The motion-sensor alarm that had been attached to the balcony was still shrieking when Danielle and Simeon returned to their third-floor condo. It was casting its blinking-red warning across that gap and seeming to say, This is too great a temptation for a five-year-old boy.
She silenced the device and took stock of the damage by poking her head out through the opening. Someone had retrieved the balcony platform from the water and hauled it up onto the floating dock. Rain began to dot the dock and tap the metal wreckage with a minor tone. Beneath her feet was a sheer drop to Ferti’s once-identical balcony. The brackets that had attached Danielle’s to the building were distended and straining at the screws. One had ripped out and left a jagged scar.
Danielle drew a sharp breath and retreated into her bedroom, listening for Simeon, wishing she had a sixth sense that would give her his exact location at all times, from now through his young adulthood and possibly beyond. A maternal GPS. She heard Legos being poured out of a box in his bedroom and felt relieved.
The slider was jammed, firmly stuck in the half-open position it had been in after she and Simeon passed through. The only real danger was that passage about two feet wide where the curtain played a breezy peek-a-boo with the sky.
She needed a way to block it.
If Tony were here, he would pull his phone out of his breast pocket and summon someone to make the breach vanish. If Vance were here, he would assess the problem, leave, and return with materials to do the job. But both men were occupied with more urgent matters. She would have to figure out a temporary solution on her own.
The tall bamboo bookcase in her living room looked to be about the right size for a blockade. She guessed it to be about seven feet, high enough to prevent birds from getting in and children from getting out. While she quickly unloaded the case of its knickknacks, she called Simeon away from his toys and put him in charge of the books.
“Make a path of books that leads to your bed,” she instructed. “Let’s pretend those are the only safe place for you to step in the whole apartment.”
“It’s like the whole place is hot lava!”
“We’ve had an eruption, have we?”
“Like the one on Laith’s TV!”
Danielle didn’t want to know. “And you have bare feet.”
“S’okay. I’ll make a path for you too.” Simeon threw down a paperback and balanced on it like a flamingo. He wobbled.
“Sorry, no books allowed in my room. But don’t worry about me. I’m wearing my special fireproof shoes.”
“If your toes start to melt, come find me. My bed’s a lava-proof rescue boat!”
“I’ll give you a shout if I need rescuing, ’kay? Right now I’m going to move this to block more lava from coming in. You should save your toys while you can.”
Within minutes Simeon was safely occupied arranging and rearranging the stepping-stone books, making paths to his various toys and transporting them to the rescue-boat bed in his room.
When the case was empty, Danielle tilted it forward to rest on the matching coffee table between it and the sofa. With any luck, she wouldn’t scratch up Tony’s things. Then she took the flat sheet off her bed, folded it in half, and laid it on the floor where the case had been standing. When she righted the unit, it stood on top of the sheet. Picking up the linen tail, she was able to drag the bookshelf rather easily across the room and through the partitions that formed the narrow bedroom hallway.
The hall entry was open to the roof, and Danielle didn’t even think about the bedroom door frames until the shelving unit was right in front of her door. It was too tall to go through.
Sidling around the bookcase, she grabbed the sides and pulled it toward her, tipping it onto its long end. It wasn’t heavy, and the sheet underneath made it easy enough to push the unit into her room. But halfway through, the bookcase struck the end of her bed.
Danielle set the whole thing down and assessed the problem. The doorway and the position of the furniture didn’t allow enough room for her to turn the case. And she wasn’t far enough into the room to tilt the bookcase upright. Every angle and corner conspired against her. She needed someone inside the room to lift this thing up over the mattress. Or, lacking such a person, she would have to move the mattress.
“This is why I don’t give myself much credit for competence, Ferti,” Danielle mumbled.
“Can I help?” Simeon asked from the other end of the hall.
“Stay in your room,” Danielle snapped.
Her tone was sharper than she intended, and she turned around to apologize. But Simeon already had shrunk out of sight. She might have felt less guilty if he’d argued with her. She turned to go to him, to say she was sorry and explain what she was trying to do.
“Give you a hand?” someone said.
Surprised, Danielle pulled up and took a detour out of the hallway. On the other side of the main living space, a businessman stood at her front door, which tended to yawn if she didn’t close it hard enough for the latch to fully engage.
The intrusion should have alarmed her. The man’s football-player physique, which blocked her only exit, should have sent her memory banks into a review of every self-defense class she’d ever taken. Instead, her panic slept like a dog in the sun. He was familiar in a pleasant way. And a dreadful way. The thickness of his hair with the swirling curl at the crown, the way his ears stuck out just so, the slightly bowed legs—they could have belonged to her dead husband.
A buried grief thrust a fist through her heart. Because it wasn’t Danny at all, of course, but the man who’d arrived with Tony and Carver.
