at the beginning of her past, when she thought that lots of glamorous things were in store for her. I know that’s why she was so careful with it; she was waiting for her life to be as exciting as that bottle of perfume, and the closest she ever got was a couple of cocktail parties with my father, who hardly ever had a job, and whose temper was the bane of her existence. I tipped the bottle to one side, trying to figure out how much perfume was still in there, after thirty-seven years. It was impossible to say.

It was not, of course, until this very moment that it occurred to me that I had left a pan full of water boiling this whole time on the stove top. Which I have done several times in the past, in different apartments, to more or less disastrous results, so I jolted myself out of this mournful and useless reverie and ran back to that lousy kitchenette, where I put more water on to boil, then made another cocktail, cooked up some noodles, had another drink, watched the end of a documentary about Egypt, and had a good cry. Then I thought about just passing out on that couch in front of the television set, which seemed like a really poor idea, because that is the sort of thing that leads one to think one might actually be an alcoholic like one’s mother which was a thought I didn’t particularly want to entertain that night. So then I stood up, definitely wobbly, but didn’t judge myself because Mom was dead and I was feeling hideous, and then I thought about climbing into her bed, and that was just not an option, so then I wandered back through that maze of rooms until I found the one with the stars and planets on the ceiling and the little beds on the floor, and one of those beds was made up with a couple of pillows and a kind of a kid’s coverlet that was dark blue with rocket ships all over it. And then I slid off my jeans and got under that cover and I cried a little more, and then I went to sleep.

“Who the fuck are you?”

That’s the next thing I remember. Two guys standing in the doorway, staring at me. One of them had flipped on the overhead light, so I could see there were two of them, two fucking huge guys, staring at me sleeping in that little bed on the floor of that little room.

“What?” I said, blinking. “What?”

“Answer the fucking question. Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?” The first guy, the one standing inside the room with his hand on the light switch, was drunk. You could tell that right away.

“What time is it?” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. And I really wanted to know what time it was. I was completely confused.

“Who gives a fuck what time it is? Who the fuck are you?” the first guy said again.

“Shit,” I said. Which, it may not have been the brightest thing to say? But this guy was scaring me.

“Answer the fucking question. And get out of that bed. Get up. Get up!” Now he was barking orders and it was totally freaking me out. I was still blinking and trying to wake up and figure out what time it was and how much of a hangover I had, and this huge guy was reaching over to grab me. Honestly, I remember thinking, what a fucking drag. I’m in a total mess again and this time it isn’t even my fault; me staying here was Lucy’s dumb idea, I was just doing what Lucy wanted, and here I am now in a total fucking mess. I squeezed myself back against the wall, ducked my head down and threw my arm across my face because it was taking me so long to wake up and I was scared. Oh what a drag, I thought, what a complete hideous drag.

“Stop it, Pete. You’re scaring her,” said the other guy.

“Good. I want to scare her. Breaking and entering is a fucking crime, she should be scared,” said Pete, still coming at me, like he was going to drag me out of that bed.

“I didn’t break and enter, excuse me, excuse me but do you think I could put my pants on?” I yelled. “Get away from me, JESUS BACK OFF YOU JERK.” I smacked Pete’s hand away before he could touch me, and surprisingly he actually did back off. Feeling suddenly cocky I continued yelling. “Turn around, would you please TURN AROUND?”

Okay, why this worked I have no idea, but it did; both of these guys did as they were told. I mean I was freaked out because seriously these were two huge guys, both of them maybe six two or six four and I’m a little bit of a peewee so I totally did not expect them to do as I said. But they did so I grabbed my jeans off the floor and slid them on fast. Being half naked was not going to be an advantage in whatever this situation turned out to be, that much was certain.

“Who the fuck are you guys?” I said, trying to sound angry and sure of myself. I was totally scared out of my mind so I had to keep the upper hand as long as I could.

“We’re the ones asking questions here,” Pete started. “I hope you’re dressed because that’s as much privacy as you’re going to get.” He turned around just as I finished zipping up my pants, and when I looked up I noticed that he was taking a hit off a beer bottle. No question: they both were tanked. This was a very bad situation. “So what’s your name?” he demanded.

“I don’t have to tell you my name. You tell me your name,” I said.

“You’re sleeping in my fucking bed, so yeah, you do have to tell me your name,” Pete countered.

“Forget it. Let’s just call the police,” said the other guy.

“I am the police,” Pete told him, annoyed. “You can’t call the police when the police are already here.”

“Well, who cares who she is?” asked the other guy. “Just get her out of here.” He looked back toward the back of the apartment, like he knew what was back there and it made him sad. Pete looked like he wanted to argue about this, but then all of a sudden he was too tired to do it, so he looked back at me and reached out again, like he was going to grab me. I backed up. He didn’t get mad this time, though, he just moved his hand, like that little gesture that means, Come on, let’s go.

And that’s what he said. “Come on, let’s go. I don’t know how you got here and I don’t care. Count yourself lucky. Just get lost.” He wasn’t even looking at me by now, he was half following the other guy, who had already headed down the hall. He took a hit off his beer, looking totally wiped and also like all he really cared about was finishing the one beer and finding another. Now that he wasn’t screaming at me I could see that he was not bad looking; he needed a shave, and he was a little paunchy around the middle, but he had great eyes, dark brown, kind of shrewd and sad, which made his whole face look like a worried kid, even while he was being mean. Under the circumstances obviously I wasn’t falling for it, plus, I truly didn’t get what was supposedly going on here. These guys had barged in and woken me up maybe a minute ago. And now what, I was supposed to leave? Who the fuck did they think they were? I mean obviously I was grateful in the moment that they didn’t turn out to be rapists, but after the initial terror some sense of reality was setting in. What the hell?

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told Pete. “This is my apartment. I live here. And and and I think it’s a good idea to call the cops because you’re the ones who what the fuck are you doing here? Who the fuck are you?”

“You live here?” he said. “You live here?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is my apartment. I own it.”

“You own it?” he replied, taking a step back and calling down the hall. “Hey Doug! Get back here! This chick says she owns this place!” He turned and looked back at me, angry again, but in a calmer, nastier way. He also seemed to find my claim, that I owned the apartment, sort of quietly hilarious. He took a step back into that teeny bedroom. “Maybe you should tell me your name after all, sweetheart.”

“I don’t, I don’t—you tell me your name,” I insisted. I shoved my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and felt the hard edge of those bills I had stashed there. I was glad I had taken the precaution of pocketing that stuff right when I found it; it was starting to look like I might need it sooner rather than later. “I mean this is like my house and you’re like, you’re like…”

“Your house?” said Pete, half laughing. “Your house. That would make you—what was your name again?”

“Tina Finn?” I said. Okay I shouldn’t have caved like that, making my name a question at the last minute, but it just wasn’t so easy, keeping up the act that I was on top of this situation.

“Tina Finn,” he said, smiling now. “Tina Finn. One of the daughters of Olivia Finn. Would I be too far off the mark, assuming that?”

“Yeah, actually, she was my mom, and she just died two days ago, and and and—”

“Yesterday was the funeral.”

“Yes, yesterday was the funeral.”

“Yesterday was the funeral, and you still managed to slime your way into our apartment the same night. How very resourceful of you.” This was a creepy guy, smart and wily and drunk and way too fucking good looking. He was the kind of guy who knew he could get away with complete shit, and say and do completely shitty things because he was both great looking and smart. I wanted to get away from this guy as fast as I could, but I couldn’t give any more ground, none at all. If I did, there was no question I was going to be kicked out of there, and where was I supposed to go?

“Okay, you got my name, how about you give up yours?” I said. “Somebody Drinan, yeah? Pete, that’s your first name? So that makes you Pete Drinan. Bill was your dad?”

“Give the little lady a prize,” he smirked.

“Well, listen, Pete Drinan,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere tonight. Now that you know who I am, maybe you should just piss off.”

“Maybe you should stop thinking you have any rights here.”

“Maybe you should stop thinking I don’t.”

“And what gives you rights again? Your mother conned my father into marrying her, which gave her rights for a while, I guess, but you, I’m guessing not so much.”

“He left her this place. That doesn’t give me no rights,” I said.

“Really,” he said back, like what I said just meant nothing. He took another hit off that beer.

“Yeah, really,” I said. “He left it to her, and she left it to us.”

None of this seemed surprising to old Pete Drinan, but it didn’t seem like he was totally familiar with the story either. He made that little wave with his hand again, like, Let’s go.

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I don’t have to leave.”

“Well, that’s debatable, but I’m not asking you to leave. Hey Doug!” he yelled, heading down the hallway toward the back of the apartment. “Listen to this!” Then he yelled back to me again, without even turning around. “Come on, Tina Finn, I think it would be really great for you to explain this situation to my big brother. Come on.”

What a jerk, I thought, and boy does he know how to order people around. I followed him back to television land, to see what fresh hell this great-looking asshole was about to cook up for me.

His older brother was sitting on that sad little couch, in front of the television set, sort of slumped over, looking at the empty bowl of noodles and the half-empty glass of vodka and grapefruit juice. He glanced up when I entered, and I got a better look at him this time; he had the same pair of tired, smart brown eyes as his little brother, but they didn’t scare me as much for some reason. It might have been the rest of his face; his mouth was thinner, and kind of kept in one line, like it was so used to being disappointed all the time it didn’t even bother, anymore, to find another shape. His hair was thinning, too; I could see the beginnings of a bald spot dead center on the top of his head, and he had one of those hairlines that has crept so far up the dude just looks startled all the time. So somehow Doug Drinan managed to look shrewd, old, startled and disappointed. It happens to some people, I guess.

“There’s hardly any furniture left,” he observed, kind of to no one. “I wonder what he did with it all. You think he sold it? He must’ve sold it, but why?” It sounded like what it was: a very good question. Pete was on his own track, though. He turned to me and tipped his head, like I was some kind of circus animal he could order around with these little gestures.

“Tell my brother your name,” he said, all arrogant and smug.

“Why don’t you do it for me, you seem to think it’s so funny,” I countered. He really was the kind of guy, instead of doing the simplest thing he asked, you’d really rather just irritate the shit out of him.

He grinned. “Oh, no, I don’t think it’s funny at all. Tina Finn. Her name is Tina Finn, and she has just shared with me a few truly remarkable facts,” he said. Then before Pete could get around to narrating these fascinating facts, he glanced into the next room, the bedroom, which was as I had left it: an unmade bed, piles of clothes on the floor, underwear and books and empty boxes everywhere. The place looked absolutely ransacked because in fact I had ransacked it. “What the fuck?” He looked back at me, all angry again. “What the fuck. You went through his stuff. You went through my father’s shit?”

I blushed like a teenager. “I didn’t, I was just—um…”

“You were just what?” he asked, tossing underwear at me. “You were just casually going through my father’s underwear drawer?”

“I’m sorry, I was looking—my mom had this old bottle of perfume and I was—”

“You were looking for a bottle of perfume in my father’s underwear drawer and what you found was—his wallet.” He unearthed it, looked through it swiftly. “And, oh look, there’s nothing in there now, is there?” He closed the wallet and tossed it to the other guy, who was still sitting on the couch.

“I didn’t take anything from your dad’s wallet,” I said.

“That’s a lie,” he noted, correctly.

“It’s not a lie,” I said, continuing to lie. “Yeah, I found it in there, but I mean there was nothing in it.” It was, as I said, already clear that this guy was one hell of a bully but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t get around to actually frisking me so there was no way to prove that I had the cash, which by the way I was not about to give up. “I was looking—”

“You were looking and looking and you also found—the vodka!” he exclaimed, picking up the bottle off the coffee table, where I left it.

“Knock it off, Pete.” The other Drinan stood, shaking his head, like he was used to this nonsense from crazy Pete but not in the mood. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to me. “You must still be in shock.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. Doug Drinan expressing sorrow for my loss was frankly the most consideration I had gotten out of anyone, all day. “Thanks. I mean, thanks.” I said.

“It was sudden, yes? I mean, she wasn’t sick,” he said.

