I make it to The Serendipity in fifteen minutes and find a spot on the street right away. It’s a cool building. Reminds me of a brownstone in some ways. I’ll wait a few minutes to see if someone comes in or out, but if not, I guess I’ll knock on windows.
A minute passes with no residents appearing, and I decide that’s as long as I’m going to wait. I’ll check the front door just in case but then I’ll knock?—
The main door clicks open. Oh, good. Bad for security, though.
I spot the front desk Phoebe was talking about. A glance around shows a staircase to the right, so I head that way and pass the mailboxes. I don’t want to slow down to figure out which one is hers, but I wave and say “Thank you” to thewhole bank of them for giving me a reason to talk to Phoebe about something besides work.
Those stairs don’t go down, but the hall leads me to more stairs at the back of the building. They’re lit well enough to not be creepy, and when I reach the bottom, I’m in a basement with a concrete floor and exposed air ducts and beams. It’s not a murder basement, but it’s also not a hangout basement.
“Phoebe?” I call.
“Here,” she answers from around a corner just ahead.
I find her inside a chain-link storage fence, surrounded by old file storage boxes. You can’t spend time in archives and not recognize their size and smell. One box sits on the ground with the lid off and a pile of loose papers inside.
A bike is chained to the fence. And Phoebe is … chained to the bike? I can’t exactly tell from my vantage point.
I squint and hurry toward her. “Hi. What am I looking at?”
She’s sitting crisscross on the ground, facing the bike and me, her head bent so it’s even with the bike chain and parallel to the floor.
“My hair is caught in the chain,” she says.
I might have noticed that right away if she wasn’t in cutoffs again. I’m distracted by her killer legs. What does this woman do on her off time? Spend it all running stairs? Squatting marble sculptures? It’s working for her.
“The gate is unlocked.”
I lift the latch and hurry in to crouch beside her. Saying her hair is caught in the chain is like saying tornadoes are breezy. Her hair is forming a symbiotic relationship with the bicycle.
“Sorry to drag you over here,” she says. “There’s an apartment down here, but no one answered when I yelled. I don’t want to call the building manager because he leaves at 5:00,and I try to save after-hours calls for stuff like ‘Help, my bathtub fell through the floor.’ The only two numbers I have for people in town are you and Harvey. Not saying this is a job for you, but it’s definitely not a job for Harvey.”
“I’m glad you called,” I tell her. “I know you thought I was angling for a date the other day, but I just wanted to check out this building, so thanks for that. Now that my curiosity is satisfied, I can go.”
“Ha, ha,” she says. “Go ahead. But remember, I grew up with a brother, and I’m an expert in retaliation.”
“Fine, I’ll help.”
“I’m hoping you have sailing experience that makes you super handy with knots.”
“Not this kind.”
After a beat, she asks, “But you do sail?” She barely stifles a laugh.
I sigh as I carefully touch the strands of her hair closest to the chain. “Yes. It would be wrong not to when you grow up in coastal New England.”
“Uh-huh. Do you belong to a yacht club?”
“About your hair …”
“That’s a yes to the yacht club.”
“I belong to a yacht club, but I don’t have a yacht, know-it-all. Never have, never will. Just a sailboat.”
“Okay, just-a-sailboat. Would it look like ones I’ve seen in, say, a Nautica or Ralph Lauren commercial?”
“What I’m hearing is that you’d like me to leave you here to wait until someone else finds you?”
“I bet it’s such a nice sailboat, and everyone should own one. And it’s not an East Coast prep school kid clichéat all.”
