Page 25 of The Dead Come to Stay

“As in, were they murderously high? I wouldn’t say so.

We don’t get overinvolved in city disputes, but the Lord Mayor descended from on high to make sure we knew his feelings on the matter.

So we did a bit of looking in.” Fernsby nudged his computer mouse to bring his screen to life.

“All the permits are there, and things were off to a banging start. They finished the first three or four floors—then things started to slow.”

He beckoned MacAdams to look at his screen, which boasted photographs of a rectangular building, finished with windows and

all the trappings to floor four, but with a network of bare iron scaffolding above.

“That’s odd, isn’t it? Finishing as you go?”

“I’d think so, but the architects tell me differently. Apparently each finished floor level gets a concrete topping—a structural

slab that more or less keeps everything below from being weathered on. Thing is, they use it for fast-track jobs, something

they plan to complete well before any damage could occur.”

“But this job is behind schedule.” MacAdams took a cursory sip of espresso—found it better than expected and finished it off.

“I don’t suppose you looked further afield? Any other jobs running behind?”

“We didn’t, no. But we did do an assessment of who was coming and going. Very minor surveillance, I suppose. Again, everything

was aboveboard. Contractors were still turning up, machinery still rolling. Just at half speed for some reason. Another espresso?”

MacAdams didn’t trust himself to more caffeine at the moment—his brain was whirring fast enough.

“I need dates,” he said. “Job start, job slowdown, any protracted stalls.”

“Start was about a year and six months,” Fernsby said. “With the slowdown occurring in the last third.”

Which, MacAdams noted, would be when Burnhope gave the job over to Foley, perhaps as a last chance to prove himself? Burnhope

claimed Foley was a bulldog, someone who knew what he wanted, a pushy job boss. Yet when his promotion was on the line, he utterly

changed tack. Sold his house, spent time in the country with a (possibly now pregnant) lover, stopped doing the requisite

work on the York property...

“Everything comes down to what happened six months ago,” MacAdams said out loud.

“And what’s that?” Fernsby asked.

MacAdams pushed his chair back. “I wish I knew,” he said. “It’s around when Foley got put on the job.”

***

MacAdams called Gridley on his way back to the hotel. No, no next of kin had turned up. No, they still didn’t have leads on

Foley’s early years. One plus: they had tracked the other burner numbers Foley had contacted. Every last one had been disconnected, but they all lead back to Newcastle.

They were still digging.

“Print the obit, send it to papers in Abington and Newcastle,” he told her. Someone must know the man more personally, and perhaps the girlfriend might even turn up. He tucked the phone back into his jacket

before heading into the Astoria hotel. There still wasn’t a desk clerk, and the day had darkened such that the lobby looked

somehow more forlorn than before. Jo had picked it, and perhaps he ought not to have let her; it looked exactly like the place

people went to be murdered. And that was a professional opinion.

MacAdams climbed the stairs and stepped into the third-floor corridor. He expected the assault of red-and-salmon zigzag carpet.

He didn’t expect to see Jo Jones sitting on it, just opposite the stairwell door.

He was going to ask if she’d been locked out. That was before she looked up at him. Eyes swollen from crying, pink stains

down both cheeks, the look she gave him wasn’t misery so much as defeat. He’d never, ever seen her that way. Would have thought

defeat alien to her nature, even. He wasn’t sure what had happened, or what to do, so he knelt down next to her on the same

awful rug.

“Hi,” Jo said. “I look like I feel.”

“And how is that?”

“Not good.”

A fair assessment. He set aside his hat and coat. “Can I ask what happened?”

“I think so,” she said, but didn’t try to get up.

MacAdams sank down next to her, both of them with legs outstretched and backs to the wall.

“Okay. What happened?” he asked.

Jo took a deep breath, then another, like a swimmer before a dive. Then, instead of speaking, she handed him her phone. MacAdams

looked down at an obituary for Thomas Oliver Lofthouse, born 1966, died 1994. From the somewhat sanitized account, he gathered

there was a car accident.

“That’s my father,” Jo said. She sounded like she had a head cold; MacAdams hunted fruitlessly for a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sure if she heard him; her eyes stared into the far corner of the hallway.

“Car accident, officially. Unofficially, he drove at high speed into a literal brick wall.” Jo took her phone back and flipped

to another search window. “That’s the rest of the story.”

This was not an obituary, but a series of police reports. “No surviving kin,” they read. Because they didn’t know. Thomas,

it seemed, was troubled. Violent outbursts that sometimes landed him in prison—sometimes in psychiatric hospital—and sometimes

put other people in hospital. Like his first wife, who was not, MacAdams now realized, Jo’s mother.

