“You all right?” The detective looked up from his notepad.

Iris shook her head. There was no fly.

She downed her beer. She itched to order another one, but she had to drive home in front of half of the Cleveland Police Department. She asked Carmichael for water instead and waited patiently for the detective to finish scribbling his notes. When he finally did, he looked troubled. The knots in her stomach tightened, and beer rose up in her throat. Were the lies written all over her face?

“You know, I never thought I’d have to go back into that building again.” His temples and beard stubble were gray, but his light blue eyes looked surprisingly young, almost boyish, but sad.

“You’ve been in there before?” she managed.

“Not since around the time it closed. I was just starting out. They gave me the lead on an investigation . . .” His voice trailed off. He pressed a hand over his mouth and shook his head.

“What sort of investigation?” She avoided his eyes. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, but she was desperate to know. “I’m sorry. I just find the building to be so . . . strange.”

“Strange in what way?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I don’t know. Things are still sitting on the desks. The filing cabinets are still filled with files.” Talking was like loosening a pressure-relief valve. She wanted to tell him everything, to confess it all—Beatrice’s suitcase, her notes, the stealing. She bit her lip hard. “It’s like the whole building is a time capsule, like a bomb went off in 1978 and vaporized all the people but left everything else behind.”

“Oh, a bomb went off all right. When the bank let the city default, the people down at city hall got angry enough to finally let us open an investigation into the board of directors. Within two weeks the place was shut down, and the bank was gone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bank holdings were sold off to an out-of-town company, Columbus Trust, and the feds locked the building down to protect deposits. I’m just glad we got a few indictments first. We brought down one crooked family, but the rest got away. Some people disappeared. I think you just found one of them.”

The devoured body on the shower floor. She swallowed hard and tried to distract herself from the smell of vomit still lingering in her hair and clothes. She kept her cigarette close to her nose. Two weeks, she thought to herself. The city defaulted on December 15, and the bank was sold on December 29. Didn’t Suzanne say that Beatrice had disappeared before the bank was sold? She couldn’t remember.

“Did you know anyone who disappeared?”

“My sister for one,” the detective said, his eyes trained on his mug. He put up a stony facade, but Iris could tell it still pained him.

“I’m so sorry.”

He waved his hand at her apology. “It was a long time ago. I just always thought she would turn up by now, you know? Max was like that.”

The name Max hit Iris like a lightning bolt. She’d seen the name before in a book, in Beatrice’s book. There were still stacks of scribbled shorthand somewhere in her apartment in folders she’d stolen from the file room. And there was the mysterious suitcase. The suitcase had belonged to a woman.

Iris buried her face in her hands. “I think I need to go home.”

CHAPTER 50

“Iris, this is Charles Wheeler. We’ve heard about what happened. Take the next week off to do whatever you need to do to recover from this shock . . .”

Iris walked to the kitchen as the message played and downed three shots of vodka. Apparently a week off from work was the going rate for discovering a dead body at the job site. She wasn’t sure how her boss had found out so fast, and she really didn’t care.

“. . . the project has been put on hold temporarily. WRE intends to cooperate with the police and their investigation; however, all drawings and notes regarding the building and all of its contents remain the sole property of the owner. We expect you to keep the details of your survey work confidential. We’ll touch base when you get back.”

Liquor warmed her stomach as she staggered to her bedroom. She peeled off her clothes and threw them into an overflowing trash can. Sitting on the floor of her bathtub, she let the hot water run down her face until it ran cold. Every time she closed her eyes, all she could see were flies.

Three hours later, Iris still couldn’t relax, even after three more shots, fifteen cigarettes, and four sitcom reruns. Her hands twitched. Her thoughts swayed unsteadily from the flies to the detective’s voice to the stolen keys in her field bag. Detective McDonnell had said his sister had gone missing. His sister was Max.

She set the bottle of vodka down and stumbled out of her kitchen. Unpacked boxes still littered her living room floor. The cupboards and drawers and closets of her new apartment were empty. All she’d managed to unpack so far was a coffee mug, a spoon, and a shot glass. Pathetic.

She plopped herself down in front of the closest box and tore off the tape. Plates, glasses, silverware, cleaning supplies, and books spilled out as she opened box after box. She couldn’t see the floor between the piles of this and that, but there was no sign of it anywhere. Beatrice’s folder was gone. She tried to remember packing it, but her thoughts spun out of her reach. The mess around her seemed to spin too. She had to get away from it. She hauled herself up from the floor and held on to the wall all the way back to her bedroom.

TV reruns, couch, vodka, crackers, sleep, and nightmares. The next few days were a blur. The only calls were from her mother, and Iris didn’t pick up the phone. She knew if she did she would cry, and her mother would come running. Ellie didn’t call, but Ellie never did. She wasn’t a phone-call kind of friend. Nick didn’t call—not even after Monday morning came and went and he’d no doubt heard about what happened. Iris didn’t leave the house. She stayed in her pajamas and only got up to use the bathroom. Her guts coiled in knots as nagging thoughts kept clawing through her drunken haze. She still had the keys. Someone might still be looking for her. She’d lied by omission to a police detective. The only way she was able to sleep at night was by passing out cold.

Tuesday morning she opened her eyes to an overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle. A rustling sound had woken her. She heard it again—scratching and crinkling papers. She sat up from the couch with a start. The room wobbled, and she grabbed the armrest to make it stop. The sound was coming from the kitchen. She swallowed the acid in her throat and picked her way toward the noise.

“Hello?” she croaked.

The sound stopped abruptly. Her heart thumped against her weak stomach as she rounded the corner and peeked into the kitchen. No one was there. Jesus. She had to stop drinking; her imagination was running amok. She pressed her forehead to the wall. As she did, she caught sight of a tiny brown mouse scurrying across the kitchen floor toward her. She leapt away from the wall with a shriek and fell over a box.

The kitchen counter was strewn with paper plates and garbage. It was no wonder. The floor was still covered with her unpacked shit. The Friday night sex sheets were still on her bed. Her clothes were piled in disorganized heaps all over her bedroom floor. The walls began to sway. She felt her way into the bathroom and threw up.

An hour later, Iris staggered into her bedroom, stripped the sheets off of the bed, and laid them on the floor. She piled all of her dirty laundry into the middle and wrapped up the whole mess and threw it over her shoulder. She grabbed a fistful of quarters and marched off to the corner coin laundry in her sweatpants.