“No, they, they said it was a heart attack. I don’t know.”

“That makes it hard.”

“Don’t make friends with her; she’s not staying,” Pete advised his sad big brother. He had pulled the cork out of the vodka bottle and started pouring it into a dusty glass which he seemed to have located in one of those cabinets.

“You’re going to regret that in the morning,” said Doug.

“I’m going to regret everything in the morning. I regret everything now,” Pete informed him. “But since you’re so interested in making friends with our little intruder, maybe you should hear what she has to say about the apartment, and why she’s here.” He took a hit off that straight vodka. For a second I was hardly listening, I was sort of suddenly desperate for a drink myself and wondering if there was any way to make one without losing anymore ground. Doug looked at me with a puzzled weariness, like he was sincerely curious what I might say in response to Pete’s nasty prodding, but also like he didn’t believe, really, that anything horrible was going to come out of my mouth. Seriously, he was just such a tired and sad person. It was like he’d already been through so much bad luck that he didn’t think anything, really, could get any worse.

“I…”

“According to Tina Finn, who claims she is not a thief, evidence on hand notwithstanding, Dad left the apartment to her mother, you remember the oh so lovely Olivia—”

“Jesus, Pete.” Doug looked away, disgusted and embarrassed. “Knock it off, would you?” He stood and grabbed the bottle of vodka, heading for the kitchenette and the little freezer full of ice cubes. The drinking was apparently going to continue with both these fellows.

“I’m just getting to the good part. Dad left the apartment to Olivia—”

Doug turned at this, confused and concerned, and about to interrupt, but Pete had more up his sleeve.

“And Olivia left it to her daughters.”

This stopped Doug in his tracks. He turned and looked back at me, sceptical but wary. The whole idea was clearly so ridiculous that he couldn’t take it in.

“She didn’t actually leave it to us,” I said, embarrassed as hell. “I mean, she did leave it to us. She didn’t make a will and there’s this, you know, she died intestate. And that means—”

“I know what ’intestate’ means,” said Doug, going for the ice. “This would explain what you’re doing here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Is your mother even in the ground yet?” he asked, a sort of edgy tone underlining the question. No more friendly expressions, so sorry for your loss, now I had to tough it out with both of them. To hell with it. If they were both drinking, then so was I.

“The funeral was yesterday morning,” I said, grabbing my half-empty glass of vodka and grapefruit juice and following him into the kitchen, defiant. “So we went from the cemetery to the lawyer’s and then we came here.”

“Very efficient.” Doug nodded. He dumped some ice in my glass and handed me the vodka bottle.

“Well, we didn’t, it’s not like, I mean I had no idea about any of any, you know, they didn’t even tell me until after, I was standing there at the graveside, you know, honestly, when they told me about it.”

“’They’ being…”

“Me and my sisters.”

“Right, there are several of you,” Doug reminded himself. “Four of you?”

“Three. Me and Alison and Lucy. And Daniel, he’s Alison’s husband. But no kids. None of us managed to, I guess.”

“Fascinating,” Doug nodded. “And someone told you…”

“This lawyer, he said he was my mom’s lawyer.”

“That idiot Long,” stated Pete. He was lying on the couch now, spread out the whole length of it, so now there was nowhere else for anyone to sit in this dreary little room. He had the little jewelry box on his lap, the one that had Mom’s perfume bottle in it. In fact he was actually looking at the perfume bottle. “And he said you inherited our apartment. You inherit all my mom’s stuff, too?

“That was my mom’s,” I said. I wanted him to give it back.

“That was not your mother’s,” Doug informed me, cold. He was just considering me now, like he was trying to decide what to do with me, like maybe he was thinking he could just lock me in a closet and leave me there. I started to wonder if maybe he was not the nice brother at all; maybe he was just a little less sparky than the other guy.

“Yeah it was too,” I said. “She had it her whole life. So I just, that’s why I was looking through their stuff, I knew it was in there and I wanted to have it.” I set my drink down and walked over to the couch, reached out my hand to take it from asshole Pete. He closed his fingers over it and dropped it back into the jewelry box and shut it.

“Everything’s up for grabs though, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Long told you?”

“No, that’s not what he told me. What he told me was everything was ours.”

“Everything of ours is yours, that’s what he told you?”

“He told me, he told everybody—”

“Oh, look at this!” Pete found the little tarnished silver box, with all the keys in it; he had been lying on it, on the couch. “You take a fancy to this too?”

“I wasn’t stealing anything!” I said.

“Except our home,” said Doug. He leaned up against the wall, looked out the window.

“Oh look, my mom’s wedding ring,” Pete observed, picking it out of that silver box. “Glad to know you weren’t stealing that.”

“Look, you guys are mad. Okay, I get it,” I said.

“Like her mother, a regular rocket scientist,” Pete murmured.

“My point being I’m not the one who fucked up this situation. That would be your dad, right? Didn’t he tell you he was leaving the apartment to my mom? Didn’t he even tell you that?”

“Who are you again?” said Pete, really pissed now. “Have we met? Do I know you? Then what the fuck are you doing here in my apartment? I grew up here, with my family, and my mother. My father was happily married to my mother for twenty years, not two years, twenty years. This is our apartment! What the fuck are you doing here, sleeping in my bed? What the fuck gives you rights?”

“Well, apparently some document that your father signed gives me rights.”

“He was a fucking drunk!”

“Yes, that’s real news. I was here for fifteen minutes I figured that out.”

“Because booze was the first thing you went looking for.”

“No—”

“Just like your mother.”

“Go tell the judge. Go tell Stuart Long. What are you yelling at me for? You think I’m making this up? You think I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t given me the keys?” I snapped back at him. “Go yell at your father. Oh, sorry. Guess you missed that chance.”

That shut old Pete up. He glanced at Doug, who looked at him for a second then looked out the window. It was pretty fast but there was no question.

“Holy shit, he did tell you, didn’t he?” I said. “You knew. That he was leaving her the apartment. He told you. That’s why you’re so mad. Because you knew.” They both looked at me real surprised for a second, like it hadn’t occurred to either of them that I might actually put that together.

“You don’t know anything,” said Pete, deflated as hell all of a sudden.

“Well, I don’t know a ton, but I’m learning as we go,” I retorted. “What’d you do, piss him off? That’s just a wild guess.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he said, but he was tired now.

“I don’t think we should be talking about this,” Doug observed, instantaneously cool as a cat. Seriously, these two were a mixed set, they were like salt and pepper shakers. They maybe fit together? But they were not alike. Both of them knocked back their vodka at the same time, but I could see it wasn’t going to bring either of them any peace. Oh well, like vodka brings anybody peace, ever.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Doug.

“What, we’re just going to let her stay?” Pete asked, offended by my very existence now.

“Unless you want to take her home with you, I don’t know what to do with her,” Doug said, shrugging.

“You know, you guys don’t actually get to decide what to do with me,” I said, all snarky and defiant again.

“Don’t count on that,” said Doug, rapidly moving into first place in the asshole competition that we all had going on by this point. “And don’t get too comfortable.” He set his empty drink down on the kitchen counter and headed for the black hallway. Pete slammed back the rest of his drink, and picked up the jewelry box as he stood.

“Listen,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me. There would be no listening tonight.

“Nothing,” I said.

He nodded and turned, following his brother down the hallway, taking my mother’s little black bottle of perfume with him as he went.

CHAPTER THREE

I called Lucy first thing. She was not in the least bit impressed with my story about Tina and the night visitors.

“They were going to show up eventually, that was a given, she announced.

“They were pretty pissed,” I told her.

“Did you think they were going to be delighted to hear that they’ve been disinherited? I didn’t.”

“Man, Lucy, do you always have to be so mean about everything?” I said, already sick of this. Lucy, she’s, no kidding, it’s very impressive how capable she is but honestly sometimes I think she just thinks everybody should sleep on rocks. Plus I had a whanging hangover. I was in no mood for all this steely resolve.

“Just because I knew they were going to show up, that doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it,” she replied. “I think this could get pretty complicated pretty quickly and I don’t see any point in being naïve about that.”

“Yes, yes, okay,” I said. “Actually what I meant was couldn’t you be like a little worried that I was stuck in this apartment by myself and these two big guys showed up and scared the shit out of me?”

“They frightened you?”

“Well yeah of course they did!” I said. “I was sound asleep, all of a sudden there are two big guys in this empty apartment with me, I didn’t know who they were, it was terrifying.”

“Did they threaten you?” Lucy asked, only idly curious about this.

“They were both drunk and, yeah, they threatened me; they threatened me a lot,” I said. This cheered her right up; she went from being vaguely interested to downright perky.

“That is absolutely unacceptable,” she said. Now I could hear her typing.

“Are you taking notes?” I asked, kind of wanting to strangle her.

“I just want to have everything on paper, for the lawyers. We’re going to have to have a paper trail, if they get aggressive. No point in putting it off,” she said.

“One of them is kind of good-looking,” I admitted, apropos of nothing.

“Great,” Lucy acknowledged. “Listen, I have to run into a meeting.”

“You’re running into a fucking meeting? What am I supposed to do if they come back?”

“Tell them to call our lawyer,” she reported. “Let’s seeLong, tell them to call Stuart Long, you met him yesterday, he was Mom and Bill’s lawyer, he put together the will.”

“Yes, I remember, but I don’t have his number.”

“They’ll know who he is, Tina,” Lucy said. “Listen, I really do have to run.

“Wait a minute. Would you wait a minute?” I said. “There’s somebody here.” And there was, there was somebody in the apartment.

“Who is it? Is it them?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s someone,” I whispered. I was all the way in the back, on that little couch and television island where Bill and Mom had drunk themselves to death. But it was like all the air in the back of the apartment was moving differently, like someone had opened a door far away and that affected the whole place, like the wind comes just before the train in a subway station. And then I could hear somebody moving somewhere far away, but inside. I could hear it.

“Tina, go find out who it is, and then if there’s a problem, call me back,” she instructed me, only half interested. “I’ll tell my assistant to come get me out of my meeting if you really need me. All right?”

“Can you just hold on a minute?” I said.

“No, sorry, I actually can’t. For heaven’s sake. It’s not like it’s the middle of the night and they’re walking in and threatening you. I can understand why that upset you, but this should be easy. Handle it, would you? You’re not a child.”

“Look, don’t talk to me like that, okay?” I said, really annoyed now. “I don’t appreciate it. We’re all in this together.”

“That’s my point. If you need me call me back.” Okay, she said that, and then she hung up. No kidding. She hung up on me, without saying goodbye.

“I hate my family,” I said to myself. I knew calling Alison would be useless in the complete opposite direction: she would just get all uptight and start freaking out and have no idea what I should do and then she and Daniel would come by and he’d try to take over everything. I was not terribly interested in that option, so I just thought I’d better head back to the front of the apartment and see what the hell was going on.

I heard another sound, kind of like pots banging in a kitchen, six miles away. “Hey!” I yelled. “Who’s in here?” Which was not particularly sly, but I wasn’t looking for the surprise element since I assumed it was just those two boneheads, or one or the other of them. “You need to get out of here!” I yelled. I was charging through the maze of rooms now, all determined and cocky. The apartment looked considerably friendlier in the morning light. Even though there wasn’t much furniture and the carpeting was shitty, the walls were really all painted beautiful colors, which glowed in the morning light. It gave me courage, which was good because I didn’t have much else to go on. “Get out of here and call your stupid lawyer and stop bothering me!” I shouted, charging into the giant room at the front of the apartment.

“Helllooooo,” said a man. “Who are you?”

Okay, I practically jumped out of my skin. Because I turned the last corner and there was a man, a different man now, standing in the middle of that giant empty room. This one was not tall, he was actually quite short, and he was very tidy, like a tidy little person in clothes with dirt all over them. I half expected him to evaporate but he didn’t evaporate, he just stood there and stared at me until I recovered the part of my brain that wasn’t completely hung over and flipped out.

“Who am I?” I said. “Who are you?”