“Will you let me help you?” he repeated.
How could he possibly know what she was trying to do? He couldn’t see the hallway or bedroom from where he stood. As much as she needed help, she wasn’t about to let a stranger into her bedroom.
“No. No thanks,” she said. “I’ve got this.”
“I guess you do. I’m Ranier Smith.”
“Oh.”
She had to think through the meaning of this. Ranier Smith—the prospective buyer she had been scheduled to meet earlier in a not-so-coincidental encounter. Why was he here, at her unit, instead of at one of the vacant condos with a real estate agent? And why had he come with Tony and Carver? And why had Tony given her this appointment if he’d planned to come himself? Her quick mind was sidelined.
She cautiously stepped out of the hallway and extended a hand.
“Danielle Clement.”
She met his grip, noticing the brilliant silver cuff links. They were fashioned of strange silver pieces unlike any silver she had seen, coarse instead of polished, lumpy instead of smooth. They were the size of marbles and looked like balls of clipped threads, like something the seamstress Ferti might gather up off her studio floor.
“They’re a rare type of native silver,” he said, as if to explain them in terms she’d understand. Perhaps if she’d been a real art broker she would have. But she had no idea what native silver was, compared to the regular stuff. And she was embarrassed to have been caught staring.
He smelled like saltwater, out of place in this river setting. His hand was callused and dry. It was the hand of a laborer, and quite different from her late husband’s. This hand reminded her of Vance’s encircling her entire arm in his rough fingers, holding her out of the water.
“You’re a sculptor?” she blurted without thinking. It was information from the file Tony had given to her. But he didn’t seem surprised that she knew.
“What gave me away?”
Not the cuff links, for sure. She gestured to his hands.
Ranier nodded. “I work a lot with clay. Dries out my skin.” He looked around at the art hanging on her walls, each piece properly displayed with just the right size frame on just the right size walls with just the right kind of spotlight. There were some bronze pieces on a table next to the entryway. Tony had initially put blown glass there until she insisted he replace it with something more childproof.
The man said, “And you’re a mom.”
This was not what she had expected his assessment to be. She quickly scanned the living room, but except for a few of the books on the floor, all evidence of Simeon was relegated to the bedroom.
He continued, “And an . . .”
“Art broker,” she provided.
He regarded her with what seemed like wariness.
“I was going to say executive assistant.”
His accurate guess changed the tone of their encounter. Danielle heard judgment in his tone, and suddenly she felt angry with Tony for not telling her everything she needed to know about Ranier Smith’s arrival.
She took a step away from him and crossed her arms.
“Was there something you needed?” she asked.
“Yes, actually. I was asked to bring you a message.”
“I thought you were . . . here to see the condos.”
“Why would you think that?” he asked.
Why indeed?
“I, uh, saw you come in with Tony earlier.”
“I actually came on my own, just to deliver a word.”
A word?
The man reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a phone. He summoned the communication with several gentle taps of his forefinger on the screen. In a moment he began to read: “A message from the Living One who holds the keys of Death, to Danielle Clement, who will be judged.”
What? Danielle forgot the bookcase, forgot the hole in her home that exposed her to the elements.
Ranier continued to read, “You say you are strong but you are weak. You say you can see but you are blind. You say you are rich but you have nothing to call your own, not even a white dress to cover your shame. What will come must happen, but you need not be afraid if you open your eyes to see. Strengthen yourself with genuine love. Invest yourself in true riches. Free yourself from selfishness. Then may you find mercy.”
This man was no sculptor, no prospective buyer. He was a handsome, smooth-tongued freak. For a moment her thoughts were confused. She was offended. She was frightened. She was ticked off.
Ranier turned off his device and seemed to be waiting for her.
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“I think you know.”
She didn’t. Her mind was on white dress and shame. Whoever came up with that must know about her and Tony. But who would care? And who would dare accuse her of anything after all the losses she’d faced, and all she’d sacrificed to meet her son’s needs? Weak! Blind! Poor!
“How could you? How could anyone . . . Why would you say something like that to me? You don’t even know me.”
“The Living One who—”
Danielle held up her hand. “Are you from a cult?”
“No, I come from God.”
“Please leave.”
“The Living God would like to free you from selfishness.”
He was certifiable.
“Yes, well, the Living God isn’t on my list of favorite people right now. What does he know about selfishness? He killed my husband and abandoned me to fend for myself.”
“God didn’t kill Danny. And he didn’t abandon you.”
Danielle balked. How did he know Danny’s name? Had Tony mentioned it?
“Let me give you a tip on how to be more convincing, Mr. Smith: don’t put judgment and love in the same sentence.”
“This isn’t judgment, Danielle. Not yet.”
“Then what is it? The Living One who holds the keys to death? What’s he doing with those?”
