Vicious Grace

SEVEN

Morning shouldered its way past the thick curtains, pressing in around the edges. Aubrey, on the other side of my bed, muttered and pulled the pillow over his eyes. I tried to convince myself that the muzzy feeling in my head meant I could still fall back asleep. Ex coughed once in the kitchen. His feet shifted softly on the tile. Sunlight streaked the ceiling above me. I was awake.

My brothers aside, I’d seen only four men naked, and one of those had been a wholly awkward fifteen seconds with my dorm mate and her boyfriend. Aubrey, half under our shared sheet, was the oldest man I’d ever slept with. I’d always thought he was beautiful. Sure, he had a little belly, and his hair stood up like a metalhead’s from the eighties until he washed it down. I pulled on my robe quietly, watching him sleep. There were scars on his body, some of them the result of skirmishes against the possessed. There was damage I couldn’t see too. Spells that Uncle Eric had taught him that had taken a toll. And maybe other things.

I pulled my hair back with one hand so it wouldn’t brush against him, kissed the small of his back, and slipped out the door. The flood of sunlight didn’t wake him. I walked into the kitchen and the smell of fresh coffee.

“You’re looking thoughtful,” Ex said. “Anything wrong?”

“No,” I said with a yawn. “Just booting up. Where’s Chogyi Jake?”

“Meditating. As always.”

“I probably should do that too. I’m feeling . . . I don’t know. Restless,” I said, sitting at the small kitchen table. The view of Lake Michigan in daylight was astounding. It was the kind of thing you paid an extra million for. I wondered idly how much the condo had actually cost. The clock said it was almost nine o’clock, and I wasn’t sure if that felt too late or too early.

“You probably should,” Ex said. “Good news is he went shopping first. Bacon and eggs?”

“Oh, Jesus, please,” I said. “And tell me that’s not just coffee incense or something sadistic like that.”

Ex grinned and found a cup, rinsing the dust out of it before he poured. My laptop was still in the living room. I’d left it turned on, and the battery was empty. I strung the power cord to an outlet in the kitchen and waited for the operating system to finish bitching at me while I drank my coffee. After a year together, we all knew one another’s taste, and Ex made my coffee with just enough sugar and no milk.

“No word from Kim yet,” he said. I felt a wash of confused emotion: pleasure that Kim wasn’t there, shame at being pleased, and resentment for being made to feel shame. I knew I was being petty and stupid, but that didn’t stop it from happening. I covered by taking another drink of coffee before I answered.

“Were we expecting her?” I asked.

“Not particularly. I’m a little concerned about her going back into the hospital alone, though. After what happened.”

“Whatever it was, I don’t think it was after her,” I said.

“Yesterday, it wasn’t. Today’s a whole new ball game.”

“Always is, feels like. She’ll do the right thing. She’s a big girl.”

There was e-mail waiting from my lawyer. She had called an acquaintance who ran an image and video enhancement service for the State Department and who would be happy to spend a couple hours on my project. She gave me his e-mail address and a link he’d provided for uploading the data files to him. As I started the transfer—about twenty minutes remaining, even with the high-speed connection—the pop and sizzle of frying bacon brought me back to the room. I sighed and stretched. Ex was reading through a thick file of papers even as he cooked. I recognized the study logs Oonishi had brought us.

“Anything interesting?” I asked.

“Some background on the subjects. We should think about contacting them directly.”

“If we need to,” I said.

He looked over at me. Half silhouetted by a wide stretch of water and sky, he looked softer than usual.

“It might upset the client,” he said.

“That would suck,” I said casually.

“Might upset Kim. This is her colleague we’re working for, after all.”

“Then we won’t do it unless we need to,” I said. “But if it’s piss someone off or don’t figure this out, there’s some feelings going to get bruised.”

Ex grinned and turned back to the bacon. I spooled through my other e-mail. Spam. A note from Trevor in Montana about processing a refund for the extra, unused training time. A note from my little brother, Curtis. I opened my brother’s e-mail. He was back for his senior year in high school, which made me feel old all by itself. He had a girlfriend that Mom and Dad were doing their best to ignore. Jay, my older brother, was living in Orlando, and had just gotten engaged. Curtis speculated irreverently about whether Jay had gotten her knocked up. I wouldn’t have said it to anyone, but that was my guess too. I started to reply to him, then dropped the message into the drafts folder. I needed to think a little before I wrote back. Maybe after I’d gotten a little more blood sugar.