“Oh wait, oh wait,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re Tina! Alison, Lucy and Tina; you’re Tina. Olivia showed me pictures. I’ve seen pictures of you.

“You’ve seen pictures of me?” I said.

“Look at you, you’re pretty, you’re much prettier in real life, you don’t photograph well. I think that’s strange, don’t you, how some people look just lovely when you meet them, and then you see them in pictures and you think, Well that just didn’t translate. Well, anyway. I’m Len! Your mother…didn’t…? Didn’t she?”

“Didn’t she what?”

“Nothing,” he said, kind of sad. “Oh well. She said you didn’t talk; I didn’t realize that meant you didn’t talk at all. You didn’t talk at all?”

“Listen, Len, I don’t…”

“No, of course, not my business! Not my business. And honestly it’s not that we spent a lot of time on it but she seemed, much more so than Bill, to have a kind of yearning, you know you should have called her, you really, oh well. You don’t have to answer that; I know things were complicated. She didn’t blame you, so who am I?” He seemed to think this was a point well worth making, but at the same time he didn’t seem to want to continue our conversation. He glanced over toward the kitchen, distracted.

“Look, could you, you know…” I was starting to get really annoyed with this guy. I was getting frankly annoyed with just about everyone: Lucy, those shitheads who barged in on me in my sleep, my mother, my ex-boyfriend Darren, everyone in New York City, the universe. “I think, you know, whoever you are, Len, I think uh this isn’t a great time for me to maybe visit, and I’m not sure what you’re doing here.”

“Sorry.” he smiled, suddenly looking down and dusting himself off, like he remembered something about how actual people behave. “I’m being ridiculous, you’re right to be upset. Did you stay here last night? You must have done. I’m so sorry for your loss, it must have been a terrific shock. Well, it was for all of us. Such a shame. She was really a terrific person. I’m Len Colbert, like I said. I was a friend of your mother and Bill, I live in the penthouse here on the top floor. Well, of course it’s the top floor, that’s where penthouses are, aren’t they?” He laughed at himself, bemused by this astonishingly obvious statement of fact. “I’d shake your hand but mine are not presentable, I’m a, well, it’s complicated what I do,” he sighed. “Not complicated. I’m an anthropological botanist, I was, that is, I don’t teach anymore. But the uh—the kitchen here—have you seen the kitchen?”

“The moss?” I asked.

“Yes, the moss.” He smiled. No surprise, this elflike character had a fantastic smile, charming and self-involved and devilish as hell. He also had the most alarming blue eyes I’d ever seen, dark edges but sky blue around the middle. For a second I was seriously grateful that that dude was at least thirty years older than me because in spite of the fact that he was so odd I could see the appeal of eyes like that. “Bill and I had an arrangement. He rented me his kitchen,” Len the blue-eyed elf continued. “He lets me, that is—both he and your mother—they let me use it as a kind of greenhouse. My own greenhouse, up on the roof, is obviously untenable for a mossery, not that I didn’t try, but to maintain the habitat, the hydration alone, not that, it may be possible that we just didn’t solve it. But people were not enthusiastic overall, you can imagine. The terror of a few bryophytes! Anyway it was finally impossible. I investigated the possibility of renovating the plumbing, you know, to provide the additional, and there was no support from my fellow tenants. None whatsoever. One may even say, open hostility. At least, lawsuits were threatened. Anyway you’ll have to come see it.”

“See…”

“The greenhouse. It’s a rarity to find one in the city, but the light, as you can imagine, so far up, utterly spectacular, even, the views, not to mention what you can accomplish. With that much light? I am I think not unduly proud. I’d love for you to come up; you should take me up on this. But it is absolutely useless for moss. Our solution—Bill and I—to our mutual needs—was as you see.” He made an elegant gesture toward the kitchen behind him. “Actually it’s a bit of a secret. There’s a lot of misunderstanding, in the building, about moss. This confusion between moss and mold—it’s ridiculous. They’re not even the same species. Bill and Olivia were very understanding. And discreet.” He smiled at me and nodded, apparently finished with this unintelligible explanation.

“So you have a key?” I asked.

“Oh yes. They spent most of their time in the other half of the apartment, it wasn’t any kind of, as you can see this part of the apartment has not been in use for years.”

“Well, okay, but it looks like I’m going to be living here now,” I said.

“Reeeeallly?” Len asked, cocking his head at this, as if it were the most extraordinary news. Actually, he made it sound like such extraordinary news that it was just the slightest bit too extraordinary to be believed.

“Yes, until the will is settled. I’m staying here.”

“And what do the boys have to say about that?” Len the elf asked, sort of half to himself.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked him, edgy

He smiled at me, clearly amused by my tone. “The boys, he repeated. “I ran into them last night, in the lobby. They didn’t mention to me that you would be living here. So I’m just surprised to hear it. As I assume they were.” He folded his hands in front of his chest, with a sort of odd little gesture of delight, and smiled at me again, as if I would find his clever little bit of deduction charming.

“Look, you’re going to have to go,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, and you know, you want me to be discreet and everything but I don’t know, this is clearly some sort of illegal thing you got going here.”

“Moss is not a controlled substance,” he informed me, laughing.

“Oh sorry, I maybe misunderstood you, before,” I said. “Because you said something about how people in the building got all mad when you were trying to grow it up there on the roof, so I was just thinking maybe they wouldn’t like to find out, so much, that instead you decided to grow it on the eighth floor, like in the middle of the building, where it might actually spread.”

“Ah,” said Len Colbert from the penthouse. “I understand why perhaps you thought I said that.”

“Yeah, it sounded a little like that, like people maybe wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear what you were doing here.”

“That’s not what I was saying,” he said.

“So I don’t actually need to keep my mouth shut about this?

Elfman laughed again, to himself this time.

“What’s so funny, Len?” I asked.

“Nothing, no, nothing,” he replied. He looked back at the kitchen, this time with real longing. “Do you like moss?” he asked me.

“Honestly, I never thought about it that much,” I said.

“It is a rare spirit that appreciates moss,” Len told me, as if this were news. “There are seventeen different species in this particular mossery, some of them exceedingly beautiful. The curators at either of the public botanical gardens in the city would give their eye teeth. Frankly, it’s actually a bit of an achievement that I could do what I’ve done, and under these conditions? Please. Let me show it to you.”

“That’s not necessary, Len,” I started.

“Please,” he said, holding out his elegant and dirty hand, like a prince at some ball, waiting to sweep me into a dance.

“What the hell,” I said.

So for the next hour this strange guy walked me through the intricacies of moss, gametophores and microphylls and archegonia—that’s the female sex organ of moss, who knew—and how much water moss needs to fertilize, and how long it takes for sporophytes to mature. He talked about liverworts and hornworts; he had mosses in there that were actually only native in the Yorkshire Dales moorland, and he had mosses that only grew in cracks in city streets, and he had mosses that only grew in water. As it turns out, in World War II sphagnum mosses were used as dressings on the wounds of soldiers in Europe because they’re so absorbent and they have mild antibacterial properties. Also some moss can be used to put out fires, don’t ask me how they would do that but apparently it’s historically accurate. Old Len knew a ton about moss, and he made sure that I knew how great his mossery really was, and how no one builds them anymore, and what a tragedy it would be if anything were to happen to his mossery.

“That would be awful,” I agreed. I looked around the transformed kitchen. Len had even hung a picture of an old medieval tree on one wall, presumably to keep the moss company. “So how much did Bill charge you, to rent out his kitchen like this?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, looking at me kind of sideways for a second. “It was a very friendly arrangement.”

“He didn’t charge you rent for this? But they were broke, weren’t they?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I spent the night here. There’s nothing here. They were living on vodka and fish sticks and red wine,” I said. “Which he paid for in cash.”

“You have been busy, and you say you just arrived yesterday? Len observed.

“So he really gave you this room to grow moss in, for free?”

“I didn’t say that.” Len smiled. “I said we had a friendly arrangement.”

“Like under the table, like friendly like that?” I asked.

“Bill liked to fly under the radar,” he admitted with a small shrug. “He did prefer cash.”

“How much did he charge you?” I asked, direct. Len looked at me sideways and then he went back to examining one of his moss beds, poking at it carefully with his middle finger. “One thousand dollars a month,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“You know what, Len?” I said.”I think this mossery is fantastic, and I see no reason why you couldn’t just keep it here for as long as you want. I’m gonna go make a phone call.”

“Lovely.” Len smiled. “I’ll just continue my work then.”

Figuring that I might need to keep the cash coming, it did seem like a reasonable idea to let this guy keep his mossery. But I also figured that this was maybe going to be a little bit of a problem, given that the first thing Lucy and Alison both said when they saw it was we have to get rid of the moss. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to finesse this situation but I felt pretty sure something would come to me. Anyway, I went back to TV Land and picked up the phone and started dialing, meaning I made it halfway through Lucy’s number before I realized that the phone was dead. There was nothing on the line—no clicks, no beeps, no dial tone, just nothing. I hung it up and tried again, and then I did that about eight more times, and then I plugged and unplugged the phone about eight times and then I tried it eight more times. Then I tried it in three other jacks, in three of the little bedrooms.

“Something wrong?” Len asked me, hanging out of the kitchen door. I mean, obviously there was something wrong; I was holding the phone out and staring at it like it was about to explode.

“The phone doesn’t work,” I told him. “I mean, it worked just an hour ago. Now it doesn’t work.”

He held out his neat but dirty hand and I gave it to him. He listened for less than one second, then nodded. “Well,” he said. “I need to introduce you to Frank.”

Frank was the doorman. Len took me downstairs to the front lobby, and there he was, Frank, a kind of good-looking Hispanic guy with a beard and really long hair, in a beige uniform with little gold things on the shoulders. He had one of those weird haircuts that are short in strange places, with a crazy zig-zag lightning bolt running down the back of his head. With the dopey uniform it looked really nuts, but he seemed nice enough.

“Hey Len, what’s up?” Frank asked.

“This is Tina Finn, Olivia’s daughter.” Len made a little wave with his hand, seeming to indicate for a moment that I might be some sort of fancy dish that was being served up. I felt like bowing.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Finn,” said Frank, reaching out and shaking my hand politely. “I’m real sorry about your mom.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Tina is going to be staying in the apartment for now, while they settle things up with the estate,” Len informed Frank. It was genius, seriously; coming out of Len, “she’s staying in the apartment” sounded pretty good. At least, Frank the doorman had no problem with it.

“Well, welcome to the Edge,” he said. “If you need anything, you let me know.”

“There is something,” Len nodded. “It looks like her phone’s been cut off. Could you put a call in about it?”

“Sure. Who’s your carrier?” asked Frank, reaching for the phone receiver on his desk.

“You know, I’m not sure who they had,” I said.

“Well, let’s see then, maybe I’ll put a call in to Doug—that’s Bill’s son,” he told me. “There’s probably just been some mistake, he cut the phone off maybe. Did he know you were going to be staying up there?”

“Yeah, we talked you know, we just talked yesterday about it,” I said. “Look, you don’t need to bother him, I’ll call him myself.”

“I got it right here,” Frank said, dialing. “It’s no bother.” He was dialing away when Len tapped him on the shoulder.

“It’s probably better to just give her the number,” Len said under his breath, like he was trying to keep me from hearing what he said. Frank looked at him, a little confused, and Len did that thing with his hands, opening them up, apologizing to the universe for the stupidity of the human race. “There’s got to be a lot going on, Frank. You probably don’t want to put yourself in the middle of it.” It sounded so much like he was taking care of Frank there that for a minute I forgot he was actually taking care of me.

It was, however, starting to occur to old Frank that maybe this story didn’t add up. “But you did see Doug last night?” he asked, a little worried now while he rooted around for a pen.

“We hadn’t figured out what we were doing last night, when we talked. Everything was such a mess. With Mom’s funeral, I was kind of a wreck and we hadn’t actually thought about the practicalities. I mean I was just like crying and crying so I really didn’t get the details straight,” I fibbed.