“Oh.”

“He wasn’t okay,” Jo said.

“No,” MacAdams agreed. “Did—did the artist tell you all of this?”

“Sort of.” Jo rubbed at her nose. “Arthur told me some. Arthur gave me letters that were my uncle’s. And I realized I could have met him. And that hurts like fuck.”

MacAdams didn’t say anything. And Jo didn’t say more. So they sat in the hallway in silence for another ten minutes.

“It’s really an awful design,” MacAdams said at length.

“The stripes don’t even line up,” Jo said. “I’ve been counting them.”

“All of them?”

“Just the pink ones. There are 341.” She paused. “I do that. Counting. Especially when I have an emotion hangover.”

MacAdams nodded, hid head bobbing against the paneled wall. He wasn’t very good at comforting people; his job usually benefited

from the opposite treatment. You wouldn’t call him a shoulder to cry on, certainly. But there were a few things he understood

pretty well.

“Is it even remotely close to the way one feels after signing divorce papers?” he asked. Jo turned her head to look at him

for the first time.

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Then I might know a good place for a cure,” he said, returning the glance. “At least, it’s where I went after signing mine . Italian. Greasy pizza and cheap beer.”

“True Italian pizza isn’t actually greasy,” Jo said, wiping her nose. “It originates in Naples and was just an easy way to

eat tomatoes and cheese on flatbread.”

“Is that a no, then?” MacAdams asked.

“It’s a yes,” she said.

***

Jo had changed back into jeans and T-shirt, washed her face and was feeling a bit more like herself by the time they returned to the hotel car park.

The restaurant, MacAdams explained, was a little out of the way, on the outskirts where York looked less York-like.

This meant the buildings weren’t a thousand years old and pitching in every direction like plate tectonics, something Jo enjoyed for obvious charm, but which also made her just the tiniest bit anxious.

“The proprietor’s name is Allen. But he’ll insist you call him Giuseppe,” MacAdams said.

“He’s Italian?”

“He is not.”

He wasn’t American, either, but upon entry, Jo had the uncanny feeling of placement slip. Exposed-brick walls, multicolored

lamp shades, the smell of deep dish and—ironically—black-and-white photographs of New York. Tables sported red-and-white-checked

plastic tablecloths, shakers of dry parm and red pepper flakes, and she could almost imagine they were somewhere in south

Brooklyn.

“James!” shouted Giuseppe-not-Allen. “Haven’t seen you in ages! Light or dark?”

“He means the beer,” MacAdams explained.

“Dark?” Jo suggested, and a pitcher followed them to their table.

MacAdams rolled his sleeves and poured them each a glass.

“I never lived in York myself,” he said. “Found this by mistake while searching for a pub. Came back weekly for a while, despite

the distance. Treating the—the emotion hangover, I suppose. Getting used to being single.”

“I never had a chance, really,” Jo admitted, sipping through beer foam. After her own divorce, Jo had moved to Chicago middivorce

to help her ailing mother. “Or at least, taking care of the dying is not the best way to do it.”

MacAdams leaned his elbows on the table and gave her a thoughtful look. “I have seen a lot of death. But never the dying.

My mother’s still with us; my dad had a killing heart attack while I was in training.”

“You couldn’t see him before he went?”

“No time. He was there. Then he wasn’t. But I think that might be a blessing, frankly.

We hadn’t any scores to settle, my da and I.

Good terms.” Jo felt a little shiver run across her synapse.

It occurred to her that he was telling her personal things, and she wasn’t sure he’d ever done that before.

“I had all sorts of unanswered things to settle,” she said. “But eight months of hospice didn’t actually solve it. So I’m

inclined to agree.” Jo was testing herself, like testing thin ice. But she’d managed to speak of her mum and not fall through,

so she walked a little bolder. “I know what she was hiding now. I even know why. But that hasn’t actually solved my mystery

for me.”

“You mean about Evelyn,” MacAdams guessed. Jo wondered if she should clap like Chen did. Instead, she ordered a bacon-sausage-hot-pepper

slice.

“Evelyn, why her painting was done by a different artist, how and why it was destroyed. Her death. And— and her missing baby,” Jo explained. “Aiden knew. Had to have known. At least, I think so. I might be making big leaps.”

“Little stories based on clues, isn’t that what you called it?” MacAdams asked. “Try me.” He’d ordered a far less flamboyant