Art's apartment was on the second floor. As he climbed the stairs, he heard a door opening somewhere above. Footsteps were approaching.
Mrs. Knooch, his next-door neighbor—a hawkish lady in her sixties or seventies—turned around a corner. She carried a large basket of laundry, hugging it to her chest.
"Good evening, Mrs. Knooch," Art said.
She nodded. "You too." Her head bobbed up and down. With her stooped posture, her long neck, her neatly arranged gray curls, and her small, beady eyes, she reminded him of a wigged turtle.
A smell wafted from the lady or from her load, somewhere between a chemical and a perfume. It was strangely familiar, but Art couldn't place it.
He pressed himself against the wall to let her pass. But as she did so, a white piece of clothing hanging from her basket brushed against him and dropped to the ground. He picked it up. It felt soft between his fingers. Taking care not to examine it too closely, he returned it to its companions with a smile.
"Thanks." Her voice had the charm of a rasp. "I'm lucky that the blouse needed washing anyway—the stairs are so dirty this week." The thin smile on her lips failed to reach her eyes.
"You're welcome." Art nodded. "Enjoy the evening." He climbed on and heard her descending below him, muttering something.
So, you think the stairs are dirty?
Art had a pretty good idea who had ratted on him for not sweeping the staircase.
He scanned the steps for the dirt that Mrs. Knooch had spotted. Not a speck did he find. He stooped down and moved a finger over the smooth stone surface then rubbed it against his thumb. Nothing, not a crumb of offending matter.
The woman's strange smell lingered, scampering over the folds of his mind, tugging at memories here and there, but failing to connect.
As he reached the second-floor landing, the level of his and Mrs. Knooch's apartments, he continued his search for incriminating traces of things unclean. The gray tiles were spotless except for a small, white something on the ground close to the threshold of Mrs. Knooch's abode. He picked it up. It was a crumpled piece of paper. He flattened it into a small square, cut along two edges and torn along two others, as if ripped from a larger sheet. Both its sides were blank—no writing nor print.
A tracer to trap a negligent neighbor oblivious of the roster?
He held it up to his nose. The Knooch scent was there, no doubt about that, but he wasn't sure if it came from the paper or if it was still lingering in the wake of her passing.
The possible origin of the paper in his fingers intrigued him. It looked totally innocent, yet he ogled Mrs. Knooch's apartment door with suspicion.
He shrugged, unlocked his own entrance, entered, and locked up behind him.
A sigh escaped his lips as he looked into the evening gloom of the short, unadorned corridor connecting his two rooms and the frugal kitchen between them.
This country felt so unreal. Its rigid façades, inscrutable inhabitants, and arcane rules—qualities that seemed to have found their distilled perfection in the very house he lived in.
Not for the first time, he considered looking for another place to stay—something more modern and less creepy. But decent apartments were rare in the city and exorbitantly expensive.
And there was something about this place's order and orderliness that resonated with him.
He went into the kitchen and tossed the paper, or the marker—whatever—into the bin under the sink.
YOU ARE READING
The Egg at Dumstreet
Mystery / Thriller[Completed] A U.S. expatriate is cast into a rainy, foggy corner of Europe. He went there on the pretense to work on his research, but he actually wanted to put as many miles as possible between himself and his ex. The university he works for has fo...
