Echo Bridge

Chapter 7

After twenty minutes in the car, we arrived in Cambridge and turned onto Memorial Drive, which ran along the Charles River past Harvard and then MIT. I gazed out the window at the full moon shining on the Charles and wished that we were just going out like normal girls to see a band somewhere or to party at Hong Kong, a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square that turned into a dance club after ten o'clock and was notoriously lax about fake IDs. I wished we weren't on a mission.

Lexi performed an expert parallel parking maneuver on a narrow street just outside of Kendall Square, and we walked up to the address Farah specified: a tall apartment building with a lot of huge windows and terraces on the upper floors. A banner on the front advertised renovation and luxury living in Athenaeum Lofts.

Lexi whistled. "This is where he lives?" She dropped her head back to gaze up at the top of the building. "A lot of dark windows."

Farah pointed to the sign. "Guess there are a lot of unoccupied lofts."

Instead of a doorman, there was a portly man with a gray beard sitting behind a desk inside the front door, with a bank of security cameras behind him. Farah gave him an apartment number, and he lifted a phone and asked for her name.

"Mad Judy," Farah said. Lexi and I, standing behind her, exchanged a glance, but after the security guard repeated the name into the phone, he hung up and nodded at us, pointing to an elevator bank.

Lexi barely managed to hold it together long enough for the elevator to arrive. Once the doors slid closed, she burst out laughing. "Mad Judy?"

Farah folded her arms. "It's a Buzzcocks song," she said. "It's my handle. It's the only name Mr.—this guy knows me by."

"Wait," I said, as Lexi kept laughing. "Does that mean you only know this guy's screen name?"

"Yes," said Farah. "It's safer for everyone that way. Most of the work he does is not exactly legal."

"So what's his name?"

Farah blushed. "Mr. Grieves."

That set Lexi off again. "Mad Judy and Mr. Grieves. You're like a comic strip!"

"It does kind of sound like a Jimmy Stewart movie," I admitted, chuckling.

"It's a Pixies song," Farah said to me. "A good one."

"I take it you like punk rock," I said.

"I like loud music, whether you want to call it punk or hardcore or just rock or whatever. Those classifications were only ever just labels on racks in music stores. They're essentially meaningless in the era of digital music formats." Farah gestured at her messenger bag, which was covered with patches for bands, some of which I'd heard of, like NOFX and Fugazi, and most of which I hadn't: Secret Trial Five, Black Blood, The Kominas, Liberty or Death, Agnostic Front. I didn't say anything else. I was obviously out of my element—aside from a handful of girly folk CDs left over from my sister's college years, I just listened to whatever was on the radio.

The elevator dinged as we arrived on the eighteenth floor, and Lexi stopped laughing. We stepped into a vestibule and looked around. The chrome elevator bank faced a leather settee and a huge abstract painting. The hallway was off to our left, ending with a window of black sky. There were three doors, spaced far apart. Our feet were silent on the gray wall-to-wall carpet, and no voices or TV sounds came through the walls. I began to feel nervous.

"This is a really nice building," murmured Lexi. "Mr. Grieves doesn't—I mean, this has to be his parents' place, right?"

Farah smiled a small, satisfied smile, and it occurred to me that Lexi probably wasn't easily impressed. Farah straightened her shoulders. "Just follow my lead." She marched down the hall and knocked on the center door, 18D. After a pause came the clicking sound of some number of locks.