Chapter 3: The Six-Year-Old Lease
My phone buzzed again.
I looked down, expecting another photograph of my apartment. Instead, a single line appeared from the unknown number.
You shouldn’t have gone inside.
I stared at it for a beat, then turned the screen toward Luca.
“Apparently, I’m bad at following instructions,” I said. “First I get in the wrong car. Now I go into my own apartment.”
Luca’s expression tightened. “They knew you were there.”
“They knew before we left the sidewalk. That narrows it down to someone watching the building or someone watching us.”
Gabriel glanced along the street. Snow skated over the pavement in thin, restless sheets.
“Could be either,” he said. “We shouldn’t stand here.”
“We’re waiting for the officers,” I reminded him.
His mouth pressed into a line. “Then we wait somewhere visible.”
Luca didn’t argue. He pointed to the laundromat at the corner, its windows bright against the dark street. I walked there under my own power, with Gabriel beside me and Luca keeping the distance I’d asked him to keep.
The officers arrived before we’d finished explaining the photographs. They took my statement, documented the boot print and the open door image, then went upstairs to secure the apartment. I gave them the information about the baseboard, making clear I hadn’t touched it. One officer said they’d examine it before anyone went back in.
I was relieved to hear that. I was also very aware that the unknown sender might have known what was behind it.
Inside the laundromat, a gray-haired man in a cardigan sat behind the counter, watching the spinning washers like they were a television program he’d seen too many times.
His name was Mr. Dombrowski. He owned the building and had rented me my apartment two years ago. He looked from my face to the two men behind me.
“Bad night?” he asked.
“That depends on your definition of bad.”
“I own a laundromat. My definition is somebody putting a red sock in a white load.”
“Then you’re about to hear something much worse.”
I explained that someone had entered my apartment. I didn’t tell him about the photos or Luca’s family. Not yet. Mr. Dombrowski listened without interrupting, then reached under the counter and pulled out a small metal key.
I recognized it at once. We’d found it earlier, old and dark with age, but hadn’t known what it opened.
“You know what this is?” I asked.
“I know it’s not for any door in this building.” He turned it over in his hand. “I saw one like it with a tenant’s things. Years ago.”
Luca took one careful step forward. “What tenant?”
Mr. Dombrowski studied him, then looked back at me.
“A young woman. Quiet. Paid her rent on time. Didn’t stay long.”
“Do you remember her name?” I asked.
“Not the name she gave me.” His eyes shifted toward Luca. “But I remember the way she watched the street before she went outside. Like she was checking whether someone had come to take her home.”
Luca’s face had gone very still.
“What did she look like?” he asked.
Mr. Dombrowski described a woman with dark hair and a small scar near her chin. He remembered that she’d kept to herself and carried a canvas bag with a broken strap. She’d rented my apartment for a little over a month, six years ago, before disappearing without leaving a forwarding address.
Luca gripped the edge of the counter. Only for a moment. Then he let go.
“That was my sister,” he said.
Mr. Dombrowski’s eyes hardened. “I didn’t know who she was.”
“I’m not accusing you.”
“I’d still like to know why a man who looks like you is standing in my laundromat asking about a woman who was scared to leave her apartment.”
“Because my family told me she was dead,” Luca said. “And I’m starting to think they lied.”
The machines rumbled between us. A dryer clunked as if to object.
Mr. Dombrowski looked at the key in his palm. There was a small paper tag tied to it, so faded the writing was almost gone. Under the light, I could make out two numbers and a letter: B-14.
“Storage place over on Kedzie,” he said. “There used to be a building with lockers in the basement. The owner sold it years back, but the lockers were moved to a storage facility.”
“Do you know which one?” I asked.
“I can find out. Give me a minute.”
He made a call, keeping his voice low. While he talked, I watched Luca. He wasn’t looking at me. His attention seemed caught on some place far beyond the laundromat, somewhere six years in the past.
When Mr. Dombrowski hung up, he wrote an address on the back of an old receipt.
“North side of the block. Ask for the manager. I don’t know what’s in that locker, and I don’t want to know.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
He pushed the key across the counter. I picked it up and closed my fingers around it.
“You could stay here until the officers are done,” he added. “The back room’s warm.”
“Thank you.”
His gaze moved to Luca again. “And if the person looking for her is looking for you, don’t bring the trouble through my front door.”
“Understood,” Luca said.
It was the first time I’d heard him sound like a regular person answering a regular request. I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
At the storage facility, the manager looked at the key, checked a ledger, and led us through a steel door into a basement that smelled of dust and damp concrete. He stayed with us at the row of old lockers.
I kept my phone in my hand. Eleven percent battery. Not much, but enough to call for help, assuming the city’s oldest building hadn’t swallowed the signal.
The key turned stiffly in the lock. I tried once, then again. On the third attempt, the mechanism gave with a dry click.
Inside the locker sat a sealed tin, about the size of a lunchbox. The lid had been wrapped in tape that had gone yellow at the edges. There was no name on it. No label. Just the dustless outline where it had rested on the shelf.
Luca didn’t touch it.
“Your choice,” he said.
It was a small thing. Still, I noticed it.
I took a photo of the locker and the tin before opening it. Then I peeled back the tape and lifted the lid.
Inside lay a folded piece of paper, a brass key, and a torn strip of ledger paper with columns of numbers written in blue ink. The entries were too incomplete to mean anything to me, but one name appeared more than once: S. Marchetti.
Luca leaned in, then stopped himself before he crossed the line between watching and taking over.
“My brother,” he said.
I unfolded the note. The writing was tight and slanted, with the letters pressed hard enough to leave marks on the paper beneath.
The hospital file is the proof. It says she was dead before she was. Find the original record, not the copy Silas keeps.
For a second, the only sound was the manager shifting his weight behind us.
Luca read the note again.
“The family said she died,” he said. “They had a record.”
“The note says there was an original,” I replied. “It doesn’t tell us where it is or who changed it.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
The manager cleared his throat. “I don’t want to interfere, but I’ve got a problem.”
He was holding a clipboard. His face had gone pale beneath the fluorescent lights.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“I checked the access log when you came in. Someone opened this locker less than an hour ago.”
May you like
Luca’s eyes snapped to the door. I closed my fingers around the note, while the manager looked from the open locker to the empty corridor behind us.
“Minutes before you arrived,” he said. “And whoever it was knew exactly which locker to open.”