“I know what that’s like.” Frank nodded. “I lost my mom fifteen years ago, I still miss her.” He looked at me and I swear to God, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, nothing too much, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarrassed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that hideous uniform looked so terrible on him it made me feel a little bad to be lying like this. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so that I didn’t mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. His little haircut was so sweet and stupid I thought my head was going to split.

“Well…thanks Frank,” I finally said. “I’ll go call Doug right now and make sure he knows everything about me staying there and all that and you know make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off.” I turned away a little, so that Frank would have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then there was old Len, at my elbow, showing me to the door, like a friendly undercover agent. “There’s a Verizon store two blocks up and one over, on Columbus,” he informed me cheerfully, under his breath. “They sell those throwaway phones. You don’t need a credit card, you can just pay cash, isn’t that convenient?”

“Very,” I agreed. “Thanks for the tip, Len.”

A throwaway phone was exactly the thing, of course, because I had no cell phone and no credit card and now no landline. So Len was right to suggest it, and while I was out putting his sensible suggestion into action I also poked around a couple of clothing stores so that I had something more than one skirt, one pair of jeans and one sweater in my wardrobe. I could have called that bonehead Darren and asked him to put all my clothes in a box and send them, but I had no reason to believe he would actually do that, even if he said he would. So I ducked into a couple of really cute little shops where I learned that my seven hundred dollars, minus one throwaway phone, might buy me one pair of excruciatingly expensive blue jeans and half a tank top, which seriously annoyed me until I found a Gap, where there was a whole lot of stuff on sale which fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry and I had a burger in a seedy sort of deli place, and then I needed underwear, and honestly I couldn’t find anyplace to buy it except one of those really cute little shops and that cost a complete fortune but there was nothing else to do. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two by the time I decided to head back home.

That was the first time my head said that, “Let’s go home, and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous that I thought of it that way? But no kidding, I was already in love with that place. The stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night—that seemed like just not so serious, when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I kind of half wondered, What are you going to do when you get home? And then I thought, Well, maybe I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and read a book or something, there are at least a thousand used mysteries still shoved under the bed in Bill and Mom’s bedroom. So on the way home I stopped at one of those little shops and I bought myself some fancy tea, and I was well on my way to becoming a totally different person—the kind who lives on the Upper West Side and drinks tea in the afternoon while reading mystery novels—when I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment and found out that I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours ago.

The place was packed. I had only been to the lobby twice before, but the first time me and my crazy little family were the only ones there, and the second time it was just me and Len and Frank the doorman. This time there were a lot of people milling around, a bunch of kids in school uniforms clustered around the elevator, arguing with each other and hitting the buttons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar trying to get Frank’s attention at the little brass podium he sits at. Frank was talking to two big guys and they were all kind of yelling at once, which sounded loud because it wasn’t the biggest space to begin with, but the ceilings were so high and curved the sound bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly supposed to be somehow related to the kids, because she would occasionally yell, “Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father’s package has arrived? Frank…” But the other two guys were talking on top of her, and Frank was totally dealing with whatever they were saying, which I couldn’t hear because of the other noise. Then there were two more ladies behind the one in the red jacket, who were waiting a little more patiently, but not much. Both of them were spectacularly thin, and wearing the kind of clothes you only see in ads in the New York Times, everything tight and fitted and slightly strange, like no one really wears clothes like that except the people who do. I couldn’t see their faces right away because their backs were to me; all I could see were those strange fashionable outfits and that one of them had the most astonishing black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had white hair that was kind of short and flipped around her head. Then the one with the black hair turned for a second, like she heard something just behind her, and she turned out to be one of those people who are just so idiotically beautiful that you think you’re on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the other woman she was with was yanking at her arm.

“This is ludicrous,” the other woman said. “I’ll hail my own cab.”

“That’s what I said ten minutes ago,” said the younger, spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn’t follow her, in spite of the fact that the whole idea of hailing your own cab for once was hers.

“We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” she announced, in quite a loud voice. “And I’m going to call the management company, do you understand? This chaos is NOT ACCEPTABLE.”

“I want to talk to management as well, you get them on the phone,” said one of the guys who was arguing with Frank at the front.

“Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, we’ll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket at the same time, trying to be nice but also trying to get her own way too, sort of poking through the stuff that was piled on the console. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.

Poor Frank was now apologizing to everyone at the same time. “I can do that, sure, let me—sorry Mrs Gideon, I am so sorry, so sorry Julianna,” Frank called after the ladies heading for the door. “If you give me just a second here—oh she’s here! he said, suddenly, looking both harried and relieved at the same time. And then the lady in the red jacket knocked all the packages off the top of the podium.

The whole scene was so complicated that it took me a second to realize that Frank was looking at me, and talking to me. “She says she’s living there now, and that you met last night and that you spoke about it—I’m not sure, but that’s the young lady, she said that you know each other,” Frank told the guy at the front of the line. “Tina, there’s some kind of confusion here with Doug about the locks. He says he needs to change the locks but you didn’t say anything about that so I just got a little…Can you come talk to him while I deal with this? Hang on there, Mrs Gideon, let me get you a cab. You can go ahead and look through all this, Mrs White, but I didn’t see anything. Frank rushed by me, opening the door for the infuriated Mrs Gideon and her fabulous daughter Julianna. Mrs White continued to yell at her children while she poked through the packages on the floor. Doug Drinan turned and gave me a total dirty look.

Obviously this moment, for me, was a bit of a drag. The Upper West Side glamour plates were pushing by me while I tried to grab up my Gap bags, apologizing like a loser, “So sorry, sorry, sorry…” Frank practically shoved me aside while he raced after them, trying to do his job. Those loud and insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to arrive but their mother was not yet ready to pile into it with them; she was too busy giving me the once over, like she thought I was someone who was trying to break into their building. Which in fact I was.

“The doorman seems to be under the impression that you’re living in my father’s apartment,” Doug announced. “And he thinks that I somehow agreed to this.”

“Well, we did have a conversation about this last night, Doug, and I don’t think you could have been really surprised that Frank told you that,” I announced back. We were both being polite but too forceful to actually have it count as polite.

“Last night we were decent enough not to kick you out onto the street,” he told me. “The understanding was you’d be gone in the morning. You have no right to be here—your mother actually had no right to be there either, after my father died.”

“That’s not what my lawyer tells me.”

Okay, this for some reason caused old Doug to really lose it. He was suddenly furious, his face going all red, and he actually grabbed me, right up at the front of my shirt, and yanked me toward him to do what I wasn’t sure. I was totally not expecting it, obviously; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted and they were both really mad and reactive, nobody put their hands on me. I had one of those terrible minutes where I thought, Oh no, this is one of those guys who’s worse when he’s not drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and his thinning hair is just too much for him in real life.

“Let go of me, let go let go,” I said, real nice real fast. I didn’t want to find out if he actually had it in him to hit me; I truly didn’t.

“Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen? the other guy asked. He had kind of a bad leather jacket and jeans on, and one of those old tool kits, and he looked really bored by all this. Somehow you knew right away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to own the locks to some house or apartment or whatever, and that it wasn’t all that earth-shattering, which made me realize that I probably was not going to get hit. Anyway, he sure didn’t think so. He sort of looked away, like he didn’t give a shit who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure that whoever won this battle it was not going to be me so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.

In any event, the little interruption gave Doug a chance to recover. He let go of my shirt, giving me a little push, like he couldn’t believe he actually touched me. Then he turned and yelled back at Frank, who was all the way outside, still trying desperately to hail a cab for the fed-up Mrs Gideon and her babelicious daughter. “We’re going up!” he announced. Frank didn’t even notice. Doug and the locksmith headed for the elevator but there was no way they’d get in as it was full of all those kids in school uniforms and the lady in the red jacket. But Doug was on top of his game now.

“We’ll take the stairs,” he announced, heading for the other end of the lobby. Locksmith guy followed him. I did not. I finally got a clue, pulled out my brand new throwaway cell phone and called in the Marines.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lucy, all annoyed as soon as I got her. “Where have you been?”

“They cut off the phone,” I told her.

“No kidding. I tried calling you three hours ago and got the message that the phone had been stopped,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I went out to get a cell phone—”

“You’ve been out buying a cell phone for three hours?”

“Well, I needed some other stuff too and—”

“I thought you were broke. What are you using for money?”

“Would you listen to me, Lucy? They’re here! At least one of them is here and he’s trying to change the locks. He has a locksmith here and he says I have no rights and—”

“Relax. I’m two blocks away, I’m taking care of it,” she told me.

“What do you mean you’re two blocks away? I called you at work,” I said, all confused again.

“And my assistant patched you through to my cell,” she informed me.

“So you’re on your way here? How did you know to come?”

“Tina, when the phone got cut off what did you think was going on?”

“I don’t know. I thought I needed to get a cell phone.”

“Well, I thought a little harder than that. Just stay right there in the lobby; I’ll be there in two minutes.”

She hung up on me, just as Frank trotted back in. He looked a little shell-shocked, but in a more or less delirious kind of way. I thought he was going to be mad at me because I had basically just caused a huge scene, resulting in utter chaos in his little lobby, with people threatening to have him fired and all sorts of unpleasant bullshit. Frank, however, seemed to have barely noticed. He was actually humming a little tune, as he headed over to his podium and started picking up the packages which were still all over the floor. I thought for a moment that he was one of those strange sad people who need a little action to feel alive, but then I took another look, and it was like he was glowing a little bit, around the edges, you could almost see little beams of light coming out of his cuffs and collar. I thought, Oh, he’s in love, Frank is in love with the unspeakably beautiful Julianna Gideon. And he just got to be near her, he got to hold the cab door open for her for half a second.

“She’s pretty, huh,” I said, testing out my theory.

“Oh my God,” he agreed, as if I had just spoken straight to his interior monologue. “I can’t even, when I look at her, I can’t…” He glanced out the door, taking pleasure in just seeing the place he had last been allowed to look at her.

“Does she know you like her?” I asked him.

“What?” That was a bad question; it shook him out of his fantasy and he remembered how much of a right he had to be mad at me. “Did you get things straightened out with Doug? he asked, suddenly kind of stern. “He was quite certain that you are not supposed to be living up there in 8A. I didn’t know what to say. This has put me in a very awkward position. I put a call into building management and I don’t know what they’re going to do. There’s already been so much controversy around that apartment, I’m sure they’re going to want to talk to both of you about whatever this situation is,” he told me. He was trying his best to sound really mean, but the guy didn’t have it in him. He was reading me the riot act, and he just sounded like he was apologizing.

“I’ll try to keep this out of your hair from now on,” I said.

“I would appreciate that,” he said, but he didn’t sound angry, he actually sounded like he would really just appreciate that. Which is about when Lucy showed up, wearing a great gray suit and heels, carrying a big briefcase and looking like the queen of the universe.

“Lucy! Hey, this is my sister Lucy,” I told Frank. “She’ll have this solved in five minutes, I guarantee. You don’t have to talk to building management.”

“I’m sure they know all about this already,” Lucy announced, a little clippy. “Tina tells me there’s some confusion about the locks?”

“Confusion, I should say so,” Frank said. “Doug Drinan—he’s Bill’s son?

“I know who he is.” Lucy nodded, trying not to make that little sign with her hand that means can we hurry this up please.

“Well, he’s up there, having the locks changed. He says he doesn’t know anything about you all having a claim on the place. I didn’t know what to tell him. Tina tells me she’s staying there. I got no reason to doubt her but Doug was Bill’s son—”

“And we are his wife’s daughters.” Lucy smiled, completely professional. “No worries. We’ll clear this up in no time.” She took a couple of smooth steps over to the elevator bank and pressed the call button; as far as Lucy was concerned, this was as good as done. Frank smiled at me, relieved. When she isn’t just annoying as hell, Lucy does in fact have that effect on people. You know who’s in charge.

Doug Drinan and his pal the locksmith were sadly not quite as easy to snow. We more or less fell out of the elevator up there on that eighth floor landing—that is, I fell out, with all my packages, while Lucy popped out like a genie and presented them both with a huge stack of documents.