“I don’t think you have heard the words correctly.”
You are weak. You are blind. You have nothing to call your own. What was there to misunderstand?
“Danielle, you don’t have much time.”
“Go. Get out.”
Ranier hardly seemed eager to escape her.
“I have a copy.” He reached into his opposite breast pocket and this time emerged with a sealed white envelope, which he placed on the edge of the kitchen counter. She pretended not to notice.
Danielle decided not to say anything more. Keeping silent was, in her experience, the best way to get a person to leave. She could tolerate awkwardness longer than any person she had ever met.
Simeon arrived in the room by book, which carried him across the glossy cork floor like a surfboard. Danielle stepped between him and Ranier.
“Back to the lifeboat for a second, kiddo.”
“It’s not a lifeboat, it’s a rescue—Hey!” Simeon had noticed Ranier. “How’d you get dry so fast? My hair’s still wet.”
Danielle didn’t understand what her son was saying.
“It’s a cool trick I know,” Ranier said to her son. How could those same lips that had just judged her form a smile so affectionate, so like the boy’s father? “Maybe I’ll teach it to you.”
“I’m supposed to stay in my room,” Simeon announced, making Danielle suddenly feel small and ashamed and completely ineffective as a parent.
Simeon got off the book and walked around his mother, straight for Ranier. She reached out for his arm but he slipped through her fingers.
“If you’re up here,” Simeon asked, “who is holding up our house?”
All of Danielle’s thoughts went to illogical explanations, impossible scenarios.
Ranier Smith lowered himself to one knee and put himself at Simeon’s eye level. “Don’t worry about that. For the next few days, this house is going to be the safest place you can be.”
“Cool,” Simeon said. “I like those.” He pointed to the shimmering cuff links, and Ranier allowed the boy to touch one. “They’re weird.”
“They’re native silver,” Ranier said. “Would you like to have one?”
“No,” said Danielle.
Ranier slipped the expensive accessory out of the button hole.
“No,” Danielle repeated.
Simeon took it from Ranier’s fingers as if they were boys sharing jawbreakers. “Thanks. I gotta get back to my lava-proof rescue boat.”
“Good idea.”
The boy made crazy jumps across the lava and back to his books, saying “Ow! Ow! Ow!” with each leap. He held the cuff link high over his head in his left hand. Impossibly, it gave off light. It was an illusion caused by the weakening sun filtered through skylights, but the silver seemed to glow with its own radiance.
“I don’t like people who won’t respect my requests,” Danielle said in low tones after Simeon was back in his room.
“Neither do I.”
Ranier left her, pulling the front door closed behind him. Two seconds later she heard a puff of air in the outer hall, the shifting atmosphere of another door opening and closing somewhere else in the building. Her door latch, which had failed to catch, grazed the metal plate and glided wide open again, leaving her feeling dangerously exposed.
She went to it quickly, slammed the door hard, and locked it this time, threw the dead bolt. Then she rushed to her window that overlooked the peninsula. Hidden by the curtain and the rain pelting the glass at her living room window, Danielle could be certain that Ranier left her building. He did, in about the time it took him to descend the stairs to the main level. He crossed the canopy-covered gangway. He walked up the sloping shoreline onto higher ground.
She had the odd idea that Tony was behind the man’s visit. But why? If he was, the crazy letter would make even less sense.
It seemed strange that Ranier didn’t try to protect his expensive clothing from the wetness. He strode with an unnaturally erect posture down the peninsula at a diagonal, his open cuff protruding from his jacket sleeve. Then he stepped off the side of the road and went down the opposite embankment, his head up and his steps confident, until he disappeared and she could no longer see him. She waited.
Water began to ripple over the glass now, an ocean of currents rather than a forest of drops. The once-golden afternoon was thick with grayness. This might be the storm that tested the integrity of the engineers’ and the architects’ work.
If Ranier had been a true buyer, standing with her under the shelter of an overhang as the rain came down, expressing this very concern, she would have had a dozen assurances about the soundness of the buildings’ design. The floating foundations were not of the old bathtub design that might sink if a breach filled them. These were solid blocks of expanded polystyrene foam swathed in a tough polyethylene coating before being encased in concrete. The EPS foam was so light that it was unsinkable, and yet each cubic foot could buoy more than fifty pounds.
But Ranier was not a true buyer, he was a mystery. And he didn’t reappear.
A fork of lightning drove itself into the horizon and, even at that great distance, warned her away from the glass.
Danielle’s mind returned to the problem in her hallway, and she soothed her agitation with the decision to make room for the bookcase by moving the bed herself.
She turned her back to the window. She took long strides to the hallway but stopped when she saw, through the wide-open door of her bedroom, the bookshelf standing erect against the wall, blockading the damage.