Part 6
The air inside 412 Maple Street was dead.
It didn't move; it just sat there, thick with the smell of wet plaster, pigeon droppings, and fifty years of undisturbed cold.
Clara had squeezed through the gap in the plywood door, tearing the sleeve of her coat on a rusted nail, but she barely felt it. She stood on the rotting floorboards of what had once been a commercial laundry, the moonlight filtering through the dirty transoms above, casting long, pale rectangles across the floor.
"Teresa?" Clara called out. Her voice was barely a whisper, but it sounded like a gunshot in the empty space.
No answer. Only the distant sound of traffic on the avenue and the steady drip-drip-drip of water somewhere in the back.
Clara pulled out her phone, using the flashlight to guide her feet. The floor was littered with fallen plaster, broken glass, and old laundry tags that had turned to grey pulp. She walked toward the rear of the building, where a set of wooden stairs led up to a small mezzanine office.
The stairs groaned under her weight, each step a distinct, terrifying snap of old wood.
At the top of the stairs, the door to the office was missing, its hinges rusted through. Inside, there was nothing but an old metal desk with its drawers ripped out and a pile of moldering blankets in the corner.
The blankets moved.
Clara froze, her flashlight beam shaking as she pinned it on the corner.
A face emerged from the rags. It was the woman from the diner. In the harsh white light of the flashlight, she looked older than she had the day before—her skin translucent, her eyes sunken deep into her skull. She didn't flinch from the light. She just looked at Clara with a dull, exhausted resignation.
"I don't have the money," the woman said. Her English was clear, though her voice had the dry, raspy quality of someone who hadn't used it in weeks. "Eddie’s dead. Tell Lou I don't have it. I never had it."
Clara lowered the light slightly so it wasn't directly in the woman’s eyes. "Lou didn't send me," she said softly.
The woman blinked, her gaze moving down Clara’s coat, then up to her face. She squinted, her expression shifting from fear to a sudden, sharp confusion. She leaned forward, the old blankets rustling around her thin shoulders.
"Ruthie?" she whispered.
"I'm Clara," she said, her voice cracking. "Ruth was my grandmother."
Teresa pulled her hands out from beneath the blankets. They were thin, the skin like parchment, shaking violently. She reached out toward Clara, then dropped her hands back into her lap, as if she didn't have the right to touch her.
"Clara," Teresa repeated, the name tasting strange in her mouth. "You have her eyes. The same... the same way she looks when she’s about to tell a lie to save someone."
Clara stepped into the room, kneeling on the dusty floorboards a few feet away from the old woman. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the silver coin purse, setting it on the floor between them.
Teresa looked down at it. A single, heavy tear leaked from her eye, tracing a clean path through the grime on her cheek.
"She kept it," Teresa said.
May you like
"I found it in the booth," Clara said. "Why did you come back, Teresa? Why now?"
"Because I'm dying, child," Teresa said simply. She leaned her head back against the brick wall. "And I couldn't go to the grave leaving Ruthie’s girl with a debt she doesn't owe to a man who stole everything we built."