“Mr Drinan? Hi, how are you? I’m Lucy Finn, Olivia’s daughter. It’s a pleasure to meet you after all this time,” she announced, talking quickly. “As you are aware, our mother just passed only a few days ago and so obviously we are reeling, completely caught off guard, so I’m sure this is our fault. But I think there’s been some confusion about the status of the estate. We spoke with Stuart Long just yesterday, he was in possession of your father’s will; have you seen it? I brought an extra copy in case you hadn’t.” She handed it to him and kept talking. “Anyway there is some real question about who the beneficiaries of the estate are, at this time. Your father seems to have expressed in no uncertain terms that our mother was to inherit everything, that largely meaning the apartment, it’s unclear what else is included, but in any event I’m going to have to ask you to hold off on changing the locks for now. Until we get this sorted out.” She smiled at him, very pleasant, but there was a definite don’t-fuck-with-me edge behind it all. She works in PR. It’s very daunting.

Doug Drinan unfortunately didn’t get on board with anything she was saying. He barely glanced at the papers she had handed him and just sort of tossed them to one side, on top of the old radiator that was hissing in the hallway. “I’m aware we’re going to be in a holding pattern for a little while, with regard to the dispensation of the will,” he told her. “Which is why I thought it important to secure the apartment. Obviously we can’t have just anyone wandering in and out, disturbing the effects, before we’ve even begun to probate this situation. I hate to say it, such a sad time—I mean really, condolences on your loss—but anyway it sounds to me like this is going to get pretty complicated. This is just precautionary. Don’t want things to get ugly down the line or anything.”

Okay, the speech was good, but in general he really was not as good as Lucy. He pressed those thin lips together, like he was trying to smile and explain things like a nice guy, but it came off like he couldn’t be bothered to really pretend all that hard, so it all sounded like what it was, condescending and mean and like he was even kind of enjoying messing with us. Which maybe he was, I’m not sure. The more I saw of this guy the less I liked him. His hair really was kind of dirty, and he had too much disappointment in him. Sometimes those are the worst people to deal with because they aren’t even thinking anymore, they’re just hoping that they can make you as miserable as they are.

Lucy didn’t care. Honestly, she has ice water in her veins so ultimately this guy and all his unhappiness were just no match. “I completely agree,” she said. “That’s why we felt it was best to have Tina camp out here for the time being, just so there was someone on site, making sure nothing untoward happened to the property while we sorted this all out. For instance, I think you and your brother stopped by in the middle of the night, last night, and removed some items?”

Doug Drinan stared at her, aghast at her nerve. She just looked at him. “My mother’s wedding ring,” he said, finally, like the righteousness of the situation would mean something to her.

Lucy shrugged. “We have no way of ascertaining that.”

“Except that she saw it.” Drinan turned his cold stare on me, like I was the one who was fucking with him.

“I never said it wasn’t. I didn’t—ah—” I started.

Lucy raised her hand, fearless, and cut me off. “Tina, your actions are completely blameless in this matter,” she informed everyone.

“How do you figure that one?” asked Drinan. “We got there, she’d already completely cased the joint.”

“I was looking for my mom’s perfume,” I explained again.

“You went through my father’s underwear drawer,” he sneered. “You managed to find his wallet, which was conveniently empty by the time we got there.

“I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what you were doing, Tina. The point is, you did not remove anything from the premises, nor are you—or I, or Alison—doing anything at all except insisting that we hold to the status quo until our lawyers, and your lawyers, have a chance to work through the documents and finalize the legal status of the estate. That’s all we’re trying to do. Protect everyone’s rights.”

“Look, I don’t know what any of this is about?” said the locksmith. “But somebody’s got to make a decision about what we’re doing with these locks. There’s a kill fee. You call to have your locks changed and then you change your mind, that’s a fifteen-dollar charge.”

“Not a problem,” Lucy said, reaching into her purse.

“I don’t agree to that,” Drinan snapped. He put his hand out, stopping the locksmith from even thinking about heading for the elevator bank. “I want the locks changed and I have every right to change the locks.”

“You legally have no right to change the locks,” Lucy said. Man she was so cool headed, through all of this, there was no way the locksmith was not going to do what she told him to. But he did feel bad about it.

“Listen, man, I’ll wait downstairs and let my boss know what’s going on. If the situation changes I can come back up and do the job. But I can’t get involved in something that might, you know. Be illegal.”

“This is my apartment. I grew up here, this is my apartment. Drinan’s temper was fraying again.

“Unfortunately we have a whole stack of legal documents which indicate that there is a very real chance that, in fact, it is not your apartment,” Lucy said, not quite so nicely anymore. “And if you insist on pursuing this course of action I will in fact be forced to call the police.”

“Go ahead. My brother is a detective with the NYPD, and you want to know something? They take care of their own.”

“Listen, buddy.” The locksmith was really desperate to get out of here by now. So was I. Bringing up the cops made everything just that little bit more icky.

“Wonderful. Your brother works in law enforcement, and I work in publicity. He can bring in his friends, and I can bring in mine. I know several writers for several highly prominent newspapers who would be only too happy to write about the NYPD superseding the law and forcing people from their homes.”

“This isn’t your home,” said Drinan, clearly astonished, finally, at her nerve.

“It is Tina’s home,” she told him, in no uncertain terms. “Our mother died here, and every legal document I have studied so far tells me that this apartment is now our apartment, and she had no place to live, and so for now she’s living here, and it is her legal right to do so.”

“I don’t even know you people,” Doug observed, like that was going to matter.

“I suspect we will have plenty of time to get acquainted, Lucy said, kind of mean. She looked at the locksmith, like she couldn’t even believe he was still standing there. “If you want to call your boss, now would be the time. I think we both know what he’s going to tell you.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to call him; I’m not getting involved in this,” he said. “But I do need that kill fee.”

She reached into her purse, lifted out a neatly folded bill and handed it over to him. The whole move took three seconds. “Keep the change,” she announced.

“Thanks,” he nodded, and he ambled back to the exit sign, pushed through that crummy brown door and slipped down into the stairwell. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to hang around waiting for an elevator, under those circumstances.

Drinan didn’t want to wait either. He picked up his little pile of legal documents and followed the locksmith.

“Perhaps you’d like my card,” Lucy cooed, holding one out to his back.

“When I need to talk to you I’m not going to have any trouble finding you,” he said, as the door to the stairwell slammed shut behind him.

“What a charming character,” Lucy said, putting the card away. “I thought you said he was good looking.”

“The other one, the one who’s a cop,” I told her.

“What does this one do?” she asked. “Run a charm school? Let me have the keys.”

I handed them to her. “I don’t know what this one does. Last night he didn’t say much,” I told her. “They were both drunk.”

“You should write down everything that happened last night. Have you done that yet?” she asked me.

“No, of course not. Why would I write it down?” I said.

“Well, we’re going to need a paper trail on everything, Tina. This isn’t a joke. I want it established that we are keeping records. Things are going to happen really quickly, and obviously the Drinan brothers have no compunction about playing hardball. We need to be prepared, as much as we can, for whatever they throw at us. What the hell is this?” We had stepped into the front room, which was filled with light from top to bottom. In spite of that hideous wall-to-wall shag rug, and all the crazy trouble with Doug Drinan, that room was really gorgeous so I got distracted for a minute just staring at it, and didn’t know what she was talking about, again. “Tina, hellloooo,” she said, waving her hand in front of my face and snapping her fingers.

“What?” I said.

“What,” she asked, impatient, “is this?” And with her toe she nudged a small wooden tool kit, which had been placed neatly against the wall, next to the doorway which led to the mossery.

“Oh, that’s Len’s,” I said.

“Len,” she repeated, looking at me like I had of course once again slept with someone I shouldn’t have.

“He was a friend of Bill’s, and Mom’s. That’s his moss in the kitchen. They let him grow it there. He’s some kind of botanist kind of person. He lives in the building,” I explained. “He was here when the phone got cut off, and he, you know, he said I should go get a cell phone for now.” Lucy flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.

“Yes, I see.” She sighed. “And what did you do, once you bought the cell phone? Did you call me at work, as I asked you to, and say, Lucy, the phone has been cut off and they’re probably going to try to cut the electricity as well, and maybe change the locks, could you come over and help me handle this? Did you do that?”

“No, I didn’t do that,” I started.

“No, you didn’t,” she said, continuing to flip the useless light switch for effect. “You went shopping.”

“Why would I assume this guy was going to do all that stuff you said? We don’t even know these people.”

“Tina, honestly, would you try to think for once? Hello, Monica, hi.” She was on her cell now, firing on all jets. “I’m going to need you to call Keyspan and Con Ed, the gas and electric got turned off in my mom’s apartment and we need to get it turned back on right away and I mean now. My sister is living here and she obviously can’t stay if there’s no gas or electricity, so if you need to run down to their offices then do it. I left three copies of the will on my desk; take them with you so if they give you any trouble you can prove we have the right to put the accounts in my name. Here, you can also give them the number of the building, tell them the doorman can verify that we’ve taken possession. What’s his name?” She asked me.

“Frank,” I said.

“Frank,” she said to the phone, and then she rattled off the phone number of the building, which of course she knew even though I did not. She finished up the call by snapping her cell shut and then continued explaining things, just continuing the story as if there had been no interruption at all. “I checked in with that Long person, the lawyer, from yesterday?”

“I remember. Lucy, could you not talk to me like I’m an idiot?”

“Don’t get snippy, Tina. You almost completely blew it today—”

“I told you, I didn’t know.”

“No, you didn’t think; you just took off for three solid hours on a shopping spree, and I’m not going to ask you where you got the money because honestly I don’t care. But you should rest assured, while I don’t think Doug Drinan has any sort of legal claim on this apartment, I don’t necessarily think that he is a liar. Did you find money here?” She waved her hands idly at the many shopping bags I had dumped on the floor.

“I didn’t have anything to wear,” I said, trying to get to the beginnings of a defence here. She was not interested. “You listen to me,” she snapped. “If I hadn’t gotten worried about not hearing from you, and showed up, what would have happened?”

“I don’t actually care what would have—”

“You’d be locked out. We all would be locked out. We would not have access to the apartment or the building, for that matter, for months. We’d have to go to a judge to get an injunction to get permission to even get a look at the place, by which point the Drinan brothers will have filed to legally contest their father’s will, which depending on how long that takes to get through the courts? Cuts us off for years. Years. I checked this out with Daniel’s friend, the real estate lawyer, who assures me that, contrary to what that idiot told us yesterday, a scenario like that leaves us with virtually no standing whatsoever. If they can prove that Bill was of unsound mind, and Mom was of unsound character, and none of us had ever met Bill and had never even set foot in this apartment, it is not that far a leap to making the claim that Mom tricked him into changing that stupid will, and that we have no claim upon this place. And that is what they are going to try to do. So do me a favor and don’t make their case for them, would you? We put you here for a reason. Stay put.”

“You expect me to never leave.”

“Not unless you pick up your handy new little throwaway cell phone, and call me first, and let me know that you need to go out for two hours and that Alison or I need to come by and be on site while you are off traipsing about.”

“Well, so how long—”

“As long as I say! If you don’t like this deal, let me know. Let me know, and you can go back to Darren and the trailer park and the Delaware Water Gap now, instead of later. Because if you don’t help me make this work? That is where you’re going to end up anyway.”

Now even though I thought Lucy really was overreacting and being obviously a total nightmare, this argument made a relatively significant impression on me. Even though I couldn’t fully follow the dastardly legal turns she had already worked out for herself, in terms of where this situation maybe could go? It was pretty clear that me getting booted out of there, and back to cleaning houses in Delaware, was in the cards if we didn’t pull this off.

“Okay okay okay,” I said.

“Not okay okay okay!” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear some sort of snotty okay! I want to hear, Yes Lucy I Will Do Whatever You Say.”

