Read Audrey’s Door for Free Online Page B

read, NO MOVING ON SUNDAYS! that she wasn’t supposed to move in on a Sunday.
    He nodded. “I know, Mizus Lucas. Fourteen B. They tell me. It’s in the schedule.”
    She cocked her head. The owner? The co-op board who’d approved her application? “Did Edgardo tell you I was moving in?” she asked.
    “Edgardo no work here no more,” he said, then smiled at her and went back to reading Borges’ Labyrinths in French.
    “Where’d he go?” She was holding her cactus so its dirt didn’t spill.
    He shook his head, then returned to his book. Either they were divided by a language barrier, or else he was done talking and had decided to erect an imaginary language barrier. She moved on.
    As she rode up the elevator, she noticed that the floors had all been cleaned, and the powdery hotel scent of Love My Carpet wafted through the iron bars. The only remaining evidence of a party on the seventh floor was the cigarette burns—perfectly round circles of black branded into a beige carpet. The ninth floor was still empty, but someone had hammered drywall over the plaster holes where the copper had been torn. The job looked hastily done, or else in keeping with the architecture: none of the boards were level.
    She keyed herself into 14B and put down her suitcase. The ceilings were even higher than she’d remembered, and the fifty-foot hall was more cavernous. She pictured herself waking up at night and getting lost, so she took a deep breath and reminded herself that big was good.
    Carrying her cactus, she walked down the hall and opened doors, one after the next. First, the small bedroom. A child’s room, she guessed. Where the drowned ones had slept.
    After signing the lease, she’d been foolish and had researched Clara DeLea. A divorced has-been opera diva. Worse than a has-been; an almost been. Big, beautiful, and full of temper, her drinking got the better of her and City Opera fired her. The low point in her life transformed her. She checked into rehab and became a new, more generous woman. A few months after her release, she met and married her lawyer husband at Betty Ford. They had four dewy-eyed kids aged ten, eight, five, and two. Their life was suburban perfection—a picket fence, good schools, nice neighbors, a short commute to the city. They grew apart.The divorce got ugly. She accused him of cheating. He accused her of beating the children and giving the infant brain damage. At two years of age, Deirdre Caputo had still not spoken a single word. Her eyes, which had once focused on objects dangling in front of her (mobiles, human faces, her own fingers), became glazed. When the change in her behavior was proven in court, and her concussions linked to the dull handle of a metal spatula, Richard wound up with custody.
    Clara and her kids had only lived in 14B for fifteen days before the tragedy, but in that short time, she’d managed to start drinking after more than a decade of sobriety. The Daily News posted one of the last family photos of the Caputo/DeLea family in its online archive. The father was absent, possibly because he’d snapped the picture. The kids, dressed in red-and-green finery, had stood next to the fake, white Christmas tree. Eldest Keith had cradled glassy-eyed baby Deirdre in his arms. The child’s gaze had been eerily vacant, her pupils so dilated they’d appeared black. Beside them had been the second oldest, Olivia, with her hands fixed on toddler Kurt’s shoulders. They’d formed their own family while, several feet behind them, Clara DeLea had lurked. She’d grown sloppy and obese, wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses and blue sweats.
    Normally, Audrey might have wondered about Clara—whether the woman had suffered, was sick in the head, had some kind of reason for what she’d done. But looking at this miserable, lurking thing that had glowered behind those four innocents, all she’d seen was a monster.
    Now, Audrey’s eyes adjusted to the bright October light as it shone across