The Hollow Ones(17)
Her mother kept calling. Odessa communicated with her siblings—there were five, the closest one to her geographically living outside Cincinnati, Ohio—by text, telling them she was okay and promising to call on the weekend. Her siblings were well intentioned, but the mere thought of actually talking to them about what had happened was draining. With her mother, she caught a break. In a rare moment of mercy, Odessa’s call went to voicemail.
Mom, it’s me. Sorry, things have been just hectic, as you can imagine. It’s been a terrible week and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m okay, though. I’m as well as can be expected. I’ll try you again later but there’s so much to do on my end, I don’t know when that will be. Okay. It’s Odessa. Okay. Bye.
And then she sat at her empty desk with nothing to do until it was time to leave.
The next day, they found something for her to do. She was dispatched to the Brooklyn-Queens FBI Resident Agency across the East River, in Kew Gardens. A retired agent had recently suffered a stroke, and her task was to clear out his office. Why a retired agent still had an office, she did not know, but she was certain that, as a rookie agent on desk duty currently under a cloud of investigation, questioning the assignment would not be a good look.
True to form, the office manager at Kew Gardens had no idea Odessa was coming, nor did she know anything about the office in question. She fished out a tray of thirty or so odd keys from a cabinet in the copying room and presented it to Odessa, pointing her to the hallway.
Odessa found the office at the end of a back corridor, kitty-cornered with an emergency exit to the stairs. The door was unmarked and indeed locked. Odessa shook the tray of keys and considered the time it would take to try each one—knowing that, by the Odessa Law of Averages, the correct key would be among the last ones selected. The office door was sufficiently hidden from view of the rest of the office wing, so instead she appropriated a paper clip from a vacant desk, removed a pizza delivery joint’s business-card-size magnet from the break room refrigerator, and used both to pick the simple lock.
The door opened on a room of stale air. There was no window. She flipped the light switch, and the ceiling fixture, a naked bulb, lit for a moment, then flickered and popped. This office hadn’t been used in quite some time.
A desk was empty but for a leatherette desk set; a bookshelf held a few empty three-ring binders, some standing on edge, others lying on their sides; and wall prints featured pale watercolors, which had probably been hanging on the wall when the former occupant moved in.
It looked, appropriately, like the office of a guy playing out his days until retirement. Odessa left the door open for light and moved to the desk, coated by a neat, even patina of soft gray dust. The drawers were mostly empty: paper clips, a tape roll, a letter opener. A nameplate that might have once adorned a similar desk or office door: EARL SOLOMON.
She found old receipts for travel expenses. Lunch in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1994. Dinner in Saskatchewan, 1988. An electronics shop for “tape recorder repair,” 2009.
The bottom drawer on the right side was locked. She could tell at a glance that none of the keys in the tray were the correct size for opening it.
Still drafting off confidence from picking the door lock, she assailed the tiny keyhole with her paper clip, but to no avail. A few more tugs on the handle showed her the drawer was tightly secured. She looked again at the desk blotter; the letter opener blade looked thin enough to fit between the top of the drawer and its frame.
She gave it a moment’s thought, knowing she would leave a visible trace of forced entry. Then with a glance at the open door to the hallway, she hammered the opener blade in over the top of the drawer with the heel of her hand and gave it a firm sideways wrench.
The interior clasp snapped. The drawer was loose. She at least hoped it was good booze.
The drawer rolled open to reveal a reel-to-reel tape recorder. She lifted it out, placing it on the blotter. Heavy construction, not pure plastic. Beige in color; Sony-branded, though the letters were widely spaced—S O N Y—in a compressed, dated typeface; and sporting an old, two-pronged electric plug. The case promised “high-fidelity.” The twin spindles were empty. She found a handful of seven-inch tape reels in the back of the drawer and piled them on the desk next to the tape deck. She had a vague memory of her grandfather spooling up tape. She was curious enough to try.
She set one reel on the left spindle, then reversed it, unspooling tape and feeding it through the reader part. The brown tape was brittle; she had to be careful not to snap it. She curled it around an empty reel on the receiving end and figured out how to crimp it in a slot near the bindle so it would not unspool. She wound it a few feet by hand, then plugged the deck into the wall, the prongs connecting to the electric current with a cranky blue spark.
She switched the deck on and then turned the dial to PLAY. It worked! Or seemed to—no sound came out of it at first. She turned the dial again and the tape fast-forwarded with scary speed. She turned it back to PLAY.
The sound of a microphone being bumped startled her. “Testing, testing.”
She turned the volume down on a baritone voice, clear but for the scratchiness of the aged Mylar tape.
There was then a radio recording that started up mid-song, also scratchy and distant, then some bumps as the recording microphone was moved closer:
Here come the stars tumbling around me…
There’s the sky where the sea should be…