“Well, I’m not going to say that,” I snapped back. “I’ll do it, but I’m not going to say it.”

“Fine,” she said, clearly sick of me. “Now, what’s the story with all this moss? This is actually here for a reason?” Which, look, I find it impressive when she does that. In the middle of all that arguing, she still remembered the one thing I told her about the moss.

“Len, it’s Len’s moss. He lives on the top floor,” I said.

“Well, Len is going to have to get his moss out of here,” she said, shoving his little tool box with one of her slick black heels.

“I don’t have his number,” I said. “But I could go downstairs and get that doorman to buzz up and see if he’s there.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, only half paying attention again.

“Maybe I should get the keys copied, while I’m down there.”

“Now that, actually, would be useful,” Lucy noted. She was dialing her cell, then she popped it to the side of her head while she held out the keys. I took them. “Listen, don’t panic, there’s nothing to get upset about,” she said, by which I knew she was talking to Alison. “But I’m over at the apartment. There’s a lot going on.”

Okay, now you do have to wonder why people like Lucy believe people like me when we suddenly cave and agree to all sorts of nonsense in the middle of an argument. Because really I had no intention of calling Len and telling him he had to move his moss. Instead, I went downstairs, waved to Frank, walked over to Columbus and found the one inexplicable bodega which actually hovers there, and I bought myself a box of Dots. Then I walked around the block, ate the Dots, and thought about what it was that I was going to do next. Then I wandered around the Upper West Side some more and I found a crummy little hardware store, where they made some new keys for me. While I was there I bought a few more choice items. Then I went back home, and more and more I felt I had every right to think of it that way.

CHAPTER FIVE

“The moss guy isn’t in. Frank buzzed him about eight times but he wasn’t answering,” I told Lucy. “So I asked for his phone number, but it’s unlisted and the doorman isn’t allowed to give it out. Anyway, I left him a message with the doorman to call as soon as he got in, so when he does I’ll tell him that we need him to move all that stuff. Here, I got a set of keys for you and then also an extra one, in addition to the ones I have. Soaring right through the lie about Len, I started fumbling with the keys. She didn’t even look up as she took them from me.

“You didn’t leave my number as well?” she asked, pecking away at her laptop. She had set it up on that little coffee table back in the apartment side of the apartment and there was a whole mess of documents and file folders kind of falling out of her briefcase on the couch. She clearly had decided to spend the rest of the day back there. I felt like I had been invaded.

“He and I got kind of friendly so I just thought it would be better for him to call me,” I said.

“You thought it would be better if I let you handle it,” she said, making this sound like a stupendously idiotic idea. I looked at the floor and acted like I was really sorry that I was such a stupid person, which worked, because that’s what she thinks I am anyway. Smart people are easy to fool about really stupid things. It’s all about the assumptions.

The door to the bathroom behind the little laundry room swung open and a woman appeared. I just about jumped out of my skin, but Lucy kept on typing.

“Fantastic,” the woman said, smiling at me like we were old friends. She had very tight hair, blonde and tight to her head, and she was exceptionally tanned. She also wore a tight beige microsuede pantsuit—pants and a jacket made out of synthetic beige polyester—and then she also had on actual panty hose and a kind of boring-looking pair of low brown heels. I’m sure that everything she was wearing cost more than I made in a month of cleaning houses, but frankly I don’t fully understand why people dress like that.

“This place is fabulous,” she informed me, striding over and holding out her hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Betsy Hastings. Did I hear you saying something about the moss, in the front kitchen?”

“We haven’t been able to get hold of the guy who owns the moss,” Lucy announced, “but it’s being handled.”

“No worries, no worries,” said Betsy Hastings. As opposed to my sister, she couldn’t have been nicer. “This whole place is amazing. It’s incredible when a place like this comes on the market. Just thrilling.”

“You’re the real estate person,” I guessed.

“A lot of people are already interested, Tina,” Lucy informed me. “And there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Things are very preliminary at this point.”

“No question, no question,” Betsy agreed. “I would love it if you would let me handle this. I have a number of corporate clients who would pick it up immediately, as is. I mean, I don’t think you need to worry about anything, the moss, the carpets, the appliances, you’re in a situation where you can completely let the buyer take care of all of that. Even in this market, which obviously has cooled considerably in the past couple years. But you don’t have anything to worry about; this place is amazing.”

“We’ve noticed,” Lucy observed.

“Absolutely. Absolutely.” Betsy Hastings nodded, running her hand over the pocket doors. “A property like this, my advice would be to let a professional pick it up and do the renovation, even at eleven or twelve million it’s going to be considered undervalued, which is good; you want them to see the potential for a fast turnaround and a big profit. You don’t want to get involved in the level of renovation that a place like this would need, to pull in the really big numbers. There are agents out there who will tell you that you could take in twenty or even twenty-two on this, but that’s going to require enormous investment on your part up front and I really would let someone else take care of that.”

“Why don’t you put together a strategy and call me tomorrow,” Lucy nodded, not even looking at her. She held out her card. She did everything but tell Betsy to her face that her wild enthusiasm had completely put her out of the running.

“That’s not to say, if you’re looking for the bigger numbers, I can work with that too,” Betsy explained, taking the card with a little shrug. “This end of the market, it’s always a question of how long you want to wait. If you can afford to take the time and put a few million into it yourself, then we’re talking about significantly larger numbers. It’s just a different approach. As I said, I’d love to work with you on this. Really, it’s a great place. Just the size of it, and the details! I love it when these old places open up. New York. There’s no place like it, there really isn’t, you just get such a sense of history. Fantastic. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, we can go over a couple of different plans.” I had to give it up to that old Betsy Hastings; it was pretty inspired bullshit. I mean, everything she said was true, and she really did have a kind of excitement about the apartment which I totally agreed with. But obviously she was mostly talking about money, which also obviously contributed to the fact that everything she said sounded pretty phony.

So Betsy took off, and then this young kind of swank Indian character showed up and he went into overdrive explaining how if we could take a year and sink a million into the joint and break it down into three separate but spectacular separate apartments we could pick up twenty-two easy. Which made me actually kind of like Betsy even better, because she totally called that, that some other agent was going to show up and tell us this version of events, and then that actually happened like within the hour. And then this older white guy came by, wearing an extremely expensive suit, and he just looked around and acted like the place really wasn’t so great after all, and that the fixtures were all just inappropriate, and the appliances were from the seventies, and he would have to think about whether or not he was interested in taking this on, even if we could work out the legal difficulties. He was the only one who brought up the “legal difficulties” which, perversely, it seemed to me, cheered Lucy up quite a bit; she just shrugged and said something like, “That would be up to you.” He was really pretty snotty, and they were quite snippy with each other, and his approach may have been a posture that he thought would make us want him more, but I’m not sure why he thought that because clearly we were sitting on the mother lode, in real estate terms, legal difficulties or not. Anyway it was all very nerve-wracking by the end of the day, when Daniel and Alison came by so we could have a powwow over Chinese food.

“There’s no way we’re going to be able to push through a sale before they slap a cloud on the title, if that’s their intention, and it sure as hell would be mine,” Lucy explained as she picked pieces of chicken out of one of those little cartons. “It’s going to cost a fortune and the legal tangle will be considerable. What’d your friend tell you, inheritance taxes are due within the year?”

“Six months,” Daniel nodded. “Although it’s apparently not much of a problem getting an extension when the will’s being probated. We can get Wes to file for us if it becomes necessary.”

“When,” said Lucy. “When it’s necessary; there’s no use being naïve about this.”

“How much is this going to cost us?” asked Alison, all worried as usual.

“Much more than we have,” Lucy admitted. “The only way we’re going to be able to afford this is to get into a partnership with a real estate agency. I’m going to talk to Sotheby’s about it tomorrow.

“That guy from Sotheby’s was an asshole. He was the least interested of anybody,” I pointed out.

“That’s how I know he wants it,” Lucy said, spearing a shrimp with slashing efficiency. “We need someone who’s going to be willing to work around the legal problems. Those other two were too spooked to even mention it. Losers.”

“What if Sotheby’s gets behind the Drinan side of this?” I asked.

“I sent over a packet of the documentation. They’ll look at it and decide, but it’s pretty clear we’re going to win.” Lucy shrugged.

“How can you be so sure? I just don’t know how you can talk about all of this like you know what’s going to happen. How could anyone know what’s going to happen?” asked Alison. “You keep acting like this is all going to just work out and I don’t see how you can know that.” I thought this was a pretty good point but Lucy didn’t even respond. Daniel reached for some beef and broccoli thing, and he didn’t bother answering Alison either. “These legal situations aren’t sure. They never are,” she persisted. “And if we spend all our money, if our money isn’t enough to cover the costs, costs can go through the roof and instead of everything what if we end up with nothing?”

“Alison,” Daniel finally said, impatient. “I spent the day on the phone with four different lawyers; all of them gave us the same answer. This is a no-brainer. We’re in the clear.”

“If it’s so totally clear that we’re going to win this, how come it’s all such a surprise to those Drinans?” I said. “I mean, they knew that he was leaving it all to Mom.”

“They told you that?” said Lucy. “Wait a minute. They told you that they knew he was leaving the place to Mom?”

“They didn’t say it. I just kind of figured it out,” I said, eating. “Anyway, they definitely knew.”

“That he was leaving the place to Mom.”

“Yeah, they knew that part. But they totally didn’t know the rest, that then we would show up and get it. Like, why would they know that part but not the other part?”

“What else did they say?” asked Daniel. He sounded even more uptight so I looked up from the Chinese food finally, and they were all staring at me. For a second I considered lying some more, because I was beginning to feel like Lucy and Alison and Daniel were acting like such unbelievable sharks, that’s what they deserved. But I didn’t see any point in protecting those Drinans either. It was hard to know whose team I was on, already. And we had only been at this for a day and a half.

“They were just sad and drunk and kind of mad, that’s all. I shrugged, opting for a vague non-answer for now. “One of them talked about all the furniture being gone like it was so sad. Like he was a little surprised, I think, that so much of it was gone.”

“Why would that surprise him?” Alison asked.

“Not totally surprised. But sad. Like they hadn’t seen the place in a little while, like they knew what it was like in here but not all the way. Sort of like that.”

“They probably weren’t allowed in very much.” Lucy stared into her spicy shrimp, putting it all together. “By all accounts Bill was a Howard Hughes-level freak. Then when he died, if Mom didn’t want them around, she didn’t have to let them in. Maybe she was afraid they’d try and kick her out. They probably would’ve tried to kick her out; they haven’t been exactly civil, have they? Anyway it was only three weeks ago, they didn’t exactly have a ton of time to figure out a game plan. They probably didn’t even know they needed a game plan. Most people don’t think ahead.”

“What was only three weeks ago?” I asked.

“When Bill died.”

“Bill only died three weeks ago?” I blurted.

Okay, I honestly do not know why I didn’t know this. But I didn’t know; the whole situation with my mom was that screwy. One day she was living in Hoboken and working at some H & R Block office, filing tax returns, then all of a sudden she was getting married and moving to Manhattan. Then it was done before we even knew it, practically, when it became “Bill’s private, he doesn’t see a a lot of people,” or “We’re really busy this month, maybe the fall would be better. I mean, before she went off and married this guy it’s not like I saw that much of her anyway. Mostly we communicated through phone messages: the man who lived underneath her got a dog and it was barking day and night, or the phone company screwed up her billing and they were just driving her crazy, or she was trying out a new recipe and did I ever hear of Asiago cheese? It makes my head hurt now to think of how lonely those messages were and that obviously I should have tried a lot harder to see her, while I could. I’m not saying that all of us had abandoned her. Alison saw her more than me or Lucy, I knew that Alison would come out and see her and Lucy saw her too. But not all that much. So when she went ahead and married a guy who didn’t want us around it didn’t make a huge impression.

