by Jeff Ross
“You’re friends with Tom?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I’m shaking. “How can I know that?” I ask.
Grady stops beside a dilapidated Honda Civic and opens the front passenger door. “His favorite flavor of ice cream is cookies and cream. He used to play soccer before he put on weight. He still watches every episode of The Simpsons no matter how bad it is. And we really, really need to not be here right now.”
All of this is true. The Simpsons was one of the few things we’d talk about every week. If our father didn’t drop Tom off, he’d call and we’d go over the episode from beginning to end, charting the characters’ lives.
“I mean, even if they aren’t coming back, those guys could call the cops. I did assault them.”
“You were saving me,” I say. “No one would blame you.”
“I have the weapon.” He looks at the building again. “I don’t want to leave you here. Tom would be seriously pissed if I did. But I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to. And by that I only mean getting in my car. Like, going with me to try to find your brother.”
“You think you know where he is?” I say.
“Not for sure, no. But maybe.”
“Where?” I say.
“I’ll show you,” Grady replies. “If you can trust me.”
TWELVE
As we cross the bridge, I press myself to the door and pull my legs up onto the seat.
I don’t know this guy. I would say, looking at him, that he’s harmless. But he just cut two people with a knife, so maybe harmless is the wrong word.
“Are you okay?” he asks. The streetlights are brighter here, set up on giant towers in the median. The inside of the car flares up, then fades to gray every few seconds as we pass from one halo of light to another.
“Sure,” I say, though I don’t even sound convincing to myself.
“That must have freaked you out a bit.”
“Um, yeah. And you too. Are you okay?”
“I’m good. I do that kind of shit every day,” Grady says, doing a little head-shiver thing.
“Oh, do you?”
“Fo’ sure, girl,” he says through his laughter. “Actually, that scared the hell out of me. I didn’t mean to cut that guy who was holding you.”
“So what happened?”
“I just meant to get the knife out and, I don’t know, wave it around. I kept thinking, Brandish it, Grady. That’ll be enough. But I got too close and accidentally cut him. He also moved in to me, if we’re being honest.”
“Oh, of course, and if we’re being honest, what about the other guy?”
“He was an easy mark. But again, I only meant to get close. I know it might be hard to believe, but I’ve never done anything like that before.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Seriously,” Grady goes on. He holds his hand out, and it is shaking almost as bad as mine. “See, that totally freaked me out.”
I hold my hand up beside his. “We match,” I say.
I try to slow my breathing and in doing so detect an inexplicable odor. I look at the floor, then into the backseat. A laptop lies half out of an open backpack, alongside four cell phones in a Tupperware container. I sniff loudly.
“Yeah, about that smell,” Grady says. “This isn’t my car.”
“Oh, whose is it?” I clasp one hand with the other, but the shaking continues. My throat feels as if it has needles in it. Grady seems calm. Which worries me even more.
“My uncle owns an auto-wrecking place.” Grady glances at me. “People bring cars in they don’t think work but really only need an adjustment or a couple of replacement parts. That happens because, basically, people are lazy. I mean, it’s a car, right? Who decides their car is ready for the wrecker without first getting it seriously checked out? Anyway, my uncle keeps some extra license plates around, so if I can fix a car, I can take it out.”
“Oh.” I sniff again for effect. “Any idea what that is?”
“It’s rancid, isn’t it? I didn’t notice it until I turned the air-conditioning on.”
The windows are down, and a hard wind pushes through the car. It’s the beginning of June, and the weather has already turned from spring to summer. Resurrection Falls is far enough north, right up near the Canadian border, that we get really distinct seasons.
“Let’s leave that off then,” I say.
Grady laughs. He’s tall enough that his head almost brushes the ceiling.
“Where do you think he is?” I ask, trying to change the topic.
“It’s just a guess, but we sometimes jam in this old warehouse by the lake.”
“Jam?” I say. “As in play music?”
“Yeah, I have a portable studio. We bring a guitar and a few drums and set up in there. The sound is amazing.”
“What does Tom play?” We stop at an intersection. Cars flash past. Music pours from the speakers outside a McDonald’s. It’s after midnight, and most of the city is asleep.
“You don’t know?” Grady says.
“No, I didn’t know he could play any instrument.”
“He sings.”
“Is he good?”
“He’s great.” The light changes and Grady pulls through the intersection. “He’s never told you? Or, like, you’ve never heard him singing at home? He’s crazy talented. It’s really annoying.”
“We kind of move in our own circles.”
Grady says, “He did mention that.”
“How do you know him?”
“I used to work at the record shop downtown before it closed. You know that one on Percy Street? Radicals?”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t know record shops still existed.” We are out of the city limits now, heading for the warehouse district.