I had never told the rest of the family what happened after I’d left ASU. As far as they knew, I was still the standard college dropout, wandering the face of the earth in search of permanent employment. Or possibly whoring myself out for drug money. My parents didn’t have a good opinion of anyone’s moral character unless they went to our church. I’d always thought of them as prudish, self-righteous, and narrow. Only the stories Eric had told Aubrey about my mother’s affair gave evidence of clay feet, and I wasn’t about to tell Curtis any of that. Maybe once he was safely out of the house too. Until then, I was playing everything close to the vest with the family, even the ones I liked. I didn’t know what any of them would have made of my traveling companions, my chosen work, or my million-dollar view of the lake. If it really was a million-dollar view.

I connected to our private wiki and looked for the list of properties. I found the condo easily. It was actually a seven-million-dollar view with an entry that read like a real estate ad: North Lake Drive, 5bdrm, 3bth, and the obscure notations Eric had made, YNTH and DC1. I lingered over the notations as Ex put a plate in front of me. The Los Angeles DC1 house had held some of the most useful, interesting documents we’d found so far. But this place was so free from occult anything, it was like a rental. There wasn’t even a copy of Fortean Times in the bathroom. I scooped up my fork and took a bite of the eggs.

“Mmm,” I said. “Nice.”

“Thanks,” Ex said.

“You know,” I said around a mouthful of breakfast. “I understand in my head how much money Eric left me, but it makes me a little dizzy sometimes.”

Ex sat down across from me with his own plate and cup of coffee. He ate with a seriousness that made it seem like a chore.

“It surprises me too,” he said. “The things we don’t know about Eric would . . . Jayné? What’s the matter?”

A small tapping sound caught my attention. It was me, my left hand fidgeting at the keyboard. Something shifted in the back of my head, an idea I hadn’t quite had yet. Aubrey yawned in the bedroom, and Chogyi Jake walked into the kitchen behind me with catlike near silence. The penny dropped.

I said something obscene.

“Did something happen?” Chogyi Jake said. Ex stared at me. The bedroom door opened, but I didn’t look back. I was pointing at the wiki page.

“You were right,” I said. “You kept saying it, but I didn’t snap until just now. The place is too small.”

“What’s going on?” Aubrey said behind me.

“Eric’s condo has five bedrooms,” I said. “We’re in the wrong place.”

IT TOOK me five minutes to find the manila envelope Harlan Jeffers had given me the day before; it was under the couch, and his card was still in it. An hour later, we all headed down to the building management offices. Chogyi Jake had his point-man suit on, and the rest of us were also dressed to intimidate. Walking across the lobby, I felt like the opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs, only with wider ties. Harlan stood in the office doorway, face pale and eyes a little too round. I could see white all the way around his irises.

“S-so,” he said, as he waved us in. “Is there something—”

“I’m having my lawyer fax you a copy of the paperwork from when my uncle bought this property,” I said. “I have some questions.”

“I don’t think this is something that I can—” he began, then lost himself and started over. “Without having, um, counsel present, I’m not sure—”

Chogyi Jake put a hand on the man’s arm and smiled.

“It may be a little early to build a legal defense,” Chogyi Jake said. “Why don’t we go in and talk.”

Harlan’s gaze shifted from him to me and back. His nod was a sharp, small movement. Tiny drops of sweat beaded his upper lip.

The office smelled like burned coffee. A low black slate desk held the center of the room, trying to look expensive. On the walls, clean-lined modernistic frames held documents outlining Harlan’s rise through business schools and professional societies, the times he’d shaken hands with important people or famous ones. There was one with a tired-looking Stephen King letting Harlan put an arm around him. On the desk, a smaller frame showed a chubby-cheeked three-year-old of uncertain gender that couldn’t have looked more like Harlan if it had worn his clothes.

“All right,” I said once the door was closed behind us. “Let’s just go over the problem here so we’re all on the same page. The place my uncle bought had five bedrooms. The one I’m in right now has three. So. What the fuck?”

Harlan sat down, his chair hissing as it took his weight.

“I understand your anger. And your confusion. We should have . . . I should have addressed this issue directly, but it was only after Mr. Heller passed that I became aware of it.”

Ex crossed his arms, scowling down at the man like the instrument of an angry god. He was good at that.

“Why did you put us in the wrong condominium?” Ex said. “And where is Eric’s real place?”

“What? No, 1904 is Mr. Heller’s property. It’s the one he bought.”

“It doesn’t match the description we have of it,” Chogyi Jake said.

“It doesn’t,” Harlan said. “Look, I came on here three years ago. I never met Mr. Heller. I don’t even know for certain that he ever came here. I mean, maybe he did. I don’t know. We had very strict instructions not to go into his condominium. If there was a problem, I could call him or his lawyer, and that was it. A water line broke on the floor above? We couldn’t even go in to repair the damage to his kitchen. I called, and he sent his own people. Until he died, I swear I never went in there once.”

“But after he died, you did?” Aubrey said. I sat down. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton ticking, like I was wrestling an idea that wasn’t ready to be thought.

