Read Bedbugs for Free Online Page B

5:42. Susan unplugged the baby monitor from the bedside table and took it downstairs, certain she was up for the day.

5.
    Susan did not meet the “nice gentleman” who acted as Andrea’s unofficial, part-time maintenance man until Wednesday afternoon.
    It was a little after one, and Susan was returning from yet another epic morning of errands when she turned off Henry Street onto Cranberry and heard the panicked, terrified wailing of a child. Her heart lurched in her chest—
Emma
—and she burst into a panicked sprint, the heavy plastic-sheathed bulk of the dry cleaning shifting in the crook of her arm, shopping bags flapping against her legs.
    Emma appeared to be unharmed, thank God. But the girl was red-faced and screeching, crying with a ferocity that Susan rarely witnessed, standing at the center of an anxious tableau at the bottom of the stoop, just past the squat black wrought-iron fence that separated the brownstone from Cranberry Street. Andrea was crouching beside the girl, patting her uneasily on the shoulder; Marni hovered over them, wringing her hands and looking around stupidly; a few steps to Marni’s right, standing with one foot up on the bottom step, was an older black man with a bald pate and a massive gut, looking anxious and flustered. The sun glinted off the man’s smooth scalp while trickles of sweat dripped into his eyes.
    “Mama!” screeched Emma, holding out her thin little arms.
    That’s him
, Susan thought as she launched herself into the sceneand scooped up her daughter.
That’s who I saw in the yard that night. That’s him
. She cradled Emma to her chest and murmured, “Oh baby, oh baby, it’s OK my love. It’s OK.” And then, to the rest of them: “What
happened
?”
    “Emma got upset, the dear,” said Andrea, straightening up and nervously readjusting the gold-grey kerchief knotted in her hair.
    “I can see that. Why?”
    “She was trying to get into the basement.”
    “What?”
    Andrea gestured to a cramped plywood door under the steps, secured with a heavy padlock. Susan knitted her brow; she had never noticed the door before.
    “I was upstairs, but I guess she was at the door to the basement, fussing with the lock, and Louis saw her and he rushed over to stop her.” Susan looked at the stranger, who nodded steadily but said nothing, just pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and ran it over his brow. “Which, in Louis’s defense, he was absolutely right to do,” Andrea continued. “That basement is no place for kids. Power tools, flammable materials—”
    “Wait. Stop. Who is Louis?” Shifting Emma to her other arm, she pivoted toward the man. “Who are you?”
    “Well, my name is Louis,” he said slowly, and Susan rolled her eyes.
It’s like an old-folks home around here
. “Yes. I got that.”
    “Louis is the gentleman I mentioned,” Andrea said. “I told you. He handles things for me, repairs, blown fuses, light fixtures.”
    “Oh. Right. OK.” To Susan, Louis seemed an extremely unlikely handyman: he was portly, to put it mildly, and looked like someone’s kindly but absentminded great-uncle, emitting none of the quiet confidence Susan associated with mechanical aptitude. Plus, if theguy was any younger than Andrea, it was by five or ten years, tops; he looked like he would struggle to carry a bag of groceries, let alone haul a toolbox up the steep stairs of 56 Cranberry Street.
    Emma’s sobbing had subsided into a series of arrhythmic, pained hiccups; Susan squeezed her tighter and smoothed her pale hair.
    “Did you
tell
her not to go down there, or did you raise your voice at her?” she demanded of Louis. “Did you
touch
her?”
    “Oh, Lord, no,” Louis said, shaking his head, aghast. “Absolutely not.”
    Andrea shook her head too, insistent,
no no no
. “Not Louis. He would not have put a hand on the child.”
    “Not in a million years,” said Louis, shifting his stance and crossing his heavy arms across his stomach. Susan was