"Well, that"s not so good for me," I said. "Come on, help me get home, please."

She looked at me, and a little spark came into her eyes. "You were on television-everybody"s mad at you," she informed me. "You"re in trouble."

"What else is new." I sighed. "I"m not kidding, Jennifer, you have to help me. Now, right now."

"We"re all in trouble," she observed, and looked up at the ceiling.

That"s when this improbable situation started to make some sense. She was just so nonreactive, as if neighbors routinely showed up at her bedside in the middle of the night. There was definitely a disconnect between event and reaction. And she had the peculiar nocturnal coherence of the chronic nonsleeper. "Katherine says you won"t get out of bed," I noted. She continued to stare at the ceiling.

"I get out of bed. I go to school. I come home, and I get back in bed."

"Your mom lets you do that?"

"My mom," she stated, with an evil, sardonic edge. "My mom?"

I wanted to pick her up and carry her home with me, but I knew that would not be an effective choice of action. "Jennifer," I said. I let my hand creep up onto the covers and find her fingertips. "Sweetheart, you"re depressed. You need help."

"What do you know," she said.

A door opened and closed somewhere in the apartment. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the hall light flip on, then shadows rippled across the floor where the light spilled in under the door. The doork.n.o.b started to turn. "s.h.i.t," I whispered, and rolled under the bed just as the door swung open.

"Hey, are you awake?" the hideous Louise asked. When Jennifer didn"t answer, she asked again. "Jennifer," she insisted. "Are you awake?"

"If I don"t answer, why would you ask again?" Jennifer said, reasonably. "Are you trying to wake me up?"

"I asked again because I knew you were awake," Louise observed, unimpressed by Jennifer"s logic.

"Then why did you ask?"

"I heard voices. Who are you talking to?" Louise"s question was fluted with suspicion. All I could see from my hiding place was the tail end of a frilly pink-and-white-striped nightgown and her bare feet, which made their way into the room and stopped, then turned and moved out of my field of vision again. I heard a door swing open.

"What are you doing; are you looking in my closet?" Jennifer asked. I was pretty nervous down there under the bed, but honestly it felt better to hear her yell at her sister than to watch her lie there like she couldn"t bear to sit up and breathe.

"I heard voices, Jennifer; I know what I heard. There"s someone in here with you." The feet were back in sight and the hem of the nightgown started to lower, as good old Louise, who was starting to seem like the teenage-girl version of the Stasi, was in fact bending over to look under the bed.

"Get out of here, you freak!" Jennifer snarled suddenly. Her feet appeared by the side of the bed as she inserted herself between me and certain discovery, actually shoving her older sister aside.

"Hey!" Louise snapped. "You are, you"re hiding something!"

"You are not the boss of me, Louise!" Jennifer informed her. "MOM!" Okay, this was a little further than I wanted Jennifer to go to protect me, but I was hardly calling the shots at this point. Besides, Mrs. White appeared in the room so quickly that it seemed likely she had heard the argument and was already on her way to check it out, so I don"t know that Jennifer put anything in motion that would not have happened anyway.

"What is going on in here! It"s the middle of the night!" Mrs. White announced.

"I heard her talking to someone," Louise started.

"She is crazy! I was just in here sleeping!" Jennifer snapped.

"I heard someone, there"s someone in here with her," the persistent Louise repeated, but the illogical nature of her statement undid her.

"That is ridiculous," Mrs. White hissed. "Go back to your room, Louise! And both of you go back to sleep this minute! Honestly. Your father is going to be really angry if he has to come in here, and then we"ll all have to deal with it. Go to bed." Her feet stayed in the doorway while she waited for Louise to sullenly drag herself back to her room, and then the door swung shut behind them both. After an excruciatingly long moment of silence, Jennifer"s blond hair swung down over the edge of the bed, and I saw her forehead and then her eyes and then the rest of her face make an appearance. She held her finger to her upside-down mouth.

Why is it that taking care of someone else makes you feel better? The listless despair had evaporated, and she was a different person; her eyes were alert with the delight of keeping my presence a secret, and then the prospect of getting me home without being discovered by the wearisome Louise was suddenly a fantastic adventure to be had. We waited in alert silence for a full fifteen minutes before she crept out into the hallway, pa.s.sed by Louise"s closed door, pa.s.sed back again, waited to see if she was awake and reactive, and, when she proved not to be, waved to me in the half light of the hallway to follow her. She led me with a.s.surance through the maze of hallways to the back room of the sleeping apartment, where Katherine lay asleep on the floor, just as I had left her. While Jennifer closed the door, I picked Katherine up and put her back in her bed.

"So how do you get this thing open?" I whispered, tipping my head at that blasted piece of wood stuck in the wall.

"It"s really not very hard," she said with a trace of her former arrogance. And sure enough, she squeezed her fingers into the side of it and yanked. It popped out as if she had ordered it to. The entire operation took maybe six seconds.

