Undisturbed (2)

She started the second round at 1:54 and did the outdoor row first because it was worse and she wanted it behind her.

The cold had changed while she was inside. It had stopped being something in the air and become something in the ground, coming up through the soles of her boots at every step, and the gravel had gone hard and quiet under her. Unit fourteen's padlock sat exactly as it had at eleven. She looked at it and left it and wrote nothing new.

Building One took twenty-six minutes. Nothing had moved.

She let herself into Building Two at 2:31 and started with Row D, because Row C she had done first the last time and the man had told her not to make a pattern.

D-9 was eleven doors in on the left and the latch bar was up.

Not the lock. The lock was on the concrete, sitting on its side against the base of the door, the shackle still closed on itself, a chalky scrape on the housing where the key had gone in and out over years and nobody had ever oiled it. Somebody had opened it and set it down and not put it back. The bar hung off the staple at an angle.

She wrote the number and the time before she touched anything, because that is the order.

Then she set the flashlight on the floor with the beam against the door, took the handle in both hands, and lifted.

The door was heavier than the outdoor doors. It came up in two pulls and caught on the track. She raised the light.

Nine boxes, stacked three and three and three against the back wall, corners flush, the tape seams all running the same way. On the middle stack, folded, a jacket with a hood, the size a jacket is when the person in it comes up to somebody's hip. On the concrete beside the stack, a pair of rubber boots with a yellow band at the sole, set together, toes toward the door.

Dust lay over all of it, unbroken. It had rounded the corners of the boxes. It sat along the shoulders of the jacket and filled the grooves in the boot treads, and there was no print in it and no drag and no place a hand had been.

She did not step in.

The beam was coming back toward the floor when it caught something at the top edge of the light, and she raised it.

The inside face of the door had things taped to it, and the door was up now, so they hung above her and shifted a little in the air she had made. Four of them. The same sheet four times, photocopied from a photocopy, curled at the corners, the tape gone the colour tape goes.

A halftone photograph at the top. A boy in a collared shirt against a mottled background, the kind of picture a school takes in a gymnasium in October, his hair combed flat and one side of it already coming up. Under the photograph, one word in a face that had been copied so many times the letters had thickened and closed at the middle. Under that, a name.

She read it.

Two words. An ordinary first and an ordinary last. Under the name a date, and under the date a town she knew, forty minutes down the shore, with a highway sign and a gas station and a bar with a boat on the roof.

The date was nine years ago. The sheet said he was seven.

She had sixteen before she decided to work it out. It arrived the way the door count arrived, on its own, out of habit, and it sat there in the corridor being a number about somebody she had never met.

She read the name again to see if it would do anything the second time.

It did not.

She brought the beam down and put it on the floor of the corridor behind her, reached up and pulled the door until it seated, and picked the company lock up off the concrete. It went through the staple and through the bar. She closed it and turned the face out to match the row and put her thumb on the shackle and pressed until she felt it take.

She finished Row D. Then she did Row C, all fifty-seven doors, and at the fourth from the end she put her hand on the disc lock and turned it against the hasp, which took less than a second, and she did not stop. The brass padlock above it did not move either.

---

The office had the coffee in it still. She had known it would.

She sat down and squared the log to the desk edge and wrote the round and initialled it. Then she wrote D-9 company lock found off, refitted and outdoor 14 renter lock unsecured, no contact yet, and the second line was the one that needed something after it.

The file cabinet was against the wall by the window. Four drawers, unit numbers on the tabs, and the second drawer stuck at the same place every time until you lifted it half an inch.

She found fourteen and took the folder to the desk and copied the phone number onto the log and put it back.

D was in the third drawer. There was a line in the standing orders about renters being notified in writing when a lock was found off, and she had read the standing orders twice, and she opened the third drawer.

D-9 came out easily. She put it on the desk under the lamp.

A rental agreement, signed, dated ten years back and some months. A contact card with an address on the county road and a phone number in a different hand. An authorization for automatic payment out of a bank in Duluth, signed the same day as the agreement.

The payment sheet ran down the page in one column, the same amount on the same date of every month for ten years and some months, to the bottom of the first page and onto the second and the third. The last line on the third page was three weeks ago.

The notes field ran the width of the page. It had four lines on it and there was nothing on any of them.

