Special of the Day

by Elaine Fox

  “I think I just need to sleep,” she said, looking back up at him. “I’m just so—”

  “I understand,” he said, more curtly than he’d intended. He didn’t want to hear whatever excuses she felt she had to make for not wanting to be with him. It was clear that unless she was in a sensual mood there was no place for him in her life. “I’ve got a few things I should do here anyway, before tomorrow.”

  She lifted her brows, surprised. “Really? Anything I can help with?”

  He shook his head. “No. You go on to bed. I can see you’re exhausted.”

  She smiled wanly and, with a long last look, confirming their unspoken policy that they make no physical contact in the restaurant, she went toward the kitchen and the back door that would take her to her apartment.

  Steve continued to stand in the dining room, feeling emptiness down to the core of his being. Had that really been the brush-off he’d felt it was? Had this been a turning point? A moment when they both realized the limitations of their relationship?

  Because he had to admit, at least to himself, that if this really was just a sexual thing, he couldn’t sustain it. He wanted more, he thought, his mind veering away from what that meant, exactly.

  He simply wanted more.

  16

  Bar Special

  Stinger—it sneaks up on you

  White crème de menthe, cognac, over cracked ice

  Steve couldn’t sleep. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, arms behind his head.

  He should talk to her. Tell her—no, ask her how she felt. About him. Ask her if what they had was enough for her. Or if she thought something was…missing.

  He grabbed the pillow from under his head and put it over his face. He had turned into Lia. Or Joanne. Or Corinne. Or any one of a dozen other women who used to ask him how he felt, when all he felt was a physical connection. He’d always thought that if you had to ask, you had to know the answer wasn’t going to be good.

  Was this some kind of cosmic payback? He’d finally met a woman he couldn’t get enough of and she only wanted him for sex. It was a cruel irony, made worse by the fact that he had, in the beginning, actually tried to resist her. Hell, he’d even thought that she wasn’t all that beautiful, what with how stuffy and prickly and high maintenance she was.

  But none of that turned out to be true. She wasn’t stuffy, she was shy. She may have been prickly at first, but it was defensive.

  And she was about as low maintenance as they came. Ending up, as it happened, too low maintenance. She didn’t need anything from him.

  It was all so obvious now.

  Steve threw off the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He needed to do something, occupy his mind with something else. He got up, slipped on some jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled on his shoes.

  He’d go down and investigate the kitchen. There was no way that cat had come through three doors to get into the kitchen—somehow getting out of the apartment, then outside, then inside the restaurant. He had to have come through the inside somehow. If nothing else, Steve could ensure that a disaster like tonight never happened again.

  He crept down the stairs quietly, then let himself in the back door of the restaurant. Once in the kitchen he turned on the lights, squinting in the brightness and marveling at how clean and shiny everything looked, when just a few hours ago chaos had reigned.

  His eyes scanned the walls and the ceiling above the stove, the workstations, around past the door to the dining room, over the office door, to the wall of refrigerators and the new freezer, to the back door again.

  No obvious holes or gaps in the old tin ceiling. The walls looked solid enough.

  The cat had been a mess when he’d grabbed him to take him back upstairs, squirming and fighting when Steve had first picked him up, desperate to get back to all that food that was now all over the floor. So Steve had ample time to notice that the animal was covered with dirt and flour and some kind of sticky sauce. It even had a flake of fish caught in one whisker. But it was the black streaks along the cat’s sides that had him intrigued. It was soot, Steve was certain, but where had it come from?

  He thought about his own apartment, how there was a mantel with no fireplace, just a hole for an old fashioned coal stove, probably used in the late 1800s to early 1900s. In his kitchen, too, he knew there was one of those holes behind the counter on the back wall, and at the roofline you could see the old chimney. No doubt a flue came all the way down to the first floor.

  He looked at the new freezer in its alcove near the back door. It protruded into the kitchen a little farther than the old one had—it was a bigger and more efficient model—at about the same spot where his counter covered the stove hole upstairs.

  Eyes raking down the stainless steel exterior, he smiled. There were wheels on this freezer, probably to make it easier to service. The last one had taken four burly guys to get out the back door, and even then it had cracked the back threshold.

  Rolling up his sleeves, he grabbed hold of one side and rolled the thing out slowly from the wall.

  Sure enough, behind the appliance was a stove hole partially covered by a round tin, the kind with springlike metal pieces to hold it in place, just like in his apartment. Clearly, something had pushed the tin aside and Steve would bet anything it had been the cat.

  He squeezed around the freezer and pulled the tin covering off, finding several cat hairs clinging to the side. He tried to peer in the hole but it was too dark. He thought about calling up through it, to see if Roxanne could hear him, but of course that would scare her to death. He smiled grimly at the thought that maybe he could practice a little subconscious conditioning.

  Steve is the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. The smartest, wittiest, most… whatever, he couldn’t even come up with anything that seemed remotely true.