“It was a tax issue.” Harlan stared at the far wall as he spoke, like he was confessing something. “We had auditors breathing down our necks. It was the IRS, you know? When those guys start thinking you’re hiding something, they get . . . It was a walkthrough. In and out, five minutes at most. No one took anything, no one touched anything. No one sat down on a chair. Nothing.”

“And?” I said, but I knew. Harlan had freaked out. The records said it was a bigger place than was there. When he’d come back and seen what Uncle Eric had paid for, it matched the paperwork, but not the floor plan. He drew the conclusion that they’d overcharged him.

To Harlan, it looked, at best, like a million-dollar oopsy. At worst, it was real estate fraud. Oonishi was right. People see what they expect to see.

“The statute of limitations for a contract in Illinois is ten years,” Harlan said the same way I imagined war prisoners giving name, rank, and serial number. “I’m not saying we don’t want to make this right, I’m only saying that litigation won’t help anyone.”

“I don’t think we need to go there,” I said.

He was like a prisoner whose guard had just opened the gate. His gaze shifted between the four of us in quick, birdlike movements. His voice squeaked a little.

“We don’t?”

“Windows are on the east,” Aubrey said, already running down the same road with me. “Hallway’s on the west, so that means north or south.”

“Bathroom and the master bedroom pretty much eat the south walls,” I said. “No place to put doors or a hallway. I’m betting north.”

Ex pursed his lips.

“Works for me,” he said.

I stood up, and we headed out together. Chogyi Jake paused in the doorway, looking back at the confused Harlan.

“Mr. Jeffers,” he said, “I assume there’s a super on site? A handyman for simple jobs?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“I don’t suppose we could borrow a sledgehammer?”

It turns out—I’m not making this up—there’s a construction tool called a stud finder. Had I known about these during my brief run as a college coed, I’m pretty sure my dorm mate would have been carrying one around the Northern Lounge, holding it up to guys, and saying Nope, not you. Instead, my first experience with one involved Ex slowly going over the southern wall of the living and dining rooms, marking the white plaster in thick pencil, while Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and I moved all the furniture into the kitchen and three bedrooms. Empty, the living room took on the smallest echo. Our footsteps and voices had a new, unfamiliar depth. Just behind where the cow-skin couch had been, the marks made the unmistakable shape of a door frame.

In the absence of dust masks, Aubrey sacrificed one of the sheets, ripping strips from it with a sound like paper tearing. We all tied squares of five-hundred-count white percale over our mouths and noses. We looked like angelic bank robbers. Ex hefted the borrowed sledgehammer.

“We could just go through the walls,” I said.

“If we’re right, I assume Eric protected that as well. Besides, I don’t know where the wiring is,” Ex said.

“You don’t know that doorway isn’t trapped,” Aubrey pointed out.

Ex shrugged and slowly bounced the handle of the sledgehammer against his open hand in anticipation of the architectural violence ahead.

“How likely is it that we’re about to introduce ourselves to the neighbors?” I asked.

“We could wait,” Chogyi Jake said. “If whoever lives next door would let us in, it wouldn’t be hard to take the dimensions of their rooms and see if there’s the expected gap.”

I was tempted, but not because I had any doubt about what we’d find. The truth was, plastering over whole rooms so that they didn’t seem to exist felt like exactly the kind of thing Eric would have done. I hoped whatever we found would shed some light on the incidents at Grace Memorial. And still, there was some small, quiet part of my mind that hesitated. Ex lifted his pale brows as if asking a question. Or permission.

“Let’s do this,” I said.

The first blow cracked the wall, a spiderweb appearing out of nothing. Ex swung again. Fine dust rose in the air. It smelled hot to me. The room itself shuddered, and bits of Sheetrock fell away, hanging on by a thin membrane of old wallpaper and tape. With the morning sun still spilling through the windows, the white wall seemed to glow, the darkness beyond it as thick as ink. Ex kept swinging, debris piling up around his ankles, as the doorway came free. One swing went in farther than the ones before, passing through the wall and into whatever lay beyond. The unmistakable crash of metal stopped him. We came close. Aubrey had his cell phone out, the dim glow from the screen pushing into the blackness.

Recessed behind the wall just enough so that the drywall could cover it, a black iron-mesh security door blocked a short hallway with a door on either side beyond it. Ex pulled away a hank of Sheetrock, and I could see where the security door’s frame had been screwed into the flesh of the building with round-topped bolts that defied removal. The hinges were on the far side where we couldn’t reach them. Even with the relatively little training and awareness I’d picked up in the last year, I could feel the wards and protections burning off the metal like heat. The two dead bolts were covered in thin black-etched symbols. I’d seen only one thing like it before. Eric’s place in Los Angeles. The other DC1 property.

“Bingo,” I said.