Chapter 14: Delancey

I slept that night in the corner room at the Vanderberg Hotel that had been mine when I was nineteen.

I did not sleep much.

My left hand kept finding the place where the ring had been, and the skin there felt cool and strange.

At six, Giles's first text came in.

It said: There is a car downstairs if you want it. I will not ask where it goes.

At seven there was a second one.

It said: Eat something.

I didn't answer either, and I put the phone face down on the blanket and got up.

I knew what day it was.

In my first life, a woman I never met bought the Delancey rail yard from a seller who hadn't told her about the engine house.

Under the old engine house were three buried fuel tanks, and the county posted its order on the gate on the second Thursday of the month.

I had read about it in a newspaper, over breakfast, ten years from now.

I had left Delancey off my list for that reason.

I took a taxi to the yard and stood across the road in a coat with the collar up.

A county inspector in a yellow vest was stapling an orange notice to the chain-link gate.

Two workers in hard hats stood behind him with a camera on a tripod.

They were taking pictures of a pile of rusted drums.

I watched him read the notice aloud to the foreman, because someone had to.

"Cleanup order, buried storage, no entry until remediation. Estimate eighteen million."

The foreman whistled.

"Who owns it?"

"A Mrs. Bachelder, as of last Tuesday."

I looked at my phone, so that my face would be doing something.

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