"Wow, that is pretty easy," I exclaimed.

We both looked at the hidden staircase. I could hear the rats scrambling to stay out of the light.

"She wasn"t supposed to try it without me," Jennifer noted, glancing back at the sleeping Katherine. "The little louse. So it does open into your place?" She leaned forward and tried to see into the darkness. The barest flicker of light seemed to touch the edge of that terrifying staircase from somewhere deep in my apartment, but that was all.

"There"s a storage room down there," I explained. "Bill and my mom had shoved stuff in front of the door to the room."

"So they like hid things in the room?"

"There"s a bunch of stuff in it," I admitted, "stuff from a while ago, like they needed to put it someplace, so they piled it all back there, and pulled a big cupboard in front of the door and then forgot about it."

"Like treasure?"

"Well, most of it"s junk."

"But not all of it?"

I wish I could say that I was honest with this helpful and lovely young girl. I was not. "It"s just a bunch of boxes, Jennifer, just a lot of, you know, stuff people don"t want anymore."

"Why didn"t you tell me? I was the one who found the door-you wouldn"t even know it was there if it wasn"t for me. Why didn"t you just-call me or something?" She looked at me with such a simple sense of disappointment and betrayal that it took a moment to catch up.

"I couldn"t just phone you," I explained. "Your mom would think it was weird."

"So? You don"t mind people thinking you"re weird. Everyone think"s you"re weird. So what?"

"Come on, I have to go home, it"s the middle of the night, and I can"t get caught here! It"s like I"m breaking and entering. I could get arrested for this."

"You get arrested all the time, you don"t care about being arrested," she observed. "You said it on television."

"I said that on like local-access television!" I noted with some exasperation. "Who watches that stuff?"

"Everyone in the building watched it tonight. Everybody knows about it. My mom was on the phone with the whole co-op board."

This was not good news. "What did she say?" I asked, worried.

"People think your mom was a con lady, she made Mr. Drinan give her the apartment-the same stuff. Not that they cared about him, they didn"t like him to begin with, you know."

"They didn"t like the Drinans?" This had never occurred to me.

"They were Irish," Jennifer explained, as if this made everything clear. "I mean, they liked it that he could get things done because he was hooked up with lots of people around the city, but they didn"t want him to live here."

"Why not? What sorts of things did he do?"

"Look, I don"t know, I just heard some stuff while she was on the phone." Jennifer sighed. The spark was going out of her, you could see it happen even before I was halfway through the wall. She was sitting on the edge of Katherine"s bed, her shoulders hunched over like an old bag lady who didn"t remember how to hold herself up straight anymore.

"Listen," I said. "You have to come to me. You have to sneak out and come down. To the apartment."

"You mean like ..."

"Katherine did it. You can do it. You just have to be careful. And while you"re at it, you have to find out if the co-op board is going to do anything like testify for the Drinans or against my mom or something."

"You mean like spy on my mother?" Jennifer asked.

"No, no, it"s more like-yeah, actually, it"s like spying on your mother," I agreed. Her eyes lit up, and she sat up for a moment, the wheels turning, as she considered how she was going to pull this off.

"Yeah," she finally said, with a sort of internal calculating confidence. She was already working it out. "Yeah, I can do it."

She needed a purpose; I gave her one. Her sly grin bounced back and released me into the darkness. I slipped my legs over the edge and scrambled onto that dark rat-infested staircase, feeling my way back down one foot at a time until I reached my own unknowable home.

22.

THE MORNING FOLLOWING MY NOCTURNAL ADVENTURES I FOUND myself completely entangled in about eight conflicting concerns. The biggest problem, as I saw it, was what to do with all the stuff stashed in the forgotten room. It seemed unlikely that the room would continue to be overlooked. When Lucy had invited those real estate agents over, they had just breezed through and offered general ideas about how much the place was worth. But now I felt pretty sure that the subsequent walk-throughs would be more thorough, and the original floor plan surely would alert people to the existence of that back room. And once they found it, all of Sophie"s stuff would be up for grabs. Including, perhaps, the pearls.

I called Lucy; it seemed the necessary first step.

"Hey," I said, trying hard not to sound too phony in my friendliness. "It"s me! I just wanted to call and find out how you thought it went yesterday with the press conference. I thought it was pretty good."

"Yes, people seemed to feel it was a success. You made quite a splash, as usual," she said drily. "You probably didn"t need to share quite so much information about your colorful past, but I guess I"m not surprised that you did."

"Oh, yeah, I"m sorry, Lucy, it just kind of popped out," I apologized, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel as long as I could. "Listen, I need to talk to you about when those Sotheby"s people are going to start showing the apartment. Is that going to happen right away? Because I"m a little worried about the moss."

"I told you to get rid of that weeks ago, Tina, what is the problem?" she asked, exasperated.

