Lussi spent the rest of her Friday night with Cal in the ER. Diagnosis: fractured tibia, bruised ribs, concussion. Cal had no memory of the accident, but he’d been lying there in pain for hours, unable to move under the weight of the slush pile. There wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world to cleanse her mind’s eye of the image of his white shinbone poking through the skin.
“I’m sorry you got hurt on your first day, Cal,” she said, holding his hand until his parents arrived. “I shouldn’t have asked you to get the manuscripts when I knew the basement was in such bad shape.”
“Tha’s okay,” Cal said through a haze of sedatives. “I’s not your fault. Coulda…coulda happened to anyone.”
But was that true? Lussi had been down in that basement twice now. Both times, something strange had happened. What happened to Cal went beyond hazing—well beyond. Thankfully, all signs pointed to it being an accident. She sure as hell didn’t believe in ghosts, but something weird was happening in that basement.
Lussi had planned to come in on the weekend to catch up on submissions. Not now. She needed a break from the building. She also needed to seriously think about whether she should go back on Monday. Maybe Blackwood-Patterson wasn’t the place for her after all. Money and cool-ass gothic building be damned.
By the time Monday morning rolled around, however, Lussi found herself getting up, getting dressed, and boarding the ferry. She emerged from the subway onto the streets of the East Village an hour later. She couldn’t give up so soon. Once more into the fray.
A light snow was falling. First of the season. The sidewalks were a wet, slushy mess. The temperature was hovering right around freezing, where it would stay all day, according to Spencer Christian. Lussi hugged her handbag tight as she navigated the rush-hour pedestrian traffic. She was running a few minutes late. Whenever she was behind, it seemed like she was the only one walking with any sense of purpose.
Half the buildings along her two-block route were boarded up with graffiti-covered plywood. It was a tiny detail Lussi had missed the Monday she’d interviewed with Mr. Blackwood. When she was on a mission, she could be dangerously oblivious to the outside world. Someday, she was going to make the front page of the Post for falling into an open manhole and getting eaten by a sewer gator.
A towering Black man in a fedora and wool trench coat stepped out from behind a stoop as she passed by. He jogged to catch up to her. “Ms. Meyer? Excuse me, Ms. Meyer?”
Something about him was familiar. Lussi slowed. “Sorry, do I know you?”
“Peter Faber,” he said, holding up an open wallet, showing off a brass badge. She stopped to look at it. She only got a quick peek before he snapped his wallet closed. “OSHA inspector. I was hoping we could chat.”
He certainly sounded the part of authority, though he didn’t look much older than her. “OSHA? Like the posters-in-break-rooms OSHA?”
“That’s us,” he said with a deep laugh. “Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It’s a little cold out here, though. Why don’t you let me buy you a coffee? There’s a Greek diner just around the corner—”
“If this is about Cal, you’ll need to speak with my boss. I’m just an editor.” She paused. “Senior editor. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“Cal?” he asked, blocking her again as she tried to round him. “Who’s Cal?”
She ran her tongue over her front teeth. She could feel something stuck there, a piece of oatmeal from breakfast. “I’m sorry, what’s this about again?”
“Every workplace injury is required, by law, to be filed with OSHA. Employers must notify OSHA when an employee is hospitalized or killed on the job. Also, when there’s an accidental amputation or optectomy.”
“Opt…”
He pointed one gloved finger to his eye.
“Oh,” she said.
“There’s been a string of accidents at Blackwood-Patterson,” Peter said. “We have documents dating back to the early seventies. Possibly, what’s been happening dates back earlier—that’s just when filing requirements were put into place. What we have on file, though, has raised some eyebrows around the office.”
She realized where she’d seen him before. Across the street, in Tompkins Square Park last week. Watching her. Or was she imagining that? Two-way traffic passed them on Avenue A at breakneck speed. She’d about had enough of his questions.
“I’m afraid I only started last week,” she told him. “I don’t see how I could help you with old reports. My boss just started, too—there was some…turnover at the top.”
“Xavier Blackwood. Heart attack. I read the obit in the Times.”
“His secretary is gone, too. Quit last week. I’m sure somebody at the office would be able to help you, though. If you want to follow me…”
He looked her in the eyes. His gaze was colder than the winter wind. “There’s a reason I didn’t want to meet at your office. I didn’t wait out here for the past hour to ask for your help,” he said. He handed her a business card. “I’m here to warn you. I believe your life may be in danger.”
Lussi slipped through the great iron doorway and shut the door with all her weight. Her breathing was heavy. A lump had formed in her throat, and she couldn’t get rid of it. She badly needed something to drink.
“Everything okay, Lussi?” Gail asked.
Life was beginning to return to Lussi’s frozen cheeks. After the OSHA inspector had told her to be careful, she’d run toward the building. Mr. Blackwood died of a heart attack. Perfectly natural—she’d witnessed it herself. Even Cal’s injuries weren’t suspicious. She didn’t know what other incidents had occurred over the years, but the workforce was old. The building was old. Fabien had been right when he’d called it a nursing home.
“There was a man…” Lussi’s voice trailed off. She pulled the business card from her pocket. It wasn’t Peter’s—this was for a religion editor at Random House. She turned her pockets inside out, but all she found was an old movie ticket stub. Must have dropped the man’s card. “It was nothing. Probably.”
From underneath her desk, Gail pulled out an impossibly large handgun. It gleamed silver, with black accents. It was the length of Lussi’s forearm and as thick as her wrist. A scope was mounted on a top rail.
“I keep this holstered underneath here,” Gail said, setting it on her desk to let Lussi have a look at it. “A .357 Magnum, semiautomatic pistol with a nine-round capacity. Telescopic sight with red-dot optics. They call it the Desert Eagle.”
“It’s not for deer hunting, I take it.”
“Heavens, no. There wouldn’t be anything left to mount on your wall.”
Lussi started for the stairs, then paused. “Do I need to fill out any paperwork for Cal’s injury? At my last job, if there was an injury…”
Gail was busy wiping down her gun with a rag. “An OSHA report needs to be filed within twenty-four hours. I faxed it over Saturday morning. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“You’re sure?”
Gail trained her gun at the Christmas tree, squinting to see through the scope. “Trust me, it’s all routine. You need to understand, this is an old building. Accidents happen. Nothing too serious. We’re covered by insurance.”
“What about Frederick?”
An eardrum-bursting thunderclap rocked the building. Lussi shrieked—or at least she thought she did; all she could hear was the ringing in her ears. The glass angel tree-topper lay in glittering pieces on the floor of the lobby. The bullet had practically turned it back into sand.
“Do we need to report that?” Lussi asked. Her voice sounded distant, underwater.
“N-no,” Gail said, the Desert Eagle shaking in her hands. “I’ll cl-clean it up.”
Several of the staff had rushed to the balustrade in the interim. They were already beginning to file back to their offices, apparently having lost interest once they’d seen nobody had been grievously wounded. Suddenly, Lussi didn’t feel quite so safe inside the Blackwood Building. She wasn’t sure she was safe outside, either. If this Peter Faber was really an OSHA inspector, wouldn’t he have known about Cal’s accident? Unless Gail didn’t file it, Lussi thought to herself as she walked up the spiral staircase to her office. She looked at the iron bars on the windows. For the first time, she wondered who the iron bars were really there to protect. Were the barbarians outside the gates, or inside?