The truth is last time I even spoke to her was almost a year and a half ago, when the three of us took her out to dinner. Mom suggested it. I think she felt guilty because none of us had been invited to the wedding. So there we were, six months after our mother went and married a total stranger, arguing over where we should take her to celebrate. Bill of course was not coming, but she made kind of a big deal about not going too far from home, because he might get uptight if she went too far. Then Lucy got bent out of shape about whether or not it would be a place we could afford, as she assumed we’d be “taking” Mom and she didn’t want the bill split two ways between her and Alison because she really got the short end of the stick in these situations since “Alison” covered Alison and Daniel which meant that she, Lucy, was stuck paying for me as well as half of Mom so expensive places got really quite expensive really fast, from her point of view. She was completely blunt about all this, as usual, which I took exception to, because even though I’m consistently strapped it’s not like an occasional nice dinner out is a complete impossibility. But of course Lucy was right—we ended up at a place that charged $22 for a plate of spaghetti with red sauce, which made everyone, especially me, uptight.

So that more or less set things off on an unfortunate foot. Mom had a vodka tonic which I think cost $12, and the rest of us drank tap water. Lucy as usual totally monopolized the conversation, blathering on about the big corporations she did PR for and how difficult it was to work with corporate jerks and none of them really want to talk to a woman and how they’re all in love with themselves and their own power and she really thinks they’re all closet cases anyway. Alison never actually got over the prices on the menu, and she kept letting us know how worried she was about how much things cost, and then she got Daniel to keep a running tab on the paper tablecloth, which he did methodically, with a mechanical pencil. I told them all I was going to move out to the Delaware Water Gap with Darren, and how he had this business plan set up, that so many really wealthy people had summer homes out there now and he was putting together a company that did caretaking year round and he already had six or seven clients and I was going to help him with the bookings and also do sort of personal services for people like shopping, say.

So that was the dinner. And Mom was fine, really. Kind of a little too perky, maybe, like she was trying too hard to seem happy. But I don’t know, how can you know something like that? She never said anything at all about Bill, or how it was going with him, even though Lucy made a couple of stabs at it.

“So are we ever going to meet our so-called stepfather?” she asked, sipping her cappuccino. Since nobody had wine with dinner Daniel and Alison had relented and let people order cappuccino and biscotti after the expensive spaghetti was cleared away.

“You’re all grown, you don’t need a stepfather,” Mom said, laughing a little and looking at the last traces of her second drink.

“Wait a minute. You guys haven’t met him yet?” I asked. This fact somehow had gotten by me. I assumed the reason I hadn’t met Bill was that I was out of town too much. The fact that Lucy and Alison, who lived so close by in Brooklyn and Queens, hadn’t met Bill did actually catch me off guard.

“He’s so private, I told you, sweetheart. That’s just the way he is. Some day we’ll make it work out,” she said, patting my hand.

“You live like right around the corner from here, right? Lucy noted. “Let’s do it now. He’s home, right?”

“I don’t think he’d like that.”

“We won’t stay. We just want to come by and see where you live!” she persisted.

“I’ll tell him. Maybe we can work something out for next month.”

“Is it a dump? Are you living in some sort of crazy dump?”

“No, not at all. He’s just private, you know that.”

“He’s crazy, is what it sounds like.”

It was pretty uncomfortable, frankly; the fact that Lucy was putting it out there to Mom in front of me and Daniel and Alison made the situation really sound as creepy and weird as you kind of worried it might be. Mom just shrugged a little bit and looked down and then she sighed, like this was all too much.

Lucy took offence. “It’s a fair question, Mom,” she pointed out, kind of edgy. “You’ve been married to this guy for six months. Why can’t we meet him?”

“He doesn’t want to, is why,” Mom said. And she wasn’t apologetic about that at all.

“But he’s nice to you, right?” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about me, sweetheart, I’m fine!” she said, and she smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Which okay is maybe why it finally occurred to me after she was dead that maybe what she meant was worry about yourself you dingbat; you’ve just agreed to go to Delaware with another loser.

It also occurred to me that maybe she was ashamed of us, that’s why she didn’t want Bill to meet us. A year and a half later, sitting there on the floor of that ridiculous little television room, eating Chinese food out of cartons, and trying to figure out how to screw over the two guys who grew up there, and whose Dad had died just three weeks before our Mom died, it certainly did occur to me that maybe we weren’t acting so well.

“Are you crying?” Alison asked me, suddenly.

“It’s this Kung Pao chicken. I bit into one of the peppers, I said. “I wonder if there’s any Kleenex around here.” I stood up and looked around, confused. Lucy held up a wad of those lousy paper napkins that they dump in the carry-out bag, and breezed on with her clever plan. “I’ll have the Sotheby’s guy call Long in the morning. Eventually he’s going to have to transfer the files anyway, and they’ll have a better sense of how soon that needs to happen. Surely they know how to work this so we can start to proceed with the sale even though the property’s still in probate,” she told us, licking her fingers like a cat. “There’s no question they’ll fight it, but we could get at least a little bit of a jump on those Drinans. Potentially we could leave them in the dust.”

“They’re already in the dust. Their father just died,” I reminded her.

“Their father, who disinherited them,” she retorted.

“Precisely,” I said. “Precisely.”

“You’re not going to get all moralistic about this,” Lucy said, looking up from her docs finally. “Oh, no no. This is not a situation of our making.”

“You’re sitting here—plotting!” I said.

“Plotting to make you rich. Oh, a couple million dollars, that would suck. You might have to give up cleaning houses.”

“I wasn’t cleaning houses,” I told her, suddenly feeling peevish as hell. “I was managing properties.”

“Well, my way you can own the properties you manage, how’s that for a thought,” she said, starting to close up the Chinese food cartons. “And you can go back to college and finish your oh-so-useful degree in pottery, and you can start your own little pottery shop and throw clay around for the rest of your life and never worry ever ever ever about whether or not you make one red cent off any of it. That’s what can happen to your life, Tina, if you just sit still and let me make you rich.”

“That was mean,” I said.

“What?” she said, looking at me like I was nuts. “That was mean?”

“Yeah, mean. You’re being mean to me again, Lucy.”

“We’re all tired. It’s been a long couple of days,” Daniel chimed in, soothing. He was being Mr Good Brother-in-law now, asking quietly supportive questions and making sure Lucy knew that We Were In This Together. “Lucy’s worked hard to protect us all, and I for one appreciate it.” He smiled at her, oh so appreciative. I wanted to smack them both. Instead, I smiled wanly and nodded my sheepish little head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still shook up about Mom.”

“We all are,” Alison said, like she thought maybe I was being a bit too morally superior about this after all.

“I know I know, I mean, what I mean is I didn’t get much sleep last night.” I nodded, fully in retreat mode because what other option did I have? I rubbed my little eyes for effect. “I think I’d better go lie down.”

“Be my guest,” Lucy shrugged, continuing to clean. Which was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t my apartment, it was her apartment, and I wasn’t calling the shots. As if I ever called the shots with this crew. In any event, I went and hid in the bedroom with the futons on the floor, and I stared at the stars on the ceiling and waited for my so-called family to leave. Which they did not do for what seemed forever, or at least long enough for me to start worrying that maybe they were out there plotting about what they were going to do to cut me out of my share of the loot once we got our hands on it. And once it occurred to me that that was probably what they were doing, I got myself worked into a complete paranoid frenzy, and I almost went back out there to just hang out and make sure they knew that they weren’t pulling any fast ones on me, and I was a full member of this little tribe of pirates, and there would be no sneaking around and cheating anybody out of anything. Then I thought that I probably shouldn’t be so confrontational, that that would make them think I was paranoid and weak, and that the smartest move actually would be sneaking through the pink room and into the empty room next to the television room, where I could hide behind the door and find out about their diabolical maneuverings with a clever bit of eavesdropping.

I was actually about to put this idiotic plan in motion—I mean, I was literally sneaking to the door of the pink room, and easing it open as silently as I could—when I heard them coming down the hallway. So then I had to sneak back and slide into the futon against the far wall, so that when Lucy looked back through the crack in the door she could see me sleeping peacefully and tell herself that I was a mess, but not a problem. Her shadow hovered in the doorway for a moment, watching my back, curled against the light in the hallway. Then she thought whatever it was she needed to think, and she left.

I lay there for a good five minutes after I heard the door thump shut, and the three different tumblers turn in their locks. And then I waited another five minutes. I didn’t want anybody coming back and interrupting me, which was a complete possibility, given the devious mind of my older sister. But after fifteen minutes I was fairly sure that they had in fact driven away, so I turned the light on and I pulled out the sack I had hidden underneath all the clothes that I had bought that afternoon, and then I retrieved my afternoon’s purchases from where I had stuffed them in my backpack.

So this is what I had: one Philips-head screwdriver with exchangeable heads, one zinc-plated steel four-inch spring-bolt lock, and two brass chain door guards. Both the spring bolt and the chain guards came with their own set of screws, but screws are cheap so I bought an extra half dozen just in case.

And then I spent the next fifty minutes locking myself into that apartment.

I knew it would piss off absolutely everybody that I was doing this—Lucy, Alison, Daniel, those Drinans, maybe even Len the moss lover and Frank the doorman, both of whom had really been so nice to me. Nobody was going to be happy that I had figured out a way to be the one who said who could come in and who couldn’t. But honestly I didn’t see that I had much choice. In case you hadn’t noticed, in spite of the fact that I was totally invaded the night before, not one person all day actually had spent one second figuring out how I was supposed to protect myself, given that those Drinan brothers had keys and also that they clearly thought it was well within their rights to use them at any given moment, and that they actually had badly frightened me, twice. Lucy was spending all her time cooking up plans to pull a fast one and get one over on those guys; well, if you ask me it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that they were doing the same thing to us. I needed protection. I needed a spring bolt, and two security chains.

CHAPTER SIX

I was right. I mean, I was like, immediately right. Like within ten minutes of finishing the installation process. I was back in the kitchen pouring myself a tumbler of vodka grapefruit surprise when the yelling started. You could hear the guy all the way back there, he was that mad.

“What the fuck? HEY. WHAT THE FUCK,” he yelled, starting to pound the shit out of the door. Then he started yanking and pulling at it, and pounding some more. It was enormously satisfying.

“GO AWAY!” I yelled in return, while I sauntered back up to the front of the apartment. “I’M CALLING THE COPS!”

“I AM THE COPS!” he yelled. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.” By this I knew it was the other Drinan, the cop with the sexy eyes. Not that I was surprised.

“I’M SLEEPING IN HERE AND I’M NOT BOTHERING ANYBODY. GO AWAY,” I yelled.

“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR,” he yelled back.

“What, you got like three sentences, is that all you know how to say?” I asked him, through the door. “Open the door, I’m a cop, what the fuck, is that all you know how to say?”

“I’d open the door, Tina Finn,” he warned me.

“Oh yeah, why?” I said to the door, kind of bold and cocky. It was weird; all of a sudden I felt like I was flirting with someone in a bar. “What are you going to do to me, officer?”

“I’m going to arrest you,” he announced.

“I’m not the one trying to break in and harass an innocent citizen in her home, dude,” I retorted. “If I put a call in to 911, you’re the one who’s in the shithouse.”

“There’s a stay on the apartment, Tina,” he informed me, through the door. “No one’s allowed to fuck with the locks. You’re in violation of the law.”

“Except I didn’t fuck with the locks, Pierre,” I informed him back. “I put in a spring bolt and some chain guards. The locks are fine. When I’m not here? The locks work just fine. When I am here? YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN.”

There was a pause, and then a kind of bump, right at my shoulder. “Shit,” I heard him mumble. He must have been right up against the door. For a second I thought, Wow, this door is thin, I can hear everything and if I can hear everything he can probably pry it open with one of those little battering ram things cops carry with them, whether or not I have the spring bolt in place. And then I thought, Is he the kind of cop who carries those things? What kind of a cop is this guy anyway? Does he have a gun on him? He didn’t have a gun, or a uniform, the last time I saw him, but obviously since I wouldn’t let him into the apartment there was no knowing if he any of those things—gun, uniform, battering ram—right now. I took a step back, because it did occur to me that if he started whacking at the door all of a sudden I didn’t want to be leaning up against it. But whacking at the door did not seem to be on his mind. For the moment, at least, he was quiet.

