The Dead Key Read online

  Images of the night before flipped by like a broken filmstrip. She had gone to a work happy hour down at some new bar in the Flats. With each tequila shot, the evening had gotten blurrier. Nick had been there. He was the cute interior designer she’d been flirting with at work for weeks. He liked to swing by her desk and chat. For Iris, it was a welcome break from marking up shop drawings with a red pen like a glorified secretary. Who knew what it was for him. She would laugh at his jokes and blush a lot—that was the extent of her skills in the “come-hither” department.

  Nick had bought some of the shots. His arm draped over her shoulder, he’d whispered something in her ear she couldn’t quite understand over the throbbing music. Next thing she knew, he was driving her car back to her place. He’d kissed her, and the whole world had spun out of control. All she remembered after that was him dragging her up the stairs to bed and telling her to get some rest. She supposed she should be grateful he acted like a gentleman by not taking advantage of her. But, Jesus. Was she that bad of a kisser?

  Something creaked loudly. Iris’s eyes popped open at the sound, and her car lurched. She stomped on the brake to keep from slamming into the receiving door in front of her as it rolled open. Brad stepped out and waved.

  “Good morning, Iris!”

  “Brad! Hi.” Her voice was muffled by the window. Idiot. She rolled it down and said again, “Hi! How’d you get in there?”

  “I have my ways,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “Nah! The security guard showed me where to go.”

  Brad was a model engineer, in his crisp J. C. Penney shirt and freshly ironed slacks. He looked like he’d already gone to the gym, had a shower, and eaten a four-course breakfast. Iris, by comparison, looked like she’d been pulled out of a shower drain.

  “Can we park here?”

  “Yep, come on in.”

  Iris’s car followed Brad into a dungeon-like room, which turned out to be a loading dock. There were two grimy truck bays and a broken concrete slab big enough for three parking stalls. Iris pulled her sputtering car next to an immaculate Honda that could only be Brad’s. A sign posted on the wall said “Short-Term Parking, Deliveries Only.” The loading dock grew dark as the small garage door rolled closed behind her. A horrible smell like rotting meat and vomit crawled up her nose and nearly sent her running to a corner to puke. There was a large rusted-out dumpster in the corner.

  “Smells great, huh?” Brad joked. He pointed to a red button on the wall by an abandoned security office. “Make sure you close the garage door when you come in.”

  “Sure. But how do I get in without you?” she asked, covering her mouth and nose.

  “There’s a squawk box next to the garage door outside. Ramone will let you in.”

  Iris nodded and glanced around for this Ramone, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “Okay. Let’s get started.” Brad pulled a huge field bag out of the spotless trunk of his Accord.

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t remembered to bring a field bag or so much as a clipboard with her. That figured. She grabbed her oversized handbag out of her car and threw it over her shoulder, making as if it had more than lipstick and cigarettes inside it. “Okay.”

  Brad led Iris through a long service corridor and into a dark hallway. They followed the faint glow of daylight ahead past bronze elevator doors until they reached the main lobby of the First Bank of Cleveland.

  Iris gawked at the coffered ceiling soaring fifteen feet overhead. Everything from the inlaid wood panels to the bronze window casements to the giant old clock over the entrance looked handcrafted. The tiles on the floor were tiny and hand laid to form an art deco mosaic with a round rosette set in the center. Two antique, bronze revolving doors faced Euclid Avenue. They seemed insulted by the rusted chains and padlocks hanging from them. Gleaming letters spelled out “First Bank of Cleveland Est. 1903” on the wall over two solid metal doors with swirling cast-bronze handles that led to some other room. The doors were closed.

  “What year was all this built?” Iris studied the gilded clock over her head. Its scrolled hands had ground to a halt years ago.

  “Sometime before the Great Depression. You never see this type of craftsmanship in postwar buildings.”

  “When did it become vacant?” Iris asked.

  “I’m not too sure. I think the county ledger said something.” Brad rifled through a file he pulled from his workbag and read aloud, “First Bank of Cleveland closed December 29, 1978.”

  “I wonder why,” Iris thought out loud.

  A cheap placard on the wall contained tiny rows of black velvet, where loose or missing plastic white letters spelled out the names and office numbers for at least twenty men. On the opposite wall hung the portrait of a severe old man, who glowered at her with red-rimmed eyes as she silently read the name engraved on the frame, “Alistair Mercer, President.”

  “Lots of things went belly-up when the city defaulted. Businesses shut down, nobody could find a job. Lucky for us, we have a lot of work to do.”

  She gazed up at the coffered ceiling and its hundreds of tiny murals and gilded filigree. It was a shame. Whatever had gone wrong at the bank all those years ago had locked it away for nearly twenty years.

  A warm breeze whistled through the bronze revolving doors. She could almost picture men in tweed suits and secretaries in high heels filing into the lobby one by one. Hundreds of people must have walked through each day. She wondered if any of them ever bothered to look up.