“That was the last one. Your brother would come in and listen to soul albums.”
“Really?” I say, trying not to sound too surprised.
“Yeah, he loves that old soul stuff. Some blues as well.” Grady glances at me. “He has that old-school voice. I guess you don’t know that.”
“I’ve never heard him hum, never mind sing.”
“I found out he could sing by accident. One day I had to run down the street to grab something, and I left him in the store by himself. But I’d forgotten my wallet and had to go right back. When I came in, I thought it was an old Smokey Robinson or Sam Cooke a capella thing playing. But it was your brother, wearing headphones and singing along. After that I became the most aggravating person alive, trying to get him to jam with me. He finally caved, but only if we were somewhere no one could hear him. Which is why we started coming out here.”
“What do you play?” I ask.
“A bit of everything. Drums, keyboards, guitar. Absolutely no singing.”
“Do you go to Mitchell Mayer?”
“My mom pulled me out of regular school in the eighth grade. Since then I’ve been homeschooled. But not really. My mom started doing a few things with me, and eventually, I guess, she figured I would learn everything I could about anything I am interested in and left me to it. I passed my GED last year.”
Outside, the old, abandoned manufacturing plants and warehouses rise up in the darkness.
“Listen, if you’re nervous coming in here with me, that’s okay. You don’t have to. You can wait in the car, or I can take you home now. You don’t really know me or anything. I can tell you I’m not a creepy guy, but how would you know for sure?”
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br /> “What’s with the tie?” I ask.
Grady flips his tie. “That’s complicated,” he says. “Basically, I’ve discovered that if you look like a criminal, people think you’re a criminal. Whereas a guy wearing a tie is on his way somewhere important.” He smiles at me, then pulls off the highway onto a secondary road.
There’s a drop of blood on his white shirt, which instantly gives me the shivers again. I hate blood.
“Where are your shoes?” he asks.
“That’s kind of a personal question,” I say.
“Is it?”
“No, I’m joking. They fell off when I was scrambling around in that stupid ravine.”
“Oh.” He palms the steering wheel. “What were you doing in the ravine?”
“I was climbing trees,” I say.
“Nice,” he says. “Do you have a cell phone?”
I hold my phone up for him to see.
“Yeah, of course you do. Dumb question.” He pulls in between a set of Dumpsters and a very tall fence around the back of the warehouse.
“Okay. So. How about you keep your phone in your hand and, I don’t know, stay a bit away from me when we walk in? Whatever makes you comfortable.” He shuts the car off, and a silence envelops us.
“Comfortable,” I say. I look at all the dark corners and imagine sitting in the car with my mind going crazy.
Grady nods and gives me a really forced smile.
“That’s creepy.”
“What?”
“Your smile. Why does your face do that?” Which is totally rude. I sometimes get like this. Saying whatever comes into my head. Usually when I’m nervous.
“I don’t know how to smile. Class photos are probably the main reason I left institutionalized public education. I mean…” He smiles again. “Seriously? Who can’t smile?”
“Maybe say something when you smile. I hear that helps.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like cheese, but not cheese. Something that makes you laugh. Then your smile will be genuine.”
“Gastromancy!” Grady says, laughing.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the telling of fortunes by listening to someone’s stomach grumblings.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
He laughs, and his smile is nice.
“But it works,” I tell him. I figure a guy who knows what gastromancy is can’t be that evil.
“So, are you coming?”
I rub the side of my cell phone. I light up the screen and notice that my battery is half dead, which makes no sense. My phone normally lasts all day, and I could swear I had it plugged in for a while at home as well.
“Into this dark, abandoned building with you?” I say.
Grady looks at the building. “Yeah. Seriously, though, no pressure. You can stay here. Even keep the keys. Whatever.”
For some reason, an idea I should have had when this whole thing began strikes me for the first time. “Why were you there?” I ask.
“Why was I where?”
“Maple Grove. What were you doing there?”
Grady looks out the window. “I was following you,” he says. He puts his hand on the key again. “Listen, I’m going to take you home right now. I can come back and—”
“Why were you following me?” I say.
He sighs as though about to tell me some deep secret.
“I’ve been trying to figure out where Tom is. Then that whole thing happened with the kid. Of course, I was certain there was no way Tom had anything to do with it. But I didn’t know anyone else he might have talked to other than you. So I was hanging around your area trying to build up the nerve to knock or, I guess, hoping Tom might just show up.”
“And when Tom didn’t show up, you decided to just follow me?”
“I wasn’t going to let you know I was following you,” Grady says, then shakes his head again. “That sounds even more creepy.”