And then someone else started talking, someone who wasn’t him.

I couldn’t hear at all what the other person was saying. The other voice was much softer, more from a distance; it was a murmur, and a question. He answered it, only now I couldn’t hear him, either; he was practically whispering all of a sudden, to whoever else was out there. This should have been good news to me—let’s face it, having an angry cop screaming at me to let him into my apartment in the middle of the night was not anything like an ideal situation—but the whispering voices actually made me more anxious. I stepped back to the door, and put my ear up against it, to see if I could hear what the other person was saying, or what my angry friend Pete Drinan was saying. But while a second ago I felt like Pete was practically in the room with me, now I could barely hear him. He wasn’t up against the door anymore; he was down by the elevators. The other person asked him another question, that I couldn’t hear, and he answered again, and I couldn’t hear the answer. I thought he might be talking to his brother, that would make the most sense, but it didn’t really sound like him; whoever this person was actually talked more carefully, and Drinan was talking carefully back. I truly couldn’t tell what was going on.

Given my options I decided I’d better go for it, and slid back the spring bolt quietly and carefully. Which was exceptionally difficult; those spring bolts hold together pretty tight, what use would they be if they didn’t? Luckily Drinan was far enough away now, and the conversation was apparently riveting enough that he wasn’t supernaturally attuned to the sound of a spring bolt being slowly scraped back into the unbolted version of its identity. He had already thrown the tumblers in the three door locks, so all I had to do then was make sure the chain guards were in place and open that door as silently as possible, and find out who the hell was out there with him. I cracked the door.

He was past the elevators, his back to me, and he was talking to whoever it was who lived in the other apartment, 8B. Of course he was! It made so much sense when I saw it that I almost laughed out loud about how paranoid I was being. The lady—I could see it was a lady, with kind of messy brown hair—was standing in her doorway, like all the yelling had just woken her up, and she needed to come out and complain about whatever nonsense we were involved in, just across the hall from her doorway. But she didn’t seem to be angry. She had her hand on Drinan’s arm and every now and then she would pat it, like she was comforting him, and he would nod, and look at the floor. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand that he was kind of holding behind him, like a teenager who doesn’t want his mom’s friend to know that he’s got a beer back there. His thumb was hooked into the top to make sure the fizz didn’t go.

They didn’t know I was there listening, so they just kept talking. “God rest her soul, I miss her every day,” said the lady.

“I do too,” he told her, quiet.

“It would have just killed her to see this, just killed her! Oh my God when they were selling the furniture, all I could think was this would have just killed Sophie, the way Bill is just letting everything go.”

“Actually she hated most of that stuff,” Drinan noted.

“So many beautiful pieces. Worth a fortune! And then the paintings, I thought I would just cry when the paintings—”

“She didn’t like them either.” He sounded like on every line he wanted to take a hit off that beer bottle, but she wasn’t giving him an opening.

“Your inheritance, it was all your inheritance, gone, that’s what she wouldn’t have liked. Your father should be ashamed of himself.”

“Yeah, well, he never was.”

“God rest his soul you got that right. And he never asked me. If I wanted them? I thought at least ask, I would have been happy to step in, and keep them in the building. I would have done that for your mother, God rest her soul. I told him! But you couldn’t talk to him. Well, you know that.”

“Yes.” He shifted on his feet and for about fifteen seconds I got a better look at the woman, who had a very good face, underneath that big head of messy hair. I was sort of not liking her much until I saw her face, then I wasn’t so sure, because she seemed sort of sensible, even though she was saying slightly dotty things and clearly was just cranky that she couldn’t get her hands on those paintings and all that furniture. She also had on some kind of silk robe, sage green with a burnt orange stripe; the bit I could see hanging off her shoulder suggested it might be spectacularly beautiful if I could get a better look at it. Drinan shifted again, and I lost the sightline.

“Well, thank you for your thoughts, Mrs Westmoreland,” he started. His hand, holding the beer, was getting a little slippery, plus I could see from the way his shoulders were scrunching together that he was getting pretty desperate for that drink. Before he could take a step backwards and turn to take a fast hit off it she touched him on the sleeve again, and held him there. Ai yi yi, I thought, this is getting interesting.

“But these people, who are these people?” she asked, all concerned. “Coming and going, acting like they own the place. Frank says that one of them has moved in. I’m horrified.” I went back to not liking her. What on earth was she complaining about, she was “horrified” about me living in an apartment I had every legal right to live in? She was just some Upper West Side snob who had the hots for a dude half her age, that’s what I decided, on the basis of admittedly hardly any information at all.

“It’s something to do with Dad’s will.” He shrugged. “He left everything to Olivia.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for letting go that much. And it did seem, in fact, to be a terrific and instant mistake.

“He left everything to Olivia? He barely knew her!”

“They were married two years,” he corrected her.

“Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”

“He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice was starting to get real uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. But Dad wanted to do something for Olivia.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, well, he was worried she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”

“She didn’t deserve anything!”

“Well, that’s what he felt, anyway. He, you know, he knew he was dying and he wanted her to have some security after he was gone.”

“Surely you could have put a stop to this.”

“We had a big fight about it. Doug was, you know he pretty much felt what you were saying. Dad got real mad about it. It wasn’t…we didn’t really talk much after that.”

This was so much more information than I’d ever had about Bill I was momentarily thrilled. I was once again delighted to find how successful snooping at doors could be. I was also happy to have a shred of good feeling for Bill since he did the right thing by Mom in the face of opposition. He was instantly transformed, in my imagination, from a selfish drunk into an eccentric recluse who had lousy kids.

“But Olivia is dead now. And these other people, what rights do they have?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.” Pete trailed off, clearly wanting to get out of this hideous conversation. But she was a sharp one. And she was as completely fascinated as I was by what he had told her already.

“He didn’t even know them, he refused to meet them!” she told him. “He was afraid of just this scenario, that complete strangers would come after his property, that’s why he told her they were never to set foot in the building!”

“She told you that?”

“She did! I asked her one night. She had just come back in from having dinner with the rest of them, apparently. It was so rare that you ever saw either one of them leave the apartment, so when I saw her in the lobby I said, ’This is a treat! You and Bill don’t go out much, do you?’ and she said, ’I was having dinner with my daughters,’ and we rode up in the elevator together, and I said, ’Are we going to meet your daughters?’ and she said, ’Oh no, Bill prefers to keep me all to himself!’ And I said, ’Well, that hardly seems fair. You must miss them a lot.’ And she said she did, very much, and that she had tried to speak to him about it but he was very worried, these were her own words, he was worried that other people were after his property, and he had to protect it. Those were her exact words. And then I saw him one day, not long after that—I actually saw him, putting trash in the bin, which he never did—and I said, ’Why, Bill! There you are!’ He looked terrible, I don’t need to tell you that, he was sick for a long long time and I know he refused to see a doctor—”

“Yeah, but you said you talked to him?”

“I did. I took the opportunity. I said, ’Bill, Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters. Aren’t you curious to even meet them? She’s your wife!’ I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It was the Livingston mansion apartment, it is an historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have sold it to someone who might take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”

“But he said something? About these daughters?”

“He said, yes, he said they were trash. He said, ’Those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them.’ That’s what he called them. Trash. And he wouldn’t meet them. All they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole, in my imagination.

Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.

“Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”

“Yes, he did.” Pete sighed, his hand curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”

“Oh, a lawyer…” She sighed, all worried, but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”

“Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you that he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent? That’s what she said, huh, that was his intent?”

“That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. Do you want to come in, have a cup of tea? I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. But I did love your mother. Maybe, do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?”

“Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I started thinking about how that beer was probably getting all warm and flat, and then I thought, Well, if I’m thinking that I bet he is too. And sure enough he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open by this point. What little you could see of her place from my vantage point was gorgeous.

“Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years. This whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.

“Mine too, Mrs Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.

“Good heavens, Peter.” She sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey. That sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.

He turned, to finally take a hit off that beer bottle, and stared me straight in the face. We looked at each other, through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he kind of remembered, I guess, what was going on, and he took a fast step in my direction, and I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he didn’t, he just waited. I could hear the woman from 8B start to gripe again, about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, and he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on, if he was going to try and bust the door down with one of those sticks, or what. Finally the woman from 8B stopped talking, and things were really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. After another second I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield on one side, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number on it. I turned it over. On the back, written in ink, in teeny little block letters it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, and I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down there near the floor to see if I had actually picked the card up. So I took the paper bag that they gave me at the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right there where I had dumped it, and I found a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag, and I wrote on it: OKAY. And then I shoved that through the door. And then I watched, through the crack, while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment squawked some more questions at him, and he said something else to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close. And when I went out there, in the morning, he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Len’s greenhouse was so big it had rooms: the deciduous room, the desert room, the rainforest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these rooms were apparently subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—like the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid subset of a room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner before becoming the poisonous plants room—so that the whole place seemed actually to be growing, itself; it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building, in some places. It was truly the only greenhouse I have ever seen that is big enough to get lost in. I told old Len that I thought it was pretty surprising he could get enough water up there to make a greenhouse that big—especially since it had a rainforest in it—but he couldn’t get enough water up there for a little bit of moss. He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it? By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason that he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except for the fact that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a bit of sunlight. He got light on six sides up there. It was like being on Mount Olympus, with a whole bunch of plants.

As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was nothing compared to hearing him go on about plants. He started out delivering information sort of like a university lecturer, which he had been at some point in his life. Everything was all about the genus and the species and the Latinate name and the common name, and the historical derivatives of the names. But he couldn’t hold on to the formality of it all, frankly. In no time flat he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how pretty they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird looking that looks didn’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly and she was only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, he called them the “tricksters of the desert”, which I didn’t quite follow because I have to admit all those spikes didn’t look so sly to me, they were pretty direct, in fact, but when I pointed that out Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I just didn’t know. Which of course how could you argue with that, I actually don’t know anything about cactuses, I was just making an observation. And then he took me into the orchid room and I got an earful about the orchids. He had truly more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the next. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen before on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white, and dark red with black centers, and there was one that was black everywhere, which was strangely frightening, to see a completely black flower. There were some that looked like stars and some that looked like butterflies, some that looked like tarantulas, some that looked like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were just dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they want to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len sort of casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

“Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would really hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, for at least a day.”

“Come on, Len,” I said.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous how come everybody has them in their houses?” I asked.

“Only certain species, Tina. Use your head,” he told me, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers which wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

“You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

“Until you know which ones are poisonous, and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.—

“How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

“The hard way,” he informed me. “I studied.”

The place smelled like growing things, and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools suddenly appeared behind tree trunks, or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but there were definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the next. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw, everywhere. And sky. You forgot, honestly, that you were in a building, in a city, on an island. I don’t know where you were, but it was not where you thought.

And then all of a sudden you turned a corner and you were back in his apartment. His apartment was quite small. You would say that it was quite small in comparison to the size of the greenhouse, but the fact is that it was quite small in comparison to anything; it was one little room, right at the center of the roof. There was a linoleum counter and a kitchenette, completely cluttered with pots and pans and a blender and lots of mismatched dishes on open shelves. And then across from the counter there was a wall with a lot of books, all about plants, and a chair and a little table, and then to one side of that there was a big overstuffed blue couch that had magazines and books piled all over it, and then behind that, in a corner, there was an unmade bed. And then next to the bed there seemed to be some sort of closet, and then at the back of the closet, or to the side, actually, there was a very small bathroom that had a skylight and lots of plants in the bathtub. And then on the other side of the bathtub there was one of those Plexiglas walls they sell you in fancy bath stores, and just beyond the Plexiglas was the room with all the ferns. Seriously you could step out of that bathtub and into the greenhouse. I mean, Len had walls, he did have actual walls in some places, just not as many walls as most people have. So that the greenhouse actually did seem to grow out of that tiny apartment, and then it just kept growing.

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