“Married.” I took a mug and we sat.
“The good ones always are. Tim said I should tell you everything. They mostly wanted to know about the other developer and Neighbors United. I kept telling them it was his plans that caused the problems, not Maddie’s, but I’m not sure I was very clear.”
“So who was he? And what was it about his plans that the neighbors didn’t like?” I took a sip. The same rich, dark roast I’d had in the coffee house on Twenty-Fourth.
“You know, mostly you know the other people in the business, right? You’re looking at the same jobs, hiring the same subs. But this guy was new on the scene. His name was Jake Byrd, with a Y, doing business as Byrd’s Nest, LLC. With a Y.”
“Cute,” I said. Finally, a first name for the man.
“I thought it was dumb.” She bit into a lemon coriander crescent. “Oh, wow.”
Wait until the baker started using my spices.
“Isn’t that common, though?” I asked. “When I bought my loft, I dealt with an LLC named for the location, Western and Union. All it did was that project—the construction work, the legal stuff, sales. I assume the owners form a new entity for every project, so if one fails or gets into trouble, it won’t take everything else they’re working on down with it.”
“You’re right, that is common, especially if you work on a lot of projects at a time. Maddie never did it that way, though. She says the Petrosian name is her selling point, and she wants it front and center. Except this one time.” Her hand shook as she picked up her mug. “They shot her. How messed up is that?”
“What do you mean, except this one time?”
She exhaled and set her mug back on the stone coaster without having taken a sip. “Okay, so his project was called Byrd’s Nest. Giving you this cozy sense, right, except that his designs weren’t cozy at all.” She reached for another cookie. “When is this bakery opening?”
“Halloween. That’s the goal, anyway.” I had my doubts. This was the baker’s first business venture and her ducks were all over the pond. “You were saying, Byrd’s Nest. With a Y.”
“Yeah, so Maddie decided to try to buy the rest of the build-ings—you know she owns most of the block, right? Except the coffeehouse, which she might as well own, she goes there so often.”
Jess might not look like her sister, but they shared one trait. They took their sweet time getting to the point.
“Let me get the file. You’ll see.” A minute later, she returned with two manila folders, one thick, one thin. She handed me the fat file and sat.
I opened the folder. An entity called Bird’s Nest, LLC, with an I, had signed a buy-sell for the corner property. The transaction had closed a few weeks ago.
I felt my brain tilt. No doubt it showed. “I saw Bird’s Nest, with an I, listed on the state website. But—ohhh. You’re Jessica Somers, the registered agent.” I hadn’t made the connection; her sister uses a married name.
Jess cocked her head toward Maddie’s office. “But the company owns everything.”
“Didn’t Byrd already own the place?”
“No. Maddie discovered that he only had an option. He was working on financing, putting his plans together. He had a real estate agent on board—you’ve gotta think about marketing right from the start. Although she acted like she was in charge, from what I heard. I guess this was his first big project.”
“Was the agent Deanna Ellingson?”
“Yeah. Lining stuff up in advance was smart. That way, when the owner was finally ready to sell, they’d be ready to go.”
I leaned forward. “Then Maddie came in with a more attractive offer and outbid him. But why form an LLC with a similar name? She bought the other buildings as Petrosian Properties. Or at least, that’s how she bought the insurance agency building—I saw the name when I looked up the sale. Why the subterfuge?”
Jess gave me a patient look, and the pieces began to fall into place.
Why, though, had Maddie needed to hide her identity from the seller?
“The neighbors hated Byrd’s project because it was so out of scale,” Jess said. “Not neighborhood-y at all, if you know what I mean.”
“Too big? Modern architecture instead of the traditional style?”
“Which is okay in a built-up area. You put a building like that on a major commercial street, it fits right in. There’s more going on, more variety. But in a single block where everything evokes a certain era . . .”
I knew what she meant. Last summer, my mother and I visited a cohousing community a few blocks off Broadway. It was the modern, boxy, mixed-material style, but all super-groovy, eco-friendly, with communal dining and a rooftop garden. We’d both loved it. It didn’t seem out of place, because the area around it had become so delightfully mixed. But put that same four-story building on the corner where Gregorian and Son once stood, the only commercial block for miles, and you might as well put a Taco Bell on the moon.
Jess opened the slender file and shuffled through a short stack of color renderings. All appeared to show similar images, though some had more text and others included photos of faces I couldn’t see well. She handed me a page labeled “The Byrd’s Nest, Contemporary Mixed-use in a Traditional Setting.” Tradition, shmission. The sketch looked like a Taco Bell with too much hot sauce, minus the good taste. Five stories, gray and orange, with red-railed balconies so narrow my veranda was a ballroom in comparison. It filled the corner—zero lot line, if I remembered the builder-speak. As Jess had said,
