Dara had finally emerged from the powder room and joined the detective in Studio C.
In the back office, a woman was taking pictures, writing things down, showing things to the medical examiner, who couldn’t stop coughing, red-faced and wheezing from construction dust. Earlier, Dara had seen the woman leaning over the contractor’s muddy shoe treads, the tight triangles of his natty boots.
“Yes,” Dara said. “My husband called me after he called you. Like I said.”
The police detective, a creasy-eyed white man of indiscriminate middle age, wore a tan trench coat like a detective in a movie. He had, Dara noticed, a smear of toothpaste on his shirt collar.
“Was it typical of your contractor to be working already at that hour? What, six a.m.?”
“They’d fallen behind. They were trying to pick up the pace,” Dara said. “We’re very busy here. We need that space.”
“How about back there?”
“There?”
“In the office. You weren’t having any work done there, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What about upstairs, that attic? You keep equipment, a fuse box, something, up there?”
“No. My husband showed you. He—”
“So any idea what the guy might’ve been up to? He was either going up or coming down. Looks like coming down based on the angle of the body.”
“I don’t know. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe he heard a sound, or something. We didn’t know him very well.”
We didn’t know him very well. But there you go.
The detective looked at her, nodded.
“Well,” he said, shrugging, sliding his notebook into his pocket, “do any of us really know anyone?”
* * *
*
The medical examiner came out, a dust mask pressed to his face, and the woman who took all the pictures followed, a heavy case in her hand.
It was all ending, nearly. Or at least this part was.
The body was gone, carried out in that big black bag with a zipper. Dara and Charlie had both turned their heads.
“Someone should’ve torn out that staircase years ago,” the medical examiner said to no one in particular. “Death trap.”
* * *
*
The detective spoke to Benny and Gaspar, but not for long. Everything seemed pro forma.
After, Dara told them they could go home for the day.
“Thank you,” Benny said, standing in the middle of Studio B, his hand tentatively touching the saw bench.
Gaspar began packing up, but Benny didn’t move at all for several seconds.
“Benny,” Dara said, “we’re all so sorry. About the accident.”
Benny looked at her and Dara found herself looking away.
“It’s very sad,” he said finally. “But we keep going.” Taking off his cap, he slid in his foam earplugs and reached for the table saw. “That’s how we get paid.”
* * *
*
I don’t know,” Dara said to Charlie later. “I think it’s fine.”
“But they probably knew. About Marie.”
“Maybe,” Dara said, pulling her hair back into a bun.
“We should,” Charlie said, “make sure they got paid.”
* * *
*
All the younger girls were crying in little clumps across the studio. The five-and six-year-olds, tugging at their leotard crotches, whimpering softly, sneaking glances at the door to the back office, the police tape crisscrossed.
The older girls were, as ever, dry-eyed, cool. Speculating, whispering in corners to one another, guessing about canceled rehearsals, biting their fingers and cracking their toes.
Older than most of their fathers, the dead contractor was only a voice through the walls, a constant obstruction as they navigated the makeshift path through Studio B. A dad type, with a thunderous voice and a mercurial schedule, strolling past everyone in his shiny boots, shouting to Benny every time a circuit broke.
They’d likely noticed him far less than Benny, who arrived every day on a candy-orange motor scooter and was always so nice, even when he unclogged the toilet for them, and Gaspar, who was charming with his little habits, like setting a jug of milk on the sill of the open window, not drinking it until it was icy, or the time he played Crazy Eights with a few of the younger girls, their carpool parent late for the day’s pickup.
They had no feelings for the dead contractor and, besides, The Nutcracker began in ten days.
* * *
*
Everything felt surprisingly normal, even as both students and parents were in a frenzy. Perhaps because they were in a frenzy. The turbulence of the contractor’s death in these very rooms merely seemed an extension and an intensification of the turbulence of Nutcracker season. Gossip, anxiety, paranoia churning, and two six-year-olds vomiting in the powder room, one in the sink, after another girl claimed there was still blood on the floor where the contractor’s body had fallen. It was terrible! she kept saying. I can smell it!