Bedbugs

again, as if blocked by a hidden hand determined to keep it shut, to let no air into the stale and stagnant room.

“Crapola,” Susan muttered.

First the delightful fragrance of cat urine, now a defective window. Her mind ran to the separating floor boards on the second-floor landing and the spooky Door to Perdition under the front stoop. Anything else we overlooked? she thought bitterly. Railroad tracks running through the kitchen? Faucets spraying fire?

Susan stomped back to the kitchen for a wooden chair. She dragged it back down the long hallway, through the living room, and into the bonus room, feeling damp pockets of sweat open up in her armpits. She pushed the chair into place and climbed up to examine the window frame, not sure exactly what she was looking for. She saw what Andrea had meant about the windows being double-paned against the noise — there was a second pane of glass set in the window, separated by a thin millimeter of space from the frame. But did that explain the …

Oh. Here we go.

There was a thin gash dug into the wood at the top of the window. And buried in the wood, sticking up just enough to keep the window from kissing closed into the frame, was a folded piece of paper.

No, not a piece of paper. It was a photograph.

Susan dug the picture free from the wood and turned it over in her hand. It was a wallet-sized snapshot that had been folded over twice into a fat little square, like a middle-school crush note. She sat down on the chair and unfolded the photograph slowly, carefully tugging it loose from itself; the back, it seemed, had been coated with some sort of adhesive. When she had it open she forgot about getting the window open, forgot even about the foul reek of the room. She sat in the high-backed kitchen chair and gazed at the happy couple in the picture.

They were cuddled together in a red-curtained photo booth, the old-fashioned kind that was set up sometimes in movie theater lobbies or as a fun activity at a wedding reception. The man in the picture was short haired and goateed, sporting a fedora and a pair of those dark, horn-rimmed Elvis Costello — style glasses so favored by hipster dudes. He was planting a fat smooch on the woman’s cheek. She was pretty and pert nosed, wearing a teasing, sexy grin. Her hair was dyed a bold scarlet, with bangs slashed at a fashionable angle across her eyes.

Cute, thought Susan. She turned the picture over, looking for a date, or names, anything jotted on the back. She found instead that the adhesive coating the back of the picture was, in fact, dried blood, tiny bits of which flaked off in her hand. And, at the dead center, was the dark, crusted swirl of a bloody thumbprint.

* * *

“Hey, Andrea? Did the people who lived here before us have a cat?”

Andrea’s Scharfstein’s eyes went wide, and she stopped what she was doing, which was spooning sugar out of a powder-blue ceramic bowl into Susan’s mug.

“A cat?” she said at last, with an intensity that made Susan feel a little unsettled. Andrea’s hand trembled slightly as she returned the miniature spoon into the sugar bowl. “Why do you ask?”

Susan had only wanted to ask her question and get back upstairs, but Andrea had been so nakedly delighted at the unexpected visit that she decided a quick cup of tea wouldn’t kill her. Andrea sang lightly to herself as she moved slowly from living room to kitchen and back, preparing a tea service, fruit plate, and cookie tray.

“Can I help you?” Susan had asked, but Andrea had waved her off, relishing the role of hostess. “No, you sit, dear, you sit. I’m quite all right. Fine and dandy like sugar candy.”

Andrea’s apartment was laid out on the same blueprint as the first floor of Alex and Susan’s, with the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other, though it could not have been decorated more differently. Where Susan strove for a clean, modern, and uncluttered aesthetic, Andrea’s rooms were stuffed with oversized wooden furniture, tottering bookshelves, potted plants, and — in one corner of the living room — a glass case displaying a collection of hideous “ethnic” dolls. On the opposite wall, Andrea had hung vertical mirrors on either side of the air shaft; an effort, Susan suspected, to downplay the presence of the unusual, semi-industrial architectural feature. There was nothing, Susan mused, to indicate the influence of a second aesthetic, nothing to suggest that a man had ever lived here; she wondered when it was that the late great Howard had passed away.

Andrea’s eyes looked tired and rheumy as she raised her teacup to her lips, and Susan felt like she could see past the makeup and the bright clothes to Andrea’s real age, the fragility of a woman in her early or mid-seventies — and, chillingly, felt she could see past that, too, to the very old woman that Andrea would soon be: a few lank hairs clinging to an ancient scalp, the skin pulled taut around the skull.

“I’m sorry to say this,” Susan said. “But that small room behind the living room? The one you called the bonus room? It smells really bad. Like cat pee.”

“Cat pee.” Andrea exhaled heavily and placed a hand to her forehead. “It’s worse than that, Susan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am so sorry about this. I thought we had got that smell out, I really did.”

“Andrea?” It was like one of those old grosser-than-gross riddles from elementary school. What’s grosser than a room soaked in cat urine? Susan sipped from her steaming cup of tea and stared at Andrea, waiting for the answer.

“They were a young couple. The previous tenants, I mean. Jack and Jessica, though she went by Jessie. Sweet names, right? I liked to tease them about it, tell them it oughta be up in lights: Jack and Jessie! Jessie and Jack! In their twenties, I think, and not married. ‘Living in sin,’ we used to call it, not that it was any of my business.”

Susan thought of the photograph of the sweet kids, posing giddily for the camera. The picture was currently lying on her kitchen table, faceup.

“Jessica Spender was her name. His surname, I must say I never knew. She signed the lease and wrote the rent checks, too — again, not that it was any of my business. And they had a cat. It was the sweetest little thing, barely more than a kitten. Catastrophe, they called her. Catastrophe the cat.”

Susan smiled faintly at the name, sipped her tea. Naming a cat Catastrophe, a gesture at once mildly ironic and sweet, the hallmarks of the generation just younger than her own.

“Anyway, Jess and Jack were not to be, apparently. They seemed very loving to me, very happy, but I guess appearances can be deceiving, because one day Jack abruptly departed. As in, one morning he was just, you know, poof. Gone. And I found poor Jess on the stoop outside, crying and crying. I mean — she was — couldn’t even speak. It was really something.”

“Yikes.”

Andrea took a deep, ragged breath, coughed drily, and shook her head. “Well, before you get too sympathetic. Jessie left, too, shortly thereafter, stiffing yours truly for a month’s rent. Only reason I knew she was gone was because the check never showed up. A couple days I don’t mind, of course. Between you and me, I won’t starve. But two weeks, then it’s three weeks, it’s a problem. And you know, as the days go by, I don’t see her, I’m worried. So I knocked one day, then let myself in. And … ”

Andrea stopped, shaking her head with tight, birdlike jerks. A watery pain had entered her voice, and Susan leaned across the table and stroked the older woman’s rough, papery hand — all the while dying of curiosity.

“And …” she prompted.

“And the poor cat was dead in that little room. I guess, in her hurry to get out, Jessica had — had forgotten and closed that door … no food, or no water. And this was July, remember. It would get extremely hot in there with the air off and the window closed. The poor animal … ”

Andrea squeezed her eyes shut against the memory, and Susan found herself a bit choked up as well. Poor Catastrophe! Poor little kitten! How could anybody … God. People are horrible.

Andrea honked loudly in a napkin. “Anyway,” she said firmly, as if to clear the air of the unpleasantness. “Louis and I cleaned the area thoroughly, but I guess not thoroughly enough. I will certainly have him come up and take another pass.”

“That would be great. Whenever he gets a chance.”

“No, not ‘whenever he gets a chance,’ ” said Andrea, and then craned around, raising her voice. “Louis?”

“Just one moment,” came the booming reply. Susan, startled, half rose, looking around. The whole time