Gayle Wilson - Midnight Remembered

It felt empty, however. She knew intuitively that whoever had been here was now gone. If she had come home half an hour later, the heating system and the filters would probably have taken care of the faint odor, and she would never have known.

The first thing she did was to take the semiautomatic out of the bedside drawer where she kept it. Although she was grateful to have it in her hand, it felt almost as alien as the ghostly scent she was chasing. Then, despite her sense that there was no one here, she checked out all four rooms, opening closets, looking under the bed and behind the shower curtain.

Nothing seemed to have been taken or disturbed. Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel as if she had been invaded. Violated, somehow. This was her home, and someone had come into it without her permission.

It wasn’t until her hand was on the phone to report the break-in, that she remembered the call to maintenance she’d made. More than three weeks ago, she realized. It had been her first request for repairs since she had moved in. Was it possible, she wondered, that the maintenance staff had let themselves in without notifying her they were coming?

Which should be easy enough to check out. She walked over to the light switch by the door that led from the living room into the kitchen. It controlled the overhead fixture in the kitchen and had started malfunctioning a few weeks ago.

Of course, she could walk across the kitchen and turn on the overhead light by using the switch beside the sink, but since these were newly constructed apartments, something going wrong so quickly had seemed strange. She had been afraid it might mean faulty wiring, which had made her nervous enough to call.

She pushed the switch up now, and the fixture in the middle of the kitchen ceiling didn’t respond. Which didn’t necessarily mean maintenance hadn’t been here, she acknowledged. Just that they hadn’t fixed whatever was wrong.

Paige walked back to the phone, shrugging out of her coat and throwing it over the back of the couch as she did. She took the resident manager’s card out of the drawer of the end table where the phone was sitting, and laying the pistol down, she punched in his number. She’d feel better knowing that he had sent someone up here today, she thought, as she listened to the distant ring. A hell of a lot better.

When he said hello, she got right to the point. “This is Paige Daniels in 1228. I was just wondering if you sent somebody up here to look at my kitchen light switch?”

“Hold on a minute,” the manager said. In the background she could hear the sound of papers rattling and finally he came back on the line. “It’s gonna be a while on that, Miss Daniels. The crews are taking care of emergency situations first—heating and plumbing problems. You did say the other switch still works?”

One part of her mind was assimilating his denial and his questions. The other part was trying to figure who had been here if not maintenance. “It works,” she agreed. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone closed over the pistol again. “Look, are you absolutely sure no one’s been up here today?”

“The switch start working again? Sometimes wiring does that. Probably just a short. If I were you, I’d just keep it off until we can get somebody up there to take a look at it.

“Would it be better to throw the breaker?” she asked, realizing only now that it was possible what she had smelled hadn’t been tobacco smoke. Maybe it had been hot wiring.

“I don’t see why you’d need to do that. Besides, that breaker probably controls some other stuff, too.”

“I’m a little nervous because I smelled smoke when I came in from work,” she said, readily discarding her original theory.

“Just now?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“You still smell it?”

She took a breath, drawing air in through her nose. She had been inside long enough now that she couldn’t smell anything. Coming in from the fresh air outside had made the scent of smoke obvious. Now however…

“I’m not sure. Look, could you just come up here and check out that switch? Maybe something’s hot under the plate.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. She couldn’t blame him. It was Friday night, already late because she had stopped for dinner on the way home. And maintenance wasn’t his job. Of course, keeping the complex from burning down probably was, at least as far as his employers would be concerned.

“I’ll be right there,” he said, apparently reaching that conclusion at the same time. “You understand I can’t fix the switch, but I can make sure nothing’s smoldering under it.”

“Thanks,” Paige said. “I really appreciate this.”

She put the phone down and walked back over to the wall plate. It looked innocent enough. No telltale threads of smoke escaping from behind the ubiquitous plastic rectangle. She was probably being ridiculous.

She took a quick look around the apartment. There were a few dishes in the sink and her coat was out. She walked across to the couch and picked it up. She opened the drawer of the phone table and slipped the pistol inside before she carried her coat over to the hall closet and hung it up.

After she had shoved the dirty plate and cup from breakfast into the dishwasher, she headed back to take another look at the switch plate. She put her nose close to it, inhaling deeply, trying to find any trace of what she had smelled before. It seemed to have vanished, however, and she straightened, blowing the air she had just inhaled out in a small sigh of frustration.

She was headed back to the bedroom to look into her closet again when the doorbell rang. Maybe maintenance was slow, but the resident manager seemed to be on the ball.

Paige hurried to the door and looked out through the peephole. It was the same guy who had showed her the apartment six months ago. She turned the latch and the knob at the same time, a two-handed operation, and threw open the door.

“Hi,” he said. The shoulders of his jacket were dark from the rain. He was carrying a small screw driver, and he had a pager on his belt, revealed by the open windbreaker.

Just as she had earlier, he stopped on the threshold and, lifting his nose, scented the air like a hunting dog. “Don’t smell a thing,” he said, smiling.

“Maybe it’s a false alarm, but I definitely smelled something when I came in.”

She didn’t mention that her first impression had been cigarette smoke and that she had thought someone had been in here. Right now all she wanted was for him to make sure that during the night her apartment wasn’t going to go up in flames with her inside it. Little enough to ask, she told herself.

He walked over to the switch and made the same sniff test she had made. She expected another comment about not smelling anything, but he didn’t make it. Instead, he walked into the kitchen, and she heard him open the circuit box. There were clicking noises, and the light in the kitchen went off.

When he came back, he said, “Let’s take a look.”

He placed the tip of the screwdriver into one of the tiny Phillips head screws and began to unthread it. When he had finished with the first screw, he took the other one out, slipping the plastic plate off the wall. There was no whiff of smoke from the rough cut opening behind it. There was only a tangle of wires, none of them smoldering.

The manager put the screwdriver and the cover plate on the floor, carefully laying the screws on top of it. He bent so that he was on eye level with the hole in the wall. Then he reached into it with one finger, pushing around amid the wires.

“Nothing hot. No smoke. I think that it probably—” His voice stopped, as his finger probed deeper into the hole. “What in the world?” he said, the words almost under his breath.