“Um, yeah,” I say.
“I’m worried about your brother, and I want to know if he’s all right. I probably didn’t go about this the right way, but I’m still figuring it all out as well. So if you want me to take you home, cool, I’ll do that. If not, let’s go see if he’s inside.” He reaches into the backseat, pulls a flashlight out of the backpack, then opens his door and gets out.
I sit there for a moment. I hold my hand out before me and find it’s no longer shaking. Grady is fiddling with the flashlight. He gives it a quick tap, and it comes to life.
I leave my hand on the door handle for a moment before opening the door, getting out and walking toward him.
“Do you want a pair of shoes or something?” he asks.
“You have extra girls’ shoes in your car?” I say.
“That would be creepy. I have a pair of running shoes in the backseat. They’ll be really big on you, but at least you won’t step on a piece of rusted metal in your bare feet.”
I open up the back door and dig around beneath the seat. My hand finds the shoes, and I bring them out. They’re at least two sizes too big.
Grady says, “Try leaning forward when you walk.”
I take a couple of steps, and the backs flap against the ground.
“You could be starting a new style here,” Grady says. “Who knows.”
THIRTEEN
Grady’s flashlight is insufficient in the wide open space of the warehouse. We can only see a few feet in front of us at any time, leaving the rest of the area a complete mystery. There’d been a piece of duct tape over the lock on one door. Grady had been careful to make certain the tape stayed in place once we were inside.
“Stay close to the walls,” Grady says. The giant shoes bang with each step. I try shuffling for a moment, but this seems to make more noise.
“Where do you and Tom jam?” I whisper.
“In the next room.” He flicks the flashlight beam toward a door at the end of the space. Our footsteps cause riots of noise. There are so many dark spots. I wish Grady would move the flashlight around more, just in case someone is in the room. It feels like the perfect place for a homeless guy to live. I’ve had enough of those kinds of surprises for a while.
“Is it weird in there?” I ask.
“What do you mean by weird? It’s a room like this one. Pretty big and open.” Even though we are both whispering, it seems like our voices are bouncing off the walls and ceiling, amplifying as they come back at us.
“When were you here last?”
“One week and three days ago,” Grady says with authority. “We worked on ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“A Sam Cooke song. One of his best.”
“Okay, I’ll trust you on that.” Grady opens a door and we enter a new part of the warehouse. The space is strangely arranged. There isn’t any consistency to the size of the rooms.
“I wish he had a cell we could call,” Grady says.
“Do you find that weird?” I ask. Talking is making me feel more comfortable.
“The cell thing? Not really. It doesn’t feel as if Tom is really a part of this era. He’s like a time traveler from the fifties. He seems to operate outside of the modern world.”
“He doesn’t use computers either.”
“Sure he does,” Grady says. “I loaned him a laptop. He does most of the setup and stuff for recording as well.”
“He has a laptop?” I try to picture Tom tap
ping away at a keyboard and can’t.
“My uncle collects old computers, and we get them working again. I offered one to Tom, but he said he didn’t have a use for it outside of recording.” Grady reaches out and opens the door to the next room. Something scurries away in the darkness, and I grab his arm. “It’s cool,” he says. “There are some mice in here. But they disappear as soon as we show.”
“That’s not cool,” I say. I look behind me. I thought I heard something there, coming in the door. Or moving, slithering across the floor.
“Mice don’t hurt people.”
“They’re gross,” I say.
“That’s one opinion,” he says.
“Don’t tell me you have mice as pets or something weird like that.”
“I do not have mice as pets. But I assume they should be granted the ability to thrive in places humans have deserted. It’s only natural.”
“Natural,” I say.
We step in. Moonlight softens the floorboards in great circles. The ceiling seems miles above us. The wind has picked up outside, creating a low moaning. “Right over here,” Grady says, directing the flashlight beam to a corner of the room where a lone water bottle sits on a table between two chairs.
“I don’t remember leaving this,” Grady says, picking it up. Though the room is large, this little area with the chairs and table seems close and intimate. I can almost imagine Tom being here, inhabiting this space. Though I still can’t imagine him singing.
“What were you expecting to find?” I ask. The room feels really close, even though it’s huge. The air is dense and flat, still holding a bit of the day’s heat.
“Tom,” he says.
“Like, living here?” I’m about to sit down on one of the chairs when there’s a banging in the other room. Grady puts a finger to his lips and switches off his flashlight.
At first we hear nothing more, but then there’s the unmistakable sound of footsteps. The door between the rooms is open, and a moment later a bright flashlight beam cracks the darkness.
“Do you think it’s him?” I whisper.
