“Like a bad penny,” Randi Jacek said, repeating the same joke.
“Or a bulldog.”
Randi smiled. “My reputation precedes me. Detective Walters?”
Dara nodded, pulling her coat tighter, setting her hand on the radiator. But Randi Jacek didn’t seem to notice the cold, or the smell in the air, like an electric iron left on the pad too long.
* * *
*
The back office was warmer, its door shut overnight, trapping the last of the heat. But everywhere else, the floorboards and ceiling beams were creaking and popping from the cold.
“All yours,” Dara said, stepping back. “Though I can’t imagine what there is left to look for.”
Randi nodded distractedly, her eyes back on the staircase. “And your sister? She’ll be here soon?”
“She’s at the theater. You know, our ‘show.’”
Randi looked at her, smiling generically.
“Ms. Durant, you know what?” she said. “Last night, my husband made chicken riggies for me.”
“Pardon?”
“Chicken, rigatoni, peppers. We had it on our first date. We’ve made it together on anniversaries, special occasions. And last night, out of nowhere, chicken riggies. I got the point. Fella can’t come out and say he misses me, but . . .”
“Ms. Jacek, I have to get to the theater,” Dara said.
“The son of a gun even put out place mats,” she said. “Cloth napkins. Extra-hot cherry peppers, just like I like it.” She smiled, shaking her head. “But I couldn’t eat a thing.”
“No?”
“No. Because you know what I was thinking about?”
“Ms. Jacek, I—”
“Why. Why was my friend Derek—old D-Wreck—going up the stairs? At that hour? What sent him up there?”
“A noise,” Dara said quickly. Here we go again. Here we go.
Even empty, the studio was full of noises, buzzing lights, a scurrying mouse or two, birds flapping against the gutters, clanking pipes, the furnace wheezing.
Even now, there was that whistling sound that had to be from the radiator, though the pipes were cold to the touch.
“The thing is,” Randi said, “if there’s one truth you learn after fifteen years in this business: People mostly behave in completely explicable ways. Until they don’t.”
“Maybe the power went out,” Dara continued, her voice speeding up, taking on a tone. “Maybe he thought the fuse box was up there. Maybe he just wanted to snoop, to pry. Who can say what went on in that man’s head.”
Dara closed her mouth a sentence too late. She was so tired, so tired.
Randi’s eyes were fixed on her now.
“He was just another contractor to you—someone to take up your time and take your money. But I knew him back when he was eleven years old, that great curly mane of his. All the girls loved him. I remember my friend Carla Mathis telling all of us how he’d accidentally touched her hip in gym class and she nearly passed out.” Randi laughed. “An ache that was not an ache. That’s what she called it.”
Randi seemed, maybe, even to be blushing.
“Look, Ms. Jacek,” Dara said, “I’m sorry you—”
“But he chose me. Briefly, but he chose me. One long summer day a bunch of us ran into each other biking around town in our bathing suits, like you used to do. And somehow we ended up behind my cousin’s house. Derek had stolen a Popsicle from the fridge inside. One of those twins, you know.”
Dara didn’t know. Dara doubted she had ever had a Popsicle in her life.
“Broke it in two with one hand! And gave me half. Midway through, he leaned in and kissed me right on the mouth. Tasted like grape soda. The Popsicle melted all over my hand. I still can’t drink grape soda and not think of him.”
Dara was listening, but she wasn’t listening. She was thinking of something. Of Charlie, the year he was the Nutcracker Prince. Age fourteen, cheekbones like knives. That feeling when she first saw him in the costume, so unbearably handsome in the crimson tunic with the brass buttons, the epaulets, and their mother draping the gold sash across his chest, pressing her palm on the velvet. Look, she said, seeing Dara in the mirror. Look. And Dara understanding, somehow, that their mother, like Drosselmeier in the ballet, seemed to be giving him to her. Passing him to her, the most special gift. An ache that was not an ache. And yet now it was.
“When you know someone before,” Randi said and she had moved to the spiral staircase now, her hand resting on the railing. “The Big Before. Before things happen. Before all the adult stuff—the disappointments, the broken hearts, the missteps, the scars. Then you know the real person. Before everything happened to them and they became what they became.”