  CHAPTER 2

  Thursday, November 2, 1978

  Beatrice Baker froze just inside the First Bank of Cleveland building and gaped at the enormous ceiling like it might fall down on her head. She’d never seen anything so grand and intimidating in her whole little life. The sight of it nearly sent her reeling back out onto the sidewalk. A man in a three-piece suit and heavy sideburns gave her a polite nod before heading out the revolving doors. He thought she belonged there, she realized, and she tried to smile back.

  Up on the ninth floor, Mr. Thompson scanned her job application, then tossed it onto his desk. “So tell me a little about yourself, Miss Baker.” He leaned back in his leather chair and lifted his thick, graying eyebrows at her.

  Beatrice was perched on the edge of her seat with her legs crossed at the ankles just as she’d been taught. “I graduated from Cleveland Heights High School last spring. Since then I’ve been working as a clerk at the Murray Hill Convenience Store.”

  It was the script she and her Aunt Doris had been rehearsing for weeks. She spoke clearly, slowly enunciating each word. She tucked a lock of ironed blond hair behind her ear.

  “What sort of work are you doing at a convenience store that qualifies you to be a secretary here at the First Bank of Cleveland exactly?”

  “Well, let me see . . .” Beatrice paused to keep her voice from wavering or falling to a whisper. Her aunt had told her to speak up and be confident. “Answering phones, placing orders, and balancing the register each day.”

  “Do you type?”

  “Eighty-five words per minute!” This part of her résumé was actually true. She had practiced on Doris’s old Remington for months.

  Mr. Thompson looked her sternly in the eyes. She tried not to fidget as he sized her up. “Don’t look uncomfortable or defiant,” Doris had warned her. “Just be an honest girl with nothing to hide.”

  Beatrice was tiny, blond, blue-eyed, neat, pretty—everything Doris said she needed to be. Her tweed skirt and knit blouse were ill-fitting. Her shoes were cheap. Her accent was faint, but her aunt assured her the hint of Appalachia only added to her charm. At sixteen, she was far too young for the job, but she’d lied on the application about that and many other things.

  His eyes paused on her blouse, which was unbuttoned just enough to flash a little cleavage. What Mr. Thompson didn’t know was that her aunt had stuffed tissues into her
bra to make her look older.

  She squirmed uncomfortably and tried to direct his gaze back to her face. “I appreciate your consideration. Working for the First Bank of Cleveland would be a real honor.”

  “Really? Why is that?”

  Doris had lectured her the night before. “These banker types don’t want to know your life story. They just want to know if you can type and look cute doing it.”

  Beatrice had gaped at her aunt’s comment. “What are you saying? All that matters is if I’m pretty enough?”

  “Pretty enough, young enough, fresh enough. Nobody wants to hire someone with a past.” Doris had slumped on the couch and taken another drink. “Poor girls like us without rich daddies, without fancy schooling, without a husband, we have so few cards to play. You got your good looks and your good name. That’s it. You can’t afford to squander ’em. If you play the hand wrong, little girl, you’ll end up slinging hash in some dive just like me.”

  Beatrice had studied Doris’s ruddy cheeks and rough hands. “What happened, Aunt Doris? Why don’t you work at some bank?”

  “Don’t you go worrying about that now. It’s in the past. So what are you gonna say when he asks why you’d be honored to work at the bank?” Doris had prompted her.

  “The First Bank of Cleveland wrote the mortgage on my parents’ house twenty years ago, and we’ve been loyal customers ever since.” She smiled as she lied to Mr. Thompson, feeling like her face might just crack under the pressure.

  He folded his arms across his chest skeptically. He could see right through her—she was sure of it. She struggled to hold his piercing gaze without flinching. His eyes wandered back to her chest.

  “Well, we like to think of ourselves as a family business around here. Although I must say, hiring a young girl like you does concern me a bit. We lose so many, you know. All that time spent training the girls, and then they up and leave. They run off and get married.” He tapped his fountain pen on his desk blotter. “We may be a family business, but we have to keep our eye on the bottom line. How do I know you’ll be a good investment, Beatrice?”

  “Um . . .” She cleared her throat. “I don’t have any plans to get married, Mr. Thompson. I . . . I want a career.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “But I mean it!” She took a breath to regain her demure composure. “I don’t want to cook and clean house all day.”

  “What about children?”

  The color drained from her face. “Children?”

  “Yes, children. Do you plan to have any?”

  Her eyes began to water, and she quickly dropped them to her lap. She dug her fingernails into her palm. She couldn’t believe he was asking her such a personal, awful question. “No.”

  “Really? Pretty girl like you? I find that hard to believe.” He set his pen down onto the desk blotter.

  She wasn’t going to get the job. After all those months of preparing and all of Doris’s advice, she wasn’t going to get it. She had to say something if she was going to have any chance in the world.

  “I grew up taking care of five brothers and four sisters, sir, and I can say with absolute certainty that I have no interest in having a baby. I am not spending one more minute knee-deep in diapers! No, sir! I want something better, and you have no idea what I’ve gone through to get it. I want this job!” She nearly shouted the words, and then recoiled at the sound of her own voice.

  He laughed out loud. “Well, well, Miss Baker. Aren’t you just full of surprises? That’s exactly the kind of dedication we’re looking for. You’re hired.”