"I know I know, but it"s really important to Len, and he"s on the co-op board, and I don"t want to p.i.s.s him off. You and Daniel and Alison wanted me to make friends in the building and that"s what I"m doing, and I can"t just throw it out, I think that would really be counterproductive."

"And he won"t move it himself?"

"He"s been hard to get hold of lately," I said, dropping a little truth in the middle of all the lies. "I"ll keep trying, but it would really help if you could keep Sotheby"s from showing the place for a little while."

"I don"t know how much flexibility I have on that. The market being what it is, which is obviously not what it should be, we can"t afford to set a lot of rules. The kind of buyer a place like ours might attract doesn"t come along every day. You don"t keep those people waiting."

"Yeah, but the market sucks. You"ve said so many times. Maybe it makes sense to wait."

"I hardly think you"re the expert."

"I didn"t say I was the expert," I said, trying not to get edgy. "I just mean maybe we should wait until I can get rid of the moss and then have a little time to clean the whole place properly."

"Sotheby"s will take care of the cleaning."

"I need some time to get rid of the moss, Lucy!" I finally snapped. "Honestly, I get so tired of the endless go-round that the simplest conversation always turns into with you! Why do they have to come this week? You keep telling me the market sucks-"

"I also keep telling you to get rid of the moss."

"Oh, for crying out loud! Forget it. Send them over here today. Let"s show the apartment with a ton of moss growing out of the kitchen, that"ll really sell the place. In this s.h.i.tty market that"ll be a big plus."

There was a tense silence. Finally she sighed, but not a defeated sigh, more a "Tina"s such a pain in the a.s.s" sigh, which she long ago perfected and always has at the ready. "So were you going to tell me about the pearls?" she asked.

This I did not expect. I had to stop myself from blurting out something that would sound utterly defensive and guilty. I rallied my best tone of aggressive innocence. "What about them?" I asked.

"Where did you get them?"

"Where did I get them? Who remembers? Some thrift shop in Delaware."

"You said you left all your things out there with Darren."

"Well, you know what? That idiot Darren actually got it together to send me a box of my stuff finally. You kept telling me I couldn"t have any money for new clothes, so I got Darren to send me my stuff."

"This is the first I"ve heard of a package from Darren," she observed, making it sound like the most improbable event of a lifetime, which it would have been, were it true.

"Well, I don"t tell you everything, Lucy," I said snidely.

"I know that, Tina, and let me just say, it"s a lot of work, trying to figure out what you do tell me and what you don"t and what"s true and what isn"t."

"Lucy," I started. "I show up for these dumb meetings. I get dressed up and show up at the press conference. I"m nice to the people in the building. Whatever you ask me to do, I do it! Why am I still the enemy?"

"I didn"t say you were the enemy," she responded, with so much undisguised bile it was impossible to mistake her conviction that I was in fact the enemy. "I"m just a little curious about those pearls. Alison said the Sotheby"s curator was very interested in them. He seemed to think they were valuable."

"He was a real estate guy!" I said, inwardly cursing my insanely c.o.c.ky decision to wear them to that stupid press conference. "What does he know about pearls?"

"I"m just telling you what Alison told me. She said-"

"I don"t care what Alison said. I got those pearls out in Delaware at a thrift shop last summer, which is, by the way, the same place I got the dress I was wearing and the cute shoes. You told me to get dressed up, so that"s what I did. And, by the way, it"s a good thing Darren finally sent me that stuff, otherwise I would have nothing to wear, because as you have mentioned oh so many times, I don"t have any money, and since you don"t seem to think it"s a good idea to give me money, and you also don"t want me to get a job, I"m having a little bit of a problem figuring out how to eat, much less get dressed up."

"You seem to be doing just fine, Tina," she responded, completely without sympathy. "I thought you had found some jobs around the building."

"Oh, come on, I babysat for the Whites once, and the guy upstairs pays me to let the moss stay here. But you want me to get rid of the moss, so there goes that cash!"

"That"s right," Lucy agreed. "The moss is going. You take care of it or I will, because they"re coming over to clean the place on Friday."

"Friday?" I said, trying not to panic. "That"s in three days."

"Wednesday, Thursday, Friday," she said. "Two and a half."

I had to make some more phone calls. Len was still not picking up, and neither was Charlie, although at least she had voice mail and I could leave her a message about the complications surrounding this moss situation. I also called the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and left a message for her. Then I spent an hour or so rearranging the storage s.p.a.ce and going through the boxes to see if there was anything else I wanted to keep. The thought that I was stealing from a dead woman had evaporated; now I just wanted to save some of her stuff, and since I had just concocted the pretty good story about Darren sending a box of old clothes, I thought I might be able to legitimately pull out some of that stuff without having anyone ask too many questions about where they came from. There was no reason I shouldn"t keep some of Sophie"s things. Otherwise they"d just be thrown out.