She put the pages back in the order she had found them, squared them against the desk, and closed the folder, and slid it home in the drawer and pushed the drawer until it seated.

Then she stood in front of the cabinet with her hands at her sides.

There was nothing in the standing orders about the second drawer. There was nothing in the log that needed it. She had been giving herself a reason for every door she had opened all night and she went looking for one now and there was not one there.

She opened the second drawer and put two fingers on the tab and drew out C-24.

The green was still on her fingertips from the padlock and it came off faintly on the manila.

Her mother's name was on the agreement in her mother's hand. She had seen that signature on permission slips and on the backs of cheques and at the bottom of a note left on the counter about defrosting something, and the M at the front went up at the same hard angle here as it did there. The address was the house. The phone number was the house. The authorization was out of the credit union on Third, and it had been signed on a Tuesday, and Melissa knew what day of the week it had been because she could count backward from a thing she knew, and she did that now and got Tuesday and stopped.

The payment sheet ran the same as D-9's, in the same column, to the same depth. Ten years of the same figure. Nobody had ever missed it and nobody had ever changed it and nobody had ever called about it.

The notes field had one line on it. Renter lock on door. Somebody in the office had written it years ago so nobody would waste a trip.

She read the four empty lines under it.

She put the folder back. Then she stood with her hand on the drawer front and did not close it.

There were four drawers and she did not know how many folders. Two hundred, three hundred. The tabs went all the way to the back of each one and the last ones were bowed from the weight.

She pulled two, from different drawers, not looking at the numbers when she chose. One had gone to auction in 1994 and the paperwork was stapled at the top. The other was autodraft, eight years deep, an address on a township road, and four empty lines where the notes went.

She squared them and put them back where they had come from and pushed the drawer until it seated.

A hundred and nineteen doors in this building carried nothing but the company's lock. She had counted them without deciding what she wanted the number for, and she had it now, and there was no way to know which of them were which except by opening them.

---

She put her jacket on.

She zipped it and got the keys off the belt loop and held them so they did not make noise and stood by the office door with her hand not quite up to the latch.

Through the window the lot was flat and pale under the sodium light. Her truck sat by the fence with frost coming up on the hood, and past the truck the gate, and past the gate the county road, and it would take four minutes. Punch the code, wait for the arm, turn left. There was nobody to tell and nothing to sign and the office key would go through the slot in the door.

The log was open on the desk behind her. Ten o'clock, and the first round, and her initials. Twelve-oh-six and the second lot of initials. The round she had just finished, and the two lines under it about a lock and a padlock.

If she went now, the next thing written in that book would be somebody else's hand at six in the morning, and between it and hers there would be a space with nothing in it, and her initials on both sides of the space where anybody could see them.

The clock on the wall said 3:20.

She went back to the desk and sat down and wrote the entry for the round, and her block letters were the same as they had been at ten o'clock, because she made them the same.

Then she pulled the second drawer open again and took out the small key lying loose at the front of it under the folders, brass, with a tag on it in the same hand as the note about the renter lock.

SHED.

She opened the desk drawer and took the roll of clear tape out of it and put it in her jacket pocket.

---

The shed was on the north side past the end of the outdoor row and it had a hasp and a padlock that was not the company's. The key went in stiff and she worked it and it turned.

Inside, the cold was different. It had oil in it, and cut metal, and the sweetish thing that comes off a bag of fertilizer left open a season. She found a pull chain by feel. The bulb came on yellow and did not so much light the shed as show her where things were.

A pegboard ran the length of the workbench with the outlines of tools painted on it and most of the tools in the wrong outlines. The bolt cutters hung in their own outline, which was the only thing on the whole board that was where it was supposed to be. They came off the hooks heavier than she had expected and she had to change her grip twice before she had them, and the jaws swung and knocked the vise and rang.

An inventory sheet was taped to the inside of the door, curling, a column of tool names and a column of dates. Somebody had signed out a post-hole digger in June and not signed it back in.

She looked at it for a while. Then she pulled the chain and put the shed in the dark and let herself out and set the padlock back through the hasp and pressed it until it clicked.

The cutters hung from her right hand and pulled her shoulder down on that side. She went along the outdoor row with them, past unit fourteen, past the end of the fence. The frost had come up across the whole lot now and she was putting her boots into it and leaving a line of black behind her that anybody could follow to the door.

 

To Be Continued...