  Readjusting the wire clasps in back of the cover, he pushed it back into place, then thought he should do something more permanent than that. Maybe nail it shut, though he should nail the one in Roxanne’s apartment first, so the cat didn’t crawl in only to get stuck at the bottom. Or better yet, the whole thing could be covered over by a piece of plywood, unless whoever retrofitted the place had run plumbing up through the flue, as was common.

  His eyes trailed around what was probably the original fireplace and what would therefore be brick but was now covered with plaster. The wall ran almost three feet beyond where the fireplace would have ended, to the back wall of the building. So if someone had run plumbing and/or electrical, they could have housed it in that three-foot space and not in the chimney.

  He tapped the wall beside the fireplace. It sounded hollow. At floor level, there was a slight gap where the toe molding had been eaten away by some insect or small animal, and he wriggled two fingers under it. The covering was boarded ribbing, as was typical for the late nineteenth century, that had been plastered over to match the chimney camouflage. He pulled gently and it gapped slightly. Curious, and knowing this area would never show, he pulled a little harder. A small shower of plaster rained down on his hand and a crack ran up the wall.

  He stopped, reluctant to cause any more damage than necessary.

  Still, his curiosity was piqued. He should ask Roxanne if she’d mind if he looked in here. Aside from being a possible escape route for her curiously exploratory cat, it could contain interesting historical details.

  He pulled on the panel again and tried to look in. Too dark. He needed a flashlight.

  His right hand holding the plaster-covered wood, he tried to slide his left hand through the crack to see what he could feel, anticipating all manner of spiders or maybe even a dead mouse or two.

  Webs, for sure. He flicked what was probably a dead roach aside, then felt…nothing. About three inches back there was a space where the floor ended. He ran his fingers over the edge of the floor. It was smooth and rounded.

  He pushed his hand farther into the space and felt nothing. No pipes, no wires, jus
t the edge of the floor. He pushed his hand in up to his wrist and let his fingers drop. The tips barely brushed another piece of wood about eight inches below floor level.

  Steve caught his breath, as his fingers backed up and found what could be a riser, just below the lip of the floor. His pulse accelerated as he considered that this cavity could possibly have contained an old staircase, one that went down. He pictured the basement and knew there was no staircase on this end. If there were, it would have blocked the outside cellar entrance, the one that had been broken into and was now boarded up.

  When had that entrance been installed? Late 1800s? He tried to remember the exact year, and thought it had been something like 1868 or 1870, fairly soon after the end of the Civil War. So if there had been a staircase here, they would have had to take it out to make room for the trap door entrance.

  Under the first step…he remembered, blood thrumming through his veins.

  Steve could picture the words written in Portner’s spidery scrawl.

  Includes the contents under the first step as described to my Executor…

  Steve’s lungs felt near to bursting and he exhaled, realizing as he did that he’d stopped breathing. This could be the spot, he thought. No wonder all those earlier excavations had found nothing in the old staircases. There was a back stair. One that nobody had considered or knew existed for probably a hundred and fifty years.

  Elation flooded his veins like oxygen and he tried to temper it. He could be wrong. It could be anything. An old pantry or dumbwaiter. Maybe even an early-twentieth-century trash chute. If there had been a back staircase, surely someone would have known about it, or at least suspected.

  Then again, this place had always been privately owned…And the theories about the fair copy—known mostly in academic circles—had never truly been believed.

  Steve examined the plaster covering the old fireplace and the wall beside it. He picked at a piece with one fingernail near where it had cracked. A couple coats of paint were obvious, as was an old layer of wallpaper.

  This space had been covered over a long time, there was no doubt about it.

  This could, he thought, fighting heart palpitations, be it.

  Roxanne tiptoed down the stairs. Steve hadn’t answered her knock on his door. He was probably as exhausted as she was, only without the neurotic inability to fall asleep that she had.

  Lying in bed telling herself she needed to deal with her troubles alone had not, after a couple hours, made any sense to her. She knew she would feel better with Steve beside her, just holding her and assuring her that she was not alone, that her fear that she would lose her business was not justified. It was just one review, after all. She had to be jumping to the worst conclusions.

  That Steve could make her feel better was something she was sure of. She had just been so sure she was going to dissolve into tears the moment she left the restaurant that she felt she had to turn him away earlier. She was too afraid to let him see her that way.

  Thinking about it, though, as she lay alone in her bed, she knew in her heart of hearts that he would understand. In fact, of all the people in the world he would probably understand the best. After all, he was nearly as involved in this restaurant as she was.

  How silly she’d been to think they had nothing in common, she reflected. They lived in the same building, worked in the same restaurant, dealt with the same people day in and day out—the plain truth was, she had more in common with Steve than she’d ever had in common with Martin.

  All this time she had thought she wanted someone cultured and urbane, but she understood now how completely superficial that was. Steve seemed to understand her, and he certainly seemed to care. He made her laugh and, best of all, they had fun together.

  What did it matter that he wasn’t a patron of the arts or a season ticket holder at the Kennedy Center? Who cared that he probably hadn’t worn a tuxedo since his high-school prom? If he could hold her in the middle of the night and allay her fears, he was a man she knew she could fall in love with.