  She blinked the fire from her eyes. “Really?”

  “Be here at 9:00 a.m. sharp Monday morning. Report to Linda in Human Resources on the third floor.”

  She strained to hear the instructions through the adrenaline buzzing in her ears. Something about a Linda on Monday.

  “Thank you, Mr. Thompson. You won’t regret it.”

  The room spun with his impertinent questions and her own audacity as she followed him across the shiny floor of his corner office, past the mahogany bookshelves and crystal wall sconces. Five brothers and four sisters—where did she come up with that? So many preparations, and it all came down to whether or not she was going to get pregnant. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  At the door to his office, she stopped and waited for him to extend a hand to shake. Doris had taught her what to do if anyone made the gesture.

  He patted her on the shoulder instead. “That’ll be all, Miss Baker.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Saturday, August 8, 1998

  “What are we doing here exactly?” Iris asked, turning away from the chained doors of the old bank.

  “WRE was selected to perform a renovation feasibility study for this place. I hear the county is thinking about buying it.” Brad pulled out his tape measure and clipboard.

  “A renovation feasibility study,” Iris repeated as if she knew exactly what that meant.

  “Yep. It’s going to take longer than usual. There are no legible blueprints from its original construction because the Building Department had been keeping the archives under some leaking pipes. Everything was water damaged.” Brad shook his head at the ineptitude of government workers. He pulled open the tape measure and handed her the dumb end. “We’re going to have to reconstruct the plans to show the adaptive reuse options for the building.”

  Iris stared at him for a moment, debating whether or not she could go on pretending she was following along. She took the loose end of the tape measure and walked with it to the other side of the room. “Okay. I give. What does that mean exactly?”

  “We’ve been hired by the current owner, Cleveland Real Estate Holdings Corp., to whip up some floor plans showing the potential here for new offices and retail. I guess they figure they can finally get a better deal than the tax write-off they’ve been taking all these years.” He made a note of the measurement and motioned her and the tape measure end to the opposite wall.

  “Tax write-off?”

  “Rust Belt cities have been a tax haven for years. You buy a building at a deep discount and let it sit vacant, taking a huge loss. It helps a company’s balance sheet come tax time, especially if they’re making a killing elsewhere.”

  Iris studied the tile mosaic on the floor to hide the confusion on her face. “Now they want to sell it? Is that why Mr. Wheeler said something about all this being confidential?”

  Brad made a few more notes and snapped the tape measure closed. “The county has been looking to relocate its headquarters downtown, and our design plans are supposed to help sell this place to them. This building owner is competing with several others, and the county hasn’t gone public with their plans.”

  Iris nodded and glanced at the graph paper he was marking up. Brad had already sketched a rough outline of the first floor and was neatly filling in the measurements.

  “If you want my opinion, they should just tear this place down. With all the asbestos and lead buried in here”—Brad waved his hand at the gorgeous ceiling—“it’ll cost a fortune to do anything else.”

  Iris couldn’t argue as he led her from the front lobby through the heavy bronze doors. The banking area on the other side was enormous by modern standards and consisted of two high marble counters in the middle of the cavernous room, flanked on either side by identical rows of teller stations. The bank tellers had stood in little booths behind tight bronze prison bars with only a mail slot–sized opening to pass paper through.

  Iris peered inside one of the tiny stalls. There was a small counter and an antiquated adding machine, and barely enough room to turn around. It was utterly claustrophobic, and she felt bad for the woman who used to stand there. Iris turned and tried to imagine the room the teller saw from behind the tight bars.

  Mosaic tiles, mahogany, and bronze—everything was shroud
ed in dust. The ceilings soared up fifteen feet at least, holding nothing but stale air and the faded echoes of hard-soled shoes and clacking keys. The whole place was a lost black-and-white photograph.

  Iris was overwhelmed by a strange melancholy, knowing it would all be torn down if Brad had his way. They’d probably turn it into a parking lot, she thought, trying to shake the feeling she was standing in a buried tomb.

  “So what’s the plan for today?” she asked, hoping for a larger role than just holding the tape measure at Brad’s command.

  “First, we need to lay out the basic column grid and get some overall dimensions. We’ll leave the site survey to the civil engineer. Then we’ll develop the floor plans and typical wall sections.”

  It was the closest thing to actual structural engineering she’d been asked to do since she was hired. The building was a fifteen-story tower with a footprint that was easily 100 by 150 feet. It took the better part of the morning just to lay out the first-floor grid. The rest of the first floor contained the loading dock, restrooms, and two sets of stairs. Iris passed by the grand staircase, adorned with long marble slabs and wrought-iron railings that wrapped around the elevator housings, and headed toward the second set of stairs hidden off the loading dock. A burned-out “Exit” sign hung over the door. Inside, the cold concrete treads and cinder-block walls rose up from the glow of the emergency flood lamps. The air was thick with what smelled like sour urine. Iris took quick measurements and slammed the door shut.

  The lunch hour came and went. Iris grew light-headed as her blood sugar plummeted. By one o’clock she was certain she was going to faint.