  But right now it was too late. He was asleep and she had to lie in her bed alone, with nothing to do but go over and over all that had gone wrong that night.

  She reached the landing for her apartment and her eye caught on a patch of light outside the window. She leaned toward the glass.

  In the back alley, just outside the kitchen, two patches of light from the window and door illuminated the asphalt and glanced off the hood of Steve’s truck.

  Someone was in the kitchen.

  Her pulse jumped and the hair all over her head prickled with dread.

  Someone was here. The intruders had come back. And they were looking for whatever it was they sought, in the kitchen, again.

  She had to call the cops, and quickly. Maybe they could catch them red-handed. She ran down the hall to her door, adrenaline pumping as she went for the phone, but with her hand on the doorknob she stopped.

  Steve hadn’t answered her knock.

  Do you know where Steve was last night?

  P.B.’s voice from after the last break-in echoed in her head.

  There’s good reason to believe something’s hidden in this house. Why wouldn’t he try to find it? P.B. had insisted.

  Roxanne closed her eyes. It couldn’t be. She knew what she was doing; she was fearing the worst because she’d just had the scary idea that she could fall in love with this man. Now she was trying to sabotage him in her head.

  And yet…suppose it was Steve? No matter what she told herself, no matter what she felt for him, there was the chance that he was behind the break-ins. Would she be stupid not to admit that? And if he was behind them, if it was him in the kitchen right now…did she really want the cops to find him? P.B.? Did she really want Steve arrested?

  She swallowed over a sudden lump in her throat and moved slowly back to the stairs. Just call the police, part of her said. You’ve got to trust someone sometime, so trust now that it’s not Steve.

  But she didn’t. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t. It just made too much sense that the odd damage that had occurred at each break-in had been done by someone searching for something. Something that had been hidden pretty thoroughly, and a long time ago, if digging behind a brick foundation was any indication.

  With quiet stealth, she slipped down the stairwell and opened the door to the back alley. Propping the door open with a rock she kept nearby for bracing it when she had groceries, she inched toward the back door to the restaurant and peered through the windowpanes.

  The first thing that met her eye was the freezer, rolled toward the center of the room at an angle so that it didn’t have to be unplugged.

  Her stomach did a little jump. Then her hands rose and gripped each other at her mouth, as if holding in a scream. Wanting to cross the doorway, she ducked down below the door window and scrabbled left, then leaned against the wall on the opposite side. From this angle, she could see behind the freezer.

  There, on the floor, with his hands tugging at a portion of the wall, was Steve.

  She spun away from the door window, pressing her back against the outside brick wall, and squeezed her eyes shut. Disappointment and grief fell into her chest as hard as a piano from an upstairs window, followed quickly by a familiar sense of failure.

  Stupid, she thought. How had she been so stupid? She knew she shouldn’t have trusted him. She’d been duped again. Where was her judgment? Why couldn’t she tell a good guy from a louse? How could she end up here again—used by another man who only wanted her for one thing? And it wasn’t love.

  Shit, she nearly said out loud, anger taking over. Had he slept with her so that she would overlook something like this? Or had that just been a perk?

  P.B. had been right about Steve. She could hardly believe it.

  She tipped her head back so it rested on the brick wall. She told herself she should be glad it was just Steve looking for his stupid document and not some hardened criminal with a weapon. But she wasn’t glad
. She couldn’t be. This meant that Steve had lied to her more times than she could count. He’d pretended he knew nothing about the break-ins and he obviously had no intention of telling her if and when he found what he was looking for.

  Whether or not she would be the rightful owner of that draft if he found it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Steve decided it was better to lie and keep his actions a secret—allowing her to live in fear of being robbed—than to trust her and ask for her help.

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and tried to stop tears from squeezing through her lids.

  Great. She’d screwed up her restaurant and discovered she was involved with another liar, all in the same evening. Total personal and professional devastation.

  She squatted down beside the door, then slid onto her butt, for some reason unable to move from the spot. She dropped her hands to the ground beside her, feeling the pebbly asphalt beneath her, the bits of broken glass and old tar and God knew what else.

  If she sat here long enough, she thought, maybe it would turn out not to be true. Maybe when she opened her eyes and stood up she’d see nobody in the kitchen. Maybe she was so exhausted that she was sleepwalking and had hallucinated the whole thing.

  But when she opened her eyes the patches of light were still on the ground, and the noise from inside the kitchen was soft but still there.

  Unbidden, memories of the first break-in flooded back to her. That was the night she’d brought the bottle of wine to Steve’s apartment. The night he’d been leaving for some engagement—with some kind of tool stuffed in his duffle bag.

  She sat up straighter. That’s right, she thought. She’d even commented on the handle, saying it looked like some kind of gardening equipment. Then he’d arrived home late, after she’d thought she’d heard glass breaking.

  She covered her face with her hands. Why hadn’t she remembered that before?

  Because, she thought with sudden and cynical certainty, she hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t wanted to see what Steve really was. Good old Roxanne, deluding herself again from the very beginning.